In Film Australia - all about Australian films

In 2009, despite serious misgivings, filmmaker Tony Krawitz decided to venture onto Palm Island, off the Queensland coast, with a mission – to reverse a coin of common perception; to tell the lesser known side of a tragic story that began on November 19, 2004. On an ordinary day, a drunken Aboriginal man, Cameron Doomadgee, was arrested for a minor infraction by towering white police officer Christopher Hurley, referred to by the locals as “the tall man”. Some 45 minutes later Doomadgee was dead in the local police station.  Read the rest

It’s obvious from the opening scenes of Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead that wet around the ears documentarian Joe Cross never went to film school, never debated the merits of gonzo, expository or observational approaches to documentary. Cross is the antithesis of a filmmaking expert, an inexperience he spins into a virtue as the audience watch him, a true blue Aussie bloke, drive across America, juice ever in hand, not to make great art per se but to better his health and inspire the people he meets to do the same.

The film details Cross’ physical and geographic journey as he slims down from 140 kilos using a juice only fasting diet that lasts for 60 days. It’s sprinkled with short animated clips extolling the importance of good diet and exercise. Read the rest

Writer/director Jonathan Teplitzky (Gettin’ Square, Better Than Sex) offsets the grimness of making a film about overcoming grief by modelling what could have been a morbidly despairing downer into a pot of revved-up and risqué drama with a soulful core simmering beneath the bombast.

Sex, swearing, car crashes, flames and fast-paced kitchen scenes that make episodes of Master Chef feel like gruelling single shot Russian realism flow thick and fast in the first act of Burning Man, a ballsy must-see Australian drama centred around an emotionally haunted English chef living in Bondi Beach. The heart of the film arrives later. Read the rest

Director Ivan Sen’s follow-up to the head-scratching, frustratingly abstract Dreamland (2009) sees him back on home soil to tell a personal tale of how the endemic indifference of our country has created a void into which countless lives empty out like broken vessels. In the Aboriginal township of Toomelah, a dusty outpost and former mission straddling the New South Wales-Queensland border, a fearless young 10 year old, Daniel (Daniel Connors), is getting mixed up with the wrong crowd. Given the flick from school because of his threatening behaviour towards another boy, he hangs around local drug-dealer Linden (Christopher Edwards) hoping to be taken seriously as a future member of a roughly assembled gang of wannabes. Read the rest

It’s long been a ploy of screenwriters to concoct a story in which an ordinary man – and obvious outsider - is deposited into a place insulated against the world at large. The locals, we usually discover, are very protective of their own kind, but even more protective of their secrets. In Ken Hannam’s undervalued mystery Summerfield, replacement schoolteacher Simon Robinson (Nick Tate) isn’t exactly welcomed into the rural township of Banning’s Beach with open arms. The locals are a lukewarm, lackadaisical lot, especially the indentured old crones haunting the rooming house where Simon will now be renting a space previously occupied by his predecessor Peter Flynn. Nobody seems overly disturbed by the recent disappearance of Flynn, as if people in this neck of the woods regularly take flight without telling a soul. Read the rest

I confess: I am a little bit in love with Brian Trenchard-Smith. I think he is an excellent director who, arising in a time when basically anyone could do anything they wished in the Australian film industry, convincingly established a name for himself.

Trenchard-Smith directed the first Australian-Hong Kong co-production (The Man From Hong Kong) and has been influential in Quentin Tarantino’s films (Tarantino eventually dedicated Kill Bill to Trenchard-Smith when it opened at the Sydney International Film Festival). He was able to get Nicole Kidman to keep her hair curly in BMX Bandits and his views of the totalitarian future never fail to impress in Dead End Drive-In and Turkey Shoot. AND the Mambo shirts he wears in interviews are always interesting.

I also love ‘bad’/cult cinema- a genre in which Trenchard-Smith’s films have often been welcomed in. And so, when I was perusing IMDB one day and came upon Out of the Body (1989), I had to see it, and see it I did (thank you illegal VHS copies on youtube!). Read the rest

Beyond every shifting guise appropriated by the late Heath Ledger there exists the bittersweet temptation to look back with poignancy, to ponder the creative heights all too briefly scaled. In Ned Kelly, Australia’s most notorious outlaw and anti-hero of legendary proportions, Ledger communed with a kindred spirit, a man who would sacrifice everything to erase the besmirching of his family’s name. And like Ledger, Ned too was a man destined to perish at a tragically premature age.

Gregor Jordan’s film is undoubtedly the most polished and dramatically satisfying re-tread of the Kelly story, offering a welcome balance of drama and portraiture of a necessarily self-serving nature. And despite the presence of Naomi Watts as the fictional, designated love interest – the girl who fancies Ned but can offer no alibi for fear of disgrace - she’s wisely kept to the margins, saving the drama from being cheapened by populist expectations. Read the rest

I don’t know how films get lost but somehow they do. Was it an accident? Negligence? Someone so traumatised by the film that they felt the need to burn every copy in existence? Sometimes we may never know.

Thankfully At Last… Bullamakanka: The Motion Picture is not one of these films but it is, however, rare and difficult to find. It has yet to dissolve into oblivion and I am hoping that this review renews some interest in it. No film should be forgotten about no matter how bad, although I will admit that Bullamakanka surely tests this belief of mine.

Written and filmed in 1984 by Simon Heath (his only feature) the film is not mentioned on Screen Australia’s website as ever having been made. But it was made, and I’ve watched it, and re-watched it, and read newspaper articles about it, and am now writing about it. Why? Well, because I can. Read the rest