David Veloz directed his own adaptation of Jerry Stahl's memoir of writing scripts in TV in L.A. He doctored the script for Natural Born Killers. Notionally deemed a Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin but I'm losing faith in that list.
We meet the sexually-irresistible Ben Stiller (as Stahl) working in a fast food joint somewhere far from the prime time. There Mario Bello is the first (or latest?) lady to decide she's gotta have that ("You're too darn sad-looking to just be another retard in a pink visor") and we're off to a motel room for tales of T.V. production, drugs and other ladies who we similarly learn almost nothing about. Owen Wilson plays his bestie, pretty much as Owen Wilson must present in real life to his real life besties. Peter Greene has fun dealing to the recovering. Jerry Stahl plays his own doctor, sardonically. The women include, with varying levels of involvement and commitment, Connie Nielsen (Dagmar from Deutschland with the best gear), Elizabeth Hurley (in need of a green card), Liz Torres (in need of a junk buddy), Janeane Garofalo (in need of a man, any man), Cheryl Ladd (in need of a scriptwriter). And probably others. He's shooting up on anything and tomorrow's never there.
The vibe is Trainspotting-adjacent, comedic but not very funny, definitely not fun, funny or philosophical about drug use, milking a 1990s soundtrack. Stiller appears to be all-in, at one point shooting into his neck. Many scenes are way too long and the last movement really drags. Was there a point?
Roger Ebert: three stars. Addiction is heavy stuff. The Man With the Golden Arm. Janet Maslin: a cautionary tale!
Second or third time around. Peter Weir directed a script originally by Christopher Koch that was bent out of shape by Weir and David Williamson; they elided too many of the meaningful bits while retaining all the obscurity. Maurice Jarre did the soundtrack to which Vangelis contributed the somewhat incongruous theme song L'Enfant.
The movie flits from event to event and feels rushed after the languor of the book; Koch did pace that right. Mel Gibson's Guy Hamilton is not the giant counterpart to Billy Kwan as played by Lind Hunt (Dune (1984)). (She's excellent in a mediocre movie.) Casting the tall Sigourney Weaver as an English rose only served to emphasise that. Neither are particularly effective as romantic leads — she giggling like a schoolgirl, he staring like he's been poleaxed. Did either ever try again? Bill Kerr's Colonel Henderson is undignified. Paul Sonkkila's dial is very familiar from Australian cinema.
The increased emphasis on the romance made it even more difficult to fathom the stakes; things get asserted from time-to-time but no reasons are ever given. (Koch provided at least some background in prose: what taking a bungalow signified, what Billy means by saying "Anglo-Saxons are better in the tropics", and so on.) At times the goal seemed to be to remake Mad Max.
Again I'd say Weir's direction is unsuccessful.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Saint Jack. Vincent Canby: "This film should be some kind of epic." Ozmovies (snapshot): retrospectively perhaps Weir's best! Wikipedia. IMDB trivia: shot in Sydney and the Philippines. The non-English dialogue is in Tagalog, not Bahasa. Oops.
Somewhat prompted by Manohla Dargis making it a Critic's Pick, and otherwise slim pickings amongst the new movies. Directed by Gia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola's granddaughter, new to me. Written by Kate Gersten who has done a lot of TV.
To me this is obviously a female counterpart to Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008): take a 1980s/1990s star (here Pamela Anderson) and show them now glammed up and down, still in a job that they've aged well out of. It's a genre that I suspect Diane Keaton of milking, perhaps right back to The Godfather: Part III, but I wouldn't know.
The scenario has Anderson showgirling in Le Razzle Dazzle, purportedly the last show of its kind in Las Vegas. Its 30 year run is coming to an end and she needs to find a new gig. The first half has enough fun bits to suggest a black comedy but by halfway, as Jamie Lee Curtis's cocktail waitress is eclipsed by cliche, things are deadly serious. There's a daughter plot involving miscast Billie Lourd and a fair slab of generic confected conflict. By the credits nothing has been resolved but we're still shown scenes of redemption/empathy/reconnection.
Pamela Anderson has her moments. Her best acting here is when she reaches for the extremely synthetic but her efforts are never matched by the rest of the cast, excepting her rapport with Curtis. (Curtis is far better here than in Everything Everywhere All At Once — a career-best performance even?) Stage manager/erstwhile lover Dave Bautista delivers some drecky dialogue during his big dinner scene in the mode of the emotionally incompetent character he's spent too long playing. I feel he's been better than that but perhaps I'm wrong. Jason Schwartzman is flat and brutal, just doing a favour for a cousin (?).
