My Top 20 CDs of the decade

It's end of the decade poll time - in case you hadn't noticed. The UK website rock's backpages recently asked for my Top 20 CDs of the 2000s and below you can find what I sent them.

It's not really a "rock list", which I think is a meaningless term in 2009 when so many musical categories and sub-genres so healthily co-exist. My list contains ambient electronica, African and other 'world" music, rock, English and Irish folk, and experimental jazz.

I make no claims to objectivity or omniscience - there's plenty of CDs I didn't get to hear. So much music is now released that hearing all new releases is harder than ever - indeed impossible. I just liked these a heck of a lot. I'd go as far as saying that several of them are deathless masterpieces.

Of course 20 is a random number. I feel bad about leaving off Dylan's Modern Times, Goldfrapp's Felt Mountain, Fat Freddy's Drop's Based on a True Story, Brian Wilson's Smile (great but the previously released songs were not quite as magical as the original Beach Boys recordings) and Easy Star All Stars' Dub Side of the Moon - a reggae tribute that seemed to me considerably better than the Pink Floyd original. Steve Earle only missed out because his his 2000s recordings haven't been quite as consistently brilliant as his '90s output.

Note also the list includes only one CD apiece from several artists who released more than one CD deserving to be considered among the decade's best. I include Radiohead's Kid A, for instance, but could just as easily have listed Amnesia, Hail to the Thief and In Rainbows.

The presence of The Beatles' LOVE may raise eyebrows ("isn't it old material?") but I justify it as an inventive mash-up and re-mix album - how much more contemporary do you need?

No Australian names? Not deliberate, it just panned out that way.

List in no order of preference

Rachel Unthank and the Winterset - The Bairns.

Radiohead - Kid A
Gillian Welch - Time (the Revelator)
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raising Sand
Youssou N'dour - Egypt
Ry Cooder - Chavez Ravine
Anouar Brahem - Le Pas du Chat Noir
James Blackshaw - The Cloud of Unknowing
Loscil - Submers
June Tabor - Apples
Arve Henriksen - Cartography
Tom Waits - Real Gone
1 Giant Leap - What About Me?
Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
Oumou Sangare - Seya
Damien Dempsey - The Rocky Road
Salif Keita - Moffou
Kila - Luna Park
Jon Hassell - Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street
The Beatles - LOVE

(Image: the Unthank sisters, culturopoing.com)

A small bite of Aunt Ozzie's Apple Pie

A total of 85% of Australian features in the past five years had only limited release (ie. less than 20 prints) or specialty (20-99) release.

The limited and specialty release sectors account for only 11% market share.

These figures, quoted by Screen Australia chief Ruth Harley in a story in The Australian, helps explain why local films are reaching only a limited audience. Nothing new here, of course - but it's interesting to see this confirmed by exact figures.

(image: colleenhammond.com)

Avatar clip - it's fake!

This new Avatar trailer clip looks, I hate to say, underwhelming. True, it does feature a very high level of visual detail which marks some kind of advance in terms of CGI.

The problem is its digital imagery suffers from the same problem as that afflicting many other FX-dependent movies. It looks blatantly fake - like animation. Which of course is precisely what it is.

In addition Aussie Sam Worthington's American accent is half-assed and his delivery of his exceedingly crap dialogue is almost embarrassingly flat (listen to his voiceover starting around 34 seconds in).

Of course there's plenty of fanboys salivating all over the net. They did that over The Phantom Menace too.

(Thanks to Luke Buckmaster for thetip)

Samson and Max and Mary and Delilah and Andrew and Aden

Samson & Delilah has won the Best Feature Film award at the third annual Asia Pacific Screen Awards, announced tonight on the Gold Coast. Nifty timing, given ABC1 has just finished screening the making-of doco about the film, and a sizeable honour for the film.

Congratulations to Warwick Thornton and producer Kath Shelper, also to Adam Elliott and Melanie Coombs for picking up the best animated feature gong for Mary and Max and indeed to all the winners (main ones listed below).

