Oscar Contenders

Better late than never, Anna and i discuss all things Oscars and why Parasite was deemed to be the Best Picture of 2020.

George MacKay as Ned Kelly

I think people will recall Tony Richardson’s 1970 version of Ned Kelly  which wrangled the idea of putting a rock star (in that film's case, Mick Jagger) in the role of one of Australia’s most notorious outlaws. Now, filmmaker Justin Kurzel (who directed ‘Snowtown’ about the infamous South Australian murders and did a terrific version of ‘Macbeth’ with Michael Fassbender) bounces back from directing the poorly received Assassins Creed,  to direct this electrifying interpretation of Peter Carey’s Man Booker Prize winning novel of the same name, using a similar conceit. Although this version takes the ‘rockstar as outlaw' idea one step further.

George MacKay stars as Ned. MacKay is currently starring as the lead in 1917, here he does a bang up job with the Australian accent and channels the punk-inspired, glam rock swagger of performers like Iggy Pop or David Bowie in his performance as Ned Kelly, while delivering a version of Ned Kelly who’s tightly coiled and explosively violent.

It opens with the quote ‘Nothing in this story is true’ – which pretty explicitly tells you that this film is not trying to be factually accurate. Thematically, its more interested in the idea of how a true event becomes mythologised each time its re-interpreted.

The basic plot IS based in truth and the story plays out much as you’d expect a Ned Kelly story to play out but it’s the take-no-prisoners, balls-out attitude of the film and the highly stylized production design and cinematography that add an adrenalised surrealism that makes for a searing two hours of cinema.

The story predominantly centers on the relationship between Ned (George Mackay) and his mother Ellen (played by Essie Davis), they live in country Victoria and Ellen attempts to provide for her children by taking on a series of lovers, including the notorious bushranger Harry Power (played brilliantly by Russell Crowe). Power agrees to take on the young Ned as an apprentice of sorts and to teach him robbery, gunplay and mainly, survival. After some time, Kelly eventually leaves Power and returns to his family's home, where he then has a number of run-ins with the law and the story we know so well then kicks in. The relationship between a toxic father figure and son looms large – something that was the focus of the central relationship in Snowtown.

True History of the Kelly Gang  feels anachronistic and very modern in its attitude and tone but it’s steeped in historical details and strange colloquial language  - dirt-poetry  one could call it and telling the story of Kelly’s notorious criminal career, fashioned as a visual assault of snow covered landscapes straight out of Tarantino’s Hateful Eight , golden amber-lit brothels, cold and rugged country Victoria log cabins and a strobe lit, hallucinogenic show down with police at the Glenrowan Inn, that is stamped with such starkly designed imagery that at times it felt like something out of Sin City. Visually stunning with a great cast (Nicholas Hoult, Essie Davis, Charlie Hunnam, Russell Crowe and Earl ‘Son of Nick’ Cave, it’s inventive, it’s polarising and it deals with the origins of the Australian identity and how we re-interpret our history the further we get from it. It’s easily one of the best Australian films I’ve seen in recent years, its just a shame it’s streaming because it demands to be seen on the biggest screen available.

Jason Bateman (Arrested Development, Ozark) collaborates with esteemed author/screenwriter Richard Price (who was also a writer for the HBO shows: The Wire, The Deuce and The Night Of ) and together Bateman & Price deep fry layers of hard-boiled crime grit and character development, in the slow-burn creep of Stephen King’s extended universe. The result: an utterly addictive razor-sharp mystery, that’s alternately moving and skin-crawling. It also stars Oscar-nominee Cynthia Erivo as private eye Holly Gibney (who is also a character in the Stephen King TV adaptation Mr. Mercedes).

This week’s Radio chat is about a number of films currently in multiplexes, all are a worthy excuse for getting out of the bush-fire smoke and are worth checking out: Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, Knives Out, JoJo Rabbit and Little Women..

