A first look at The Screaming Jets' Dave Gleeson in FTW :



Finishing the FTW (Fuck The War) movie is why it's been tomblike around here lately. The above clip is from one of the quieter moments in the movie, set during the 2003 protests against the War On Iraq, when the anti-war activist played by Gleeson goes to the pub for a beer while he waits for his kidnap victim, tied to a chair in his cellar, to recover consciousness.

Right now I'm working out how best to make use of interviews with protesters shot during a string of early 2003 marches. It's amazing how many people, including school students, at those protests made more accurate predictions about the chaos, terrorism and mass death that would unfold in Iraq than than our leaders, or our leading commentators.

FTW will be released on DVD and digital download in late October.

Another teaser for 'FTW', coming to DVD and download late October.

'FTW' : Coming to DVD and digital download late October.

Movie News

By Darryl Mason

It's been a bit quiet around here for the past week or so because I've been finishing off a movie. It's a hostage thriller set during the Sydney Student Protests against the Iraq War in 2003.

The basic plot is this : The prime minister is giving a speech at Sydney's Town Hall. An anti-War On Iraq protest outside turns violent, and during a scuffle the prime minister is separated from his security. One of the protesters manages to kidnap the prime minister. He lashes him to a chair in the cellar of an empty house and interrogates him over the deceptions and lies that led Australia into the War On Iraq.

The movie is called :



The movie stars Dave Gleeson, lead singer with The Screaming Jets. Gleeso ripped into the role like a professional, found plenty of laughs where there would have been none without him, and generally pulled the gold from a way too long script and made it shine.

Some images from Fuck The War, straight off the rough edit :









I'll get some clips from Fuck The War up on YouTube soon.

It'll be out on DVD and digital download in a couple of months.

If it sells 500 copies, Fuck The War will be one of the few Australian movies of 2010 to turn a profit.

If it sells a few thousand copies, we get started on another movie.


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It's Not Movie Piracy When Hollywood Does It

So if you've got a couple of minutes, watch these two movie trailers and spot the similarities. It's not too hard. First, an Australian movie called Freedom Deep :



And next, one of Warner Bros. mega-budget box office monoliths (or so they hoped), The Book Of Eli :



Yeah. Amazing, isn't it?

So how does an Australian movie get away with blatantly ripping off a big budget American flick?

Well they don't. Because they didn't.

Freedom Deep was made in 1995. The Book Of Eli was made in 2009-2010.

Think about that the next time you hear Warner Bros. executives whinning about movie piracy and how it's "destroying the movie business".

More from Encore Magazine :

(Australian writer/director Aaron) Stevenson claims The Book of Eli is “virtually identical” to his film Freedom Deep.

“It’s not just the premise of the prophet getting the book back to the remnants of civilisation; that plot point is the same, but there are lots of visual references as well,” said Stevenson. “The last 10 minutes make it a little different, but up to that point, it’s pretty much the same.”

“We’re independent and we don’t have the money to go to the US and start a legal case. It’s a David and Goliath story and we need the publicity first. We’re looking at the possibility at the moment,” said Stevenson.

It will be a long and ugly and expensive fight, unfortunately. Hollywood studios don't give in easily to such lawsuits, even when it's obvious blatant plagiarism has occurred.

The Full Story Is Here

"It's Terribly Flabbergasting"

Smiley

"It's The Worst Insult You Can Give A Man!"

They're A Weird Mob

The teaser trailer for the new Australian movie Red Hill, shot in the Victorian high country :

So what's it about? From the SMH :

....the film tells of an escaped convict (Tom E. Lewis from The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith) who wreaks havoc on the isolated town of Red Hill as he seeks payback on the town's sheriff (Steve Bisley). Caught in the middle is a new cop (Ryan Kwanten of True Blood). Red Hill is bloody fun.

No Australian release date yet.

Coming to Australian cinemas, June 1 :



Air Supply as a key theme song for this "gritty" Australian movie? Really?

Don't Try And Lick The Screen

An Australian documentary on cane toads, in 3D no less, is getting some huge raves at the Sundance Film Festival :

Director Mark Lewis hopes his film -- "Cane Toads: The Conquest" -- will encourage the public to take a different view of the creatures, which are reviled as a pest and a threat to indigenous species in Australia.

