Making it’s European debut at the UK’s stalwart celebration of independent cinema, Raindance Film Festival, indie comedy That’s Not Me is the feature debut for writer/director Gregory Erdstein and co-writer/lead Alice Foulcher. But is it any good?
Reviews
VOX POP: The Babadook
It may be a dying art these days, but anyone of a certain age will likely remember those advertorials where punters were asked what they thought of a film as they left a screening. Well, our semi-regular Vox Pop column is updating that notion for the 21st century by attempting to gauge the mood of the Twitterverse about Australian films in the UK, putting it somewhere between criticism by consensus and an opinionated free-for-all.
Jennifer Kent’s pop-up book scarefest The Babadook landed in British and Irish cinemas on Friday (in what constituted the widest release of an Australian film here for some time). The critics may have lauded it with four and five star reviews, and early indications suggest that it has had a strong opening weekend, but lets see what the punters thought.
IN CINEMAS: Mystery Road
To celebrate the UK cinema release of Ivan Sen’s potent, highly-charged slow-burn western Mystery Road, this review (of sorts) meanders in search of the film’s place within forty-odd years of through lines in the Australian film industry.
Vox Pop: 100 Bloody Acres at FrightFest
So, I’m not long back from the UK premiere of the Cairnes Brothers’ splatter comedy 100 Bloody Acres, which had an enthusiastic reception from the ever-excellent crowds at Film4 FrightFest, Britain’s biggest (and best) celebration of all things horror and genre.
Wandering back into The Eye of the Storm
Having made its UK premiere at FilmFest Australia last year, veteran Australian director Fred Schepisi’s adaptation of Patrick White’s much-loved novel, The Eye of the Storm, plays in cinemas across Britain and Ireland throughout May, June and July. To celebrate the release, The Far Paradise takes a look at a novel, and a film filled with homecomings, both on the page and off the screen…
‘A knight and a princess, returning to the foreign shores of their homeland. How could they not disappoint?’
Review: Mad Dog Morgan (1976)
Philippe Mora’s bonkers bushranger flick Mad Dog Morgan has gained a new lease on life in recent years, thanks to a restoration by the National Film and Sound Archive’s Kodak/Atlab partnership. That restoration led to a region 4 release by Umbrella Entertainment, a region 1 Tromasterpiece version (possibly using a different transfer source) and, released on September 5, a new region 2 version courtesy of Digital4 Media.
To celebrate the return of Mad Dog Morgan to home cinemas across the UK, here is an updated version of a review previously published on my Screen Addict blog.
Mad Dog Morgan (aka Mad Dog)
d. Philippe Mora / 1976 / Australia / 102 mins
Viewed on: Avenue One (Region 0 – Australian release) DVD
Philippe Mora is a rather intriguing fellow. Born in Paris in 1949 with Marcel Marceau for a Godfather, his family moved to Melbourne (via New York) when he was just a tot, and he grew up in the heart of that city’s fertile artistic community during the 1960s. Whilst his parents – Georges (a German-born art dealer, entrepreneur and all-round renaissance man) and Mirka (a French-born painter, sculptor and mosaicist) – played host to some of the leading lights of Australian art, from the Antipodeans to the Angry Penguins, Mora set out on the path to becoming a fearless artist and exploitation filmmaker from an early age, directing his first film when he was just fifteen.
He left Melbourne in the late ’60s to join the swathes of creative young Australians relocating to London, where he moved into the Pheasantry artists’ colony in Chelsea, engrossed himself in the underground art world, contributed cartoons to Oz magazine and The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics, and generally went about making friends and influencing people. Before long, he’d corralled a bunch of these newfound compadres, expatriates and natives, to aid in the creation of his first feature film, a freewheeling musical called Trouble in Molopolis (1969).
Continuing his life as a visual artist, Mora eventually moved into documentaries, directing two seminal features, Swastika (1973) and Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? (1975), both of which made extensive use of archive and newsreel footage and examined two extremes of mid-century western society, the rule of Nazi Germany and the entertainment of Depression-era USA. By the mid-70s, the magnitude of the Australian film renaissance had began to dawn on the rest of the world, and Mora promptly returned to Australia, establishing the Cinema Papers journal with Peter Beilby and starting work on Mad Dog Morgan.
