Australia seems to pour all its media money into racist TV ads.
Seriously, most of the movies that make it over here that I’ve seen are pretty decent.
Also, if many shitty American movies don’t make over there (and there are a LOT of them) consider yourselves lucky. I think it’s likely that the American marketing system spins many shitty to mediocre films, that nevertheless have pretty good production values, into things we are all somehow supposed to respect. IOW, American marketing makes American movies appear better than they collectively really are.
Proof is another fine Australian movie. This is not the movie from 2005 starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins - it’s from 1991 and stars Hugo Weaving and Russell Crowe. This movie deserves to be better-known - it has an interesting premise and is well-acted, well-directed and well-written.
I tend to like my war movies with lots of action and at least one big, set-piece battle in it. For that reason I’m not really a fan of “Jungle Warfare” movies (Apocalypse Now and Predator being the major exceptions) because you basically never get a really good overview of what’s going on- you just see one group of muddy soldiers firing into the jungle and one or two “representative” enemy soldiers. Che had the same problem IMHO.
The movie’s armourer is well known in Military History circles here; he’s a stickler for those sort of details and a big fan of military surplus rifles; so the guns used in the film will almost certainly be 100% correct for the time period and location.
And I agree completely with don’t ask’s quoted points and observation about the complete lack of marketing for Australian movies. But I think it might be a vicious circle- after all, what’s the point of promoting a movie no-one really wants to see anyway?
Personally, I think movies need to be cinematic to draw a crowd. Audiences have changed, but more importantly ways to view movies have dramatically changed, and a solid heartfelt drama about the plight of a poor family struggling to survive in the outback is fine for watching at home or screening on SBS, but it’s not worth the hassle of trekking out to the cinema for.
If we can make something as cool and fun as Mad Max back in 1979, why can’t we make something equivalently cool in 2009? We don’t have to compete with Avatar or Harry Potter, but if we could make something along the lines of The Transporter or Nanny McPhee, we’d have a much more likely chance of drawing in the crowds.
There are 1000 ideas brewing amongst Australian filmmakers that are guaranteed to appeal to a wide audience, and wouldn’t take much of a budget to achieve (usually way under AU$10 million) but they aren’t given the opportunity to even try.
This really needs to be repeated. In fact, I think it needs to be an OpEd piece in The Australian; that’s how insightful I think this observation is. Bravo!
I’m going to blame the Uwe Boll effect - it’s a lot easier to get funding for your uninteresting garbage if the guy writing the cheques isn’t the guy footing the bill.
Which then begs the question “How come the interesting stuff isn’t getting funded too?”
The answer has at least partially been touched on (Film Commission), but you’d think at least one person with a creative idea and the skills to pull it off would have gone to one of the major banks and said “I want AUD$7 million to make this film about a killer robot driving instructor who travels back in time for some reason” (or whatever) and gotten the funding privately. Someone, you’d think, would give them the money.
***Babe
Babe: Pig in the City
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
The Devil’s Playground
Picnic at Hanging Rock
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Dish
Bliss
Walkabout
Muriel’s Wedding
Rogue
The Proposal
The Sundowners
Japanese Story
Lantana
Strictly Ballroom
It’s a lot harder because John Howard’s tax scheme has been dismantled. When he was Treasurer in 1981 he introduced a deduction scheme that allowed investors to reduce their income by 150% of their investment and pay tax on 50% of their profit. Even I was an investor back then. Now you can only claim the amount you invest and pay tax on all the profits you make.
Paul Hogan financed all his films back then using private investors.
Considering that taxpayer money is being squandered on crap like The Tenter Hook, the question shouldn’t be “why are Aussie films uninteresting?” but “why aren’t the idiots who allow Aussie films to be made still walking around free?” I’d boycott Australian films but it wouldn’t make a difference because nobody goes to see them anyway.
Wow, I’ve never had that kind of reaction to anything I’ve written before.
It’s something I have believed fervently, in my own mind, for many many years, and I do wish I had an opportunity to say it to the right people, in the right way, and it actually be listened to. Even though I’m sure most of the industry people know it already; they just aren’t brave enough to admit it, in case the snobs overhear it and kick them out of their elite club.
