Culture 101

Dan Slevin reviews three new releases: The Dog Stars, Ridley Scott's post-apocalyptic survival story in which a former mechanic and soldier keep a small plane flying after a virus has wiped out almost all human life, starring Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley and Josh Brolin; The Whisper Man, a Netflix thriller from New Zealand director James Ashcroft in which a widowed crime writer must enlist his estranged father to find his kidnapped son, as a copycat killer recreates the crimes of the town's most notorious serial killer, starring Adam Scott and Robert De Niro; and Lomu, a documentary about the iconic All Black winger and his struggles with success, expectation and his fragile health.

Tiny Statements is a Te Papa exhibition drawing 200 badges from a collection of more than 4,000, spanning just over a century from the First World War to 2024. One highlight is the pennant of Alpha Maamoe, the first woman to captain the New Zealand women's hockey team in the 1960s, covered in badges she swapped with players from around the world. Another is a simple cast badge that says only "Post Office," which people keep stopping in front of. Curator Stephanie Gibson joins Culture 101 to talk about why the anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear era produced the highest volume of badge wearing in New Zealand history, and what the difference is between a badge and a brooch. The exhibition tours to Waikato Museum from 30 October.

Erotica by the Fire is a new RNZ podcast hosted by comedian Donna Brookbanks and writer Shoshana McCallum, in which fellow comedians, writers and performers write their own erotic fiction and then read it out loud to the hosts. Josh Thomson's contribution is set in a hardware store and involves compost. Hayley Sproull's features Jason Momoa, who she messages on Instagram and from whom the hosts are hoping for a public response. Barney Duncan, it turns out, used to be an erotic fiction ghostwriter. Ashley Bloomfield declined. Donna joins Culture 101 to explain how it all came together and why season two is already confirmed.

WORD Christchurch runs from 1 to 6 September, with more than 60 events, 100 writers, artists and thinkers, and an expected 13,000 attendees flooding the CBD. Programme director Kiran Dass joins Culture 101 to preview this year's lineup, which spans Dave Dobbyn and Jon Toogood, romantasy, crime, politics and art, and to make the case that you don't need to have read the books to get something out of it.

Emily Hartley-Skudder's new exhibition CAMEO has opened at Te Manawa Museum in Palmerston North. The show is her response to Ladies Rest, the city's 1936 Art Deco public toilet block in the Square, which Lonely Planet has named one of New Zealand's five most picturesque toilet blocks and which received a Category 2 heritage listing. The title comes from Community Action by Mothers and Existing Other users, the early 2000s protest group that stopped the building being absorbed into an information centre. Hartley-Skudder is the inaugural recipient of the $40,000 Fair Trust Art Prize, created under the will of collector Eileen Fair specifically to let a mid-career artist develop one major new body of work. Her practice revolves around hyper-realistic oil paintings of cleaning products, bathroomware and what she calls the artificial ordinary.

Michelle Langstone reviews new releases: Spa Weekend, a comedy starring Anna Faris, Michelle Buteau, Leslie Mann and Isla Fisher as old friends whose trip is derailed by a chaotic fourth; and Savage House, a period comedy-drama set during a Georgian smallpox epidemic with Richard E Grant and Claire Foy as a debt-riddled noble couple hosting a Duke and Duchess in their crumbling manor. She also picks up on (and disagrees with) other reviewer's thoughts on & Sons starring Imelda Staunton and Bill Nighy.

Melanie Lynskey plays a mother dying of cancer in Don't Say Good Luck, a Netflix film produced by Adam and Jackie Sandler and co-starring their 17-year-old daughter Sunny. It was, she says, one of the easiest jobs of her career. She traces her training back to Miranda Harcourt, who taught her more in a single day audition for Heavenly Creatures than she learned in formal drama school, and to Jennifer Ward-Lealand, whose lessons she still uses. She also reflects on being nominated for two Emmys in the same year for two different shows, Yellowjackets and The Last of Us, getting Covid before one ceremony, and why she goes to sleep looking at houses in New Zealand.

Rachel Hemingway stepped on her son's skateboard returning from a family Disneyland trip, fell backward on concrete, and spent the next two years trying to come back from a serious brain injury. She came out the other side as the owner of Chapter One Gallery in Christchurch and the creator of Suitcase Stories, a fundraising project where she put out a social media call for artists to each transform a vintage suitcase with no brief other than to tell a story.

Our Ocean of Islands has just opened at the New Zealand Maritime Museum and is unlike most exhibitions in that it is contributor-led rather than curator-led: each of the 24 participating island nations was invited to decide for itself what it wanted to share, guided only by a broad focus on the inseparability of peoples, environments and indigenous knowledge. All 17 Pacific nations with diaspora communities in Aotearoa are represented, alongside Tangata Whenua and nations as far as Taiwan. Barbara Makuati-Afitu and Kolokesa Uafa Mahina-Tuai, founders of Pacific consultancy Lagi-Maama, join Culture 101 to talk about what it means to give communities the power to tell their own stories.

Therese Eberhard is an American-born scenic artist, props and set painter who came to New Zealand to work on King Kong and never left. She has worked on Avatar, The Hobbit, Rings of Power, What We Do in the Shadows and more, and spent the past decade accumulating interviews and photographs from more than 50 contributors for The Reel Deal, a scrapbook-style love letter to the below-the-line film crew. A leukemia diagnosis that kept her off set for an extended period gave her the time and focus to finally finish it. She joins Culture 101 to talk about why it took a security guard to give her her favourite interview in the book.