Colourful
character ... Toni Collette in Mental.
David Dale, The Sydney Morning Herald,
reports
Producers of local films seem to be settling
on a theme for success: our stupidity.
If you arrive at the advertised starting time for a movie in your
local multiplex this weekend, you're likely to have an experience that will
make you feel embarrassed to be Australian. I'm not talking about The Sapphires, an Oz flick
that's a bit clunky and a bit corny but great fun. (Indeed, the audience at my
session last Sunday burst into applause at the end, and 200,000 other
Australians agreed with them during the week.)
The experience that will embarrass you will be two trailers you'll
glimpse among the forest of commercials before your chosen film. They will make
you wonder if the latest answer to the age-old question ''How do we get
Australians to see their own stories?'' is: ''Make the movies as stupid as the
audience.''
You'll recall that in the early noughties this country generated a
number of taxpayer-subsidised films about cancer, suicide, drug addiction and
the mistreatment of Aboriginal people. They were critically acclaimed and won
awards but rarely sold enough tickets to cover their budgets.
When asked why they didn't like locally
made movies, Australians tended to reply: ''Because they are depressing and
wanky.''
So, in the past five years, the more commercially minded producers
tried other pathways to our hearts and wallets. They played the patriotism card
- because, after all, Aussies loved Gallipoli
and Phar Lap -
but found that the most successful attempts, Beneath
Hill 60 and The
Cup, made less than $4 million at the local box office.
They tried romantic comedies - because, after all, Aussies loved Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge - but I Love You Too made only
$2.4 million, despite the work of the charismatic Peter Dinklage, and Any Questions for Ben?
(from the creators of The
Dish) made an embarrassing $1.5 million. The film's star, Josh
Lawson, went on to be a deep south dilettante in the Will Ferrell comedy The Campaign, suggesting
once again that Australian actors do best when they don't play Australians.
The producers tried gritty crime drama -
because, after all, we loved three Mad
Max films - but the Oscar-nominated Animal Kingdom barely cracked $5 million and Snowtown managed just $1.1
million. They even tried vampires, at the peak of Twilight frenzy, only to find Daybreakers made much more
in the US than the $2.4 million it scored in its homeland.
Their biggest successes came from grand spectacle (Australia made $37.5
million), sci-fi (Tomorrow,
When the War Began made $13.5 million) and pretending not to be
Australian (Mao's Last
Dancer made $15.4 million, with Balmain substituting for Houston,
Texas).
But the budgets required to try again in those genres are not
sustainable in our small market. So, apparently, the producers have arrived at
their last resort: complete stupidity.
This year's first manifestation of this
desperate logic was A Few
Best Men, in which Priscilla
director Stephan Elliott persuaded Olivia Newton-John to go way over the top.
It made $5.2 million in February this year.
The next two manifestations are now previewing in the multiplexes:
Housos vs Authority,
written and directed by Paul Fenech, and Mental,
written and directed by P.J. Hogan, who gave us Muriel's Wedding.
Fenech is a niche-marketer. His TV shows (Pizza,Swift and Shift Couriers
and Housos) are
perfectly pitched at partially deaf 13-year-old boys with IQs below 85. His
first film, Fat Pizza,
made $3.5 million in 2003, which was more than most of the art-house flicks
could generate at the time. His financial backers have judged that the time
must be ripe for another loud look at suburban stereotypes.
The second trailer presents Toni Collette
as a colourful character named Sharon Thornbender, hired to babysit the
hysterical offspring of a character named Barry Moochmore. It's good to see the
versatile Collette back on home turf, but the trailer suggests the only accent
she cannot do convincingly is broad Australian.
Of course, you shouldn't judge a flick by its trailer. We'll wait
until we've seen the entire movie before we decide if Hogan thinks Australians
want subtle and sophisticated or slapstick and sentimental.
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