This weeks radio review see’s me spruiking The Marvelous Mrs Maisel Season Three and The Expanse Season Four, both of which are on Amazon Prime. Maisel is wall-to-wall quips and banter with big budget production design and elaborate period set pieces. A visual treat with a cracking script.

On the flip-side of this is sci fi action-drama The Expanse which has been revived and given a second lease on life by avid fan of the show, Jeff Bezos, after its third season aired on SyFy .

 Dylan River’s documentary chronicling the Finke Desert Race, an off road, multi terrain two-day race for bikes, cars, buggies and quads through desert country from Alice Springs to the small Aputula (Finke) community, is as awe-inspiring and endearing a tale of heartbreak and the bone-shattering quest for racing glory to come down the pike in quite a while. The treacherous route on the bone-dry Finke river bed, that stretches hundreds of kilometres out of Alice Springs, is a two day event that comprises of two race sections, one day spent racing one direction, pitching tents, drinking (a lot), staying the night and then doing the race back to Alice the next day. Four-wheeled vehicles race first, followed by the motor bikes. Hundreds compete for the sake of adventure and for the ability to tell the story that they completed the insane race, though there are professional bike riders in it for the win.

We’re introduced to the KTM team rider David Walsh, an Alice Springs local. Yamaha sponsored bike racer Daymon Stokie is something of the underdog in the event though he’s also a local. There are a number of other riders who we follow in the gruelling race, one in particular is Isaac Elliott, who attempted the race some years earlier only to hit a tree and break his spine,  leaving him a paraplegic. His intention is to finally finish the race, so he enlists a mechanic friend in Alice Springs to weld a frame onto a bike that’ll cradle Isaac’s legs, so he can straddle and ride his bike and hopefully even finish. While he does this, he’ll be shadowed by two friends on motor bikes, who’ll ensure he’s helped whenever he needs it. It’s the sheer lunacy of the venture and Isaac’s bloody-minded grit, to strap himself to a bike and potentially face further bodily damage in an effort to get closure on an event that haunts him daily, that is not just deeply aspirational but also extremely moving. Bearing many similarities to the documentary TT3D: Closer to the Edge , which featured similarly obsessed, crazy-brave riders who compete in the Isle of Man TT motorcycle race, an equally treacherous race where the riders and their families understand that injury and loss of life is part of the life of a competitive rider. Where the Isle of Man racers compete to be dubbed King of the Mountain, the Finke riders compete for the moniker King of the Desert.

The cinematography in Finke: There & Back  is stunning,  with aerial photography taking full advantage of the desert locations and the outback’s wide-open vistas, this is a documentary that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen available. Narrated by renowned revhead Eric Bana, Finke: There & Back  documents that most quintessential Australian trait: the ability to shrug-off the most crushing, soul-destroying and difficult tasks with a joke, a laugh and an ice cold beer.

 JARROD WALKER

The Irishman is the film that many fans of the genre wanted to see from Scorsese: a majestic summation of the toll that a life in the mob exacts – not only on the mobsters and stand-over men themselves but the price paid by their families. It’s meta at times – Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci & Al Pacino  - bringing the baggage of their previous roles with them and it has many echoes of Scorsese’s previous mob films, but it also takes us on a very different journey.

When considered alongside Martin Scorsese’s previous gangster films, The Irishman does have a decidedly more melancholic and somber tone. The Irishman is written by screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, American Gangster, Moneyball)  and for this film he’s adapted the 2004 memoir I Heard You Paint Houses which tells the true story of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a World War II veteran and truck driver who had a talent for thievery and casual brutal violence. In the 1950s, he meets Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), who is the boss of a Pennsylvania-based crime family. Sheeran becomes a trusted foot soldier and hitman for Russell Bufalino and he’s given many jobs, proving himself pretty reliable as a blunt instrument, though Frank is given one job in particular that ends up taking up a huge part of his life – when he is asked to work for Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino), whose Teamsters Union was extremely powerful, had billions of dollars in its pension fund and which Hoffa controlled and gave loans to mobsters from.

