Australian Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Mark Hartley's new documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! is currently playing in limited release around the country. I caught a press screening a week or so ago, and though it's not the deepest or most thoughtful documentary in the world, it's a lot of fun, and it left me with a long checklist of Australian exploitation movies I wanted to see. However, I was disappointed to find that even in this day and age, more than half of the titles featured in the documentary are not available on DVD in the United States.

Of course, anyone can rent George Miller's Mad Max (1979) and there are a few others, such as BMX BanditsDead-End Drive-In, Howling III: The Marsupials, Long WeekendMad Dog Morgan, Patrick, Treasure of the Yankee Zephyr and Turkey Shoot, though some of the official DVD releases have gone out of print and may be hard to find, and others are of dubious quality. It took me a while, but I finally found Richard Franklin's Road Games (redheaded Nicole Kidman's illustrious debut), (described by Quentin Tarantino as an "undiscovered gem"), (1981), with Jamie Lee Curtis; no one seems to agree on whether there's a space between the two words, and some searches have it one way and not the other.

It's kind of remarkable to me that Australian filmmakers have a knack for taking some of the most tired film plots and combining them with a distinctive sense of humor. Movies like Strictly Ballroom, Muriel's Wedding, and even it's "Hollywood cousin" My Best Friends Wedding (both directed by P.J Hogan) were movies that, normally, you couldn't pay me to sit through, but for some reason, those Aussies just seem to know how make it work. Which makes me think there might be some promise in the next project for Shine director Scott Hicks.

The Hollywood Reporter announced that Hicks had signed on for his first Australian production since the Oscar winning Shine. On board to produce is Southern Light Films and they have already made a deal with BBC Films. The Boys Are Back in Town will center on a twice-divorced single father and sportswriter who has the duties of fatherhood thrust upon him when he's forced to raise his two sons. If you are a fan of English crime television, you might be happy to know that Prime Suspect writer Alan Cubitt is penning the script based on real-life UK sportswriter Simon Carr.

On paper the film might not sound earth-shattering, but Hicks has proven himself to be a talented director, and I hope that quirky Aussie perspective can help fight off any of the usual feel-good movie clichés.

 

Moira Macdonald of The Seattle Times walked out of Wolf Creek but reviewed it anyway, in the form of an editorial explaining why it was not worth reviewing. Roger Ebert dusted off his zero-star review, denouncing the film as something that he could not sit through "without dismay." Other critics have responded similarly. Ok, fine. But my question is this: why does it cause less dismay for these critics to sit through comedies like the Friday the 13th and Scream films, which make sight gags of slashed-up bodies, heads crushed like walnuts and popped-out eyeballs? Consider this tidbit from Ebert's review of a recent Michael Myers film: "There is a scene in the movie where a kid drops a corkscrew down a garbage disposal.....I am thinking, if this kid doesn't lose his hand, I want my money back." No dismay there. The key stylistic change between that film and Wolf Creek is that in Wolf Creek, death is not played for laughs. The characters are not glaring stereotypes, and the audience is primed to take their potential torture and death seriously. The director wants you to be legitimately scared or to cry, as some people around me in the theater were doing, when the carnage begins. So, why is that no longer a legitimate aim of horror cinema? Why is writer/director Greg McLean being castigated for doing his job effectively?