Being one of Samson's many admirers, I hate having to raise the issue of a potential for controversy, but it's hard to ignore the fact the best film decision was taken by a jury that was flagrantly unbalanced, with a third of the members - two out of six - being from Australia.

The respected film historian and independent distributor Andrew Pike was already on the jury when actor Aden Young stepped in to replace a last minute drop-out.

Making up the rest of the panel were Chinese director and producer Huang Jianxin (as chair), Tahmineh Milāni (Islamic Republic of Iran), Gina Kim (Republic of Korea), and Pryas Gupta (India).

In the absence of inside information on the jury deliberations, it would be unwise to suggest the presence of two Australians among the decision-makers had any effect on the jury deliberations at all. It may well have had none.

I am saying however that the appearance of neutrality can be just as important as neutrality itself, and from that point of view, the jury composition was unfortunate.

The awards are meant to represent the filmmakers of a huge region - all of Asia, plus the Pacific nations. Allowing one nation - regardless of which one it is - to have such dominant representation on the panel that decides the winners is decidedly bad form. Imagine the two jurors had been, say, from Thailand, and a Thai film had won -best film. The same would apply.

Edited from the APSA media release:

"The Asia Pacific Screen Awards were attended by more than 800 film industry luminaries from the Asia-Pacific region, and around the world. Thirty seven films representing 16 countries and territories were finalists.

"Winners came from Australia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Islamic Republic of Iran, Israel, Palestinian Territories, People’s Republic of China and Thailand and high commendations from the Jury for films from Australia, India, Republic of Korea and Russian Federation.

"Japanese star Masahiro Motoki was on the Gold Coast to receive the Best Performance by an Actor Award for his performance in Okuribito (Departures) and the Best Performance by an Actress Award winner was Korea’s Kim Hye-ja for Madeo (Mother)."

Pictured at the top is "China’s Nanjing! Nanjing! (City of Life and Death), which received two awards: Lu Chuan for Achievement in Directing and Cao Yu for Achievement in Cinematography.

"Best Screenplay was awarded to Asghar Farhadi for Darbareye Elly (About Elly), pictured above right.

"The Jury awarded two Jury Grand Prizes to the director of Darbareye Elly (About Elly), Asghar Farhadi (Islamic Republic of Iran), and the director of The Time That Remains (pictured above left), Elia Sulieman (Palestinian Territories)."

AFI snub of Disgrace is a disgrace - director Steve Jacobs

In today's Australian Financial Review (p44 - on the web it's behind the AFR paywall) I report on Steve Jacobs hitting out at the local film industry for omitting his film Disgrace from ALL nominations categories in the forthcoming AFI Awards.

Jacobs says he's not upset at the lack of "best picture" or "director" nominations for himself, but is disappointed for his actors and crew.

As well he might be. The absence of a best actress nomination for Jessica Haines's knockout performance is a disgrace in itself. (Nothing new there - a few years ago the AFI voters overlooked a very fine Naomi Watts performance in Strange Planet then waited for David Lynch to tell them it was OK to recognise her acting qualities).

Nothing for John Malkovich? Steve Arnold's cinematography? Fiona Press's perfect handling of a difficult female supporting role? How come Rachel Ward's heavily flawed script for Beautiful Kate is up for best adapted screenplay while Anna Maria Monticelli's skillful adaptation of J.M.Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel is overlooked?

Solving the problems of the Oz film industry in 1 hour

Yesterday I was a guest of ABC Radio National's Australia Talks program where I debated local film industry problems with Anthony Ginnane, president of the Screen Producers Association of Australia.

(Images on this page are posters of films produced or executive-produced by Ginnane).

Ginnane and program host, Paul Barclay, were in studios in different parts of the country so trying to know when, or if, I could jump in without the cues of eye contact or body language was a challenge I fluffed on at least a couple of occasions. Such is radio.