So, Sheeran served as Hoffa’s right-hand man for many years as well as his muscle-for-hire and the hook for Frank Sheeran’s memoir and its notoriety, was that Sheeran claimed to know what actually happened to Hoffa - who’s disappearance in 1975 has never been officially solved.

Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy tapped Iron Man director Jon Favreau to shepherd and produce The Mandalorian, a live-action Star Wars TV show that’s just launched on the new Disney + Streaming Platform.

Pedro Pascal, who starred in Narcos and Game of Thrones, plays the titular Mandalorian, who’s a bounty-hunter and gunfighter. He runs into some trouble during a routine bounty collection which ends up taking a greater toll on his career than he’d intended.

It’s currently shooting it’s second season. Given the December 19th premiere of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, there’ll be a Skywalker-less galaxy to explore in Star Wars films moving forward, so a detailed Star Wars universe-building exercise such as The Mandalorian is probably not a bad idea, in terms of establishing and growing characters that can show up in the next few films and cross paths with other newly created characters. Centering a tale on the galaxy’s underworld and its nefarious gangsters is also a great idea. Nick Nolte as a tiny alien farmer? Comedian Bill Burr as a mercenary? Taika Waititi as a bounty hunting droid? Werner Herzog as a shady gangster? TAKE. MY. MONEY.

Additionally, now that Disney+ has launched, there’s a detailed release schedule of Marvel Studios limited series which interconnect with the upcoming Marvel Studios movies. I’ll run through a few of these shows and mention the upcoming ones that are still in the planning stages.

The Crown Season Three sees the three principal characters — Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, and Princess Margaret, previously portrayed by Claire Foy, Matt Smith, and Vanessa Kirby respectively— recast with older actors. So now, Queen Elizabeth is portrayed by Oscar winner Olivia Colman, Tobias Menzies (who many would know fromOutlander, Rome and Game of Thrones) plays Philip, and Helena Bonham Carter plays Princess Margaret. All three are pretty brilliant, I think they’re more effective than the previous cast, mainly because of the gravitas and weight they can bring to the characters but also because they are just really solid actors with a ton of experience.

This season of The Crown focuses predominantly on the period during which Harold Wilson was the U.K. PM. The unexpectedly warm relationship that develops between the Queen and the fiercely socialist politician (played by Jason Watkins) is – I think - one of this season’s most fascinating elements, simply because he gives voice to the perspective that the existence of the monarchy is something that’s debatable. So the interactions between the Queen and her PM are very blunt and frank – but also quite endearing in the way that he sees he simply as his equal - a fellow human being doing a tough job.

 There’s also the recurrent theme that to be born into a royal family is something of a poison chalice, where the personal cost is high and the life one leads erodes ones free will until it’s basically evaporated.

Overall it’s still the sumptuous, stylish and well-crafted show that it’s been over the last two seasons – though I think I prefer Olivia Coleman’s Queen to Claire Foy’s – if only because this interpretation of the character benefits from the years of experience and the years of the burdens of public duty. She’s flawed, cantankerous but also fascinating.

Apple TV + has recently released The Morning Show, which stars Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston and Steve Carell. It follows a morning news program that is thrown into disarray after its lead anchor Mitch Kessler (played by Steve Carell) is accused of sexual assault and fired from the show, leaving his long-time partner Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) high and dry as she fights to remain in her role as host on the show. Reese Witherspoon, who executive produces along with Aniston, stars as Bradley Jackson, who is a small-town conservative news reporter vying for her own role on the morning show. The series also stars Mark Duplass and Billy Crudup as a network big wig – the showrunners have shied away from comparisons to the Matt Lauer scandal and his firing from the Today show – but I mean, come on! It’s pretty obvious that’s the inspiration.

It’s snappy, entertaining and certainly gets better by the second and third episodes but it still feels like an Aaron Sorkin ‘West Wing’ style drama in search of a writer of that calibre to really lift the material. Still, I really enjoyed it, for what it is. It’s not Broadcast News but more The Newsroom-lite but it’s still really entertaining.