I did not enjoy the cinematography much.
Sheila O'Malley. I think she forgets just how artificial Anderson's beauty always was. Sandra Hall: a family production. Luke Goodsell. The commentariat generally holds that Anderson is good in a bad movie.
Prompted by the claim in the IMDB trivia for Giant that Ava Gardner was too busy filming this in Pakistan to star in that in Texas. Directed by George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story) from the adaptation of John Masters's novel by Sonya Levien and Ivan Moffat.
It's so late in the British Raj (ballpark 1946) that even the whitest of Brits just want to leave; it's even getting too late to found a kingdom. But before departure the powers-that-still-be have to thwart terrorist plots that would have delayed the mail train and killed Gandhi while, of course, falling in love with Anglo-Indian Gardner. Notionally the focus is on the problems of her ethnicity — where will her kind fit after the quit? will they continue to be privileged employees in the Indian railway hierarchy? — but really it's about there being only one eligible woman in the whole of the fictional town. It's therefore a bit Doctor Zhivago. The story is framed as a recounting to a superior officer by Colonel Stewart Granger in the safety of a train carriage. There are vague echoes of the fair-superior The Train (1964). It could've been called A Passage to England.
I feel Gardner was miscast; she's a lot better in The Night of the Iguana (1964). She is clearly working hard to show the requisite interest in her three (serial) suitors but only really warms up when the locals draw her into an all-male dance (which that movie echoes). Most fatally her accent wanders from British-ish to east-coast U.S.A. when the script calls for histrionics. Many actors (e.g. Patrick Taylor, Freda Jackson, Peter Illing) appear in brownface.
Bosley Crowther: the ending is a bit childish for such an adult movie. IMDB trivia: needed the epic treatment that Cukor could not provide. More details at Wikipedia.
Prompted by the noise associated with it winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, the heavy Oscar interest and Jason Di Rosso's interview with director Sean Baker. The last reminded me that I'd passed up on Baker's Red Rocket a few years ago. In short: childish and drecky.
The movie is in three distinct sections. The first establishes lead Ani/Anora (Mikey Madison) as a full-service stripper at a Manhattan club whose knowledge of Russian comes in handy with the really high rollers. She's from a Jewish part of NYC, somewhat like Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems. She encounters and gets hitched to Russian scion Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn, a shoo-in for a Prince biopic?) in Las Vegas. The second part begins with him doing a runner from the local operatives of his absent parents who are all shitting bricks about the marriage. The grand tour of NYC really dragged. Coney Island is having a moment. The third has Ivan delivered to his parents who are obviously keen to disentangle him from Ani/Anora.
The whole show is not exactly zany or unfunny. Many scenes are overlong and do not progress character or plot. There's a fair bit of sex but it's not salacious; as Di Rosso and Baker observed it attempts to get away from the male gaze. (Actually none of it is sexy, especially not the commercial sex; in line with recent movies it tends to emphasise the accompanying issues (divergent libidos, selfishness, emotional investment, exclusivity, prophylaxis, transactionalism, ... everything) rather than go in for the titillation that used to get Roger Ebert excited. This is not an erotic thriller.) The central flaw is that I never got a grasp on what makes Ani/Anora tick beyond the obvious hedonism — and geez it looks like hard boring work. Is she in it just for the money? Does she have other prospects or ambitions? Throughout it's unclear if she's as credulous and vacuous as she presents: all posturing and underbaked threats, like the crass hiphop that floods the zone, spouting F-bombs, handy at lashing out with her feet but otherwise without leverage. Is this what passes for street smarts now? With thirty minutes to go Ivan, standing on the steps of his parents' plane, asks her the obvious question: is she stupid? I couldn't understand why she hung on so hard. The Assistant did a far more plausible treatment of aspirational girlish naivete.
The acting and cinematography are fine. The fault lies in the scenario and the impoverished characterisation.
