Review: Wish You Were Here

Wish You Were Here

Dir. Kieran Darcy-Smith

Country: Australia

Aus Rating: MA15+

Running Time: 93mins

There’s a joke about the Australian film industry that all of our films are about serial killers in the outback, or serial killers in suburbia, or just all sorts of other grim and grisly things that send potential tourists running to a different departure lounge. The idea of going on a tour of the dusty outback doesn’t look too appealing once you’ve watched a movie about a vacationing couple being carved up and forgotten about, does it? Wish You Were Here reverses that trend and posits all of its trauma – well, the physical stuff, anyway; emotional trauma is something else entirely – offshore as four young, attractive, affluent Sydneysiders venture to South-East Asia for a getaway and fall afoul of… well, both the audience and several central characters aren’t quite aware of what they run afoul of (bad ecstasy, perhaps?) and therein lies the mystery of this debut film of Kieran Darcy-Smith (known more for his acting in work like The Reef and The Square).

Read the rest at Onya Magazine

Review: Warrior

Warrior

Dir. Gavin O'Connor

Year: 2011

Aus Rating: M15+

Running Time: 140mins

Let’s face it – Rocky has been done to death! And yet its simple underdog tale gets routinely trotted out due to its unwavering success at moving audiences, most notably big manly men, to tears. Director Gavin O’Connor tries sprucing up the material by swapping out boxing for mixed martial arts, but it’s still the same old story told the same old way. At least Real Steel had robots.


Read the rest at Trespass Magazine

And just in case that review doesn't make it clear enough? I'm on Team Edgerton. For everything.

Yes please.

Review: The Thing

The Thing

Dir. Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.

Year: 2011

Aus Rating: MA15+

Running Time: 103mins

Enter any debate about “original versus remake” and John Carpenter’s The Thing will inevitably arise. It’s a proverbial trump card in any argument with anybody who says remakes are never better than the original. Carpenter’s 1982 remake of The Thing from Another Planet is a pulse-racing, terrifying, claustrophobic horror-thriller that featured (quite literally) out of this world make-up and visual effects that remain as gruesomely effective today as they were then. So, in this day and age of ad nauseum remakes it’s a pleasant surprise to see the filmmakers of the latest version of The Thing have actually gone down the road of making a prequel rather than an out and out remake.


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Review: The Waiting City

The Waiting City
Dir. Claire McCarthy
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 100mins

An affluent white couple arrives in slum-ridden India and within hours the airline has lost the wife’s luggage and the husband has gotten sick from drinking the water. These may be scenarios you would find in a light-hearted fish out of water comedy (it’s half the plot of Sex and the City 2, actually), but in this case they are the starting points to Claire McCarthy’s mature and poignant tale of lives affected by adoption in The Waiting City. McCarthy had previously worked as a volunteer in Calcutta and has used this life-changing experience as the basis for this her second feature film. Starring Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton, both of whom returned from successful American careers to make this small, some might say “intimate”, exploration of a failing relationship teetering on the brink of collapse.

Read the rest at Onya Magazine


The Waiting City is beautiful and poetic and I don't mind admitting a shed a couple of tears. However, on a far more crass note - has Joel Edgerton ever been more, ahem, doable? I think not. He just gets better with age, doesn't he? I'm so glad Americans, along with the rest of the world, will soon be getting a whole lot more of him from Animal Kingdom, The Thing remake and Warrior.

Review: Animal Kingdom

Animal Kingdom
Dir. David Michôd
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: MA15+
Running Time: 112mins

Australians love a good crime drama. Hell, judging from the TV ratings they love even bad crime dramas, crime documentaries, crime comedies, crime anything as long as it features people getting themselves in too deep with drugs, violence, sex or the inability to drive properly. And yet crime seems to only pay on the small screen, what with big locally made hits such as Underbelly, Border Patrol and City Homicide sitting pretty alongside international fare like Bones and Midsummer Murders at the top of the ratings heard. Give audiences a body - or, preferably, an ever-increasing pile of them - and they're on board.

