Slim & I (2020) - Movie Review

I only have one concrete memory of Aussie music icon Slim Dusty, and as embarrassing as it may seem, I’m fairly certain I’m not the only one in my generation who remembers him for this. It was when he did a duet with the Wiggles on I Love To Have A Dance With Dorothy, a kid-friendly reworking of his drinking song Duncan. Wiggly Wiggly World was in pretty heavy rotation for me as a kid, and to this day, it’s one of the main things I remember from my childhood. Even listening to it today, it gets my toes tapping… and fills me with a slight melancholy, as the singer tragically passed away from cancer when I was only eight years old. And yet that one core recollection I have of him, singing about mates joining together in dance, oddly fits with the depiction of him given in this documentary about him and his wife Joy McKean.

Red Dog: True Blue (2016) - Movie Review

In the lead-up to today’s film (which is technically still happening, since it’s officially released on Boxing Day and I managed to catch a preview screening), whenever the original Red Dog film got brought up in conversation, it always ended on the same note: Don’t talk about it, it’s too sad. Having now seen the original, I can kind of see why that is. An unexpectedly iconic piece of Australiana, the original Red Dog is honestly really damn good. A bit cheesy and occasionally unsure of who exactly it was meant to appeal to (the kids in the audience or the adults), but overall pretty good as a look into Australian culture and mannerisms. So, naturally, a follow-up look at our four-pawed folk hero was something I was looking forward to. However, for reasons I’ll get into, this film has plenty of reasons to be initially sceptical about, and for other reasons I’ll get into, it validates an awful lot of them.