If you missed the program, it's available here as an hour-long live stream or download.

Towards the end of the show multi-platform producer Kelly Chapman and ABC TV presenter Mark Fennell came in to make a couple of interesting contributions. It would have more sense to have introduced Chapman earlier in the piece to help frame the debate in terms of the huge changes going on in audio-visual media, but c'est la vie. I didnt get to say half of what I planned to say but that's just motormouth me.

I don't have time to comment on this now but hope to come back to the topics discussed when I clear my current workload.

In the meantime I've reproduced below some of Ginnane's Wednesday November 18 welcome address from last week's SPAA conference in Sydney. Again, no time to comment right now, but please feel free to post your own views in the comment box.

Ginnane, speech extract:
"We have spent over $1 billion on our film industry since the 1970s but we have never stood together and said “This is an industry. This is a business. It’s not about art. It’s not for dilettantes”.

"In most other business, government intervenes in the marketplace via subsidy to correct an imbalance. It’s cheaper to make cars in Korea – so government intervenes in the automobile industry to enable Australian autos to sell. But the intervention is to help a car that conforms to marketplace needs get sold - not to force a 3-wheeled pink variant into the market.

"In the film industry, government intervention has been consistently used to assist in the creation of product the market does not want and the market tells us that year in, year out by rejecting it en masse. But we don’t listen and we don’t want government to notice.

"We purport to clamber for commercial success but when it eludes us (not surprisingly given the content of much of our output) we fall back on the circular and incestuous praise of a troika of critics, film festivals and cultural commissars for our justification. We confuse Americanism with internationalism and then chant the “Australian voices” mantra like some warped reverse playback of the Red Flag.

"No wonder we struggle to get to 5% of the Gross Box Office, let alone the 10% we should easily be obtaining to justify the continued subsidy support.

"We need to resolve once and for all the 40 year push/pull between art and commerce. Industry and government need to accept that this is a business, not a culture fest.

"Of course there is a place and a role for government to fund culture (including cinema) but it should be separate from and funded and judged quite differently to the sustainable commercial industry we need to create.

"We have forgotten that, at heart, we are program suppliers and we only exist to make broadcasters and distributors more profitable.

"But many of us resist, with a passion, any attempt to integrate distribution with production; forgetting the glory days of Cinesound & Union Theatres and Hexagon & Village.

"With vision and that $1 billion we should have had half-a-dozen Luc Bessons and a world wide industry – or at least 2 or 3 Peter Jacksons. Of course we have George Miller and, from a different perspective, Baz Luhrmann – but apart from George and Baz, as an industry, we could have achieved so much more and performed so much better without the straight jacket of cultural protectionism we enveloped ourselves in.

"Are we frightened? Is that the answer? We’re not frightened in sport, or music and our exhibitors like Village and, to a lesser extent, Hoyts and GUO, blazed world wide trails. But the feature film production industry, with a couple of exceptions, hasn’t.

"'We can’t compete”' 'They have bigger budgets'. But CSI’s budget is many times that of Underbelly. The budget for 30 Rock is many times that of Packed to the Rafters. This budget thing is, frankly, a cop out.

"Perhaps collectively our ability to read the marketplace and audience appetite has been so dulled by the subsidy drug that we have completely forgotten what audiences want.

"There is no formula for what works; but we know what doesn’t work. Our job is to feed the food chain of distribution and to develop and produce what buyers want; take local concepts and develop them for a global market. Genre is key and it’s bizarre to me that when literally hundreds of social realist Australian films fail, we keep making them; and when a few horror thrillers fail after Wolf Creek, its time to shut that genre down again."

We've just hit 1 Billion computers. Now look forward to Trillions

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Brilliant clip. Thaks to Mark Pesce for uncovering.

If you think social networking is a fad, you need to play this

Heads up: Mark Scott.

