Down Under Flix

    It’s been a fruitful season on Down Under Flix after some fallow years. In 2016, the first year of the site, 30 articles were published, followed by 32 articles in 2017. That decreased to 13 articles in 2018, two in 2019, one in 2020, eight in 2021, and three in 2022. With this, the 27th article of 2023, I’ve now matched the total number of articles from 2018–2022. In the spirit of celebration — and as a documented armchair Oscar commentator and loyal This Had Oscar Buzz listener — let’s hand out some awards.   While I’ve published year-end best-of lists previously—see here  and here —the Duffies will award films and creators across seven categories. All 42 films reviewed on Down Under Flix since May were considered. Winners are listed in bold, and nominees/runner-ups are listed alphabetically below. Best Picture: Dark City Elvis Flirting Looking for Alibrandi Malcolm Puberty Blues Three vital coming-of-age films, two big and bold directorial ...

  When I listed Australian sequels in my recent review of Wog Boy 2 , I neglected to mention Flirting (1991) , John Duigan’s follow-up to The Year My Voice Broke . Of its predecessor, I wrote in 2017:   Duigan’s film shares DNA with earlier Australian coming of age precursors like  The Devil’s Playground  and  Puberty Blues , and casts a shadow over later period-set depictions of small town youth malaise like  The Crossing ,  The Delinquents , and more recently  Jasper Jones . There’s also a touch of Peter Bogdanovich’s  The Last Picture Show  in its portrait of a slowly dying town (situated off the highway and left to erode) with a cinema as its social hub. It’s a somewhat melancholic portrait of small town life and the people politics therein, but the natural environment surrounding the town is impressive and beautifully filmed by Geoff Burton … Noah Taylor and Loene Carmen, who would co-star again in  The Nostradamus Kid ...

As the self-loathing streak (rightfully or otherwise) in Australian cinema has grown in recent decades, the place at the table for the daggy, overlit, low-budget theatrically-released Australian comedies pervasive in the 1990s and early 2000s (apex: The Castle , d-pex: The Wannabes ) has shrunk. Its descendants in more recent years are either much more polished ( A Few Best Men , Swinging Safari ,  Top End Wedding ), micro-budget ( Hot Mess ), or crass and obnoxious (Paul Fenech’s work).    You Can’t Stop the Murders (2003) , directed by Anthony Mir, is a product of the genre’s twilight years, in which two cops in a sleepy small town (Gary Eck, Akmal Saleh) are teamed with a city slicker supercop (Mir) to investigate the Village People-themed killings of a biker (Jason Clarke), a construction worker (Gary Sweet), and so on [1]. Whilst the plot is akin to a three-minute sketch — see, for example, Hale & Pace's Spice Killer sketch — the film sustains its one-joke pr...

  Colin: The water in the Harbour’s not blue, it’s green. Cold and hard and green. Elaine: The Emerald City of Oz. Everyone comes here along their yellow brick roads looking for the answers to their problems. All they find is the demons within themselves. This city lets them out and lets them rip.    The above lines are delivered by John Hargreaves and Ruth Cracknell in Emerald City (1988) , the second Hargreaves-starring stage-to-film adaptation covered on DUF this month and the star’s third David Williamson adaptation after The Removalists and Don’s Party . It’s also the second film covered on the site, following Oz: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Road Movie , to draw parallels between Australia—here pitting Sydney’s Emerald City against Melbourne’s Kansas—and Frank L. Baum’s and, more specifically, Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz . Emerald City , adapted for the screen by Williamson himself, was directed by Michael Jenkins, who previously scripted Careful, He Might Hear You —fe...

  Two years ago I reviewed Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Roam , in which the German director dramatized a native title dispute and clash of cultures between an Australian mining company and Indigenous custodians of Arnhem Land. Herzog is not the only German New Wave filmmaker to make a film in Australia: so too did Wim Wenders with the international co-production Until the End of the World (1991) . The film is co-scripted by novelist Peter Carey—whose literary work provided source material for adaptations  Bliss , Oscar and Lucinda , and the dreadful True History of the Kelly Gang —and co-conceived with star Solveig Dommartin.    I’ve seen fewer Wenders films than I have Herzog’s, though I’m less wary of Wender’s methods. Of the films I’ve seen, I best like Paris, Texas— a fairly uncontroversial choice—and, more controversially, Hammett and The Million Dollar Hotel , which star Mel Gibson—not a guy afraid to opine—called “as boring as a dog's ass”. On the fl...

