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Random Play: The movie that cried out to be made

Posted at 10:12AM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

I honestly thought that the new Keanu film The Day The Earth Stood Still was the worst movie I had seen in decades, then last night we saw Australia.

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I honestly thought that the new Keanu film The Day The Earth Stood Still was the worst movie I had seen in decades, then last night we saw Australia.

Far be it from me to be a spoiler -- and please go see it, if you must -- but we thought it the most trite, sentimental, predictable, cornball, overblown epic ever. And I’ve seen some clunkers from the Fifties -- which stand up better for their sheer camp value.

About 10 minutes in when Hugh Jackman gets under a bush shower in a scene that looks like a commercial for a new shower gel with gay appeal -- and Nicole eyes him with the kind of cliched shock that only an English gentlewoman can muster -- I turned to Megan and said, “Can this get any worse?”

It did. For another couple of hours. And then some. (Tip: take a packed lunch.)

It also comes with a patina of A Very Serious Issue as it bookends the marathon with something about the Stolen Generations. Insulting, but nice to see Jackman desegregate a pub just by being steel-eyed. If only MLK and Mandela had thought of this approach.

I think Australia is a truly awful film on every level -- it’s a rare one when you can not only predict the next line but also how the next scene will be staged and shot -- but as I say, don’t let me spoil it for you. You might even like the Impossibly Cute And Obligatory Kid (The Day The Earth Stood Still has one too) and the sentimental use of The Wizard of Oz. You might even think the characters who are drawn with cartoon simplicity (bad man, wise Aboriginal etc) and the appallingly bad matte painting of the scenes in Darwin are deliberate and therefore delightfully kitsch.

This film was expected to bring droves of tourists to the Outback and Darwin (I’ve been, you should go despite the movie, it’s worth it) and although it’s early days that looks like it might not happen as the film could tank at the box office in the US and Oz amidst indifferent reviews. There are hate sites about Kidman (cruel and unnecessary I think, she will have to live with this film and that should be punishment enough).

Oddly enough director Baz Luhrmann undersells the spectacular Outback aside from a couple of chopper fly-over scenes. Maybe he was saving the footage for the ad campaign Tourism Australia got him to do for around A$50 million. Might be a case of the ads being better than the film.

Anyway, I started to think about what an epic called New Zealand might look like. Given our “cinema of unease” history I see it panning out like this.

It is the late 19th century and Lady Jane Champion from Rutland has to rush to New Zealand where her husband Vincent has been injured in an accident while breaking in land near Wardville on what was Maori land.

The first three minutes deal with her six month journey to New Zealand and the hardships on the way: on the ship a woman dies in childbirth, a drunken sailor throws a little boy and his cute dog overboard and they drown slowly, a mysterious Maori man inhabits her dreams and she wakes up screaming . . .

Lady Jane arrives in Auckland and for a few days stays in a boarding house run by a woman who plays divine piano and performs abortions on the side. A woman dies during a procedure. Another two women in the boarding house are secretive lesbians who have murdered the husband of one and now live with the shame. It rains a lot.

One night the husband of the woman who owns the boarding house comes home drunk again, beats up his wife, and cuts her fingers off with a butcher’s knife. The lesbians kill him. Lady Jane witnesses this and flees in the rain.

She heads down to the farm where her husband is now slowly dying surrounded by a pinch-faced Bible-quoting pastor, and sympathetic and handsome Maori -- and one who looks suspiciously like the man in Lady Jane’s dream.

The farm is on the picturesque West Coast. Denniston in fact where it rains constantly and women die in childbirth. Children work in the coal mines, men get drunk and beat up their wives.

Vincent dies, Lady Jane decides to stay and work the land with the help of a young artist called Colin who has A Dark Secret and paints landscapes of black mountains and grey skies. He never speaks. It rains constantly.

A sullen Maori man called Heke is carving a canoe for reasons which are never explained.

A dark stranger arrives in Denniston. We see him kill some chickens.

The pastor berates Maori for their godlessness, Heke kills the pastor and pushes out to sea in his canoe. He drowns.