Sydney Film Festival presents outcomes of Independent Review

Media Release (bold emphasis is mine - LB):

"The Sydney Film Festival yesterday met with members to present the outcomes of the independent review conducted by Booz & Co. in partnership with NSW Government following the 2009 Festival.

"The Sydney Film Festival is NSW’s pre-eminent showcase for independent cinema and has run continuously for 56 years. The review was commissioned to look at the current operational and business model and to ensure that the Festival would be sustainable into the future.

"After examining every aspect of the Festival’s operations, undertaking research and conducting extensive interviews in Australia and internationally, the Booz Review has concluded some key elements of activity and future developments.

"Overall the review recommended a two to three-year development strategy for the Festival that focuses on operational and governance reform, exploration of new markets and further consideration of the Sydney Film Festival’s future position in the local, national and international events calendar and film festival environment.

"The highlights of the Booz Review include:

1. The Festival should continue to be held in June for the immediate future and should consider how it can best expand its activities to include satellite events throughout the year.

2. While centered in the traditional home of the State Theatre for 2010, the festival should look to expand into other Sydney areas in particular Parramatta. This would build on the success of the Sydney Film Festival’s Travelling Film Festival to regional NSW and other centres.

3. The Festival should fully develop its digital media strategy that fully leverages advances in technology and changes in audience appetite.

"In order to underpin these plans for audience development, the Review recommended a program for organisational reform, and presented options for changes to its governance arrangements, bringing it in line with other major arts organisations and state-funded festivals.

“The results of the Booz Review are encouraging to the board and staff who have worked tirelessly over the recent years to initiate and implement change, and to develop the Festival for a wider audience in the future,” said Virginia Gordon, SFF President. “The company has already acted on a significant number of recommendations.

"We feel confident that the recommendations form the basis for the SFF further building its audience and relationship with partners, and continuing to be an inseparable part of the cultural landscape of Sydney and NSW for many years, reaching more people than ever before.”

"As a result of the recommendations, the Board discussed with members last night (Monday- LB) the options available for restructuring of board appointments and the evolution of the organization into the future. Members will be advised on options for change over the next month leading up to an EGM in December and the AGM in January."

(Image: Pieter Pieterse)

Samson sweeps the IFs

IF Award winners 2009.

Congratulations to the winner. Oh hang on, the winners...

Best Feature Film: Samson & Delilah – Warwick Thornton, Kath Shelper

Best Actor: Rowan McNamara – Samson & Delilah

Best Actress: Marissa Gibson – Samson & Delilah

Best Script: Samson & Delilah – Warwick Thornton

Best Music: Samson & Delilah – Warwick Thornton

Best Direction: Samson & Delilah – Warwick Thornton

Best Sound: Balibo – Sam Petty, Emma Bortignon, Phil Heywood, Ann Aucote

Best Editing: Balibo – Nick Meyers

Best Production Design: Mary & Max – Adam Elliot

Best Cinematography: Beautiful Kate – Andrew Commis

Independent Spirit Award: My Tehran For Sale – Director: Granaz Moussavi, Producers, Julie Ryan, Kate Croser, Granaz Moussavi

Rising Talent: Dominic Allen

Box Office Achievement: Australia – Baz Luhrmann, G.Mac Brown and Catherine Knapman

Living Legend IF Award: Baz Luhrmann

Best Film Festival: Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival

Best Short Film: Ralph – Director Deborah Mailman, Producers Jessie Mangum and Kylie Du Fresne

Best Animation: The Cat Piano – Directors Eddie White & Ari Gibson, Producer Jessica Brentnall

Best Short Documentary: Mankind is No Island – Jason Van Genderen

Best Documentary: The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce – Michael James Rowland, Producer Nial Fulton

Best Music Video: Sway Sway Baby – Short Stack – Dan Reisinger

Why classical composers and musicians in film are crazy - Part 3

Sydney Film School sound design and music lecturer Michael McLennan suggests the problem may lie less with their musical subjects per se than with the bio-pic tradition – this type of story is often riddled with cliché and notoriously difficult to pull off.

