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Dog’s World: Ruben Guthrie (2015), Acolytes (2008), Koko: A Red Dog Story (2019)

 

In my recent review of Russell Crowe’s Poker Face, I neglected to mention Brendan Cowell—the potato-faced star of Beneath Hill 60, Noise, and I Love You Too—when listing Australian actor-directors. Cowell adapted to screen his own stage play Ruben Guthrie (2015), in which the titular alcoholic advertising whiz (played by Patrick Brammall) embarks on a year of sobriety to win back his fiancée (Abbey Lee Kershaw) to the chagrin of family, longtime friends, and colleagues. Like Crowe and many other actor-directors, Cowell astutely uses his talented cast, including Jack Thompson (whose role provides a bookend of sorts to his similarly soused part in Wake in Fright 45 years earlier), Robyn Nevin, Jeremy Sims, Harriet Dyer, and Alex Dimitriades. The heavily marinated dialogue betrays the film’s theatrical roots, but cinematically speaking this is brassy and blingy and doesn’t feel stage-bound. The road to recovery beats evoke the likes of Clean and Sober and 28 Days, but the film this most resembles is Any Questions for Ben: a lighter film than Ruben Guthrie, but similarly a character study of a successful marketing guru with an offshore romantic interest and the collapse of his tenuous ecosystem.     

 

 

Acolytes (2008), directed by Jon Hewitt, follows three high schoolers (Sebastian Gregory, Joshua Payne, Hanna Mangan-Lawrence) in a regional community who discover the body of a missing teenager and begin to investigate the crime. The film starts fairly promising, like a teen version of The Dry, or a more emo version of Jasper Jones. Shorn of the star presence and production gloss of those films, I appreciated the naturalism of the leads, the authenticity of their relationship (bonded by growing up together, but with simmering tensions and a creeping love triangle), and the film’s keen sense of place, capturing its small-town milieu as effectively as Ruben Guthrie captures its slick Sydney scene. It also, like Wasted on the Young a few years later, eschews parents and guardians entirely, locking firmly into its young adult vantage point. 

Then the film devolves into a nasty, nihilistic, cartoonish Ozploitation wannabe, though that was probably a foregone conclusion, given the seedy visage of Joel Edgerton—a capable actor I’ve never warmed to despite his multi-hyphenate talents, and this film nary advances that cause—on the poster above. As a former fan and scholar of the genre, I cannot feign moral superiority to it, nor ignorance of its lizard appeal when well executed. But I’m wary of film bodies like the Film Finance Corporation and Australian Film Commission financing exploitative as opposed to edifying projects. 

 

 


Kriv Stenders’ Red Dog is hands down my favourite Australian film of the 2010s, a terrific mainstream entertainment and tearjerker. Its sequel/prequel Red Dog: True Blue is a lower key but thoughtful follow-up evoking the spirit of Storm Boy and Blue Fin. Koko: A Red Dog Story (2019) is a spin-off documentary about Koko, the kelpie who played Red in Stenders’ original. Narrated my Jason Isaacs and directed by Aaron McCann and Dominic Pearce, the film charts Koko’s robust seven-year life from dog show champ to movie star to his early death from heart disease, using on-camera interviews with breeder Carol Hobday, filmmaker Stenders, and producer/owner Nelson Woss, as well as re-enactments featuring Sarah Woods, Toby Truslove, and Felix Williamson in those roles. Charges of emotional manipulation and cheese could easily be levelled at Koko, much as they could at the Red Dog films themselves, but by virtue of its subject this documentary is fairly critic-proof: like its companion works, this wears its heart aggressively on its furry sleeve and is catnip for dog lovers.


Ben 
 

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