Dana Stevens saw something different to me. Anora doesn't reassure her customers at the strip club, she just gives them the hard sell. (Many are clearly vulnerable which is not to say they're victims.) Ivan's "24 hour security guards" did not notice the day or two in Las Vegas though they were at the New Year's party. And so on. Stephanie Zacharek. Risky Business! "[Madison] plays Ani as a woman in charge" ... — but Ani/Anori is always so obviously deluded on that score. Both seemed to work the info pack hard, as hard as Baker milked that ending. Nobody points to Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience (etc) and I can't because I haven't seen it.
Produced and directed by George Stevens (Gunga Din) from a script that Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat (nom'd) adapted from Edna Ferber's novel. Over many sittings as it is lengthy (3hr 21min), initially unpromising and regularly flags. It is often funny, perhaps unintentionally. Heavily nominated for Oscars but only Stevens came away with Best Director.
Circa 1920s, Texan cattleman Rock Hudson (nom'd) finds himself in Maryland, aiming to buy a horse off some Eastern gentry, but comes away with a wife in the form of Elizabeth Taylor (not nom'd) too. She's as strong willed as her horse which for the convenience of the plot soon improves her domestic situation by offing sister-in-law/fellow hard lady Mercedes McCambridge. Over two generations we're shown the horrors of Texas society and why these clans found it necessary to have so much land separating them. A second schism opens with the arrival of oil money, personified by enriched, aspirational white trash James Dean (nom'd).
Hudson is actually decent here, far better than he was in Written on the Wind (also 1956) and Seconds (1966), working mostly as raw material for Taylor to drag into modernity. She has some fun with every argument leading to frisky business; she gets up the morning after a spat all energised while he's totally shagged out. Son Dennis Hopper is restrained in his portrayal of his generation going its own way with more moral fibre than earlier members of the lineage. Carroll Baker pines for the old days of straightforward social climbing. Dean does well with what he's given but the final movement drags out the grindingly predictable. Those fatuous good old boys always know the score.
Bosley Crowther: aimed to be bigger than Texas... and succeeded! IMDB trivia: inspired Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind. And surely There Will Be Blood, which was also shot in Marfa, Texas. It's sort of like Gone with the Wind without the maudlin nostalgia for the Old South. Did anyone ever make an epic about the North?
A jag from a Roger Ebert retro-review of Alien. Also an idle bit of Howard Hawks completism. Charles Lederer (responsible with Hawks for His Girl Friday) adapted it from a book by John W. Campbell Jr. Directed by Christian Nyby (in his first outing?) but IMDB suggests (credited producer) Hawks had to do a lot of heavy lifting.
As you'd expect from the auteurs it's very talky, even talkier than a modern sci-fi/action flick. Some of the dialogue is racy for the times (captain Kenneth Tobey rags secretary Margaret Sheridan for departing his bed without saying goodbye, she likens him to an octopus) and attempts to draw attention away from the minimal amount of action. There are a few fun bits I guess. The creature is Frankenstein's without the bolts.
Prompted by the arrival of a director's cut reported by Jason Bailey in the New York Times. Directed and co-written by Richard Shepard. Tamar Brott was the other co-writer. Also notionally for David Bowie. Over many sittings as it is every bit as bad as the reviews say.
The scenario has waitress Rosanna Arquette working in some upscale restaurant in NYC while she explores her fixation with Madame Houdini. Her bestie Eszter Balint designs killer lingerie. Bowie plays a new bartender who has pressing reasons for obtaining a green card via the marriage route. The joint is owned (or at least operated) by Andre Gregory (My Dinner with Andre) and Buck Henry whose witless repartee is excruciating. The only actor who emerges with dignity preserved is cashier Marlee Matlin, working the door and cashbox under a pretzel hairpiece.
I hadn't realised Arquette had had such a big 1980s; to me she's just a minor player in Pulp Fiction. Bowie's acting is the worst I've seen by him, but the real problem is that too many other things are busted. So many scenes just do not work. The plot is absolutely standard NYC: some people have too much money, most not enough, everyone is on the grift and all the forced pretence looks so joyless. Winning looks so tedious.
Janet Maslin at the time, uncriticially shilling the local product.
A Victor McLaglen jag from Gunga Din. He got his Oscar for leading this. A somewhat early John Ford directorial effort. He also got Oscared. Adapted by Dudley Nichols (who declined his Oscar) from a story by Liam O'Flaherty. The music also got Oscared.
