Published 2017 on Down Under Flix
Every week, another film turns 30 years old. And if you visit movie websites or frequent “Film Twitter”, you’re bound to hear about it. Robocop turned 30? Here are 12 fun facts from The Wrap. Lethal Weapon turned 30? Here are 15 fun facts courtesy of Metro. Predator turned 30? Here’s an oral history from The Hollywood Reporter. Full Metal Jacket turned 30? Jo Blo’s got you covered with a Matthew Modine/Vincent D’Onofrio interview. Not a lot of local films get the 30 year commemoration (partly because they don’t lend themselves as easily to nostalgia-tugging click-bait), so I figured it was time to get into the 30th anniversary business and shine a light on some 1987 releases. I’ve already reviewed several 1987 titles on Down Under Flix, including Les Patterson Saves the World, The Time Guardian, and The Year My Voice Broke; other notable releases include Kangaroo, The Lighthorsemen, and Travelling North. Suffice to say, it was an eclectic year, and the three film discussed below are the very definition of a mixed bunch.
Every week, another film turns 30 years old. And if you visit movie websites or frequent “Film Twitter”, you’re bound to hear about it. Robocop turned 30? Here are 12 fun facts from The Wrap. Lethal Weapon turned 30? Here are 15 fun facts courtesy of Metro. Predator turned 30? Here’s an oral history from The Hollywood Reporter. Full Metal Jacket turned 30? Jo Blo’s got you covered with a Matthew Modine/Vincent D’Onofrio interview. Not a lot of local films get the 30 year commemoration (partly because they don’t lend themselves as easily to nostalgia-tugging click-bait), so I figured it was time to get into the 30th anniversary business and shine a light on some 1987 releases. I’ve already reviewed several 1987 titles on Down Under Flix, including Les Patterson Saves the World, The Time Guardian, and The Year My Voice Broke; other notable releases include Kangaroo, The Lighthorsemen, and Travelling North. Suffice to say, it was an eclectic year, and the three film discussed below are the very definition of a mixed bunch.
Dot Goes to Hollywood
Director: Yoram Gross
Stars: Barbara Frawley, Robyn Moore, Keith Scott, Stan Laurel,
Oliver Hardy
I’ve
only watched three animated films since 2014, two involving Lego and one
involving Snoopy, so I’m a long way from the target audience of Dot Goes to Hollywood. But the Dot films and filmmaker
Yoram Gross are worth talking about. Gross is a major figure in the history of
Australian animation. His nine Dot films, his work on Blinky Bill, and countless other feature, television, and
short animations helped carve a seat at the table for local animation, a seat
that’s yet to be as fully embraced or exploited by another filmmaker or
animation house.
Gross’s
films typically feature animated characters interacting with live action backgrounds
and occasionally live action actors. In Dot Goes to Hollywood, Gross’s most famous
creation Dot – a barefoot young girl who debuted in 1977’s Dot and the Kangaroo – travels to Hollywood
to become a star and raise money to support her ailing koala pal. There she
encounters old school Hollywood luminaries, a year before another famous
Hollywood-set animation/live action hybrid feature, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Gross’s film features
appearances by Hollywood icons Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx
Brothers, Shirley Temple, Johnny Weissmuller, Cecil B. DeMille, Fred Astaire,
and especially Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, either in animated form, live
action form (via footage appropriated from their films), or a combination of
the two.
Dot Goes
to Hollywood is
very much Gross’s love letter to classic Hollywood rather than a topical
portrait of Tinseltown circa 1987. This is probably for the best: while it
renders the film archaic even by 1987’s standards, it also gives the movie a
timelessness that wouldn’t have come from, say, Dot hanging out with the Brat
Pack and Schwarzenegger. And while Gross’s animation has dated, there’s a charm
to seeing Dot dancing with Laurel & Hardy and Fred Astaire that can’t be
denied. On a side note, the film’s songs were composed by Gross’s son Guy
Gross, later the composer on several Stephan Elliot productions, including the
film that helped launch Down Under Flix, Welcome to Woop Woop.
Dogs in Space
Director: Richard Lowenstein
Stars: Michael Hutchence, Saskia Post, Deanna Bond, Chris Haywood
Of
the three 1987 titles reviewed here, Dogs in Space arguably looms largest today. Similar to
films like Quadrophenia, Withnail & I, and Dazed & Confused, the film enjoys cult status
as a portrait of hedonistic buoyancy and a timestamp of both the period in
which it’s set (for those who experienced its onscreen lifestyle firsthand) and
the era in which it was made (for those first generation viewers the film
imprinted on in 1987). It also serves as testament to the star wattage of late
musician and actor Michael Hutchence, who previously worked with director
Richard Lowenstein on INXS music videos and who’s immortalised both onscreen
and on the film’s soundtrack.
