Director and writer of Stone Bros, Richard J Frankland, is a funny bastard. Piss-taking, irreverent and just genuinely bloody funny. His intro at the Q&A screening of the movie last Sunday night had the place rockin’. I’m a comic’s nightmare, routinely po-faced while others are rolling around hooting, but I cacked myself to the point of needing to wipe away tears by the time he was finished with us.
Disappointing, then, that this bloke’s undeniable comic talent didn’t quite bloom on-screen in Stone Bros – not as extravagantly as it might have, at least. Continue reading ‘Stone Bros’ – Movie Review→
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…
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.
