Reviews

A complex film about follows the lives of people in a small village in northern England just after the First World War. The main character, a young boy afflicted with epilepsy, has to cope with a father gassed in the war and a mother keen to protect him from too much reality. His hero is an educated single man in the town, played by Liam Nesson, whose claim to fame is a vast collection of books. The boy forms a friendship with a slightly-older teenager girl called Win but the entire movie revolves around his discovery that the Neeson character is carrying on an affair with a married woman in the village. What plot there is very hard to follow and the abrupt end of the movie suggests the director had no real idea of how to resolve the relationship between the boy and the girl while resolving the relationship of the Neeson character and his lover, played by Natasha Richardson, in a way that assumes the mores of the late 20th century applied in England in the 1920s.

The engrossing sequel to Bird of Prey sees bank clerk Henry Jay running for his life as the villains from the first series close in on him. The twists and turns in the plot are a tribute to the writers and the last five minutes of the final episode are as gripping a piece of television as you will see. And the final exchange of dialogue between Henry(Richard Griffiths) and his wife Anne(Carole Nimmons)is the final twist in the story. Enjoy.

Arguably the worst series ever made for Australian TV. Supposedly set on a tropical island most of it was filmed in Melbourne in winter, if you look closely you can see the actor's breath in several takes and no-one ever goes swimming! A total ratings bomb with characters being written out of the series at the average rate of two an episode towards its end.

My suspicion is that this was an undergraduate film script project to write a fairy tale. But even fairy tales need some basis in fact. The lead, Anna, played by Australian actor Miranda Otto, appears to be a longtime local game warden who, incredibly, is unable to speak the language of the area's tribe and ignores basic survival steps ie. you never walk away from a broken-down vehicle in the desert. Her brother, the local priest, is a cardboard cutout racist and disappears from the movie altogether in the last 20 minutes. The plot holes are extraordinary. How Anna suddenly discoveres a cache of poached ivory in her friend's house is simply never explained, the same goes for the significance of the ceremony in the closing minutes of the film when the local tribe pour sand over her and just why an African-American lawyer is living in a small village in Namibia is utterly ignored, apart from a one scene while suggests he is looking for minerals. And the ignorance of the black/white divide in southern Africa makes the entire effort laughable.

Shot on location in Queensland, this is as implausible a piece of film making as you are likely to see anywhere. Jack Thompson is at his oafish best and Ms Welch still looks pretty good, considering she was in her late 40s when this was shot. The storyline is non-existent and poor Nicholas Hammond looks embarrassed throughout the movie.

Based on the novel by Hesba Brinsmead, this was the first Australian TV series to address racism in any meaningful way. Ryhll Merewether, played by Jeannie Drynan, finds herself dumped on a northern NSW banana plantation after her father dies. She hates it and and hates the people, including a half-caste labourer (Harold Hopkins)who wants to go to university and his crippled old Melanesian grandfather, on the plantation even more.

Her journey of discovery, including her realisation only after the death of the old man, that he was her grandfather and she is the sister of the plantation labourer, was handled remarkably well for a time when Australia was still pursuing a white-only immigration program and discrimination against black Australians was endemic.

Jeannie Drynan's best line in the series "Now I know what it's like to be coloured and it doesn't feel any different" was a big step for Australian TV and signalled a move away from comfortable drama in prime time.

An awful soap set on Australia's Gold Coast, featuring scantily dressed men and women, expensive boats and wafer-thin storylines. Like most Australian soaps it featured silly villains, vacuous vamps, treacherous businessmen and even a lesbian businesswoman. It quickly sank without trace after a couple of seasons.

Michael Caton and Daniel Wyllie as the two corrupt cops Red and Lou are a complete joy. They see their role not so much as policemen but as crime managers, making sure they get their cut, keeping crime away from most of their fellow citizens and finding ways to keep their boss Pud (Roy Billing) constantly off balance.

Embarassingly bad retelling of the Janine Shepherd story. Any connection with the travails Janine went through to learn to fly, marry and ultimately have three children is notional. The depictions of the some of the characters eg. Noel and Virginia, are so wide of the mark in respect of the real people involved as to be obscene.

The show that spawned an entire series of Australian TV cops shows (Division 4, Matlock, Bluey) Homicide premiered as a black and white show filmed on flimsy sets with very little location filming and ended its days as a colour presentation with extensive location shooting. Just about every Australian actor of any note in the 70s and 80s got a start on Homicide.

If you thought Roy Slaven and HG Nelson could not top their brilliant Sydney Olympics Games effort The Dream, (broadcast every night at 11pm on Australian TV during the Sydney Games and half the nation tuned in)think again. This effort, focused on the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, was, after a slow start, little short of brillant. Helped in no small part by two Australian gold medals, neither of them expected and one earned only because everyone else in the race fell over, the boys had some brillant hooks to hang their unique take on sport on.

And if you think the boys haven't arrived as Olympic icons then you have missed the boat. IOC boss Jacques Rogge was a guest, and thoroughly enjoyed himself, and where else would two grown men kick each other in the groin on national TV, as the medal-winning US two-man skeleton crew did, and earn Roy's highest accolades. The guests were the usual mixed bunch of winners, losers and people who count. The guest with the least was German skater Katerina Witt. She had no idea how to deal with Roy and HG and by the end of the interview looked like a desperate rabbit waiting for a car to run her down and put her out of her misery. Their next gig is Athens. Can't wait!

If you were trying to work at night, as I was, during the Olympics in Sydney absolutely nothing got done while Roy and HG were on the TV.

Every sacred cow of the Olympics was attacked and lampooned, Roy, at his belligerent best, taking on all comers, especially the Australian Olympic Committee, and athletes getting themselves into all sorts of jams trying to avoid agreeing with Roy's more outrageous suggestions and ideas. Do yourself a favour, gets the videos. Looking back the boys said some really outrageous and clever stuff. It's still fresh, even in replay

As the follow-on from Secret Army, Kessler lacks everything Secret Army had, tension, drama, good storylines and plotting and well-drawn characters. Alan Dobie's role as Richard Bauer is poorly developed and you never manage to find out why exactly he is pursuing Kessler or why. Nitza Saul's role, as the young Israeli chasing Kessler and helping Bauer, lacks any definition at all. Alison Glennie, as Kessler's daughter Ingrid, is little more than a cardboard cutout pretend Nazi. Not one of Gerald Glaister's better efforts

Fortunately this sad example of film making in the Antipodes is never likely to leave our shores. With deplorable plotting, numerous continuity breaks and and too many goofs to mention this movie should be avoided at all costs. By way of example in one sequence the lead female (Lisa Peers) arrives unannounced at a farm wearing a cheesecloth top, cutoff jeans and sandals and without luggage. Her next appearance, still at the farm, is in a full length skirt, blouse and sweater and wearing boots! And with a different hair style. And what story line there is would be inexplicable to anyone without a working knowledge of New Zealand. Watch something else.