The tale of Dan ‘Mad Dog’ Morgan had long been a popular element of Australian folklore and he was often considered the ‘bushrangers bushranger’, supposedly inspiring the later exploits of a certain Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly. In many respects, Mora’s film fits neatly within the popular perception of Australian bushrangers, a kind of semi-mythic, Robin Hood brand of folk anti-hero, and yet he doesn’t shy away from showing Morgan up as a rather vile, irrational and contemptible individual who revels in his own nasty reputation. The ‘Mad Dog’ of Mora’s film is, of course, rather infamously portrayed by Dennis Hopper, who sports a genuine ‘Oirish’ accent and method acts his way through ten or so years of Morgan’s life.
The film itself is not bad, per se, but it certainly is patchy. I got the distinct impression that, during writing and pre-production, Mora was torn between throwing caution to the wind and simply capturing the essence of Morgan’s life, and an innate desire to draw extensively upon the skills he had picked up making documentary films in London. As a result, with no archival footage to utilize or newsreels to reference, Mora simply filled in the gaps between what material he did have. Police reports and court proceedings seem to appear verbatim, with Jack Thompson and Frank Thring’s characters delivering their reports direct to camera (which, aside from the surreal genius of the backwards flaming man, is perhaps the most interesting stylistic device in Mora’s relatively limited arsenal). Combine all this with an odd parallel narrative of a French photographer – whose images were clearly used as a key primary source, both visually and thematically – and you get the distinct impression that Mora simply found a bunch of archival materials and went about filling in the gaps. To be fair, it was also partly based on a book by Margaret Carnegie, but I wouldn’t like to vouch for a book that Mora himself has called ‘fact-based’!
It’s not as bad as all that, of course. Mad Dog Morgan hasn’t aged well, sure, but it’s still a nice little piece of historical genre filmmaking and features some delightfully odd minor characters, particularly Frank Thring’s beguilingly evil Superintendent Cobham, who delivers perhaps the film’s best one-liner, shortly after Morgan’s death at the hands of the police: “By all means, off with his head, and don’t forget the scrotum!”
Finally, a parting comment about the DVD which, as people who own the Avenue One region-free Australian version of Mad Dog Morgan will know full well, suffers badly from an appallingly horrible transfer. Although it purports to be ‘digitally remastered from the original negative’, it most certainly aint. It’s almost as if the transfer was taken from a print that had played every fleapit in country NSW before sitting in someone’s attic for a few years. Oh, and either the cinematographer was as drunk as Hopper during the production, or the transfer lab has cut off about 15% of the left hand side of the frame, plus the sound sucks a big one too.
Happily though, there was a restored version released by Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive as part of the Kodak/Atlab Cinema Collection a few years back and was the basis for Umbrella’s Region 4 re-release of Mad Dog Morgan on DVD, which also features a bunch of other extras, old and new. I’m also assuming it’s the basis for the Region 1 Tromasterpiece version in North America, and also, undoubtedly, for a brand new Region 2 edition by 4Digital which was released earlier this month.
Welcome to ‘The Far Paradise’…
Ever since 1896, when French Lumiere agent Marius Sestier exposed the first foot of motion picture film in Sydney, Australian cinema has maintained a global perspective. From the imported American directors of the silent area, to the Australian Ealing films of the 1940s and ’50s and through to the co-productions and locally-shot studio blockbusters of today – not to mention the many iterations of the ‘Gum-Leaf Mafia’ – Australian cinema has occupied an intriguing position in the global film marketplace.
With that in mind, I present The Far Paradise, a mildly academic blog about Australian cinema from a British perspective. Except that’s not strictly true. I am, in fact, an ex-pat Australian living in London and the son of British (mostly Scottish) parents. Sometimes I feel Australian and sometimes I feel British, but I’m always obsessed with film and – despite being many thousands of miles away – I have an unwavering interest in the past and present fortunes of the Australian film industry.
Thus, this blog aims to explore themes around the vague concept that is ‘Australian cinema’ from the perspective of someone living in London. Occasionally it will focus specifically on films that are in British cinemas, or showing on British television, but it will just as often look at events in Australia itself: new production announcements, the prospects of local films on the Australian market, restoration or research projects, Australian film festivals, etc.
The name of the blog – The Far Paradise – is borrowed from an Australian film of the late 1920s by the inimitable McDonagh sisters. The name was chosen partly to reflect on the notion of writing about Australian cinema from afar (as well as serving my own mild obsession with silent cinema), but also to act as a reminder that, despite continual suggestions to the contrary, Australia possesses a long and illustrious film history, full of great characters, great stories and – most importantly – great films.
Thanks for reading.
The Far Paradise 