The story is simple and told linearly in a tiresome, twistless manner. It's 1922 in Dublin. Poverty is rife, the revolution is incomplete, America beckons and all a bloke needs is 20 pounds to get there with the squeeze of his life. McLaglen plays Gypo Nolan as a bull of a man, absent any brains. Somehow forgiveness is not only possible but inevitable, even for a Judas but not for the Black-and-Tans.
Andre Sennwald at the New York Times.
Looking for entertainment in all the wrong places. I guess this was a platform for Samuel L. Jackson to show us what he could do as a dramatic lead in a realist mode without Tarantino. He really only succeeds with the high-energy running-at-the-mouth that he's famous for; his scenes with wife Regina Taylor are generally poor. Directed by F. Gary Gray from a proforma script by James DeMonaco and Kevin Fox.
Notionally Jackson is a police negotiator in Chicago. Through some flimsy plot moves and too many scenes that make no sense he holes up in a Federal building with internal affairs investigator J.T. Walsh who does what he can. He insists on fellow negotiator Kevin Spacey helping him untangle his situation. Getting that lined up takes about an hour of runtime. Spacey is flat and declamatory here, putting me in mind of Kevin Rudd at his most fatuous. David Morse works his villainous-Englishman features just so and does not miss an opportunity to take a shot. Ron Rifkin and/or John Spencer play dicey senior cops in stereotypical fashion. Also Paul Giamatti and Dean Norris as hostages. I don't think we ever learn who the informant was; the information dumps are arbitrary. And I didn't get why the scammers didn't just find a proper patsy and point Jackson at that person.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. He got right into it until he stopped to think, so don't ever stop to think. A pile of genre tropes, "a triumph of style over story, and of acting over characters." Janet Maslin, blandly. Stephanie Zacharek: a 2hr 20min thrill-free, humourless slog. "Gray appears to know nothing about directing actors or clarifying characters' motives." Slightly too clever to be entertainingly dumb. Die Hard. IMDB trivia: J.T. Walsh died before this was released.
Still #87 in the IMDB top-250, at least until the next round of the MCU.
Roger Ebert: four stars, some time after the full version was released on video. Vincent Canby savaged the 2hr 15min version released to American theatres but it's unclear he would have been any happier with the 3hr 47min Cannes edition.
I felt that this was the first of director Justin Kurzel's features I've seen but it's not; his Macbeth was solid, Assassin's Creed not so much. There was also a segment of The Turning. It's the first of his signature psychologicals for me though. The script is by Zach Baylin based loosely on a book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt about the white supremacist group The Order which was active in 1983 and 1984 on the northwest coast of the USA.
The frame echoes Oliver Stone's version of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio: as in that movie Jewish talk back host Alan Berg (Marc Maron) cops blowback for his combative universalist views. From there we meet charismatic, dead-eyed leader Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult in his most effective non-MCU role yet) and his eventual opponents but not quite nemeses FBI agents Terry Husk (nominatively-determined Jude Law, bloated) and Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett). There are some bombings and robberies, the odd minor bout of ideology but nothing as challenging as some of its predecessors (e.g. The Believer, Ted K). The organisation has no interesting structure, no cells, no isolation. The movie is structurally similar to Wind River: a steady drip of arbitrarily withheld information.
Despite it being intrinsically worthless I'd say this movie is well-made except that some of the cinematography is very murky and that I got lost at times; for instance I had no idea why Tony Torres (Matias Lucas) got picked up by the cops. The climactic shootout is a mess — it's poorly shot but could’ve been awesome in its disorganisation. I did enjoy watching Law lose his shit over the incompetency of the local cops. Deputy Tye Sheridan has perhaps his best scene ever where he loses his at the FBI.
Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times. He points to January 6. Glenn Kenny at Venice: a relief after Babygirl. John Sutherland summarised the actualities in 1997 during the trial of Timothy McVeigh.
A Jeremy Renner jag from The Hurt Locker. Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan who has form for these neo-Westerns (Sicario, Sicario 2, etc.).
It's eventually established that the Indian Reservation that Renner works on (as a hunter of wild predators) is in frosty Wyoming. We get this info after Elizabeth Olsen (not her best work) arrives from Las Vegas, representing the FBI in a pale and witless echo of Twin Peaks. The absolutely stock action sequences are cut up with excessive and predictable exposition dumps that come too late. You can see the Mexican standoff of a climax from the minute the leads discuss security blokes at a mine site; the whole thing is as unsubtle as Waco. The jittery cinematography is really trying. So many scenes just don't work. The deracination of indigenous Americans is observed, passively.