For avoiding all the traps he highly rates Canadian filmmaker Francois Girard’s 1993 film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (pictured left). As the title suggests, the film is constructed as a series of discrete films providing a multi-faceted view of a complex musician.

Filmmakers also face the problem of how to treat actors giving musical performances to make them seem authentic. Edward Primrose, lecturer in film composition at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, says that viewers inevitably “enter this little game of ‘are they playing or are they not?’“

There’s also the fact that composing is a very internal and solitary act and to make it visually appealing filmmakers go to great lengths, creating scenes that are exaggerated or made up, he says. “The trouble is that in reality, there’s no real relationship between the composer’s internal processes and their ordinary day-to-day life. Filmmakers strive to overcome this, to create an artificial connection between the life and the art – ‘I see this, therefore it inspires me to write my brilliant third symphony’.”

But for all their problems, these films can lead viewers to make great musical discoveries. As a young man Sculthorpe was heavily struck by the music of Gershwin (pictured left), Chopin and Strauss after seeing their respective Hollywood biographies, Rhapsody in Blue, A Song to Remember and The Great Waltz. Several of those interviewed said they thought Amadeus was ridiculous but nonetheless entertaining and filled with marvelous music. Even Ken Russell’s silly The Music Lovers (Tchaikovsky) and Mahler are filled with wonderful examples of their subject’s art.

For one of the finest fusions of cinematic and musical art, oddly it’s Russell to whom we must turn. Before turning towards camp excess, Russell made a series of restrained films for the BBC on the lives of composers including Elgar, Debussy, Bartok and Delius, the latter, Delius - Song of Summer (pictured right), remaining one of the best films about a composer made to date. Not just by Russell, by anyone.

Image: Gershwin, cherylandalex.wordpress.com/.../

Why classical composers and musicians in film are crazy - Part 2

The notion of the artist as a tortured soul stems of course from the Romantic era, with Beethoven – infamously cantankerous and half-crazed by his hearing loss in later years - the emblematic example.

Peter Sculthorpe says he is particularly fond of Eric Smith’s 1982 Archibald Prize-winning portrait of him (detail below left) because “all the previous portraits had shown me as a tortured composer, and this is the first that had shown me as I am – happy and optimistic. Traditionally painters have preferred composers as tortured beings.”

Composer Alan John, whose film credits including work on Three Dollars and Percy Grainger biography Passion, points out that well-adjusted composers and musicians make for dull subjects. Plus you have the fact that many composers were in fact dysfunctional characters, John says, citing Bruckner as one example. “It was a Romantic period and maybe it fed into the way the artists saw themselves – but I think if Schumann had had a choice, he would have chosen not to go mad,” John says.

Schumann’s mental deterioration was recently portrayed in the German film Clara (pictured above) about the three-way relationship between the man, his wife - composer and pianist Clara Schumann - and Johannes Brahms.

Composer Christopher Gordon, whose film music includes Master and Commander and Mao’s Last Dancer, thinks the wild artist, operating outside the realms of polite society, is more than just a cliché to filmmakers. Film, he says, “needs its archetypes, and that can mean making people quite extreme in certain ways. The artist archetype is an interesting one. There’s this thing about the artist being untamable yet the one person that tells the truth. It’s like fire, in a way: it fascinates and draws you in but threatens to burn you. In a mythical kind of way the artist is often put into this kind of role; whether it’s Shine or Amadeus, the artist is seen as this wild and not necessarily social being that tells us the truth about ourselves.”But do these archetypes make for good films? The list of impressive films about composers and classical musicians is a short one. Triteness, distortion and kitsch abounds. Composer Nigel Westlake, whose works include the soundtrack for the film Babe, says that “in almost all these cases, huge liberties have been taken with the subject matter in the name of drama and scandal, to the point where historical fact is transformed into virtual fantasy…

“Where the cap doesn’t fit, the screenwriter will go to any lengths to re-write history in order to conform with the ‘tortured artist’ myth. Can any of these films be taken seriously? I don’t think there would be any historians who would consider these films anything more than entertainment and as about as historically accurate as Gladiator."

