film
9 Oct 2009
More Corn, More Hype, More Australiana
Lynden Barber has a solution to the malaise affecting the Australian film industry — and middle class arty types like him aren't gonna like it
The scale of the audience crisis facing Australian films became dramatically clear to me last year when I went with my partner to see a new road movie called Cactus at Sydney's Chauvel cinema. The screening was a depressing experience. Not because of the film, which we both enjoyed. The downer was the fact that our seats were the only ones of the cinema's 365 to be occupied.This, please note, was not at the end of the film's run or on a quiet, rainy night — it was on the film's opening Sunday, with generally favourable (three and three and a half star) reviews, still fresh in the memory from the weekend's newspapers.
We asked a staff member on the way out what the problem was and if the film had been getting more of an audience in other sessions. His reply: "You're the first people to turn up in three sessions".
A few more people turned out to see some of the year's other Australian films, but hardly in significant numbers. A sign of the low expectations: when commentators brayed about how great it was that the film Unfinished Sky, a well crafted drama about a lonely farmer sheltering an Afghani woman on the run from sex traffickers, had reached the $1 million box office threshold, a modest sum even for a small drama.
Overall Australian produced feature films earned $35.5 million or only 3.8 per cent of the total domestic box office in 2008, a fall from 4 per cent the previous year and below the 10-year average of 4.4 per cent. And most of that sum was taken up by earnings of a single film: Baz Luhrmann's Australia, a US$130 million production bankrolled by Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox and the Australian tax payer, and hyped to be better than the Second Coming.
Since then things have improved — they could hardly have got worse without a total collapse. The global financial crash has seen increased cinema audiences worldwide and a more diverse slate of local films has seen a number hailed as box office successes. These include the Paul Hogan and Shane "Kenny" Jacobson comedy Charlie and Boots ($3.6 million and still going) and to everyone's surprise, Warwick Thornton's small-scale aboriginal drama Samson & Delilah, which earned nearly $3.17 despite taking an unflinching view of the aimless life of a petrol sniffer on the run from the law.
Last week Mao's Last Dancer, based on the bestselling biography of Chinese expatriate ballet dancer Li Cunxin, brought the strongest news yet for the beleaguered local film industry. It had earned $3.32 million by the end of its opening weekend (once preview screenings were added). As its distributor was quick to point out, the film could also boast the fifth highest ever opening-day earnings for an Australian film — and even though that figure isn't inflation-adjusted, it's still an impressive result. Made for $25 million, the film needs to keep going strongly and do well in overseas markets to have a chance of earning back its production cost, but the result so far augurs well.
Now here's the rub: Mao's Last Dancer is no masterpiece. Though hardly a bad film by any measure, the film has struck several commentators — myself included — as somewhat lackadaisically directed by the veteran Bruce Beresford (who has delivered far stronger work in the past including Breaker Morant). For the first half the film plods on dutifully through Li Cunxin's early life story and arrival in the US, only gaining serious traction as a drama around the mid-way point, when Li decides to defect.
The dance sequences are also curious: Chi Cao, who plays the adult Li, is a superb professional dancer who also acts perfectly adequately. Yet to compare the dance sequences — where a static camera is placed in the audience — with the elaborately photographed choreography of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's classic 1948 ballet film, The Red Shoes, is to get a sense of how great these sequences might have been.
Look at Luhrmann's Australia and the automatic equation of strong box office with quality looks even more suspect. The problem with most Australian discussions of box office is that they've been focussed on how to make "better films", usually by spending more money on script development.
Time to own up: some of the best films don't get the sizeable audiences they deserve (last year's The Black Balloon among them), and many of those that do are mediocre or worse. Due to the policy of "front-end loading" (ie get the audience in quick), major US movies are heavily marketed to the point where they can set turnstiles spinning on opening weekend before the bad word of mouth sets in. The production of rubbish and mediocrity is no impediment to success.
We're quick to recognise Hollywood hits don't always equate to strong filmmaking — so why not with Australian films? Baz's recent camp adventure may have been an artistic failure but it entertained many ordinary Australians. Why? I'd suggest any big budgeter that wallows in Australiana seems to hit an automatic chord. Look at The Man From Snowy River (critics sniffed, the public flocked). Or Crocodile Dundee I and II — the first had charm, the second was lame but that didn't stop it earning a motzah.
Even Strictly Ballroom, which many seem to now accept as a cinematic masterpiece, is not that good a film, I'd argue — energetic and sparkly, sure, but also corny, predictable and let down by a male lead with the acting weight of a sequined cummerbund.