Like the source texts for Cosi and Looking for Alibrandi , I studied Hannie Rayson’s AWGIE-winning play  Hotel Sorrento in high school, as well as seeing a touring stage production and watching two thirds of Richard Franklin’s film adaptation. At the time I found the play trite, though I didn’t know that word. I was also ignorant of the greatness of Franklin and star John Hargreaves , so revisiting Franklin’s Hotel Sorrento (1995) in full almost a quarter century later, my frames of reference have expanded. While I find the play a lot less trite, I remain lukewarm on the film.   Like the recently reviewed My Year Without Sex and Floating Life , Hotel Sorrento is family-focused, and like the latter film sister-focused. After the death of a family patriarch (Ray Barrett), daughter Meg (import Caroline Goodall, following a high-profile run including Hook , Cliffhanger , Schindler's List , and Disclosure ), a novelist based in London, returns home to Australia with her Br...

Candy (2006) , alongside the recently reviewed Looking for Grace , belongs to a sub-genre that could be dubbed "parental nightmares", in which children turn out to be evil (e.g. We Need to Talk About Kevin ) or are besieged by the evils of the world (off the top of my head, Hardcore , Ransom , Taken , My Sister's Keeper , Thirteen , Beautiful Boy , Rabbit Hole , Babyteeth , to name a few). In the case of Candy , the nightmare experienced by parents Elaine and Jim (Noni Hazlehurst and Tony Martin) is watching their daughter Candy (Abbie Cornish) in the throes of heroin addiction. Hazlehurst experienced this nightmare previously in Little Fish , as the mother of Cate Blanchett’s recovering junkie, and a quarter century earlier dated Colin Friels’ heroin addict in Monkey Grip , making her an onscreen avatar for women contending with addicts in their orbit.    Lest the above suggest the film is told from Elaine and Jim’s viewpoints, it’s actually squarely focused on Candy and...

In my year recap for 2016 , I listed Looking for Grace (2016) as the fifth best Australian release of that year, writing:   Odessa Young delivered two superb breakout performances in 2016, in Simon Stone’s ornate The Daughter and Sue Brooks’ scrappier Looking for Grace . I’m not sure Looking for Grace , released on Australia Day, will make too many top five lists for 2016 – it mightn’t even make Odessa Young’s top five – but I was won over by the film’s playful structure, its peculiar grace notes (pun intended), Young’s aforementioned work, and a great neurotic turn from Richard Roxburgh. Given I remembered very little of the film before this rewatch, it’s possible I did not see very many new Australian films in 2016, hence competition was lean; or have seen far too many films since 2016, hence my strained recollection; or criticism and opinion are subjective not just to individuals but to seasons of life and, indeed, the very day of the week someone pens their best of the ...

  Puberty Blues (1981) was Bruce Beresford’s follow-up to Breaker Morant and The Club . All three films anthropologically probe into cultural milieus with built-in hierarchies, rivalries, vocabularies, tribal rituals, and ingrained injustices—the military, professional sport, and high school—although Puberty Blues is distinguished from the other pair by its adolescent and female protagnists. The film provides a time capsule of Cronulla and surrounds in the early 1980s, capturing the golden sands and persons occupying them in their hazy, sun-scorched glory, as well as capturing the rotten gender and social pecking orders that keep down underdog protagonists Debbie and Sue (Nell Schofield and Jad Capelja, both naturalistic and engaging) until they take up surfing at film’s end. Cinematographer Donald McAlpine shot all three consecutive films for Beresford, and here shoots the surfing action with the same cleanness as The Club ’s impressive football scenes.    Beresfo...

  When penning my review of Black and White , starring Robert Carlyle, I was reminded of my two theatrical viewings of The Full Monty : one in a packed theatre with patrons lapping up the film, the other a few weeks later in a large theatre with less than a dozen, far more polite punters. As a dumb teen, I took away the wrong lesson: that the film didn’t work/wasn’t successful outside a packed auditorium. As an adult, I have a more rounded appreciation of the film and its grace notes that aren't dependent on an enthused opening weekend crowd — the thoughtful, non-condescending working-class milieu it sketches (much more effective and less caricatured than the likes of Billy Elliot ), the lovely work from Lesley Sharp, and so on—but the two distinct viewings remain an instructive lesson in the role of an audience in galvanizing each other and collectively elevating a film experience [1]. Malcolm (1986) is a film I’ve also watched twice—albeit at home and with a much longer interva...