Set
in Melbourne in 1978, Dogs in Space revolves around shenanigans in a sharehouse of
undetermined size and indeterminable tenancy. Inhabitants include musician Sam
(Hutchence), girlfriend Anna (Saskia Post), the mysterious Girl (Deanna Bond),
and other assorted musos and misfits. On the basis of Dogs in Space and 2001’s He Died With a Felafel in
His Hand,
director Lowenstein is Australia’s foremost curator of twentysomething
sharehouse living experiences on film. But where the latter film is a touch
arch, seemingly manufactured for oddball cult adoration, Dogs in Space is a shaggier, more anarchic
creature, perhaps in part because it stems from its director’s own lived
experiences and those of his contemporaries, rather than another creator’s
(John Birmingham in the case of Felafel).
There’s
a clear debt to American cinema of the 60s and 70s in the film’s savvy
execution of Robert Altman-esque overlapping dialogue, as well as in its tragic
denouement, a resounding announcement that the party’s over ala Easy Rider and Shampoo. I also like that the film
and filmmaker resist the temptation – one so many directors fall prey to – to
retrospectively canonize their generation as more politically enlightened than
subsequent ones. Though set in a counter-culture milieu, Lowenstein evades such
contrivances: any didactic expressions of student politics or anti-Fraser
sentiments are quickly ribbed and relegated incidental to the party atmosphere.
Despite my best efforts I had a hard time warming to Lowenstein’s film, though
I recognise its value as a cultural artifact and cult object, and appreciated its
craft and its smarts.
High Tide
Director: Gillian Armstrong
Stars: Judy Davis, Claudia Karvan, Jan Adele, Colin Friels,
Frankie J. Holden
High Tide is the third Gillian
Armstrong film covered on Down Under Flix – following Starstruck and The Last Days of Chez Nous – and the third and best of this triptych of 1987
releases. Recently re-screened at the Melbourne Film Festival as part of a
program on Australian women filmmakers, the film marked Armstrong’s return to
local features following an American digression with 1984’s Mrs Soffel. 1982’s Starstruck, her last Australian film
prior to this Hollywood excursion, ended with ingenue Jackie Mullens’ (Jo
Kennedy) singing her way to stardom in Sydney’s iconic Opera House. High Tide opens with its protagonist
Lillie (Judy Davis, reunited with her My Brilliant Career director) playing third
banana backup singer to an Elvis impersonator (Frankie J. Holden) doing chintzy
gigs at unglamorous regional clubs. It’s a telling study in contrasts.
Subsequently ditched by her peers and stranded in the beachside town of Eden
NSW after her car breaks down, Lillie befriends the adolescent Ally (Claudia
Karvan). However, it soon turns out she shares history with Ally’s grandmother
Bet (Jan Adele) and with Ally herself. To appropriate a line from Casablanca, of all the caravan parks in
all the towns in New South Wales, she had to walk into hers.
Like The Last Days of Chez Nous, High Tide is a family drama
examining three generations of women. However, in the project’s earliest stages
the protagonist of High Tide was male; the creators decided to switch the lead
character’s gender during development. The gender switch makes High Tide a more nuanced,
atypical viewing experience: absent deadbeat dads come good are a dime a dozen,
but depictions of women in these roles are scarce, and Armstrong and co resist
the urge to shave off Lillie’s rough edges. Davis as an actress excels with
rough edges, bringing texture and empathy to outwardly unsympathetic
characters, and she was awarded the Australian Film Institute’s Best Actress
gong for her performance here (the film was also nominated for Best Picture and
Director, but lost to The Year My Voice Broke). Strong performances are also delivered by
Adele, likewise an award winner for her work as Ally’s resilient grandmother;
the youthful Karvan, completely naturalistic and un-self-conscious on camera;
and Colin Friels, Davis’ real-life husband (and co-star in that year’s Kangaroo), as a beachside fling,
though their romantic subplot is unfortunately abandoned.
Water
and the surf are recurring motifs in Australian women-centred dramas, serving
as a means of cleansing in addiction dramas Monkey Grip and Little Fish, a tribal meeting ground and
backdrop for rites of passage in Puberty Blues, and much more. In High Tide, the surf represents for Allie an umbilical
link to her late father (a former surf champion) while for Lillie it symbolizes
both a dangerous force engulfing her self-imposed isolationist existence but
also ultimately a source of purification. Veteran cinematographer Russell Boyd
gives the film a cool, chilly look, as befitting its coastal winter setting,
but the actors invest the film with warmth, heart, and the promise of spring
and new seasons.
Ben Kooyman