The New Boy (2023) - Movie Review

Two people can look at the same image and come away with two completely different understandings of what the image is. This is a fundamental aspect of the human ability to interpret, and something that crops up regularly when it comes to discussing art such as films. As much as I try and give the impression that I know what I’m talking about when writing about what a given image ‘means’, I also try and underpin that with the understanding that this is all my interpretation of things. I could be on the completely wrong track from what the image maker intended to convey, or I could be almost on the same wavelength but missing some vital piece of context, but all the same, I don’t tend to write what I think unless it actually is what I think.

Scarygirl (2023) - Movie Review

Coming off of the decent if inconsistent Tales From Sanctuary City trilogy, director Ricard Cussó’s latest is a major switch-up, both textually and visually. Textually, it’s adapted from an IP that has been doing the rounds semi-regularly for the past two decades, becoming toys, a comic book, a Flash game and even an Xbox Live Arcade download before making it to the big screen.

Visually, however, is where things get really interesting. While Australia has been experiencing something of a boom within the animation industry over the last several years, thanks in no small part to studios like Animal Logic and Flying Bark, this still manages to look like nothing else I’ve seen this country produce thus far. Not even the Sanctuary City movies come anywhere close to this.

Combat Wombat (2020) - Movie Review

Yep, it’s a double feature today, as director Ricard Cussó and Odin’s Eye Animation certainly haven’t been wasting time as not only did this come out this year, but another one has already been finished and slated for release in 2021. After being pleasantly entertained by Wishmas Tree, I was certainly hoping for something just as good with their follow-up, and making it about superheroes is certainly an easy lay-up for me. And yeah, I like this. More so than Wishmas Tree. By a pretty hefty margin.

H Is For Happiness (2020) - Movie Review

Well, this sounds familiar: A precocious red-headed girl with unrelenting optimism and a ‘unique’ perspective on the world sets out to basically fix everything around her. Even as someone with a higher-than-usual tolerance for this brand of family-friendly content (chalk that up to growing up with Mara Wilson as Matilda, I guess), there’s something inherently strained about sitting through a story where children have a greater vocabulary and emotional range than the adults. It’s the kind of thing that normally smacks of wish fulfillment for adults more than anything else, letting the older writer(s) live out their own fantasy of how they wish children acted in the real world. But then there are films like this, which undeniably fit into this niche but also feel wholly singular to themselves.

Three Summers (2017) - Movie Review

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve looked at an Aussie film, so let’s rectify that by looking at today’s film by that fabled Australian filmmaker… Ben Elton. Okay, to be fair, this is a primarily Aussie production, full of premier Aussie actors and it’s set in the outback; it’s just directed by a British guy. But not just any British guy but one of the UK’s foremost satirists. Behind such classics as The Young Ones and Blackadder, Elton’s bombastic and scathing approach to satire is genuinely impressive. Whether it was looking at 80’s punk culture with Young Ones or basically the whole of history with Blackadder, the man had a definite knack for the work, which considering how fiddly true satire can be is commendable. It also helps that he had a hand in the greenlighting of Red Dwarf, not only a strong force of sci-fi satire in its own right but an all-out classic piece of British pop culture.

 

With this kind of pedigree, and taking into account what Australian media is often best at (cultural examination), this should turn out pretty good… right?

A Few Less Men (2017) - Movie Review

I really, really wish I would stop jinxing myself. First the whole low attention span thing comes back to bite me with Dickshark, and now I’m forced to reconsider my statement about Australia’s output for this year. I say this because we are once again dealing with a raunchy Australian comedy starring Xavier Samuel… and it’s really saying something when it’s a follow-up to a film that barely anyone liked to begin with. Released in 2011, A Few Best Men is a film that I barely remembered watching less than an hour after sitting through it and what little I did recall made me feel pretty comfortable with my general lack of recollection. But even with how bad that turned out, I won’t say that I was expecting this to be quite so painful. Let’s kindly get this the hell over with already.

Oddball (2015) - Movie Review

Even as someone who has a dog, I have never really understood the appeal of films starring dogs. Whether it’s the Underdog adaptation, the numerous Air Bud sequels, the numerous Beethoven sequels… actually, that’s another thing: I have never understood why these films spawn franchises that last for that damn long. Anyway, while it may be the archetype of the 'a child and their pet' subgenre, unless your name is Disney, chances are you won’t be able to bring anything new to the proceedings. As such, probably the only way that this could be done any more, and make it to the big screen no less, is if it was based on a true story. Thankfully, we have another entry in the stranger than fiction files where in south-western Victoria early last year, a sheepdog saved a colony of penguins from predators like wolves and foxes. Well, anything for something potentially interesting to come out of Australian cinema, I say, but how well did this story translate to film?

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.