It is the second time the Austalian film-maker has investigated the toads, which were introduced to the country in 1935 in a misguided attempt to control beetles ravaging sugar cane fields in the tropical northeast.

"For me, the 3D allowed us to get a point of view closer to the toads and to give a real perspective to the conquest," Lewis told AFP.

"In a way, it's my 'Ava-toads,'" he joked, referring to James Cameron's record-breaking science-fiction film "Avatar."

Avatoads! Brilliant. If those marketing this movie don't run hard with the Avatoads catch line, they're crazy.

What a stunning statistic of the ability of cane toads to infest a new environment - 12 cane toads were released in Australia 75 years ago. There are now estimated to be 1.5 billion.

The 3D doco's director, Mark Lewis, shares his thoughts on why cane toads are not a menace, here.

A reviewer from the LA Times :




I can't find a trailer for Cane Toads : The Conquest, or any footage online. Presumably there will be some soon.


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"We Don't Need Maps, We've Got An Aboriginal Elder!"

It's been a long time since I've watched any new movie trailer three times in a row.



Just brilliant. Thanks to @marcfennell for making me aware of this.

The Bran Nue Dae website is here.

It opens January 14.


------------------------

This blog has been going for getting onto four years, it has a few thousand regular Australian visitors, I've written here fairly often about new Australian movies, and yet outside of the one publicist working on the ultra-independent movie The Jammed, I've never received an e-mail press release or been sent a trailer link by anyone from either major or minor movie distributors.

You'd think Australian movie distributors, producers and publicists would be going out of their way to find every single online avenue to publicise, promote their movies, even at a blog like this.

But no.

Hopefully that will change in 2010.

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"They Had The Courage To Come When No-One Else Did"

Balibo is the new movie from director Robert Connolly (Three Dollars, The Bank) about the "no witnesses" slaughter of Australian journalists in East Timor :

A tense political thriller, BALIBO recreates events surrounding the shooting of five Australian journalists during Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975. BALIBO is told through the eyes of a sixth Australian, Roger East, who is lured to East Timor by Jose Ramos-Horta to investigate the truth behind the death of the five men, who were supposedly "caught in cross-fire" during the invasion.

Can't wait to see it. Balibo hits cinemas in mid-August.

"We Were Confronted With The Iron Fist Of Middle Class Taste"

The all but lost, extremely loose, 1975 movie 'Pure Shit' gets a long overdue re-release.

Here's the trailer :



For its time, this was a wild movie, raw and dangerous and challenging, unlike most Australian movies today. Even the trailer rings a hell of a lot more true of junkie outlaw reality than anything we saw in two whole series of glammed-up Underbelly.

In an interview with Cinetology, Pure Shit director Bert Deling goes hard on the safe and non-offensive Australian film industry :

"It opens up a couple of interesting questions. It opens up the question of how it is that we have had a film funding organisation in Australia that for last 25 years has continued to make films no one wants to see.

"They are the same 12 or so people who made all this crap in the past that no one wants to see. They get hold of a hundred percent of all the governments’ money. In any other country, that would be considered to be a scandal!

"And you can see what the aim is - these f***ers who may have made two or three features, bland sort of things which get two weeks at some art house cinema here and never sell overseas, they want a big kill. They want to get a big budget film, and they’ll make that and then they’ll disappear, leaving the Australian film industry in a smoking ruin. I just don’t get it. They are going to smash it to pieces."

But Deling holds out hope that the low-budget digital movie revolution will deliver on its promise and potential :

"There’s gotta be something soon, like Pure Shit, where somebody wants to go out and make a film and doesn’t give a flying f*** what the middle class say. And they can do it. You could almost do it on a halfway decent credit card."

More on why boring people are killing the Australian movie industry :

"Right across the board we were confronted with the iron fist of middle class taste, and they’re the men and women who’ve been running the film industry. That’s why we get the sorts of films that we do – because they know what they’re gonna get. They’ve read the script, they know the director, they know the actors who’ve been cast. The film that they get is the film they wanted. And so they and their friends get to see a film they think is perfect, but nobody else does and no one wants to go!"

