Prompted by some curiosity about what Nicolas Cage could do for ozploitation, how-bad-can-it-be and Jason Di Rosso's interview with the director, Irishman Lorcan Finnegan. He worked off a script by fellow Irishman Thomas Martin.
The template is Wake in Fright (1971) but less motivated. Cage arrives at the beach/bay of his youth only to find it has become locals-only to a clutch of neo-pagan menchildren who appropriate his surfboard. They write "sanctuary" on it and hang it above the door to their redoubt then claim it has been there for at least seven summers. Julian McMahon (offspring of Billy and Sonia McMahon) tries to locate his inner hardarse as the leader-guru. He spouts random platitudes (selected unoriginal cliches of toxic masculinity) mixed with degraded Christian tropes into a witless literalism that is supposed to degrade Cage's heavily financialised character into acceptance/acceptability/geekdom. A hobo living in a car! A handgun! — uncommon in Australia so it must go off. Some cute wildlife shots. All the blokes are childish and asinine and none of the actors come out looking good. The major flaw, edging out many others, is that it is never adequately established why Cage returns to the beach/bay after dropping his son off somewhere. Why does he never leave, even just to get some food or clothes? I was also waiting for Cage to go psycho but he never properly does. For all that they got the stakes right: Cage does it all for a house.
I can't see this film being made anywhere else but Australia; obviously it riffs on the Bra Boys and the (illegal/semi-formal) enclosure of the commons. That doesn't explain why Screenwest would fund it: why make your awesome beaches look so unfriendly? Is the great state of Western Australia full now, like Sydney was back in 2000? I guess they did also fund Last Train to Freo (2006) — this one should've been called Last Lexus to Margaret River.
Peter Sobczynski: two stars at Roger Ebert's venue, "resembl[es] a feature-length meme." Jamie Tram: the sermons repackage those of Fight Club. Glenn Kenny avoids assessment/judgement.
Kindle. I fondly remember reading McCann's This Side of Brightness (1998) about twenty years ago. One big part of that was his excellent use of his research and empathy for the people he encountered in the tunnels of NYC; the result was (as I recall) a powerful mix of history, engineering and present-day precarity. This gave me reason to expect he'd do the same for those who repair the fibre optic cables that now bind the world together.
And he mostly does, excepting an unnecessary binding of his tale to Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and Apocalypse Now (1979). The style is first-person autofic and I guess (as with life) the author-narrator doesn't quite know what to do with his enigmatic free-diving lead character or even himself, a long-form journalist. I didn't feel he got to the heart of anything much but it was a pleasant read; the writing is great. I wish he had developed his thoughts on Samuel Beckett some more.
A week or two after a sneaky rewatch of The Accountant (2016) which proved unnecessary; there is no essential continuity with the first one. Once again directed by Gavin O'Connor from a script by Bill Dubuque. Once again Ben Affleck plays a man with autism who has the movie-trope mental gifts as well as being bulletproof and ultraviolent. There's no kink this time; it's a strictly linear buddy flick with Jon Bernthal once again playing the normie/less lethal/more vulnerable buddy-brother.
The opening scene has Affleck attending a dating meetup that he's hacked, and like most of the other comic relief it does not land. There's an extended sequence where Affleck's people (the children at this universe's equivalent of the X Mansion) engage in Bladerunner-ish enhancement of surveillance images that suggest the USA has cameras everywhere now, just like the U.K., but Hollywood has yet to move on from the Sneakers (1992) (etc) conception of or consistency in what computers can do.
After all the necessary buildup, where the law is found to be inadequately effectual (just like Dirty Harry did in 1971), things get Rambo-esque (or perhaps just generically action-McJackson) over some human trafficking from Mexico; the last 30 minutes is almost pure video game violence. Yes, having American men saving Latin American children with machine guns is served up straight. Alongside this we see Daniella Pineda discharge a few contracts (evoking the ultra capable femme of Logan (2017)). J.K. Simmons reprises his earlier role as an investigator and Cynthia Addai-Robinson is again the G-woman-in-distress, much like Emily Blunt in Sicario (2016/2018). There's very little to recommend it.
Manohla Dargis: don't think too hard, it works! Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: two circumspect stars.
Ryan Coogler's latest; apparently the only other thing I've seen from him is Black Panther (2018). He wrote and directed. Long-term collaborator Michael B. Jordan led as gangster twins, just like Tom Hardy in Legend (2015) and Robert De Niro just now in The Alto Knights (2025).
