He Died With a Felafel in His Hand

John Birmingham's loose collection of share-house anecdotes He Died With a Felafel in His Hand was a surprise (and surprisingly enduring) hit on the Australian literary scene. Whatever it was that made the book so successful, the movie definately doesn't have it; even the addition of something close to an actual plot feels more like a loss than a gain. Not that it's much of a plot: would be writer Danny (Noah Taylor) is living in Brisbane in his 47th share house. The quirky residents of the house go about their business peacefully enough - when they're not belting cane toads with golf clubs or setting fire to the dishes in the sink - but the arrival of Anya (Romane Bohringer) signals nothing less than the total destruction of the house and the lives of those in it. Share house 48 for Danny is in a thinly drawn Melbourne (it rains all the time and the cops shoot people is the extent of the insight here), and share house 49 (Sydney) brings the love triangle between Anya, Danny, and Sam (Emily Hamilton) to a head. This strips most of the quirky stories out of Birmingham's book and replaces them with not a hell of a lot, and it shows in the performances. Noah Taylor had relocated to London by the time the production was up and running: judging by his performance here (of an admittedly subdued character) he could have just mailed a photo of himself back and let it play the part. Worse, the jokes aren't funny, the sense of the bizarre found in the book only appears during the Brisbane sequence, and the love triangle itself is just plain dull. What makes the book so fun is that everyone in it is up to some wacky and / or insane adventures; the characters here have little to say, take forever to say it, and don't even seem like they mean it. Your mates down the pub have funnier and more truthful stories about share living to tell than the ones on offer here.

Anthony Morris

(this review appeared in Forte#254)

Mall Boy

Fifteen year-old Shaun (Kane McNay) spends his life hanging out at the local shopping mall with his mates, dodging his social worker, and spending as little time as possible at home. Fair enough too - his two sisters spend their time swearing, mostly at each other, while inbetween drinks and swearing at her daughters his mother (Nell Feeny) tries to do her best but has no idea what that is. At least his dad (Brett Swain) is out of prison, but the welcome home party turns into a punch-up when dad brings his girlfriend around, and he doesn't seem that interested in having Shaun around anyway. Often blackly funny (if laughing at bogans is your thing, this is the must-see movie of '01) but also surprisingly powerful in its' depiction of aimless youth, Mall Boy manages to avoid the social drama cliches we've come to expect to instead deliver a spot-on look at a depressingly pointless way of life. Musician turned writer / director Vincent Giarrusso (from The Underground Lovers) has definitely made himself a name to watch in film with this one.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte)

The Wog Boy

It's not exactly a surprise that a movie made by the team behind Wogs Out Of Work and the countless related spin-offs (including the TV show Acropolis Now) should end up being titled The Wog Boy. What is surprising is that there's more to this than a bunch of stereotype-based jokes: sure, Steve (Nick Giannopoulos) is a self-confessed 'wog boy', complete with hotted-up Valiant, Travolta-inspired moves with his fellow chick magnet Frank (Vince Colosimo) down the night clubs, and a childhood spent playing on a concrete garden. When a trip down to the dole office leads to a fender-bender with the evil employment minister (Geraldine Turner), it's not long before Steve's being attacked by a national current affairs show (hosted by Derryn Hinch) as "the nation's biggest dole bludger". Steve's wog boy charm turns his follow-up appearance on the show into a triumph as he goes from bludger to battler - exactly the kind of person the employment minister needs to launch her own final solution to the unemployment problem... They've gone out of their way to broaden this film's appeal beyond those viewers with first-hand experience of multi-cultural bingo matches and "the curl gets the girl" approach to clubbing, and for the most part it works: showing politicians as liars is always a winner (especially if they're sex-crazed to boot), and bagging the tabloid media isn't going to lose them any friends either. But it's still the wog jokes that work the best (you'll be lucky to hear a lot of the dialogue over the laughs), and the constant swinging between ethnic humour, political satire, romance (both Frank and Steve find true love), and some moments of serious drama leaves this a bit all over the place. Think of The Wog Boy as a Four Corners pizza: not all of it's going to be to your taste, but somewhere in there is something you're definitely going to like.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #213)

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

Once Were Warriors wasn't really the kind of film that demanded a follow-up, and despite featuring some of the same characters What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? isn't exactly a sequel. Jake the Muss (again played by Temuera Morrison) might have a new girlfriend (Edna Stirling), but he's still out there boozing on and causing fights even as his son Nig (Julian Arahanga) is killed in a set-up by his own gang. Nig's girlfriend Tania (Nancy Brunning) teams up with Nig's brother Sonny (Clint Eruera) to avenge his death, and when Jake refuses to help they get involved with a rival - and just as evil - gang. Meanwhile Jake's life is again on the skids as his erratic behaviour alienates family and friends, and it's not until he hit rock bottom that he realises helping Sonny may be his salvation - if he's not already too late...

The big difference between this film and the original is that Warriors actually had something to say about Maori society; this is just the continuing adventures of Jake the Muss, and his gradual redemption is nowhere near as powerful as his fall was in the first film. Without the savage energy of Warriors (despite the occasional nasty bashing) and a story that's a gang-warfare shadow of the original, even a collection of good performances can't save this from being something of a disappointment. What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? isn't a bad film - it's just no Once Were Warriors.

