I grew up under the high-heeled jackboot of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, when post-apocalyptic visions of futuristic fascist dictatorships seemed to turn up as regularly as London buses. Back then we all felt that the world was at risk from the insane plans of a mentally deficient, war-mongering, US president captured by the military-industrial complex. Of course, now things are completely different (ahem) but Children of Men still seems like the product of a bygone era.
20 years into a grey British future: the population is sterile and extinction of the human race is inevitable. Alcoholic public servant Clive Owen is persuaded by ex-girlfriend and freedom-fighter Julianne Moore to transport some precious cargo to the coast but her plan (and her team) is soon shredded by the forces of reaction and Owen is forced to go it alone. There are several absolutely jaw-dropping set-pieces and I wonder whether the people of Bexhill realised what sort of mess was going to be made of their quiet little seaside town. Never lend anything to a film crew!
Films like Kenny are usually called “mockumentaries” for two reasons: they appear to be documentaries but they’re not really and (in films like Spinal Tap and TV’s “The Office”) they usually “mock” their subjects. This is different.
In a delightful first feature by the Jacobson Brothers, porta-loo plumber Kenny Smyth is a paragon of a man: he loves his family; takes pride in his job; and finds the bright side of situations that would force most of us to jump head first in to a bath of deoderant. The film follows our hero (played to perfection by Shane Jacobson) through a few weeks of an event-filled Melbourne spring, culminating in the big one: over 125,000 people at the Melbourne Cup. While he performs his (literally) thankless tasks, Kenny stoically puts up with an unreliable ex-wife, a co-worker with diarrhoea (of the verbal kind) and a father who is one of the great screen monsters of all time (played with an admirable absence of vanity by the real Jacobson pere, Ronald).
Kenny is a philosopher-plumber, a bard of the bathroom, and has that mastery of the vernacular that Australians seem to excel at: “Mate, there’s a smell in here that will outlast religion!” is my favourite but there’s plenty more.
Kenny is my number one film of the year and the funniest Australian picture since The Castle. Highly recommended to anyone who has ever taken a dump (or had a Henry-Pissinger).
2006 is the Year Of The Veteran and following Clint Eastwood’s outstanding Flags of Our Fathers we now have an Australian salute to the men who served in the Pacific in WWII. Kokoda is the story of the Australians in Papua New Guinea in 1942, when they really were the last line of defence between the Japanese and the mainland and it is a tremendous example of efficient and atmospheric story-telling.
The film benefits from a lack of familiar faces as unnecessary star power doesn’t get between us and the characters, though lead Jack Finsterer has a bit of the young Mel Gibson about him. I’m not convinced that every Australian soldier in the Pacific had NIDA cheekbones and gym-bunny pecs but that’s a minor quibble for a film that convincingly hits so many other marks. Even more remarkably, the film was made over a two year period by a group of 2004-vintage graduates of the Australian Film, TV and Radio School but it would be a great achievement by anyone, even a grizzled old veteran like Eastwood.
Finally, Ridley Scott re-unites with Strathmore’s finest, Russell Crowe, for A Good Year, a bosom-obsessed throwaway about a self-involved financial trader who inherits a broken-down château and vineyard owned by his Uncle (Albert Finney). All involved seem to have spent the entire project with one eye on knocking-off time and why not if you’re surrounded by red wine in Provence in Summer? Australian one-hit-wonder Abby Abbie Cornish plays a beautiful Californian wine-expert who may be Uncle Henry’s illegitimate … sorry, I’ve lost you, haven’t I? A Good Year is about three months too long but it’s a Russell Crowe film and, by definition, they have to be epic these days no matter how slender the idea.
Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 15 November, 2006.
Update: Abbie Cornish spelling corrected.
Found online:
An extraordinary piece of animation, screened at Cannes in 2003 but now available on DVD from the filmmaker. And at stuttery old YouTube. Hat-tip to CartoonBrew.
The visuals were achieved by printing out thousands of film frames (over 65,000 to be exact) and folding them into three-dimensional shapes. The paper-objects were then photographed and composited in After Effects. I can’t even imagine the effort it took to mash-up hundreds of live-action films, often times with three to four films in each scene, and make it all work in a narrative context. It’s an incredible creative achievement.
I’ve just sent away for a copy.