Written by NZers, directed by quintessentially NZ director Peter Jackson. shot in NZ, with a mostly NZ cast (notable exception being Kate Winslet)… does it count in what way?
(It only counts if we lump US and Canadian films together as well).
A speculation but my guess is that the American movie industry casts a big shadow. It obviously dominates the American audience but it also sells its products globally if possible. American movies get seen all over the world.
But there are differences in how they’re seen. In places like Japan or India or France or Hong Kong or Mexico, there’s enough language and cultural distance that American movies are seen as “foreign”. This leaves room for a domestic movie industry to exist and produce “local” movies.
But Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and even the UK are too close. Their potential local movie industry gets overwhelmed. On the one hand, it’s too easy to sell American movies in these countries for local movies to compete. And on the other, it’s too easy for local movie makers to leave home and go to America to make movies.
As I mentioned in the OP and has been reinforced since then, not every Australian movie is boring shite or a Worthy Arthouse Piece. But what gets released overseas is on the best of the best, and often the movies still aren’t especially successful here, for reasons so excellently outlined by GuanoLad and others.
I think there is much in the “90% of everything is crap” theory outlined by others above, but I don’t think it covers everything. We just don’t have the firehose of money to support an industry where a guy gets to green light a film like that parodied in The Last Action hero, where Aahnuld does Hamlet with dynamite and hand-grenades. How the American movie industry got to the point where there is so much money lost on duds, yet punters still shell out for more in a system that is relatively stable might be an interesting investigation.
There is also much in the self-perpetuating “luvvies” theory. The American concept of a boondoggle is applicable here. It means a fraud, but there is sense in which it means a subtle kind of fraud, where a group of people all come to understand that what they are doing is worthless, but the whole operation has got too large to stop. No-one has the courage to dismantle it because to do so admits mistakes were made from the outset and this no-one can afford to do.
It is said that a good example was RCA Victor (IIRC) going broke trying to invent a vinyl video disk system. Even though it was obvious that it could never get enough bits-per-second onto a screen, no-one had the power to stop it because so much had been invested, and to stop it would invite questions about how things were allowed to get as far as they did, which fed back into the loop of pointlessly continuing on.
I fear the people who are writing the public cheques for films may have effectively written prospects of financial success out of the selection criteria merely because they aren’t very good at picking winners, and so they can justify their positions by grading a film on its “worthiness” instead.
For what it’s worth, the Ozploitation genre kind of self-absorbed up its own arsehole around the time of the Howling IV: the Marsupials. They got so godsawful about the time that importing American movies became so cheap that there was no more audience for them.
The genuinely good movies were niche, weird and far between (see movies like Bliss and the Navigator
In the early '90s, Australian movies moved to dark comedies set in the suburbs - Death in Brunswick was probably the best of them - or quirky, arthouse slice-of-life movies that weren’t too bad (e.g. the aforementioned Proof), but gradually became quirkier, arthousier and slicier-of-life until they were just a group of ten writer-directors playing round after round of Soggy Sao.
There was the occasional high-concept, technicolour international niche-comedy (Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding, Priscilla QotD) that allowed everyone in the industry to continue to believe in the "we’ve got the best film industry in the world"™ mantra, while becoming more and more execrable.
But in short, it’s a small, incestuous group who control the Movie-Nobbling Commissions (AFC, NSWFC and VFC) and exclude fresh blood, it’s been well-established that there’s no money to be made from private investing in films (because if there’s a profit the studio will keep pretty much all of it, but there’s never a profit anyway), and there’s enough money and prestige running around the system that no-one on the inside sees the need to change anything.
If people want to see some good Australian movies of the past decade that you’ve never heard of, try the following list:
Little Fish
Japanese Story
Mary and Max (and its marginally less-constantly depressing thematic prequel, Harvie Krumpet)
Lantana
Dirty Deeds
Russian Doll
Alexandra’s Project
I think that’s about it. Of those, Dirty Deeds may not be quite depressing enough to make you want to kill yourself.
And the Bank was shit. Just because a movie has good critical reaction from within the Inner Sanctum doesn’t make it worth watching - viz. the Proposition.
