As an Israeli-Australian collaboration, I’m not sure that $9.99 qualifies as an Australian movie. If it did, I would have no hesitation in declaring this another brilliant offering – if not the most brilliant – in a year that is now, without doubt, a great one for Aussie cinema.
This stop-motion claymation movie opens with an encounter between a jaded-looking suited businessman and an articulate derelict who approaches him for a light. The businessman accedes, but baulks at the follow-up request for a cigarette, realising he has been played. A Socratic-style exchange of dialogue follows, culminating in the vagabond holding a gun against his temple, threatening to kill himself if he is denied a cigarette, while the businessman frets over being manipulated and decides that he is not responsible for another’s suicidal action. His neat conclusion is thrown dramatically into doubt by what happens next. And what happens next is not as it seems at first…
Background (Limited concentration span? Skip the background and go straight to the review under picture – see below)
Any cinematic recreation of 1969’s Woodstock music festival is destined to divide its audience – especially the baby boomers who might be expected to make up the main target demographic.
For those boomers who hold the event dear – and often possessively close – as the spectacular generation-defining culmination of all that was good and groovy about the 60s (and their youth), anything less than a reverent portrayal will be pelted with charges of blaspheme. Continue reading ‘Taking Woodstock’ – Movie Review→
I attended a pre-release screening of Balibo last Sunday at the Luna (thanks to ScreenWest and Tony Bective), followed by an absorbing Q&A session with the director, Robert Connolly, and Damon Gameau, the actor who played Greg Shackleton – one of the Aussie journos known as the ‘Balibo Five’, gunned down in cold blood by the Indonesian military during their invasion of East Timor in 1975.