Great Interview

Exclusive? We Got Nothing

By Darryl Mason

Sydney's Daily Telegraph, Melbourne's Herald Sun, the Courier Mail, the Adelaide Advertiser, proclaims a Mad Max 4 "EXCLUSIVE" today :



MTV had a story with far more detail back in early March, including the fact that director George Miller has already stated the fourth Max Mad movie is going to be animated, not live action, meaning there will be no "shooting" in Sydney :

“We’ll probably go a different route,” Miller told MTV News about the potential talent voicing the lead role. The plot would be partly lifted from the script of the fourth “Max” film, which was set to shoot in 2003 until financing collapsed in the wake of the Iraq War.

Now Miller is resurrecting the idea as an R-rated, stereoscopic anime flick for theatrical release. It’s a curious undertaking, to be sure, but one made all the more certain to happen after the runaway success in 2006 of his computer-animated “Happy Feet”—not that the newest, ever-violent “Max” film will have much in common with that kid-friendly penguin party.

“I see myself as someone who is very curious about storytelling and all its various media,” Miller said. “I’ve always loved anime, in particular the Japanese sensibility. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”

The Orstrahyun covered this story back on March 8 :

Max Mad 4 Is Coming, Animated And Mel Gibson Free

So what's the big Exclusive all these Rupert Murdoch daily newspapers have nabbed?

Nothing :

The Daily Telegraph could not confirm casting intentions because nobody at Kennedy Miller was available for comment.

Nor could we confirm whether Miller intended to direct Mad Max 4 himself. And if he did, whether he intended to direct it simultaneously with Happy Feet 2, which is currently in production in Sydney.

Nothing about Mad Max 4 as anime, or the extensive video game that will see release before the fourth Mad Max movie, nothing about Miller's already announced plans for the movie, nothing about the old Mad Max 4 script, 'Fury Road', that has been kicking around for years and will likely supply at least the basic plot of the new movie :

The new film is set two centuries on from where we last left Max, wandering the wastelands at the end of third instalment, Beyond Thunderdome.

While the first two films saw women and gasoline as being the most precious resources left to be plundered by biker road armies, and water became a plot catalyst in Beyond Thunderdome, this time around the unpolluted DNA of human 'pure breeds' will be the treasure all seek to possess.

Gibson's Max is expected to show up in the new film in flashbacks, to reveal what happened to him in the last years of his life, before the new Max, a 'son' derived from his DNA, takes over the story.

The new Max's mission will be to act as a 'protector' and escort a group of non-mutants across the wastelands with their precious stock of unpolluted DNA. This pure DNA stock is desired by the mutant hordes, as it can be used to clean up their genes, and make them resistant to the radioactivity that still infects the land.

How hard is to fluff out an "Exclusive" with some actual information from a Google search, seeing as the Daily Telegraph couldn't get an interview with George Miller, or find out any hard detail from anyone connected with the project?

The MTV story quoted above, with Miller's quotes, is the third story listed when you Google 'Mad Max 4.'

Rupert Murdoch thinks that people will soon pay him to access this kind of non-event "Exclusive" content online.

Good Luck with that.

Here's an old trailer for the original Mad Max, the American trailer with, akk! American voices dubbed over all those excellent, characteristic, funny Australian ones. How wrong is this?

Getting Nostalgic For A Post-Apocalyptic Aftermath

Above, The Herald Sun takes a photoshop shot at imagining what actress Cate Blanchett would look like if she were to take on the role of Pauline Hanson in a planned movie of her life :

Melbourne filmmakers Leanne Tonkes and Steve Kearney believe Australia's most radiant leading lady would be perfect to play the One Nation founder in their Pauline Hanson biopic.

AFI award-winning screenwriter and playwright Stephen Sewell is on board. So is director Anna Broinowksi, best known for her account of the Norma Khouri literary hoax, Forbidden Lie$.

The producers have talked to Blanchett. "She's very busy," Kearney admits. "It really depends if we deliver a script she likes."

"It's based on Hanson's life, starting from a fish and chip shop and ending on Dancing With the Stars."

They should include the very real conspiracy that unfolded between the Labor Party and The Liberals to destroy Hanson beginning in 1996, after John Howard lifted some of her most popular policies and made them his own. Neither the Labor or Liberal parties wanted to see a third party threatening their shared monopoly of federal politics, and for a while there, One Nation with Hanson at the helm looked to have a decent shot at shattering that monopoly. Sabotuer extraordinaire Tony Abbott went so far as to arrange pro-bono lawyers for those who really wanted to grind Pauline Hanson into the ground with lawsuit after lawsuit, a standard tactic for shutting up those with too much to say, and too many people listening.

