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August 19, 2012

The Sapphires

Australian films lead the industry in one very important regard: tone. We may not make the biggest movies, or have been the first to establish certain techniques or stories, but we were and still are way ahead of Hollywood in making movies that hate their audience, in making blockbuster dramas ‘dark’. So when a story comes along about both the Vietnam war and the mistreatment of Aborigines at home it would be safe to assume that Zanex need be mixed in with the popcorn. Strangely then thanks to a few scattered soul numbers the darkness of The Sapphires is only skin deep, our industry perhaps learning how to handle large issues with something of a light touch.
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August 15, 2012

Puberty Blues – Pilot

I accidentally caught a few seconds of The Shire while I waited for this show to start and couldn’t help but think back to it throughout my viewing of this much publicized premiere. Both were made at the same time, both are set within the same Sydney shire, both tell stories of sex, drugs and drama among a few young people but only one of them purports to be depicting these things as they are in ‘reality’ and staggeringly that is The Shire ( which, Spoilers to all the Shire fans reading this, ended its episode with a scandalous breakup and the subsequent revelation of a potential pregnancy).

Of course the term ‘reality television’ has long since lost all meaning – those so called shows not just resorting to staging events but starting there – and so I say we give it a new one and re-apply it elsewhere. I’ve never been to any of Syndey’s shires, the seventies are as alien to me as much of the sci-fi they spawned and I’m not remotely close to being a teenage girl but I feel confident in saying that this remake of Puberty Blues by Aussie prestige drama producer John Edwards is about as authentic a depiction as you can get of all of those things, that despite being scripted and performed it is true ‘reality television’.

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April 22, 2012

Beaconsfield

Mining is perhaps the most manly occupation out there; miners are men at their Aussiest, brothers in bulky arms and dust-built beards toiling away underground for the rest of us. They’re such classic blokes that they even threaten to kiss one another as punishment and yet it takes a near-tragic event such as Beaconsfield for us to actually recognize them with a telling of their story; which is made much worse by the fact that it is killers, addicts and incestuous idiots who get the attention instead. Even here though the fact that they are miners seems besides the point, it’s only the plural status of the word that matters, that there are two of them under there that makes this a story worth savoring. Unlike 127 Hours or the like this isn’t a story of survival – physically their achievements were not amazing – or the strength of the human spirit – I’m not sure that they actually triumphed over adversity – it’s one of mateship and according to scripture nothing is more Aussie than that.