Dolemite Is My Name is a comedy bio-pic directed by Craig Brewer (who made the great Hustle & Flow , which still remains the most awkward Best Song winner ever at the Academy Awards with ‘It’s Hard Out There for a Pimp’ being performed before an audience of old, confused white people). 

In 1970s Los Angeles, Rudy Ray Moore (Eddie Murphy) is working in a record store, trying to get his music on the air on the local radio station, which is housed IN the record store but runs into a disagreeable DJ played by Snoop Dogg.  At night, Rudy Ray moonlights as an MC for Ben Taylor (Craig Robinson) and his musical group at a club. He asks the owner of the club for some time doing comedy, but he’s turned down. Moore self-produces and markets a comedy album and he becomes quite successful within the African American community. Off the success of this, Moore decides to make a film based off his stage character called Dolemite is My Name. It’s the free wheelin’, short-cutting style of filmmaking that is deployed which makes for much of the humour here – if you like Bowfinger, Living in Oblivion or Ed Wood or any film about a filmmaker with big dreams and a lot of vision but not really the talent to pull it off, there’s a sweetness and a sincerity to that that’s really appealing and this film has it in bucket-loads.

Daybreak follows the story of 17-year-old Canadian high school outcast Josh Wheeler (Colin Ford) searching for his missing British ex-girlfriend Sam Dean (Sophie Simnett) in post-apocalyptic Glendale, California. Joined by a ragtag group of misfits including 10 year old pyromaniac Angelica and Josh’s former high school bully Wesley, now turned pacifist samurai. Josh tries to stay alive amongst the horde of Mad Max-style gangs (evil jocks, cheerleaders turned Amazon warriors), zombified adults called Ghoulies. Matthew Broderick also stars in flashbacks as their High School Principal.

Paying homage to the vampire films of the 80’s such as Vamp, Fright Night, The Monster Squad and Near Dark, Nightwalkers lays its scene in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, following the trials and tribulations of the Vampire slaying Corey Sisters, as they hunt and kill bloodsuckers who threaten the ‘burbs of Western Sydney and are looking to bring about a vampire apocalypse. I sat down for a chat with Adrian Castro (Co-creator, Writer & Director) and Taylor Davis (Co-creator, co-lead and Writer) and talked about their Horror influences as well as the creative inspiration for Nightwalkers.

The central character of the opening episode of HBO’s Watchmen, is Angela Abar (Regina King), she’s a Tulsa police detective whose public face is as a retired police officer wounded in the line of duty-turned-professional pastry cook, something which serves to protect her from the ‘Seventh Kalvary’, a growing group of Rorschach-inspired vigilantes who execute anti-police violence. She’s also known as ‘Sister Night’, a masked vigilante who kicks untold amounts of ass as she helps her fellow cops against the white supremacist extremists. Don Johnson plays her superior, Chief Judd Crawford of the Tulsa Police and Tim Blake Nelson plays Wade, a Tulsa Police detective code-named ‘Looking Glass’ because of his reflective mask.

Tim-Blake Nelson as ‘Looking Glass’

We do see one other unnamed character, presumably Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, played by Jeremy irons – who’s a rich recluse living in a castle with a butler and a maid. It’s a bizarre scene but nonetheless engaging, clearly signposting that characters from the comic will be introduced as the show progresses.

Lindelof told NPR in the US:

“At the time that I was sort of approached to consider rethinking Watchmen, I had to answer the question, "What is the pervasive sort of anxiety in America right now?" And it was impossible, as all these things were happening — not just Charlottesville but everything was happening through the lens of race and it felt like there was a great reckoning happening in our country, overdue and necessary. This idea that Watchmen has always been about the history that has been kind of hidden and camouflaged, and also it's about the pain and trauma that is sort of buried in the American consciousness. And I started to feel like it was incredibly important to tell a story about race. To not tell a story about race in the context of a political text in 2019 almost felt borderline irresponsible.”

