Dirt Music (2020) - Movie Review

With how much attention I bring to the names attached to the films I review, I really shouldn’t be in a position where I’m covering the same creative twice in a year by accident, but it seems that the Mighty Oak/Cats & Dogs 3 synchronicity from last month was just a harbinger of what’s to come. Today, we’re looking at a film adapted from a piece of classic Aussie literature by British writer Jack Thorne, who wrote the latest version of The Secret Garden to hit cinemas and screens, and who also has two other feature-length adaptations this year alone. We’ll definitely get to those at some point before the year’s out, but for right now, we’re dealing with this… and honestly, it’s got a lot of the same issues as Secret Garden.

Nekrotronic (2019) - Movie Review

From the makers of Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead, which remains one of the most fun movies I’ve covered on this blog, Nekrotronic is another showing of genre pastiche, basically taking everything the Roache-Turner brothers watched and loved growing up and putting their own spin on it. I can’t exactly say what I was expecting out of this, since Wyrmwood is such a weirdly unique film in its vigour and delivery, but I’m happy to report that not only have they stuck to what they know best, they’ve built on their toolkit to bring the same level of fun at a slightly higher polish.

Lion (2017) - Movie Review

If your average community theatre productions have told us anything, it’s that dramatic acting isn’t nearly as easy as it appears on the surface. Sure, we end up doing quite a bit of pretending in real life for various reasons, but doing so for a purpose that isn’t trying to alleviate real-life social situations can prove rather difficult. In the realms of the acting craft, I believe no singular gambit better emphasises the difficulties within that craft than the prospect of accents. Much like acting as a whole, feigning an accent that isn’t your own seems easy enough but, as someone who has had to hear mocking Aussie “G’Day, mate!” imitations, I know more than I should that accents are difficult to make believable. Making a joke out of how people talk is one thing, but making them believe that that is actually how you speak is something else entirely.

Why do I bring this up? Well, of all the reasons I have so far shown for being excited for certain releases, from the people attached to them to the subject matter to one or two convincing trailers attached to them, this might be the first time that efficacy with accents has been my defining reason for wanting to see a film. Let’s find our way into this thing and I’ll explain why.

Blinky Bill: The Movie (2015) - Movie Review

In the canon of iconic Australian children’s television, there’s a lot more to us than Skippy the Kangaroo; hell, I still haven’t seen an episode of that show and I’ve lived here all my life. You’ve got the surreal and boundary-pushing morality tales of Round The Twist, the endlessly imitated artistry of Mr. Squiggle and the latest addition to the CGI hostile takeover Bananas In Pyjamas, just to name a few. Amongst this collection of oddities is the hallmark animation franchise Blinky Bill, a series of adaptations of the Dorothy Wall book series about a mischievous koala bear and his friends; yeah, it turns some stereotypes surrounding Australia ended up being true.

Brought to the big and small screens by the Aussie Don Bluth Yoram Gross, it made for a very environmentally-vivid part of many a childhood including my own. I still remember a competition at my primary school where I won a stuffed kangaroo because I knew one of the character’s names off-by-heart. Of course, considering the aforementioned decline of the dressed bananas, is this character capable of surviving in today’s Cartoon Network-influenced market? Time to find out with this latest cinematic iteration of the series.

Paper Planes (2015) - Movie Review

While the rest of Australia was busy celebrating how much this great country has developed from being “just bush” (Dammit, Abbott!), I was doing what I find myself on pretty much every major holiday: Watching a movie at my local cinema. However, it seems that my half-baked attempt at scheduling my movies for the week has given birth to a rather convenient coincidence. I originally planned on going out to see a Naruto film at the cinemas, but then I realized that I knew even less about Naruto than I did about DBZ when I reviewed that movie and since it was called “The Last”, chances are I would be more than a bit lost. As such, I instead went with today’s film which is an Australian production. This will probably be the only occasion where one of my reviews will be anywhere near the neighbourhood of timely, so let’s make the most of it.