Culture 101

Jess Reiner Reed is the senior project director for Wolverine at Insomniac Games, the studio best known for its Spider-Man series. She's visiting New Zealand for the game's release and joins Culture 101 to talk about what you have to get right when you take on a character that exists across decades of comics, films and cartoons, how her team landed on a specific vision rather than trying to please everyone, and why a woman who plays video games every day still doesn't think of it as work.

Karl Puschmann joins Culture 101 with his picks for September. He recommends Good Bones on Three, Josh Thompson's new mystery dramedy about a procrastinating home renovator who discovers a body behind a wall, calling it frighteningly good; A Killer Story on HBO Max, a three-part true crime about a true-crime-obsessed couple who spend years emailing a sceptical New York Times journalist with evidence to exonerate a convicted murderer; and A Remarkable Place to Die on TVNZ+, Chelsea Preston Crayford's Queenstown-set cozy crime drama, which he watched with a cup of tea and found quite satisfying.

Mama Moo is a new absurdist comedy from Prayas Theatre, New Zealand's largest South Asian theatre company, in which a widowed butcher who can see his dead wife's ghost slaughters a cow that then becomes a spiritual matchmaker and life coach, setting him on a course to win the heart of an animal rights activist. Writer Nimish Tanna started researching the ethics of vegetarianism after being embarrassed at a work drinks when he couldn't articulate why he was vegetarian. Six months of research later, he found a story in the conflict. He's a vegan; his wife is a meat lover. It is, he says, largely working out. The show runs at TAPAC from 21 to 26 September, with a live band on stage.

Mike Allen has spent his career in retirement planning and financial advice, but music has always run alongside it. He put down the saxophone as a child and picked it up again in his 40s. This Sunday he'll be one of more than 300 community instrumentalists joining the Auckland Philharmonia for their annual Community Bash at the Auckland Town Hall, alongside 134 singers and 74 orchestra musicians performing O Fortuna and Peer Gynt. Perlina headed to his Grafton office to find out more about both worlds.

Dan Slevin reviews three new releases: Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, a New Zealand indie gross-out comedy about a slacker still living at home who finds herself carrying a fast-developing alien foetus after an awkward hookup with her neighbour; Fall 2: Deadpoint, in which the sister of one of the two women from the 2022 surprise hit is dared to walk an off-limits ancient plank walk around a terrifying mountain in Thailand, only to find it more dangerous than advertised; and The Runner, a Prime Video thriller in which a London prosecutor is forced to shoot her own star witness when her diabetic son is kidnapped by a mysterious caller who can track her every move, starring Gal Gadot and Damian Lewis.

Dan Slevin reviews three new releases: Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, a New Zealand indie gross-out comedy about a slacker still living at home who finds herself carrying a fast-developing alien foetus after an awkward hookup with her neighbour; Fall 2: Deadpoint, in which the sister of one of the two women from the 2022 surprise hit is dared to walk an off-limits ancient plank walk around a terrifying mountain in Thailand, only to find it more dangerous than advertised; and The Runner, a Prime Video thriller in which a London prosecutor is forced to shoot her own star witness when her diabetic son is kidnapped by a mysterious caller who can track her every move, starring Gal Gadot and Damian Lewis.

Nic Russell's memoir Bollix took four years to write, partly because she had to learn to write it at the same time. She got her medical notes to use as a timeline, and found that revisiting the clinical language pulled the emotion back too. By the time she was in her late 40s, Nic had lost a daughter to Ewing's sarcoma, survived breast cancer, received a heart transplant and been diagnosed with Parkinson's. She set up a charity in her daughter Kenzie's name after discovering that family support evaporated the moment a child died. She joins Culture 101 to talk about the book, the friends she describes as an orchestra, and the difficulty of writing about her own life without the benefit of showing, not telling.

Black Grace has moved into a converted warehouse just behind Karangahape Road, the latest stage in founder Neil Ieremia's decade-long plan to build a permanent centre for Pacific contemporary dance. The new space has a sprung, moveable performance floor, a full lighting rig, blackout draping and an LED wall at its entrance built from the same design grid as the Black Grace branding. It doubles as a hireable performance space and rehearsal room for other companies. Running alongside it is the company's new three-month intensive academy, where six dancers are currently learning Black Grace and classical ballet technique, nutrition, dance history, singing, contracting and, by Ieremia's own insistence, how to make their bed on tour. Perlina took a tour with Neil to find out more.

Beautiful Words Con is a new independent writing festival launching in Nelson from Tuesday until 26 September, with 30 talks and workshops covering fiction, poetry, songwriting, game writing and indie publishing. Director George Penney is a published author who moved to Nelson three years ago and started writing people-watching vignettes about the community, which then took off both locally and internationally. She's hosting a workshop on how to write a romance novel, and her central argument is that if you understand a basic romance plot structure, you can write almost any genre. Her evidence: Silence of the Lambs is, beat for beat, a romance between Clarice and Hannibal.

Four Hawke's Bay artists have each received $10,000 through the second Te Matau-a-Maui Contemporary Art: Gwen Malden Trust Commissions, supported by Hastings Art Gallery. Leanne Morrison's contribution, Inside Looking Out, is nine geometric paintings combined with fabric works that aim to put the viewer inside the work rather than outside looking in, drawing on the Samoan concept of va, the space between things. Sophie Davis, director of Hastings Art Gallery, joins Morrison to talk about what a completely open brief does to an artist, and what emerged across the four very different practices. The exhibition runs until November.