Review: Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot

Gus Van Sant’s biopic of US comedian John Callahan is named after Callahan’s memoir, which is turn is named after the punchline of perhaps his most famous cartoon: a couple of cowboys chasing a villain down find an overturned wheelchair and… you get the idea. It’s a sharp skewering of clichés, the kind of cartoon that’s bound to offend, and this biopic contains pretty much none of that spirit. 

That's not exactly a slam on the finished product. What Van Sant serves up is a warm-hearted and kind-spirited film that finds it in its heart to treat just about everyone with thoughtfulness and forgiveness. Joaquin Phoenix's performance as Callahan does an excellent job of capturing his youthful naivety (though Phoenix is probably past playing 21 year olds, as that's the age Callahan was at his accident) alongside the essential optimism that surfaces once he shrugs off the booze.

As for why Callahan made the darkly funny cartoons that made him famous? Well, this never really digs into why Callahan – a boozehound who became a quadriplegic after a drunken accident – became a cartoonist; it turns out he always had drawing ability but never used it. The shame he felt at being adopted is the reason he gives for his anger and his drinking, but how that shame and anger became comedy remains a mystery.

What we do get a whole lot of is a look at how Alcoholics Anonymous in general, and especially a kooky group of wacky types (led by a blissed-out but 'tough-love' wealthy hippie played by Jonah Hill), helped him straighten out after his accident. Van Sant is a director drawn to this kind of material but he's not great at dramatising it; despite some shouting and insults, much of the group therapy side of things feels generic and rote as Callahan plods through all twelve steps to get his life back on track.

Perhaps it's cynicism, but taking the story of a man who punctured cliche and cheap sentiment and turning it into a feel-good tale of can-do achievement and positive thinking feels like a betrayal of something important, even if the intentions were good. In his personal life Callahan may have been a great guy who found a way to face the world with a smile and good cheer, but he was also an artist; this just doesn't seem all that interested in his art. 

- Anthony Morris

Review: Ladies in Black

By 1959, Sydney's tram network was in disrepair. Lines had been closing down since the late 1930s; despite public opposition, removal of the service was government policy thanks to congested streets, competition from buses and private cars, and a general lack of investment. Deliberately run down and rickety, the entire network - once the largest in Australia and one of the largest in the world - would be gone by 1962.

Sydney 1959 - specifically, the lead-in to Christmas - is also when Bruce Beresford's latest film Ladies in Black is set. It's a sunny, polished, feel-good tale centered on the staff of the high-class department store Goode’s (think David Jones), where the floor staff – named the “ladies in black” – guide the women of Sydney in their fashion needs.

For sixteen year-old Lisa (Angourie Rice), it’s a holiday job between high school and (she hopes) university; for Fay (Rachael Taylor) it’s love that’s paramount (and the Aussie blokes aren’t measuring up); Patty (Alison McGirr) has a man but the spark isn’t there; and for migrant Magda (Julia Ormond) who runs the store's fashion gown department, Lisa is someone she can take under her wing and show the world to – well, the European side of it at least.

The tram Fay repeatedly travels to work on is in perfect heritage condition; if the Sydney trams really were looking that good in 1959 they’d still be running today. But you don’t need to know the real-life state of Sydney trams to tell this is a look at the past through glasses so rose-coloured it’s hard to see much of anything clearly through them. Here controlling dads really mean well, deadbeat husbands really mean well, racism is limited to using the term “reffo” and it doesn’t matter that the Nazis conscripted you to run their railways so long as you have a good heart. Where were those Nazi trains going again?

The mood is pleasant enough, but this near total lack of dramatic tension – if this was what 1959 was really like it’s hard to see why anyone would have rebelled against anything in the 60s – only throws the films other flaws into high relief. The cast can’t do much with their one-note characters but some manage better than others; a basic rule of thumb is the better the 50s outfit the better the character comes across. The constant raising then dismissing of issues gives it the veneer of facing up to the hard facts of mid-century Australia, but the suffocating blandness means just about everything simply… works out.

Girls can go to university (on a scholarship!), sexual issues are resolved with a snuggle, poor people from the country know their place (not in Goode’s), foreigners just mean everyone else gets different food to try, gays are free to perv at hot guys on the beach and Melbourne is a crap town everyone makes fun of. All this wrapped in constant sunshine and stylised gloss that gives this competently forgettable film the look of a tourism video sent forward in an attempt to lure time travellers back to 1959.

Then again, the casting of Shane Jacobson as the kind of knockabout decent Aussie bloke he’s played to the point of cliché and beyond suggests that this really is some kind of tourism video. One aimed at overseas audiences selling them on a fundamentally welcoming and intellectually lively Australia that – much like those pristine 1959 Sydney trams – never really existed.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Predator

The first Predator works mostly because it's a brilliantly simple idea well-told: a bunch of action movie badasses meet something even more badass than they are. The second Predator is pretty much the same idea only in a different setting and with a bunch of extra junk thrown in, and it only kind of works. The Predator is nothing but extra junk; it does not work.

