AACID TUNG: SEPT/OCT 97

DOING TIME FOR PATSY CLINE )
National Release September 25, 1997
A real slap in the face for Tamworth (or a bit naïve) this film, as the young hero, Ralph (Matt Day) sets off to make his name in Nashville! Straight from his dusty outback home (population three) to Nashville, without stopping on the way? Except he does, of course, get detained, literally. By the cops. Ralph is an object lesson in the evils of hitchhiking: his lift turns out to lead into jail. The Jag driven by Boyd (Richard Roxburgh) and Patsy (Miranda Otto) is stolen; they’re hauling drugs; they’ve got no scruples. Well, very tiny ones. We spend time in jail with the two boys and the inmate band (gruesome country folk playing lousy music) while Patsy escapes in a truck, but she’s suspiciously ill - suspicious because we can bank on a teary revelation about her sickness. Guess what letter it starts with. Anyway, the biggest problem of this film is its jump from a bitter sweet story into a confused and confusing attempt to either play with time or suggest that Ralph is dreaming. Since the end result is unsatisfying, the device is a failure, and we are left in emotional limbo.

DUST OFF THE WINGS
National Release October 30, 1997
This is a so called low budget movie, shot on video and made with more enthusiasm than money; cheap would be a more accurate term. It’s set in Bondi where sex drugs and rock n’ roll are the only recognisable signs of life, if filmmakers Lee Rogers and Ward Stevens are to be believed. (They both also co-star.) The film is a study of a young man’s last moments before marriage. It is presented as if it’s his last moments alive. The blokey sensibilities will appeal to the blokes, but a tad too much sermonising will put the same blokes off. Bared bums while surfing notwithstanding, it’s not really raunchy, except for one very gross joke, but it isn’t too sophisticated either. The amateurs & the professionals in the cast come together at the lowest common denominator, with the exception of Kate Ceberano. But even she is not enough to save this from the netherworld of movies that don’t appeal to any audience block.

THE FULL MONTY
National Release, October 16, 1997
This overrated little film relies on getting an audience by nudity - male nudity. Actually, by the PROMISE of male nudity. So much for honesty in filmmaking. That aside, Robert Carlyle is his usual engaging self as the strip leader of a group of unemployed men in the provincial English town of Sheffield, whose women happily (with much shrieking and screeching giggling) fork out £20 to see male strippers - despite being broke and miserable. Just goes to show that women are equal spendthrifts to men when it comes to ogling the opposite sex, but at least men do it quietly. The film’s tension is created and held by the prospect of these unlikely men turning into strippers and going the full monty - fully naked. Well, of course the film ends with them going full monty, but the camera is behind them, and the frame is frozen at the crucial moment anyway. So much fuss over so little. We immediately realise we’ve been had. What’s more, the men are still unemployed.

DAYTRIPPERS
National Release: October 9, 1997
We meet a young couple, clearly happy and deeply in love, Eliza (Hope Davis) and Louis (Stanley Tucci), who live in suburban New York. When Eliza finds what appears to be a love letter addressed to Louis, she begins to fear the worst – another woman. Her mouth of a mum and deadhead of a father drive her into town to confront Louis at his office in a publishing house. He isn’t there, because just coincidentally, he’s been given the day off. (By the scriptwriter.) They try and track him down at one of those publishing parties, but eventually find him at a very different kind of party, on the roof. And not with another woman. I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s one of those unexpected (and rather sneaky) little devices that writers come up with when stumped for progress. It looks like that because it is completely arbitrary and because the film ends inconclusively, as if the camera just ran out of film. It’s a cheat of a film, although the cast make it a good cheat.

BUDDY
National Release: September 25, 1997
"I threw the pear into Buddy’s cage – and he rushed after it. I pushed the gate shut and clicked the padlock. He was safe now. . . this was no animal I had tricked back into prison. It was a child of the human stem, a being with the power to think and to love, and to suffer." So wrote Gertrude Lintz in her book Animals Are My Hobby, about her pet gorilla. She was not a total fruitcake, because she managed to convince not only herself but her husband and her entire household – along with a good many others who happened to cross her path – that her menageries of animals were actually children. She clothed and fed them as if they were. Her husband nodded smilingly as the chimps careered out of control. (It should have been called Gorilla in their Midst.) Her story was irresistible to executive producer Francis Ford Coppola and the Jim Henson company. The latter made a lot of gorilla suits with real good hair for the actors to mimic the gorilla, Buddy, who was all the time mimicking humans. But the film only tells half the story: where does it show these animals reaching puberty and banging each other? Where does it show them pooping on the expensive rugs in the Lintz mansion? Bah, it’s all cleaned up. Of course, it’s very easy to poke fun at people like Gertrude, with their obsessive pandering to animals who should by all rights be pounding the turf in the wild. It’s easy to suggest they are a few hairs short of a wig for their fanatical obsession. Easy to ridicule a story that ignores the fundamental questions – including how Gertie and hubby came to such a pass. So it’s easy. So what.