The grim reality of filmmaking in Australia: the glam of Hollywood it is not

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The grim reality of filmmaking in Australia: the glam of Hollywood it is not

7 April 2025

Tangentially related to last Thursday’s post… Australian actor and filmmaker Matthew Holmes (The Biscuit Effect, Twin Rivers, The Legend of Ben Hall, and The Cost), speaks out in an open letter about the lamentable state of the Australian film industry:

All my films have won awards at film festivals and received fair to excellent critical praise. They have been sold and distributed worldwide to Showtime, HBO, Stan, Prime Video, Apple TV+, SBS, Vudu, Tubi, Peacock, 9GEM, and Foxtel and they’ve been released on DVD and Blu-Ray. Yet, the financial return I’ve seen personally from all four films combined would barely amount to $6,000.

Certainly there are successful, well-off, Australian filmmakers.

Yet it is defies belief that a director like Holmes, who’s made a number of award winning, and well received features, is in the predicament he finds himself in. Holmes isn’t alone. Other Australian directors, with quality work to their names, struggle to obtain funding, while other, far inferior offerings (names not being named) get the green light.

Cinemas are just so twentieth century

3 April 2025

Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, says cinemas are dead. There’s a bold call. Certainly it can be argued there is no need for cinemas any more. No one needs to go to a cinema to see a movie nowadays. They can do that from the comfort of their own home.

Despite the ease and convenience of watching films at home, negating the need for the middle-person that is a movie theatre, I think cinemas will be with us for a while yet. Going to the movies is a social and entertainment experience. A night on the town, sort of thing. Patronage might be down, and we might see some closures, but I doubt cinemas will go away completely.

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The Inner West Film Fest part three, scary clowns, road trips, and other films

27 March 2025

The Inner West Film Fest returns for its third outing, between Wednesday 9 April to Thursday 17 April 2025. The inner west — for readers outside of Australia, and that’s a fair few you — is a group of suburbs to the west of downtown Sydney, not too close in, but not too far out either. Newtown, Leichhardt, Balmain, and Marrickville, are among the suburbs in Sydney’s inner west.

Flat Girls by Jirassaya Wongsutin, Who by Fire by Philippe Lesage, and The King Tide by Christian Sparkes, are but a few of the titles screening. Check out the festival trailer for the vibe.

The mysterious death of a young woman’s uncle triggers family turmoil in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, trailer, by Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni. The title screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2024, but isn’t in theatrical release in Australia, as far as I can see, so check the streaming services.

Deux personnes échangeant de la salive (Two People Exchanging Saliva) a short by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, is set in a repressive world where kissing is illegal. Don’t snigger: it might happen. Luàna Bajrami, who featured in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (presently stream-able on Kanopy, by the way), stars as Malaise. See the teaser here (Instagram link).

With or Without You, trailer, by Kelly Schilling, an Adelaide, Australia based filmmaker, is a road trip story about three people, at odds with each other, forced to drive together across Australia. With or Without You opens in local cinemas on Thursday 8 May 2025.

Why do clowns and horror stories go together so well? I have no idea. But if you like horror movies featuring sinister clowns, then Clown in a Cornfield, trailer, directed by Eli Craig, might be for you. Also opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday 8 May 2025.

Small Things Like These, a film by Tim Mielants, with Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson

13 March 2025

Small Things Like These, trailer, directed by Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants, and starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson, looks like a drama/thriller not to be missed.

Based on the novel of the same name by Irish writer Claire Keegan, and set in 1985, Murphy portrays Bill Furlong, who works as a coal merchant and timber merchant, in the Irish town of New Ross.

After finding a young girl locked in shed while on a delivery job, he takes her a convent to be cared for. But it soon becomes apparent things are not what they seem to be at the convent. Bill goes on to not only uncover some disturbing secrets about the convent, but also his own past.

Small Things Like These opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday 10 April 2025.

Wake in Fright, Ted Kotcheff’s Australian outback classic, restored by Mark Hartley

7 March 2025

Canadian filmmaker Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 drama/thriller Wake in Fright, trailer, set in the Australian outback, is being re-released after being remastered by Australian film director Mark Hartley.

Wake in Fright may not be a horror film in the conventional sense, but to be trapped alone, in a mining town in the middle of no where, full of hard drinking, gun-totting men, who slaughter kangaroos for leisure, might make it seem that way.

But Wake in Fright was lucky to see the light day again.

The camera negatives were lost soon after the film’s 1971 theatrical run, and turned up in a rubbish bin in the US city of Pittsburgh in 2002. Hartley commenced work to restore the film several years ago, collaborating with Charlie Ellis, who did the colour correction.

The Phone Call, a short film by Mat Kirkby, with Sally Hawkins

5 March 2025

Aside from a co-worker, possibly a boyfriend, and the voice of veteran actor Jim Broadbent, British actor Sally Hawkins is about the only person visible in the twenty-minute short feature The Phone Call, trailer, made in 2013, by Mat Kirkby.

