Not Quite Hollywood: Grade C

C
Not Quite Hollywood (2008)
Writer-Director Mark Hartley.

This is a documentary of Australian action and horror films of the 1970’s and 1980’s, few of which are known to a wide audience. Mel Gibson’s Mad Max is probably the best known example. They featured buckets of blood, naked breasts, and above all, high speed land and sea vehicles that ultimately explode.

Dozens of films are briefly reviewed with short clips and commentaries from the actors who appeared in them, their producers and directors, film critics, and Quentin Tarantino, who presents himself as some kind of an expert on the genre and who seems to want to elevate it to the level of the Spaghetti Western.

The films are interesting, especially in the first hour, but Tarantino’s comments are inane and obnoxious, telling us over and over how great these films were and how much he loves them. That is just not informative or helpful. However, the comments of the aging actors who appeared in them are often insightful. They include a few well-known actors such as Dennis Hopper, Jamie Lee Curtis, and George Lazenby, but mostly are unknown (to me) Aussies.

There are some worthwhile insights about the development of the Australian movie industry in general. After about an hour though, the whole project becomes repetitive and boring. How many exploding cars can you watch? It becomes apparent why the genre never transcended its roots.

Australia: Grade F

F
Australia (2008)
Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman; Co-writer and director Baz Luhrmann.

Kidman is an English aristocrat who goes to northern Australia just before the Japanese bombed Darwin in 1942. Her husband is dead but she decides to continue running the cattle ranch with the help of ranch-hand Jackman. There is some predictable humor as the city girl confronts the grit of the outback.

The movie is actually a concatenation of two stories, which explains its 2 hour plus running time. In the first story, she must get 1500 head of cattle to Darwin before the monopolistic cattle baron King Carney sews up the contract with the army. A ragtag crew is put together, including herself on horseback, speaking politely to the cows (guffaw!), a drunk handyman, and a cute aboriginal boy. Together they endure many misadventures as they drive the cattle for several days. The landscape is beautiful and beautifully photographed. There is a subtheme of the boy’s relationship with his grandfather, an aboriginal shaman who seems to live in the wild, away from any community. In the end, the cattle arrive on time, she gets the contract, saves the ranch, earns her spurs and falls in love with Jackman. What more could you want?

Then the second movie starts with the Japanese invasion. There is much fire and destruction, the boy is captured by Catholic missionaries and taken away, and Kidman is separated from Jackman. Each assumes the other has been killed, but then there is a sentimental reunion with swelling violins, and you’d never guess this part, the young boy is returned safely also! Everybody goes back to the cattle ranch happy, healthy, and whole.

The acting is terrible, even from Kidman, who is a master of the craft, so I would have to put that down to bad directing. Everybody barks their lines without context, while gestures are pure canned ham. Even Kidman’s famously expressive facial twitches are exchanged for slack-jaw farce. At first I thought all this was supposed to be ironic, because the movie has the feel of a 1960’s television show, like an extended episode of Bonanza. But it’s not ironic, it’s just bad.

Music is exceptionally obnoxious; loud, irrelevant, in-your-face orchestration that instructs you what to feel at each moment. The aboriginal theme is trivialized rather than explored. CGI effects are primitive, intrusive, and unconvincing. The narrative is just one cliché after another, utterly predictable, cloyingly sentimental. The second story was perhaps supposed to be a Gone With the Wind or Casablanca sort of epic showing individuals as pawns in a larger historical drama, but if so, that failed also, because the individuals were only cardboard cutouts and the war story only perfunctory. Is the great Australian scenery enough of a value to save this movie from failure? Not quite.

Do or Die: Grade A

B

Do or Die (2001)

Tom Long, Kate Ashfield, Hugo Speer. Director Rowan Woods. Australian.

This older Aussie TV miniseries is now out on DVD and it is worth a look, despite the fact that it really should have English subtitles for those of us who do not speak Australian. I lost about a quarter of the dialog into the accents. And it does have the tinny feel of television, especially in its abrupt edits and implausible, melodramatic story. Despite these flaws, excellent acting by the principals and sharp dialog, makes the overall product quite good. In upper middle class London, Ashfield’s young boy is diagnosed with a leukemia that only transplanting white blood cells from the father can treat. This situation forces the mother to reveal that her husband (Speer) is not the father. The real father (Long) is a convict in Australia. She goes looking for him, but he escapes from prison just before she arrives. She must find him before the police gun him down. Several twists and turns ensue. Tom Long as the convict father is tremendous. His scowl through furrowed brow is wonderful, and he has a great screen look. He also shows subtlety of expression equal to Ashfield’s, so while the characters are somewhat flat, the project stays grounded, never escaping into cartoon land. Very high end TV!

Court of Lonely Royals: Grade C

C

Court of Lonely Royals (2006)

Damon Gameau, Samantha Noble, Leah De Neise, Ayse Tezel. Writer, Director Rohan Michael Toole. (Australian)

I love the youthful exuberance of this obscure, dark, gritty, Aussie crime thriller. Two young people are hired assassins working for the police in an unidentified Australian city. The young man wants out of the business but is told “there is no out.” A depressive young woman is eventually given a contract to kill him, but not before she forms a relationship with a hooker who wants to be part of the business, for excitement and to get revenge on men. Various incidents and accidents occur until the noir-ish, unresolved ending. The story is patchy, not quite strong enough in character or plot to carry the weight, but with fine individual scenes of intense drama or subtle humor. Strong acting and noticeably good directing keep you watching. The music is good, urban, hip, but the sound engineering is so bad that it obscures much of the dialog. Directing and photography are very creative, borrowing the creepy nocturnal violence of Hong-Kong crime drama and using loads of creative photographic techniques: color intercut with black and white, solarization, filtration, tinting, odd pans and zooms, double exposures, and on and on. All that experimentation lacks discipline however and becomes distracting, but it’s still fun to see what the young people are doing these days.

Look Both Ways: Grade B

B

Look Both Ways (2005)

Justine Clarke, William McInnis. Writer-Director: Sarah Watt. Australian.

This is a quiet contemplation on how we face death, as individuals and as a society. McInnis, a strapping, healthy-looking newspaper photographer, discovers he has runaway cancer and only a short while to live. He meets Clarke, a starving artist, at the site of an accident where she saw a man run over by a train. They are attracted to each other for different reasons. He searches for comfort and intimacy to assuage his terrifying prospect. She looks to satisfy her loneliness and maybe to quiet her biological clock. But they don’t speak these things to each other. An interesting technique is that Clarke’s character imagines dreadful disasters happening to herself and others, at every moment. These imaginations are depicted in intercut penciled or water color animations. As she looks at a train, we see a spectacular train wreck. At the pool we see swimmers chomped in half by sharks. It is an innovative way to show a character’s thoughts, but it is poorly used, as her obsession with horrible accidental death does not play into the main story. The technique works a little better with McInnis’ character, who tries to imagine what he did to “catch” cancer. There are also some loosely related substories. The driver of the train that struck the man is overcome with grief and eventually delivers his condolences to the widow in a touching scene. A colleague of McInnis at the newspaper discovers his girlfriend is pregnant and is reluctant to accept responsibility as he struggles to manage his two young children and argue with his ex-wife. The movie is quiet and slow, but very well acted, especially by Clarke, and the themes of confronting both birth and death are humanly compelling. And it is nice to see Australia (Adelaide, I think it was). The music was Aussie pop, lost on me, but mostly inoffensive. This is a zero-budget indie that will be hard to find, but worth looking for.