Garrett Gives Boring Film Industry Long Overdue Slapping

It's nearly two years since Kenny turned toilet humour into Australian box office gold.

No Australian movie since has come even close to turning the kind of profits Kenny did, though plenty of low budget American teen comedies have.

That Kenny ended up being so profitable for its makers and funders probably has a lot to do with the fact that Kenny was an ultra-independent movie, and the makers worked their arses off to promote it in hundreds of towns all over the country. Kenny was funded by private investors, and the first scenes were shot by with a crew of exactly one. If you want to see one of the best documentaries ever made about how two guys with a great idea turned out an impressively profitable movie, and created a new Australian icon in the process, get the Kenny DVD and watch the extras disc. It should be mandatory viewing for every film student in Australia.

If Kenny had crawled through the creativity-draining development processes that most Australians films (partly or fully) funded by taxpayer dollars have to endure, it would have been nowhere near as raw, and funny, and would have cost three or four million dollars, instead of a few hundred thousand.

Since Kenny, there has been less than 30 new Australian movies released in our cinemas. Most have bombed, lost money and turned even more Australians off trusting Australian movies to deliver the most important thing of all : entertainment.

Arts minister, Peter Garrett, is now supposedly slapping some sense into the rusted-on dregs of the Australian film industry who still believe it is more important for a movie to make a statement than to entertain, or to turn a profit :

Australia's federal arts minister Peter Garrett told the country's filmmakers on Friday that they must shoulder some responsibility for the industry's failings.

Some? If Australia's filmmakers aren't responsible for the lack of interest from many Australians in Australian movies, then who the hell is?

In his first speech to the film biz since he was appointed minister of the new Labor government late last year, Garrett told delegates of the Melbourne Film Festival's marketplace, 37 South, "It is time for the industry to re-examine the way it does business so it can aspire not only to cultural independence but also to new levels of financial independence, too."

Despite state and federal coin at near record highs, as a proportion of all film funding, Australian films are not doing well at home or abroad.

"You will be supported for developing productions that attract strong financial backing and are genuinely appealing to audiences," Garrett said.

"You will be rewarded for writing scripts that excite leading Australian producers, directors, cinematographers and actors to come back to Australia."

The establishment within the Australian film industry that supposedly acts as cinematic gatekeepers of our culture have failed us enormously. What's the point of spending millions making poignant, beautifully crafted movies when most Australians have absolutely no interest in seeing them?

Why do appallingly crap American teen comedies routinely make $4-$10 million at our cinemas? Because they're full of big American movie stars? Bullshit. Kids go to see them because nobody in Australia is making these kinds of movies. That is, teen comedies that teens are interested in actually paying to see at the cinema.

If you need an example of just how blind the old guard of the Australian film industry is to what audiences actually want to see at the cinema, and on DVD, look at the example of the Saw movies.

Two young Australian movie makers came up with the script and trailer for an obviously franchisable, and fairly original, horror movie, which could be made (and was) for a million or less and they were turned down by everybody here. They took Saw to Hollywood and quickly found the money to get the movie made.

The four Saw movies didn't make hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide (from cinema, DVD, cable) because they were American movies. The movies were a massive success because they filled a hole in the marketplace. Torture-horror, full of great twists and real tension.

It was a hole that the Australian originators of Saw knew was there, but nobody in the Australian film industry could get their heads around that idea, and so the Australian film industry lost an entire franchise of incredibly profitable horror movies for a fifth of what it cost to turn out yet another miserable film about junkies that nobody wants to endure on a Friday night with their friends.

Movie industry people I've spoken to in the US just can't understand why our industry is doing so very, very badly. We've got the world's best actors, directors, special effects technicians, production designers and costume designers, and most of them have to go overseas to get work. They want to work here, and they will work for scale (or less), but the projects that will win their support and skills don't come along very often.

Seriously, it's fucking embarrassing when American movie producers mock our pissy little output of movies, and their appalling performances at the box office.

"You guys made 15 movies last year? Fifteen whole movies? Lithuania makes more fucking movies than you Aussies do, and they make more money."

Rant over.