This solid endorsement of vigilantism is probably aimed at filling the hole vacated by Eastwood when he retired Dirty Harry so long ago.
A Critic's Pick by Glenn Kenny at the New York Times. The opening scene is mystifying, suggesting we in for a mystical, poetic experience. That standoff scene is nowhere close to Michael Mann's efforts.
I got it into my head that Steve Buscemi directed this but in fact he directs the movie within the movie. Tom DiCillo actually wrote and directed; apparently he worked with Jarmusch in his early days. A very NYC film shoot, a bit Season on the Line, a bit The Producers (with less overt begging), even a bit Opening Night. Buscemi's task of recording a few scenes for a low-budget feature involves every problem, from issues with his demential mother to the insecurities and backbiting of the actors and the technical staff. The structure is fun though the content of each bout/episode gets a bit too stale a bit too fast. Catherine Keener does well. Peter Dinklage is flat until he gets his dummy spit. Dermot Mulroney mostly poses. The stakes are so low except for those making this damn movie.
A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin (?). Siskel and Ebert: thumbs down from both. Wears out its conceit well before the movie ends.
Kathryn Bigelow's big directorial splash. She got Oscared for best picture and best director. Mark Boal wrote the script and also got Oscared. The other three Oscars were for the sound and editing. Notionally because I discovered Guy Pearce was in it.
Between the setting — Baghdad in 2004 — and the heavy Oscaring I wasn't expecting more than an exercise in flag waving. The jittery handheld camerawork of the first half hour or so was also a real turnoff, but as things settled down I did get mildly interested (but not invested) in Jeremy Renner's Oscar-nom'd bomb disposal expert. Against this was Anthony Mackie's inert performance as his support and Brian Geraghty's over-egged junior, and a general lack of context about what Renner is looking to achieve at any given incident. (In the first scene he removes detonators while in later ones he's looking for controllers.) There's a scene where these three Americans show Ralph Fiennes's British contractors how things are done, which was, just maybe, historically plausible. Being a name actor does not ensure longevity here.
At some point the switch is flicked from character development to plot and the decision making becomes stupid. The japes between gigs are humourless, the whole show leaden, even more so than Black Hawk Down. And overall there's nothing much novel here; the concluding movement goes as it must, right down to plenty being incarnated as a supermarket aisle, just like Oliver Stone/Le Ly Harslip's Heaven and Earth. Just too damn serious. I won't be rushing to see Zero Dark Thirty (2012).
Roger Ebert: four stars. A Critic's Pick by A.O. Scott: Bigelow kept it tight, evading the wider (political, box-office bombing) issues of that war. Stephanie Zacharek: "feels unformed and somewhat unfinished." Paul Mazursky had the same supermarket scene in Moscow on the Hudson (1984). Loads of street cats, goats and a few donkeys.
Tim Robbins directed a script he adapted from Helen Prejean's book. He got an Oscar nom but no gong, riding his The Shawshank Redemption (1994) wave. Lead and his partner-at-the time Susan Sarandon plays a nun and got Oscared. She does work hard here. Second bean Sean Penn got a nom but no gong; does he do his best work in the penn? Fellow jailbird Clancy Brown puts in a effective cameo as a state trooper. Robert Prosky (Thief (1983), Broadcast News (1987)) does what he can as a talky lawyer. R. Lee Ermey! Jack Black! IMDB trivia suggests that the entire Robbins clan was in there somewhere.
Penn is on death row somewhere not too far from Slidell in Louisiana for the rape and murder of a young couple. For reasons I didn't perceive he writes to nun Sarandon and she responds in a witness/soul-saving sort of way. There are some auxiliary legal efforts to get his execution commuted that are shown to be ineffectual. She spends some time with the parents of the victims. It loses momentum in the final act as the redemption-in-Christ parts are interspersed with flashbacks of the crime.
Robbins is well-known to have liberal views and this made me feel that he was often trying to have it both ways; others may read this as even-handedness but his gestures at the Bible (essentially the New Testament against the Old) and the politics of capital punishment are shallow, manipulative cop outs. The music gets rough at times: Eddie Vedder over the opening credits, indecipherably, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and possibly Peter Gabriel in the middle, and an Oscar nom for Bruce Springsteen for the song over the closing credits.