Regina King as ‘Sister Night’

Even though its been green-lit for another series - Lindelof has said he doesn’t think he’ll return for the next season:

“[It’s] not my story, right? I appropriated it. And so the idea that someone else could come along and do another season of Watchmen, that’s really exciting to me, too. These nine episodes are sort of everything that I have to say at this point about Watchmen, and then we’ll kind of go from there.”

Lindelof also suggested that he would like to see someone like Black Panther‘s Ryan Coogler take over the Watchmen HBO series, if it continues.

This is as strong a pilot episode as you’re going to find among the avalanche of content these days. This new adaptation has been referred to as a ‘remix’ of the comic and I think that sums it up perfectly. If Lindelof can maintain the intrigue, mystery and tension for nine episodes without toppling off the high-wire, this could be a landmark adaptation of a comic.

Living with Yourself is something of a low-fi, science fiction/high concept approach to a relationship drama.  It follows Miles (played by Paul Rudd) who languishes unhappily in a marriage to Kate (played by Aisling Bea). They barely communicate, stuck in a rut, on IVF trying to conceive and Miles’ marketing job is draining his life force on a daily basis. He’s so depressed he can barely summon the energy to even go about his day.

Miles takes advantage of an opportunity suggested by a co-worker : to undergo a spa treatment at a very drab strip mall in the middle of suburbia – resembling a Chinese Medicine clinic. The treatment in essence -is meant to kill Miles and replace him with a rejuvenated clone of himself – a clone which has all his memories but hasn’t been worn down by the grind of forty odd years of living. This doesn’t go to plan, so these two versions of Miles need to find a way to co-exist. The new version who’s chipper, charming and happy - and the dour, sad and shabbily attired original Miles.

High school depicted as a hyper-real microcosm of society is not a new thing per se – Heathers featured an 80’s High School dealing with the spectre of teen suicide, Alexander Payne’s film Election had a young Reece Witherspoon as the determined Tracey Flick, running for Class President, seemingly at all costs, Wes Anderson’s film Rushmore also featured a similarly determined young protagonist with dreams of extreme ambition and Rian Johnson‘s Brick, messed about with the genre and created a heightened reality where Joseph Gordon Levitt’s protagonist attempts to solve a girl’s disappearance as if he’s a private eye in a Dashiell Hammett novel and the various cliques and gangs at his High School behave and talk like they’re trapped in the same novel.

 Which brings us to The Politician, Netflix made a pretty sweet $300 million deal with Glee and American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy to create content just for them – though technically this show is still under his old contract nevertheless he’s teamed up again with his collaborators from Glee : Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. Falchuk is married to Gwyneth Paltrow, who also stars in and produces this new show that’s currently on Netflix. It bears a lot of similarities to Glee; another example of a hyper-real, exaggerated high school setting that’s populated with overly talented bright young things committing treacherous deeds and cracking one-liners like they’re trapped in Aaron Sorkin-land.

Mr Inbetween tells the story of Ray Shoesmith (Scott Ryan), a standover man and enforcer for nightclub owner and loan shark Freddy (played by Damon Herriman). Ray lives a simple life, looking after his daughter Brittany (Chika Yasumura) and his older brother Bruce (played by Nicholas Cassim), who is suffering from a degenerative motor-neurone disease. Ray also has a burgeoning romance with a nurse named Ally (played by Brooke Satchwell).

The key to the show’s success is Ryan’s affable, friendly charm which can flip at any given second and turn into dead-eyed, dutiful hitman. He rationalises his actions by compartmentalising them and telling himself that as a hired killer ‘he’s just doing a job’ – so he’s also able to be a compassionate father and brother. Things get difficult when he starts a romantic relationship because it’s a lot harder to hide the dark parts of himself.

 It’s a cleverly written show – Ryan is terrific – helped in no small part by his unfamiliarity as a performer, so you completely buy him as the character -  and Edgerton’s stunt background means that the action sequences, when they occur, go for maximum impact.