In Kirby’s collaboration with James Lucas, who wrote the screenplay, Hawkins portrays Heather, a reserved, bookish, crisis help-line worker. Heather’s shift has barely started, when she takes a call from a distressed elderly man, calling himself Stan (Broadbent). Heather desperately want to help, but Stan is unyielding, and time is running out. Suspense hangs heavily in the air.

The Phone Call, which won the short film (live action) award in the 2015 Oscars, can be viewed in full here. You won’t be disappointed. I can’t think of single dud Hawkins has starred in.

How many people will Oscar winners thank? How long will they speak for?

3 March 2025

A forty-five second limit for Oscar acceptance speeches was introduced in 2010, but that doesn’t always stop the motivated. Or those who feel they need to acknowledge everyone who contributed to their award. Back in the day — seventy plus years ago — acceptances were usually only a few words long. But a decade ago, they were pushing three-hundred words, says Stephen Follows:

Acceptance speeches in the middle of the 20th century were exactly that, a chance to accept the award and say thank you. Over time, they have evolved into a platform to express opinions, share emotions, and highlight personal journeys.

Why the increase? Having the undivided attention of what was once a large, captive audience, might have been something to do with it. Today, of course, Oscar recipients have the social media platforms, offering a continuous outlet, not just forty-five seconds of television.

On the subject of social media platforms, the size of Oscar television audiences has, overall, been in decline — at least in the United States — plunging to a nadir of about ten million viewers in 2021. What’s going on there? Were people keeping tabs on the Oscar’s ceremony through the likes of TikTok and Instagram, or has there been a general loss of interest in the awards?

Vale Gene Hackman, dead at age 95

28 February 2025

The American actor, who retired in 2004, and whose many credits included Young Frankenstein, The French Connection, Unforgiven, and my personal favourite, The Birdcage, died yesterday in Santa Fe, in the U.S. state of New Mexico.

Hackman was found at his home along with his wife, Betsy Arakawa, and their pet dog. While the cause of death presently remains unknown, police said there was immediate indication of foul play.

Update: police now believe the circumstances of the deaths of Hackman and his wife, are suspicious and have stepped up their investigation.

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Next up: the James Bond sequel trilogy and Bond villain origin stories

24 February 2025

Long time producers of the James Bond films, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, have agreed to sell the decades old film franchise to Amazon. The new arrangement gives the tech giant full creative control, and Amazon has already indicated they intend to “move beyond the franchise of the James Bond movies”.

Who knows exactly what that means at this stage, but looking at what happened to Star Wars, after series creator George Lucas sold the sci-fi saga to Disney in 2012, probably gives us a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Good luck 007.

I gave up on the Bond films years ago. I think 2012’s Skyfall was the last one I went to a cinema to see. I never made it to No Time to Die, the Daniel Craig finale, which was released in 2021.

But Bond had stopped being Bond a long time ago. Indeed, the entire premise belonged to a bygone era. The barely plausible Bond had ceased to be relevant. Even Roger Moore, who portrayed the fictional British intelligence agent seven times between 1972 and 1985, once told late Irish–British broadcaster Terry Wogan, he thought the character was ridiculous:

“Bond films are so outrageous, the stunts are so outrageous,” Moore told Wogan. “Everything is beyond belief.”

In a way though, the slapstick nature of the earlier films was a big part of their allure. The stories were a bit of light-hearted, if fast paced, escapism. Efforts in recent decades to make the series darker, and grittier, to appeal to a new, and wider audience, seemed futile to me. Why not retire the James Bond films all together, and create a brand new character, and story arc, instead of rehashing something that’s decades old? But this is a point I’ve made before.

It’s not like there’s a shortage of new stories to bring to the big screen. That, however, is clearly not the way Amazon sees the situation. As with Star Wars, they know there’s a ready, nostalgia craving audience, waiting to see whatever new Bond offerings are forthcoming.

I take Amazon’s desire to “move beyond” will see movies, TV shows, video games, and graphic novels, among other things, based on other characters — from what will no doubt become the Bond universe — assuming centre stage in stories of their own. With nary a glimpse of Bond in sight. I don’t know, some of this stuff might be ok, but maybe it won’t.

Good luck 007 fans.

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entertainment, film, trends

Intercepted, a Ukraine war documentary by Oksana Karpovych

19 February 2025

Ukrainian film director Oksana Karpovych’s documentary, Intercepted, which features phone calls between invading Russian soldiers and their families in Russia, has one of the starkest trailers I’ve seen in a long while.

Phil Hoad, writing for The Guardian, described Intercepted as chilling, and compelling:

Juxtaposing intercepted calls back home from frontline Russian troops with shots of the devastation they have wreaked in Ukraine, this film is a bleak and searing wiretap into Putin’s warping effect on his people and the psychology of power.

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