For all that it is far better than Eastwood's later True Crime (1999).
Roger Ebert: four stars. Despite his denials option 3 (religious conversion) is roughly what we get. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. Both were hugely impressed with Penn's performance.
A neo-noir starring William Hurt opposite Kathleen Turner on debut. She's wooden at times, perhaps intentionally, but the staginess makes for some creaky and unpersuasive moments when she's reeling him in and it's obvious any sane man would be calculating the odds. Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan.
The setup is simple: he's a mediocre lawyer somewhere in hot-and-sticky Florida, not too far from Miami, and she's in the market for a man more satisfying than her dodgy husband. (We never get shown how dangerous or dodgy he and his associates are, or are we supposed to infer that she's the associate?) After she puts up a proforma fight his ego gets the better of him and we're off to something adjacent to The Talented Mr Ripley. Mickey Rourke does OK as an arsonist with a sound life philosophy (mostly just don't do it). All there is to know is that you should never let your co-conspirator out of your sight.
Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie". Double Indemnity... but original. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin? — her review is scathing, especially of Turner's performance. "Skillfully, though slavishly, derived" from "1940's film noir classics". The Postman Always Rings Twice. Vincent Canby was far more impressed a few months later. Witness for the Prosecution.
Directed by Vincent Sherman. A warning about glamorous post war consumption: go out and live, boys of San Francisco, but be wary of trading up to that nightclub singer! Ann Sheridan plays it amazingly straight to Kent Smith's incredibly square middle-aged doctor; who knew these hot-stuff types were looking for slow times with dull men! The first hour is entirely boring setup and the remainder hinges on nonsense and NYC. I thought I was getting a noir but the twist just didn't come. Something in the vein of Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956).
Bosley Crowther: dire.
Produced, co-written and directed by Michael Winterbottom. He takes us to mandate Palestine (circa 1938 to 1944) for a history lesson about one of Britain's more obviously less successful colonial projects. It seems that as the nation declines her filmmakers spend more effort burnishing those days of greatness, c.f. Steve McQueen's latest, even if they can't suppress their ruefulness.
The focus is on two colonial policemen. Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) tries to support the non (or at least less) violent Jewish groups who are agitating for a state in collaboration with the (sympathetic) British forces. He does this by enforcing the arms ban only on Arabs and the Jewish groups engaged in direct action, and romancing journalist/kibbutznik Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum). Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling, looking like he'll be playing George Orwell some day soon) has more inflexibly universalist ideas which of course lead to monumental cockups, culminating in what might now be called the extrajudicial killing of all-methods-on-the-table Avraham Stern (Aury Alby).
As usual with Winterbottom this is fabulously shot (here by Giles Nuttgens). At some point I realised I was enjoying baby-faced Booth's performance mostly because he sounds like Richard Burton. There's the faintest of echoes of Graham Greene's A Quiet American — love and clandestine operations during wartime but without the contest for the woman — and more of Zwartboek but less sexy. The longer any scene goes on the more certain that something will explode; this terrorism stuff is not very functional film making. It could've been called many funerals and no wedding.
Peter Bradshaw: what David Lean would've done with the romance.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director David Vincent Smith a while back. Both are Perth locals. I guess this might be Greta Scacchi doing her bit to revive the Australian film industry.
There's not a lot (not enough) to it. Mother Scacchi's actual daughter Leila George leads as a strong sister who is sick of having her life ruined by brother Sam Corlett's illicit drug use. The show starts in suburban Perth with the killing of a car and moves to the main set on what I took to be her grandparent's bush block (in Gosnells according to IMDB) where she imprisons him and us. (The location somewhat resonates with Tim Winton's stories. The house is full of cheesy childhood tchotchkes.) Later on we learn that his desire for druggy oblivion is due to mental unwellness. Her lifelong bestie Alexandra Nell is never shown to be much of a friend. Things go entirely predictably at excessive length; at its heart is the fusing of the getting-off-the-junk Trainspotting scene with the coercive control/intervention of Alexandra's Project into a sweary episode of an Australian soap opera. Surely getting off the meth has never been so humourless.
The internet suggests this might be autofiction.
