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.

Love & Friendship (2016) - Movie Review

Given my willingness to accept frankly insane and rather low-brow themes and narratives in my cinema, I might have depicted myself as a fairly low-brow critic, despite my intentions of reading into films as best I can. And no other statement I’ve made will end up lending more credence to that than this: I’m really not that big on costume dramas. Not to say that there are examples that I have come to like: Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing is one of my favourite adaptations of the Bard on screen. It’s just that the usual unmistakable stuffiness that pervades a lot of what we consider to be costume dramas never really works for me. It’s often too ingrained in a lifestyle so far removed from my own that, even for a guy who loves the fantastical, I find it hard to get invested. But hey, maybe today’s film could change that; if I’ve learnt anything this year, it’s that potential for success can exist in just about any sub-genre. But somehow, I doubt it.

Spin Out (2016) - Movie Review

Just to be clear, I don’t inherently hate Australian cinema. As much as my previous rantings concerning the film scene over here may argue, I don’t see a massive issue with our collective output. There’s not nearly enough of it, don’t get me wrong, but what we do come out with can and often is very good. We have a penchant for cultural self-examination and down-to-earth humour that filmmakers would sell their livers to get such a consistent hold of, and a pedigree of actors that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with anywhere else on Earth.

I’ve always maintained that, if anything, the issue starts when the critics and marketing departments get their noses into everything, combining cultural mandates with laughable tone-deafness to create a landscape more than capable of great content but also blind to what should be done with it. At least, that’s how it usually goes. Then come along films like this that throw the occasional rusty spanner into the works by actually getting all of us to agree on something. Namely, that said product is outright garbage.