Aussie crime is a fairly large TV & film genre though the pitfalls that most Aussie crime fare falls into is that it tries to replicate the US style of criminal. Underbelly springs to mind, where the tone is exploitative and heightened but the characters don’t ring true because - at their core - Australian’s don’t see themselves that way. It’s inauthentic. It’s bullshit. The Australian criminal archetype is the smart arse - something seeded at Australia’s criminal inception as a colony and exemplified by Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie letter to the Victorian government, where he called the police who pursued him: "fat-necked, wombat headed, big bellied, magpie-legged, narrow-hipped, splaw-footed sons of Irish Bailiffs or English landlords”. This anti-authoritarian attitude cuts through to who we are as a nation of upstarts, underdogs and loners - and Ryan’s Ray Shoesmith personifies this to a tee.

Mr Inbetween is hands-down the best Australian TV show currently on air at the moment and it’s a goddamn crime against humanity if you haven’t started watching it. Get your priorities in order and get on it.

Apple TV, Disney + or HBO Max? Peacock, Stan or Netflix. The baffling ordeal is only going to get more baffling. I had a pretty quick chat with ABC Radio’s Lyndal Curtis about the Streaming landscape and how fast it’s changing…

Created by Susannah Grant (who wrote – amongst other things - Erin Brockovich), Unbelievable is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning article co-published by ProPublica and The Marshall Project. It begins with the story of Marie (played by Kaitlyn Dever) an 18-year-old who’s reeling from a difficult childhood in the foster care system, who reports being sexually assaulted but as male detectives poke holes in her story, they treat her as a uncooperative witness, forcing her to repeatedly relive her trauma. Ultimately she recants her report and admits to lying, in an attempt to move on with her life. Her story runs concurrently with that of two female detectives (Toni Collette and Merritt Wever) working a separate investigation into a serial rapist. Ultimately the storyline’s converge. in an indictment of the procedures and protocols utilised in the investigation of sexual assault cases and in the way men treat women’s claims of sexual assault.

Netflix’s new show The Spy features Sacha Baron Cohen as Israel’s most famous spy, Eli Cohen, who in the 1960’s went deep undercover for Mossad in Syria. Cohen posed as an Argentine-based Arab businessman who yearns to return to his ancestral homeland – the home of his father. Once in Syria, he schmoozes, wines and dines high-brow officials to such a degree, that he was nearly appointed the Deputy Minister of Defence. Cohen's knowledge of Syria's gun placements along the Golan Heights enabled Israel to defeat Syria in the Six-Day War in 1967. It’s six-part limited series - written and directed by Gideon Raff, who was responsible for an Israeli show called Prisoners of War, from which the TV show Homeland was adapted.

Eli Cohen is depicted here as stoic and rather internal as a character – quite taciturn - but as a lead, Baron Cohen exudes a magnetic screen presence. He’s next due to appear in The Trial of the Chicago Seven alongside Eddie Redmayne and Joseph Gordon Levitt, in the story of the seven people on trial following the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago - and Baron Cohen will play Abbie Hoffman. Aaron Sorkin is going to direct that – so based on his turn in this , I think Sacha Baron Cohen may evolve into quite a formidable character actor.

As well as The Spy (which is currently out on Netflix) landing tomorrow are some more episodes of filmmaker Jon Favreau’s The Chef Show - where the actor/director (of The Lion King and Iron Man) Jon Favreau and award-winning Chef Roy Choi, reunite to experiment with their favourite recipes and techniques. In these new episodes there’s an episode featuring Seth Rogen, who sweats his way through some serious food prep for a large catered dinner. Chef David Chang also features in another episode. BE WARNED - all episodes feature crazy delicious food that WILL make you ridiculously hungry – inevitably compelling  you to scour the fridge so you can whip up something tasty.

The Star Trek: The Original Series episode ‘The Man Trap’ aired on September 8th 1966, I chatted with ABC Radio’s Lyndal Curtis about Star Trek and its cultural impact.