In Film Australia - all about Australian films

Tom Jeffrey’s film, based on the memoirs of William Nagle, to some extent comes across as an Australian flavoured, poor man’s version of Catch 22 or Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H (1970). Although primarily concerned with depicting the seriousness of young soldiers being tossed into a warzone, scenes of bawdy irreverence provide a welcome counterbalance, with the men using frivolity as a psychological defence against the implications of their presence in Vietnam.

The film, though its edge has been dulled by time, is notable for the strength of its cast. Graham Kennedy is excellent as Harry, the grizzled veteran, quick to proffer a sobering observation or two on the harsh realities of the group’s 12 month stint in ‘Specialist Services’. Offering able support is a trio of recognisable larrikins: the ever dependable John Hargreaves as Bung, Graeme Blundell as Dawson and Bryan Brown as Rogers. Then there’s a very young John Jarratt as Bill, whose going away party opens the film and around whose experiences the film is shaped.

Each actor is able exploit the screenplay’s shortcomings, for although it’s devoid of detailed characterisation, important personal moments bleed through to give the narrative some much needed depth: there’s Harry’s dissolving marriage which became the motivation for his decision to first join the military; the tragic death of Bung’s wife and daughter back home in a car wreck, and the abandonment of Bill by his girlfriend who had proclaimed undying loyalty to him before he left home. Read the rest

Superficially, Dean Craig’s screenplay for A Few Best Men seems like a lazy re-tread of the formula he used for his best known work, the inexplicably successful British comedy Death at a Funeral (2007). Firstly a thin scenario is established using minimal justification for another extravagant family gathering. This time there’s no deceased at the centre of it all, but then is a wedding really that much different? After injecting a stranger into the mix (it was the vertically challenged Peter Dinklage in Death at a Funeral) it’s then time for audiences to sit back and watch with their sides securely stapled as round after round of calamity ensues thanks to various illicit substances, feeble misunderstandings, contrived pratfalls and the absurdist antics of various eccentric or intoxicated characters. Throw in a sexed-up barnyard animal or two and you’ve got a sure-fire formula for box-office success.

Craig’s screenplay so closely follows the template of Death of a Funeral that it appears to be moving forward on rails, offering very minor variations on a theme as it does so. Director Stephan Elliot, no stranger to divisive and extravagant comedies, even imports Kris Marshall from the earlier film. He’s Tom, one of the moronic best men of David (Aussie Xavier Samuel, sporting a fine English accent) whose whirlwind holiday romance with Australian girl Mia (Laura Brent) sees him heading for the altar in double quick time in Sydney’s Blue Mountains. Simultaneously he must work hard to impress his forbidding future father-in-law, Jim Ramme (Jonathan Biggins), a wealthy politician very closely linked to a sheep in his campaigning.  Read the rest

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