A little girl disappears from a nearby village and suspicion falls on Colin. The moronic looking villagers surround his hut intent on killing him and only disperse when Lady Jane appears and speaks to them sharply.

The mysterious stranger confesses to murdering the little girl and is thrown down a mine shaft by the villagers, a woman dies in childbirth while calling out for husband who turns out to be the pastor, there is a mine accident and many children are killed, Lady Jane and Colin help the survivors and fall in love -- but he dies the next day of influenza.

At the end Lady Jane is standing on the farm when the mysterious Maori man appears and smiles at her. She smiles back and knows she’s found her home at last.

The rain stops.
Then it just fucking buckets down again and the village is washed away.

It’s called New Zealand -- and it has been in a cinema near you. Far too many times I suspect.

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DeepRed
From: The southernmost capital city in the world
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 862

Posted at 10:12AM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

Here's my idea for a movie I'd like to see made:

Working title: Arms Race
Synopsis: A cross between Sleeping Dogs, Crash, Death Wish, La Haine, A Better Tomorrow, and Reservoir Dogs, set mostly in present-day South Auckland.

Public Servant on a tea-break.
From: Wellington
Since: Apr 2008
Posts: 61

Posted at 10:36AM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

Having seen a lot of films, I can remember the one you describe Graham. Cheerless, bleak, and frigging awful. But you forgot the 13-15 year old daughter who was coming to grips with the breakdown of her parents' marriage, which the adults try and hide from themselves through excessive drinking, and her emerging consciousness of her own sexuality.

And the symbolism, the endless sledgehammer like battering from the symbolism.

Still, no matter how bad the movie was, it was good to know Ian Mune and Marton Csokas were still working.

Rich Lock
From: Devonport
Since: Feb 2007
Posts: 854

Posted at 10:59AM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

the symbolism.......the symbolism..........

Otherwise, thanks for that Graham. I do like to see truly bad films get the treatment they deserve.

Geoff Lealand
From: Univ of Waikato
Since: Oct 2007
Posts: 820

Posted at 12:17PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

Yes, but how do we get a yellow mini into it too?

Thanks for the tip, Graham. I was considering going to TDtheESS tomorrow but I am relieved now that I have avoided ruining my weekend.

Bob Munro
From: Christchurch
Since: Aug 2007
Posts: 418

Posted at 12:30PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

I worked on the safety crew for a De Beer’s diamonds commercial once. They had chosen the endless rocky moraines of the lower Tasman Glacier. There is just hills of black rock with the occasional piece of dirty ice sticking out, stretching for kilometres in every direction. Perfect place to depict a primeval diamond forming landscape.

It was a bugger of a place to work. A lot of the rock is quite thin in places and you can slip on the underlying ice. The director wanted a moody cloudscape and sure enough on the main day of filming a southerly front arrived and the cloud lowered to just a couple of hundred feet above the moraines. All access was by helicopter and we were watching closely the safety margins. The director was loving it. Then it started to drizzle.

That was enough for us and we called the shoot off and bundled the relieved actors and the disgruntled director into the helicopters and started relaying them out of there.

By the time we climbed into the last machine, underfoot conditions were treacherous from the wet rocks over the slippery ice and the tops of the dark moraine hills were blending into the grey forbidding sky. Just as we lifted off one of the riggers turned to me and said rather admiringly “Vincent would just be coming in about now”.

Rich Lock
From: Devonport
Since: Feb 2007
Posts: 854

Posted at 12:45PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

I was considering going to TDtheESS tomorrow but I am relieved now that I have avoided ruining my weekend.

A rating of 15% on 'rotten tomatoes'....That translates roughly as 'appallingly bad. Avoid at all costs'.

Paul Litterick
From: Auckland
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 879

Posted at 12:47PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

The poster was enough to put me off; and the title. It was that kind of film. How could it be anything else?

Paul Campbell
From: Dunedin
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 1177

Posted at 1:27PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

Ah but there's the big problem, a real dilemma: a yellow mini showing up in the 1800 would just wrong - but equally it would be really really symbolic - you can see how a director would be torn - I think you take the wheels off and have it carried by a bunch of orcs instead

Sacha
From: Ak
Since: May 2008
Posts: 5261

Posted at 1:28PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

“Vincent would just be coming in about now”

Too true. Imagine his frustrated directorial ambition if he had been born in sunny California instead of gloomy old enzed.