Anthony Morris

(this review appeared in Forte#198)

Babe: Pig in the City

By now pretty well everyone, young or old, knows the story of Babe the sheep pig. Not a whole lot of films have been as popular and successful as Babe, and you could count on one hand all the sequels to those films that've lived up to the original - without using all your fingers. So no matter how much you want Babe: Pig In The City to be good, it's hard not to take a "hope for the best, expect the worst" approach - and it's a film that lives up to expectations far more than hopes.

The story follows on directly from the first film, as after Babe's triumph at the local show, life settles back to it's usual sedate pace at the Hoggett's farm until Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) is injured in a Babe-instigated well repair accident. It's up to Mrs Hoggett (Magda Szubanski) to keep things running, but when the bank sends the boys 'round to foreclose on the mortgage, she has to pack Babe up and take him to the city to try and save the farm. But the city's a pretty big place, and when Babe gets separated from his human he's left alone to deal with homeless pets, a monkey circus act, and some pretty savage guard dogs as he tries to help his new friends and save his home.

First, the good news: Babe: Pig In The City is never really boring, and the much-talked about 'darker' tone is nowhere near as bad as some have suggested. But apart from that, there's no denying that this just isn't up to the original's (admittedly high) standards. Okay, the film does skilfully transfer the original's fairy-tale feel to the big city and the effects are first rate, but the new characters are muddled, Babe spends most of the film doing nothing, the plot wanders aimlessly (the saving the farm angle is all but forgotten), and for the most part the laughs just aren't there. It's not a complete failure, but after this lacklustre effort, Babe's next starring role is probably going to be in your local Safeway's deli counter.

Anthony Morris

(this review appeared in Forte#182)

Gattaca

Here's a quick test: Name four science fiction movies that made you think. Contact, 2001, Blade Runner, and... well, Independence Day was pretty good at making you think you'd wasted your money. Sadly, while SF in general becomes more relevant every day, in the movies technology means mindless special effects and the future is a great place to blow stuff up. That's what makes Gattaca stand out: A science fiction movie without special effects is rare enough, but when it's more concerned with ideas than action, you'd better make sure you haven't wandered into an old Twilight Zone retrospective by mistake.

In this version of the future, tinkering with your kids genetic nature to create perfect offspring is common practice, which may be good news for the superkids but it's a bit of a downer for those conceived the old-fashioned way. Vincent (Ethan Hawke) was dealt a bad hand from birth, but despite his bad eyesight and heart problems, he refuses to let his imperfections and society's discrimination defeat his dream to go into space. To get inside the rocket-launching Gattaca corporation, Vincent takes on the genetic persona of the perfect but crippled Jerome (Jude Law): He may have to carry samples of Jerome's urine for tests and sprinkle his hair and skin flakes everywhere he goes, but for Vincent that's a small price to pay to get into space. But when the only person at Gattaca who suspected 'Jerome' wasn't all he said he was is found murdered - with Vincent's eyelash on site - a week before Vincent's leaving for Titan, the police investigation seems certain to leave him firmly earth-bound.

As a murder mystery this is uncompelling, and as a romance - with the icy Uma Thurman as a sub standard Gattaca staffer who falls for what she believes is top-grade genetic material - it's far from memorable, but its creepy vision of an antiseptic future populated by sallow-faced pretty boys in tailored suits saves it from complete failure. A world where your every move can be tracked and your life is mapped out at birth is a pretty worrying (and frighteningly likely) prospect, and here it's played for all it's worth - it's just a shame that the rest of this film is so forgettable. Gattaca is different and interesting enough to make it worth a look, but it's more of a curio than a classic.

Anthony Morris

(this review appeared in Forte#154)

The Glimmer Man

Marlon Brando is back and he's kicking heads in The Glimmer Man... oh wait, that's Steven Seagal. Yep, the fattest man in action is even heftier in his latest outing, and to hide it he's wearing even stranger jackets and lots of black (tip for Steve: You can put a black sheet over a couch, but it still looks like a couch - and so do you). Still, he's the man to beat when it comes to slapping guys around and impaling them on anything that just happens to be around, and fans'll be glad to know he doesn't hold back on either. Then again, going by his rapidly expanding waistline (he eats dinner on-camera here), Seagal's not one to hold back on anything, especially if there's salt on it.

Story-wise it's Steven Seagal meets Seven: It's raining a lot, there's a serial killer called 'The Family Man' on the loose, and two miss-matched cops team up to track him down - only here the serial killer's got something to do with the Russian mob, there's an evil conspiracy to frame one of the cops (Seagal) for the killings, and the other cop (Keenen Ivory Wayans) gets to say lines like "I'm gonna go suck on some deer penis". All the usual Seagal elements are here - everyone says how great he is (Wayans says "He took 'em out like Bruce Lee, only better." - maybe he meant "fatter"), he craps on about the wisdom of the East, he wears love beads and jackets made out of tinfoil, he's got a mysterious CIA hitman past, and he slaps people around a lot.

The problems start when they introduce a plot, because when Seagal's idea of conducting a freelance autopsy involves cutting out a dead woman's breast implants you know this isn't exactly Silence of the Lambs. The editing during the fight scenes is so incoherent they make no sense at all so they fit in well with the plot, though you've got to give points to a movie with a credit card that cuts peoples throats and overall they're still more interesting than a Barbra Streisand film. This may be just as silly and mindlessly enjoyable as all of Seagal's other films, but it's obvious he's just marking time 'till he achieves his dream role - Jabba the Hut in the new Star Wars movies. Hey, he's already got the chins for it.

Anthony Morris

(this review appeared in Forte#132)