Word: gees
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...toward larger bodies and larger brains, H. floresiensis went the other way: not only was its body small but, again unlike Pygmy or midget H. sapiens, its brain was only about the size of a grapefruit--smaller than that of a chimpanzee. "To think," says Nature senior editor Henry Gee, "that these creatures were evolving on their island while there were perfectly modern humans all around the place--it's astonishing...
...years since In My Father's Den became a Kiwi classic. The book's cool, ironic narrator Paul Prior, an English teacher rebelling against his religious upbringing, embodied the tough outsider of New Zealand literature, starting with John Mulgan's 1939 novel Man Alone. When Gee began writing the book in the late '60s, "we were able to shake off that oppressive Puritanism," the author, 73, recalls, "which wasn't only religious, it was secular." Novels like Gee's award-winning Plumb (1978), based on the life of his Presbyterian minister turned Communist grandfather James Chapple, continued that shaking...
...Gone were the beloved creeks and orchards of Gee's west Auckland, and the religious fervor which he saw as polluting this innocent age. For first-time feature director McGann, 40, the process of bringing Celia and Paul into the present day was reminiscent of the drawing exercises he did as a kid at school; taking someone else's squiggle and turning it around into something new. "I needed to find my own voice," he says...
...McGann toys just as nimbly with the novelist's narrative. "Brad made it his story," acknowledges Gee. Even still, "the bones of my story keep breaking through." These can still be traced through the melodramatic subplot of Paul's devout, disapproving brother (Colin Moy) and his repressed wife (Miranda Otto). But they find a fuller expression in the expanded use of the secret study of the film's title. It's this room, tucked behind the poison shed in an old orchard, where Celia and Paul can retreat into the world of books. But it's also where the sins...
...Gee has found in McGann a perfect celluloid soul mate to explore these shadowlands. With Possum, his award-winning 1996 short, the filmmaker, trained at Melbourne's Swinburne school, found improbable lightness in the dark fable of a boy and his autistic sister at the turn of last century. With Father's Den, he sets a match to New Zealand's "cinema of unease," the phrase coined by Sam Neill to describe the country's love affair with darkness. "I need a cigarette to cope with this kind of scenery," says Paul at one point. So, too, might audience-goers...