The template is essentially From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) transplanted from dangerous present-day Mexico to lethal Mississippi in 1932. There's a cracker soundtrack that fuels a virtuoso bridging scene in the middle, encompassing Black music culture in the USA, warming up the jukes of all times. More of this would've been very welcome (c.f. Small Axe (2020)). Beyond that it's just what was widely telegraphed/spoiled: tired vampire tropes leavened by symbolism and gestures to history that, if you don't recognise them, are meaningless. For instance there's a staging scene where master vampire/Irishman Jack O'Connell is hunted by members of a Choctaw tribe only to be rescued by some people we later understand to be Klanspeople. O'Connell later engages in some mad craic just like a gospel meeting, suggesting that it wasn't just the Blues (at least as played by Miles Caton) that was the devil's music. I didn't try to unpick the commentary on Christianity. I was very happy to see Delroy Lindo (as always). And there's nothing to complain about in Jordan's performance, excepting perhaps that it lacks the humour and vulnerability of a Jamie Foxx.
A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Coogler is feted at least partly because he survived/elevated the MCU and Rocky. That opening scene, of Caton bursting into his father's church, echoed Kill Bill (2003/2004). Romance yielding to violence, the vampire's promise of taking the pain away. Wendy Ide: the threads of story get messy. Dana Stevens: Caton's "true power as a performer [is] to bring together musical spirits from the past and future in a delirious alchemy that transcends time and space." — and having summoned them, what a waste not to put them to more use. Reminded her of Jordan Peele's Us (2019) and Nope (2022), which I found far more opaque.
Later the romance, doomerism and reliance on the soundtrack put me in mind of Crazy Heart (2009).
More ozploitation. Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith (The Man from Hong Kong (1975)) using a script Peter Smalley derived from Peter Carey's short Crabs (circa 1974). The concept is that the state (?) turned drive-in cinemas into concentration camps for the economically useless. Really it's an excuse to update Mad Max to the mid-1980s conception of the apocalypse, one now decidedly urban.
The set is mostly cars, mostly 1970s classic wrecks (Holden shaggers, humongous Ford utes) excepting lead Ned Manning's brother Ollie Hall's 1956 Cadillac which is ridiculously pristine. (Actually the entire camp is remarkably clean.) Manning uses it to take squeeze Natalie McCurry to the drive-in but fails to realise the consequences of buying an "unemployed" concession ticket from Peter Whitford. He's keen to bust out but she prefers the hairstyles available in sheltered community life.
The strong themes (a white nationalism meeting seemed to get a 99.9% turnout) and weak plot prefigure Ben Mendelsohn's breakouts The Big Steal (1990) and Return Home (1990). This film's central flaw is that it lacks a star of his or Gibson's calibre. The early scenes are quite funny and a little cute as Manning jogs around a recognisable Port Botany while people take outre angle grinders to all sorts of things. The drive-in itself was apparently in Matraville. It looks like it was a fun and good-natured shoot.
Loads of details at Ozmovies. Tarantino's favourite of Trenchard-Smith's efforts.
A pointer from Harry Windsor's take on recent ozploitation movies, which is more retrospective than prospective. Also some minor Bruce Beresford completism; he directed his own script from a (semi-auto-fic?) novel by Devon Minchin (father of erstwhile Senator for South Australia Nick Minchin).
A bunch of blokes who work for Darcy's security company, headed by Frank Wilson (the same as always), get it into their minds that it'd be better to rob the place. It's murky as to who's working with or for whom for most of the runtime; clearly lead Terence Donovan is in cahoots with brother Bryan Brown, and the Tony Bonner/ex-cop Ed Devereaux pairing soon firms up, but toff Charles 'Bud' Tingwell's role is murky, as is detective Alan Cassell's (the canonical Gerry in The Club (1980)). The women are auxiliary: Jeanie Drynan was lumped with a reprise of her shrewish housewife from Don's Party (1976), while Candy Raymond is again reduced to little more than a sex object and handed some very trite dialogue. Stuart Littlemore was credited as the TV presenter in the graveyard.
The film was financed by the South Australian Film Corporation which meant that Adelaide had to stand in for much of Sydney. Near as I could tell they only got some shots of the money trucks on the Cahill Expressway and the vertiginous drop of the Gladesville Bridge; A proper NSW production would never have passed up the opportunity to shoot in Waverley Cemetery (cf Noyce's Newsfront of the same year). The aesthetic evokes prisons by contrasting lots of concrete, steel, grime and harsh artificial light with the airiness of the great outdoors and Australian suburbia of the era. Overall the cinematography by John Seale (Witness (1985), Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)) is not flash. A classic instance of the fundamental flaw in many Australian films: essentially just television.
All the details and more at Ozmovies. Stobie poles! Oops. "The sexual politics and the alleged flaws now have the patina of a quaint period glow." Paul Byrnes at some later date. Ahead of its time, or at least Blue Murder (1995), Wildside (1997-1999), etc.