For some reason, this predilection to crime hasn't jumped to the big screen in any major way, until now, with David Michôd's debut feature Animal Kingdom. Sure, Matthew Saville ventured there with Noise (the second best Aussie film of the last decade) sort of went there, but not to the level of Animal Kingdom. Lazy people - such as myself, I admit - will describe it as "Underbelly on the big screen" and they're not too far off the mark if you mean a slickly produced, invigorating product featuring a bevy of talented acting heavyweights of the Australian acting industry.


Set in Melbourne, Animal Kingdom begins with teenager Joshua "J" Cody (James Frencheville) being moved to live his grandmother (Jacki Weaver) after the death of his single mother. The mother who had intentionally sheltered J from the life of his grandmother and uncles. He soon becomes indoctrinated into the family business of armed robbery and drugs. The young and easily influenced J is quickly pounced upon by police Senior Sergeant Leckie (Guy Pearce) and is caught between his family and the law. Michôd's screenplay is such a fine, solid base and yet it weaves unexpected sidetracks alongside the intricate plot. Michôd has a knack for dialogue here and each character has such a strong, defined persona, which is something that a lot of films tend to lack. These characters live and breathe, and feel as if they have been for decades.

The movie is impeccably made from a technical standpoint with Adam Arkapaw's cinematography looking so crisp, there are several shots worthy of art. The sound work was, I found, particularly note worthy as was the editing by Luke Doolan who manages to wring so much tension and shock, especially during one scene in which Clayton Jacobson reverses out of his garage. Sounds simply, you will understand when you see it, but it walks such a delicate line of nail-biting suspense. Impressive too is the wonderful cast that Michôd has assembled. Perhaps Ben Mendelsohn is miscast as the elderly brother Pope, and perhaps Frencheville has some strange character traits that are hard to define (is he autistic?), but Joel Edgerton is excellent in a role that I am sure many will spoil, but I will do no such thing. Luke Ford, the brother from The Black Balloon, impresses in what is probably the weakest character while Sullivan Stapleton, Susan Prior and Laura Wheelhouse provide great support too.

The performance of the film, however, is Australian acting legend Jacki Weaver. Instantly recalling recent towering performances by the likes of Mo'Nique, Weaver spends much of the film's first half being quietly creepy and, at times, even gothic, but she proves to be merely biding her time before unleashing a flood of evil in scene after scene leading up to the film's haunting conclusion. The way her lips curl as she tries to keep a motherly smile on her face as she extorts, blackmails and manipulates the walls that are crumbling around her is a sight to behold. It is sure to be remembered as one of the finest displays of acting ever committed to an Australian film.


Unfortunately, I do think that the character of J is what lets the film down during these final passages. His character, not necessarily Frencheville himself, feels messy towards the end and the way the character navigates the twists that the film has in store isn't done as cleanly as one would expect from this otherwise finely crafted film. Sure to become a definitive title of Australian film for what it's trying to - and mostly does - achieve, Animal Kingdom is a superb film that should once and for all get audiences excited about Australian cinema once again (even though they already should be). B+

Animal Kingdom is release 3 June, but I'll remind you about it so don't worry!

Capsule Review: The Square

The Square
Dir. Nash Edgerton
Year: 2008
Aus Rating: MA15+
Running Time: 107mins

Nash Edgerton's upgrade from short film director to feature film director is a familiar course for Australian filmmakers. From Jane Campion to Matthew Saville there is an impressive roster of names - and there are more making the jump this year - and The Square is an incredibly impressive feature debut for Edgerton.

The Square is a thriller written by Joel Edgerton (Nash's famous actor brother who co-stars as a paid arsonist) and Matthew Dabner that takes that good ol' fashioned Aussie film staple - depressed man (David Roberts) having an affair with a younger woman (Claire van der Boom) - and injects it with tension and heart-racing twists and turns. Filled with secrets, double crosses, car chases, mysteries, frights and a fair share of dead bodies, The Square is the sort of film our industry should be making more of. Of course, the movie flopped upon release - all sorts of reasons for that that we won't go into yet again - which is such a shame because it really is a corker of a film. As the press quotes may say, "you'll be the on the edge of your seat." B+