Kyle Matthews
From: Dunedin
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 4380

Posted at 2:10PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

Ah but there's the big problem, a real dilemma: a yellow mini showing up in the 1800 would just wrong - but equally it would be really really symbolic - you can see how a director would be torn - I think you take the wheels off and have it carried by a bunch of orcs instead

Now you're talking Paul. Mount big spikes all around it, skulls of past victims stuck in place of the headrests in the front seats (umm, imagine it's a mini with headrests).

And maybe the good guys could have a matching Kombi van.

Sacha
From: Ak
Since: May 2008
Posts: 5261

Posted at 2:46PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

"big spikes all around" - I'm getting flashes of the urban warrior aesthetic now, Kyle...

Aquila G
From: Auckland
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 6

Posted at 3:09PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

A mini tooling across a distant hillside in symbolic 1800s NZ would be great - it'd serve as a nod to the "was it there or not - well definitely not on the DVD" car in Fellowship as well.

Felix Marwick
From: Wellington
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 164

Posted at 3:11PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

Y'know if you pitched that New Zealand concept to the Film Commission you would probably get a swag of funding.

Lyndon Hood
From: Wellington
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 858

Posted at 3:38PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

a yellow mini showing up in the 1800 would just wrong

Magic realism. Problem solved.

Paul Dowden
From: Sydney
Since: Dec 2007
Posts: 29

Posted at 4:15PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

"Beans to God!"

snakeoil
From: Blue Lynn
Since: Dec 2008
Posts: 10

Posted at 7:31PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

The town is washed out, beaching an enormous whale in the process. When ravenous survivors carve up the whale, a yellow mini is disgorged from it's guts. Zombie sheep feast on entrails and devour the remaining survivors...

Sacha
From: Ak
Since: May 2008
Posts: 5261

Posted at 8:21PM on 12 Dec 08. Permalink.

... and then drive off looking for Bruno Lawrence under a sullen nuclear sky.

Craig Ranapia
From: North Shore, Auckland
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 7136

Posted at 8:41AM on 14 Dec 08. Permalink.

Far be it from me to be a spoiler -- and please go see it, if you must -- but we thought it the most trite, sentimental, predictable, cornball, overblown epic ever. And I’ve seen some clunkers from the Fifties -- which stand up better for their sheer camp value.

And Mr. Read has stumbed over a rather delicious irony of the critical trade -- rather funny watching critics who cream their panties over the absurd, over-heated melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Max Ophuls, Powell and Pressburger and Fassbinder (Sirk on truckloads of cocaine with lots of kinky sex) have a problem with Baz Luhrmann?

Geoff Lealand
From: Univ of Waikato
Since: Oct 2007
Posts: 820

Posted at 12:34PM on 14 Dec 08. Permalink.

Mr. Read should read Mr. Reid!

Craig Ranapia
From: North Shore, Auckland
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 7136

Posted at 12:12PM on 15 Dec 08. Permalink.

Poo to your orthographic imperialism! But seriously - I prefer an overwrought melodrama to glossy sadism or "Beckett on downers does family therapy" aka the American indie film.

andrew llewellyn
From: Wellington
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 2061

Posted at 12:37PM on 15 Dec 08. Permalink.

If it helps, film festival director calls the "gumboot movies". If the characters aren't wearing them, they probably should be.

andrew llewellyn
From: Wellington
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 2061

Posted at 12:37PM on 15 Dec 08. Permalink.

That should read film festival director Bill Gosden...

81stcolumn
From: Nawthshaw
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 500

Posted at 12:37AM on 16 Dec 08. Permalink.

In my movies there would always be a stray dog barking in the street.....

Paul Brislen
From: Auckland
Since: Nov 2006
Posts: 96

Posted at 12:13PM on 16 Dec 08. Permalink.

Bollocks! Bollocks! Crikey dick.

I miss Bruno Lawrence. And his shotgun.

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