At first it seems like all the junk is going to be a feature, not a bug. After his mission to rescue hostages taken by a Mexican drug cartel is interrupted by a crashing spacecraft, US Army Ranger sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) scavenges some Predator technology (a faceplate and wrist band) and mails it back to the US just before he's captured. He also swallows the equipment's remote control so he can crap it out at an important plot point later. Unfortunately he hasn't paid for his post office box in years so the post office dumps his packages on his doorstep where his estranged family take them inside. Their house is later destroyed.

Some people are going to try to tell you that The Predator starts out strong then slowly falls apart, which it does. But they're also going to try and tell you that this films growing narrative incoherence - and make no mistake, this is one of the most garbled Hollywood blockbusters in years; at once stage a dubbed in voice tells us that our heroes (in a helicopter) can track the human bad guys (long gone) by following a brain-damaged alien dog - is the reason why it falls apart. Wrong: as that previous paragraph shows, this film starts out incoherent and does not improve at any stage.

Being a mess doesn't automatically make a film bad, of course. And a lot of the dumber part of the plot can be explained away pretty easily. How does the motley crew of escaped mental patients McKenna ends up leading find a whole bunch of fully automatic military weapons with which to shoot at the Predator? How does Olivia Nunn's scientist - introduced as a biology expert and who cowers naked in a decontamination chamber early on when the Predator tears apart a research lab - turn into someone at least as proficient with military hardware as the rest of McKenna's kill team? It's America: they love their guns.

But this just keeps on piling on twists and developments and messy action sequences with close to no regard to what's happened earlier in the scene, let alone what might make for a good movie. Most of what is consistent is slightly nasty too: there's loads of gore (all of it CGI), the action is almost always just "fire lots of guns before you get sliced up", and this is a movie where literally everyone - including McKenn's on the spectrum pre-teen son - gets at least one human kill. Maybe that's intentional; it is a firm plot point that the Predators are now just coming here to get in some kills before we kill ourselves off.

Writer-director Shane Black usually has a good nose for characters, but here he's way off base. McKenna is a bland action tough guy who's totally forgettable; his motley crew of "Loonies" are initially annoying, then stick around long enough to become the emotional core of the film (McKenna's wife simply vanishes from the story half way through), then get dispatched in slightly mocking ways that make anyone who actually cared about them feel like a chump.

Meanwhile the main human bad guy is slightly memorable yet is given next to nothing to do and one of the stupidest throwaway movie deaths in recent memory, while the Predator(s) are revealed to not really be coming here for sport but then they decide to hunt some humans anyway but it's not a real hunt because they're kidnapping humans now or something. There's a Predator dog who spends half the movie playing fetch. There is now a scientific rationale for the Predator's dreadlocks.

The real problem with these films is that the money is tied up in the IP that is "The Predator", and yet the alien space hunter monster is almost always the least interesting thing about every Predator movie. The less we see of the Predator, the better a Predator movie is; all you really need to know here is that there's more than one Predator, and they don't use their invisibility shields anywhere near often enough.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Merger

The history of Australian comedy film is the history of a bunch of knockabout larrikins who band together to defeat the bad guys. The Castle: larrikins vs development. Crackerjack: larrikins vs development. Kenny: larrikins vs the development of social taboos around defecation. And so The Merger is also about a band of larrikins getting together to - literally - tackle a worthy foe. Only this time, the foe is far more insidious than a stink that'll outlast religion.

Troy Carrington (Damian Callinan) is a local legend for all the wrong reasons. A star AFL player (until he broke his leg running through the Grand Final banner) and environmental activist who got the local logging mill shut down (earning him the nickname “town killer”) he’s not exactly well-loved in his small country town. The terrible wine he makes isn't winning him any friends either.

So when the local footy team looks set to close due to lack of players and an asbestos-filled clubroom, nobody – but especially not club legend Bull Barlow (John Howard) – wants Troy to take over. Thing is, Troy has the skills, the know-how, and after he meets Sayyid (Fayssal Bazzi), the plan: why not look to recruit new talent from the town’s rapidly growing resettled refugee population? But even when he does take over, there's the little matter of entrenched racism to be overcome before the new team can really start operating as one.

The result for both Troy and the film is never really in doubt. But this warm and gentle crowd-pleaser benefits greatly from a well-polished script from veteran stand-up Callinan (who initially toured it as a one-man show), alongside a well-utilised rural setting and a likable cast of relative unknowns. It's remarkable what a difference a decent script can make to an (Australian) film: while this doesn't exactly aim for the moon, it accomplishes what it sets out to achieve - a solid comedy with a strong run of decent laughs and enough story to make the characters more than joke machines - with a verve not often seen on the (Australian) big screen.

It doesn’t gloss over the frictions between refugees and conservative rural Australians either: there's enough real friction here to make the inevitable victory seem hard earned. But it doesn’t dwell too deeply on the divide either; it turns out everyone’s welcome in this plucky band of wacky misfits – unless, of course, you’re a dickhead.

- Anthony Morris

-->