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O último azul is lush and low key. Here is a possible vision of the future where personal choices are removed at a certain age.

Tereza has reached that age as the government has a plan to improve productivity by sending all elderly people over the age of 75 to a special colony.

At the start of the film she has one week before compulsory departure.

What will she do? What would we all do?

Turns out she does have a special thing on her bucket list. Travel is blocked so she needs to find a way. That way turns out to be the blue trail of the title.

The Blue Trail is a gentle satire that allows the story to unfold rather than being force-fed to us.

We are all getting older and it is not too far fetched to think that something like this could happen.

Life in One Chord is a great film. It is full of so many familiar faces and overall while it tracks Shaynes musical journey that overlaps with a huge number of other NZ bands & people. It is very funny in that dry kiwi way. Shayne is very gracious & more mellow these days. Writing the book has helped him and us too.

I have met and in some cases know many of the people in the film. NZ is a small place and it's often all the same people. There are some very sad moments.

Some of the band members are no longer with us and there are some sobering moments around that.

The music clips in the film are long enough for us to feel the energy. Definitely showing us why the various bands worked (or not) rather than someone trying to tell us a story.

Plenty of talking heads too but they are or were primary actors. There is thankfully very little music journalism quoted. Having Carol Hirschfeld doing some voiceovers was a good move. She was a TV news reader / presenter a few years back.

The best thing about the film is seeing everyone not named Shayne who was in band at the same time. I wonder how this will translate for non kiwi audiences though?

In that sense it is more a story of NZ music history using his story as the prism. Locals would recognise many of them. Flying Nun & Chris Knox figure a lot as they should.

Because the film is based on his book it is skewed but I expected that. His sense of humour helps to balance that out. When Wayne died at 22 on the train near Taumarunui that was a big moment in the book & his life. Makes sense. On the whole it captures the excitement & energy of the day well.

I saw this at a film festival in Shaynes home city with some of the cast and crew. Seen in context as a celebration of local music it is much bigger than just the bio aspect might suggest.

Resurrection was really out there. Parts of it were coherent and there were multiple stories with a literal MacGuffin. Characters literally ask what is in the suitcase. We sort of find out but not really. Parts of it seemed incoherent.

The whole film time shifts sideways a bit too often. Enough in there to have a second look. A giant show-stopping puzzle.

One of my friends saw this before me and said "RESURRECTION is spectacular, especially the long take that almost brings the film to a close, but don't go in expecting a coherent narrative. It's as "meta" as meta gets!"

There is a series of chapters like short stories or dreams. Despite wanting to follow some kind of thread I became lost in the immediate story. It was almost like each new section erased my memory of the previous one.

In the beginning sequence we see a kind of silent movie with various stylistic nods to different film eras. It feels like a virtuoso musician practising scales and party tricks a bit but then it hist a groove and the I got lost in the dream.

But then the next section would break the spell. I wanted to walk out a couple of times but I knew the ending was worth waiting for so I stayed for that. On the walk to the carpark I overheard some others talking about the film. We were all asking ourselves what did we just see? I was reminded of the Taviani brothers Chaos short stories film in particular. But there is a whole cinema library in there. It was very much like we had watched a some kind of magic show.