Hit films are not just a luxury but a necessity for any local film industry to prosper - the veteran producer Anthony Buckley likes to say that there's nothing wrong with the local film industry that a hit film couldn't solve. An industry that depends on public funding needs to demonstrate to the politicians and especially the taxpayers that their endeavours are appreciated by the ordinary Joe and Josephine.
This is not just a pragmatic need but I'd suggest a moral duty. No middle class art film lover — and the writer includes himself — should feel complacent about his or her passion for fine local films being kept alive by the drip-feed of tax dollars.
Wearing my critic's hat I almost cringe at what I am about to suggest. But wearing my pragmatist's hat I realise we need more corn, more hype, more Australiana; boatloads of escapism and showbiz; heroic journeys that end in triumph. Audiences want happiness and tears of joy and fear or films based on their favourite book of the past five years. Sometimes this means making films that I and many other critics will consider mediocre or even absolute crap. Let's just stop being embarrassed and hypocritical about it.
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Ah, so we don’t need better films, just more entertaining ones? ;)
Or maybe the other alternative could be to make those smaller films for substantially less money.
Marketing, I believe, is a large part of the issue. We can make great films on relatively tiny budgets but a large monetary investment must go in to the local publicity of the film in order for it to be noticed. We may not make films in the Hollywood style, but we could certainly use more hype around our films - and finding practical and creative ways to promote them is key.
Is it a "good" film if the popular audience does not relate to it? Surely we can have fart jokes or explosions AND a craftmanship AND important/interesting themes/ideas. Film makers are actually making films for an audience, after all. Aussies used to make cool genre films, and they made lots of money! And they were good movies!
Like these:
http://australianscreen.com.au/titles/stone/ (stone)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079501/business (mad max)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416315/business (wolf creek)
I don’t know that more money ought to be spent on script DEVELOPMENT. The heart of any goodflick that doesn’t boast $100 M worth of CGI effects is a good script, no argument. But you need a good story from the get-go. Script DEVELOPMENT sounds like polishing a t*rd to me.
I agree about the marketing comment, and would add one about distribution. Most people simply don’t know these films are playing. I make it my *mission* to see every Australian film on release, and even then I miss many, due to one-week runs, zero publicity and odd screening times. I would imagine there is a good argument for a three-year pilot project of government-funded marketing to accompany the commercial release of Australian films. I know Screen Australia already has sought to tie its funding model to a more distribution-oriented model for producers.
Most films which make it to commercial release in Australia are at least comparable in quality to the arthouse and blockbuster films we get from elsewhere. The major difference is that since the 1980s, with the exception of the "glitter cycle" (Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding, Priscilla) and the odd one-off hit (Babe, Shine, The Castle, Lantana, Rabbit-Proof Fence, etc), the default reputation of Australian cinema has been very low. Just read review after review of recently-released films which contain a variant of the phrase "the best Australian film in years". Only a sustained and focussed campaign can go toward changing this default reputation. And marketing in this sense makes sense, because one is talking about marketing a fundamentally good product.
…and I also agree with the comment on script development: there are plenty of local dramas which could have been very good or excellent, but which have emerged with fairly mediocre reputations due to lack of script development. Dramas written by the director are particularly prone to this problem.
I wonder how Bran Nue Dae will go at the box office.
It certainly has "showbiz" and an "heroic journey that ends in triumph"
My view and why it should triumph: Bran Nue Dae Blazes
Kevin Rennie
http://cinematakes.blogspot.com/
Diana
Strange s it may seem to some, the average movie-goer wants to be entertained. Critically acclaimed Aussie films about drug addicts, ex-cons and assorted lowlives from the western suburbs of Sydney are not entertaining, nor are weird movies like Cactus, which seemed to have no clear plot and little merit. They are just plain depressing. It doesn’t matter how cunning the direction, people won’t go to see stuff about miserable people. If they would prefer to see Mao’s Last Dancer than trudge out to see Cactus then who can blame them?
Marketing is also a problem. Lantana was a stand-out film, but it was advertised as some sort of weird sex drama, not as the thriller it really was. The advertising turned people off, word of mouth recommendations from those who had seen this film pulled in audiences.
Aussie movies have gained a reputation in their home country for being depressing,boring and self-indulgent. If people want entertainment and escapism then find a way to give them that, don’t keep insisting that what they really need is yet more angst.