Down Under Flix

  Last week’s title, David Hemmings’ Race for the Yankee Zephyr , was an Australian co-production — conceived for filming in Queensland — that was ultimately transplanted to New Zealand. The end result and the film’s overall lack of cultural specificity suggest it could have been made anywhere affording a canvas for its aerial, water, and land-based chase sequences. In contrast, the two titles discussed below — made thirty years apart — could only have been made in Australia. Exhibit A:  The titular joey, named Joey, of Ian Barry's 1997 movie  Joey is iconically Australian fauna. When Joey becomes orphaned, human pal Billy (Jamie Croft) takes Joey to Sydney to reunite him with his family, befriending a senator’s daughter (Alex McKenna) along the way.  Other signifiers of Joey ’s Australianness include sunburnt countryside, a Ute chase with Billy pursued by demented hoons, an Indigenous pal (Tony Briggs), effective location shooting in Sydney, and familiar faces l...

  David Hemmings is a fascinating character. Though I can’t profess to know all the nooks and crannies of his filmography, I enjoy his iconic late 60s counter-culture roles ( Blow Up , Barbarella ) and more conventional mid-70s leads or co-leads ( Deep Red , the wonderful Juggernaut ) and at the opposite end of the career spectrum his prolific last act adding weathered gravitas to titles like Gladiator , Spy Game , Gangs of New York , Last Orders , and The Night We Called It a Day . He was also, like Robert Powell and Richard Chamberlain, one of those British globally exported leading men who dabbled in Australian cinema, essaying bureaucrat-in-suit roles —Martin Donovan before Martin Donovan—in late 70s Ozploitation titles Harlequin and Thirst . Hemmings also directed for film —including David Bowie vehicle Just a Gigolo —and television, including episodes of The A-Team . He also helmed two Ozploitation movies produced by Antony I. Ginnane: spooky thriller The Survivor and adv...

  Like many, I was deflated by the recent news of Sam Neill’s passing. Neill was a dependable class act: wry but reassuring, seemingly effortless but always switched on, never bad, always good. As a child of the 90s, Neill’s credits in that decade loom especially large in my mind, most obviously Jurassic Park but also The Piano , Hunt for Red October , In the Mouth of Madness , Memoirs of an Invisible Man , and so on. But there’s great work from Neill in every decade, and looking over his filmography I’m struck anew by the hefty volume of Antipodean titles he appeared in. He was the rare export star who didn’t just pay lip service to working locally, but genuinely threaded the needle and worked prolifically at home and abroad: in the 2000s, for instance, he starred in The Dish , Dirty Deeds , Perfect Strangers , Little Fish , Irresistible , Dean Spanley , and Daybreakers , among American and international assignments. Neill’s passing prompted a revisit of A Cry in the Dark , Fred ...

When I saw The Travellers in November last year, I left the theatre underwhelmed. Whilst not marketed as autobiographical, there were whiffs of an essay I'd read by its director Bruce Beresford—published in the engaging 2017 collection The Best Film I Never Made and Other Stories about a Life in the Arts —where he reminisced about visiting his ageing father in his regional hometown. Ultimately, The Travellers —about an international opera art director returning home to care for his father after his mother's passing—felt, much like Bill Bennett's The Way My Way , like a minor, low-fi, autobiographical late work by a major Australian director. However, The Travellers has proven stickier than anticipated, and with the passage of time I've found myself thinking less about the film's flaws—its flattish digital photography, its middling lead casting—and more about its witty grace notes, its engaging supporting turns—especially Bryan Brown, reuniting with Beresford for th...