Why classical composers and musicians in film are crazy - Part 1

In the cover story for the October edition of Limelight magazine I examined the way the lives of composers and classical muscians have been treated on film, and wonder why the themes of mental and physical illness have been such a constant.

Story runs below in three parts:

In the US movie The Soloist, released a couple of months ago, Robert Downey Jnr played Steve Lopez, a real-life Los Angeles Times reporter who befriended Nathaniel Ayers, a schizophrenic living rough and obsessed with classical music and the lives of the great composers, especially Beethoven.

Nathaniel, played by Jamie Foxx (Ray Charles in Ray), turned out to be a brilliant musician who dropped out of his conservatorium course due to his psychiatric problems. Lopez wrote about him in his columns and, aided by a sympathetic readership, attempted to help him return to regularly playing music.

This follow-up to Atonement for British director Joe Wright was distinguished by its pair of powerful lead performances and its uncompromising treatment of serious mental illness as an often intractable force.

In the latter respect The Soloist was relatively unusual, but in other respects the movie followed a common theme when it comes to the treatment of classical musicians and composers.

Although there are exceptions such as 1938 Johann Strauss biography, The Great Waltz , the musically gifted in the movies tend to have a kangaroo loose in the top paddock, or at the very least to be troubled, physically ailing or strange. On film they are variously depicted as psychiatrically ill (viz. David Helfgott in Shine); irascible and deeply eccentric (Ludwig van in last year’s Copying Beethoven - Ed Harris as the composer pictured above right), or suffering a disabling illness (the MS-afflicted Jacqueline du Pre in Hilary and Jackie).

And who could forget Amadeus, with its pathologically jealous Salieri fixated on murder and a Mozart who is a giggling child inhabiting an adult’s body?

If the men are worrisome, according to the movies if you see a woman seated at a piano, you’d be advised to turn on your heels and run. Witness Isabelle Huppert’s sexually repressed-to-the-point-of-psychosis lead role in The Piano Teacher; the revenge-fixated ex-piano student in last year’s French drama The Page Turner; or Holly Hunter’s wilfully mute axe-wielder in The Piano.

What is it that compels filmmakers to regard musicians and composers as such dysfunctional creatures? It’s not enough to say that some of these stories are based (sometimes accurately, sometimes extremely loosely) on real life case histories, and that their music gives the opportunity for a glorious soundtrack.

We have to ask why the filmmakers have been attracted to these stories in the first place, and not to others. As composer Peter Sculthorpe points out, no-one has made a movie about J.S. Bach (pictured above left), even though he was “probably the greatest of European composers. His life was probably too uneventful to make into a film.”

Alfred Molina vs Daniel Day Lewis

At newmatilda this week I take the wrecking ball to Daniel Day Lewis's hammier indulgences and suggest a worthier candidate for the title of Great British Screen Actor - Alfred Molina (pictured above in Ridley and Tony Scott's TNT mini-series The Company).

Great acting like Molina's often goes under-celebrated for a reason. The audience is not meant to notice the acting. They're meant to notice the character!

Please post any comments on the newmatilda site rather than here please. Thanks.

Extract:
"I, for one, don't like being rudely grabbed by the lapel and told to bow down in obeisance. Great screen acting perfectly embodies a character — and the fact of a character being showily egotistical and extroverted does not make a performance more impressive or prize-worthy. Indeed it can mean the opposite: that the actor has gotten so carried away that the temperature needle has shot into the red-for-danger zone.

"Good films — and sometimes even mediocre ones — are full of great acting that goes unnoticed. That's why they're great — we're not meant to notice the craft behind them. Genuine performances don't have tickets on themselves. Sadly, this means they often pass uncelebrated..."

Audience joins the Last Ride - illegally

Australian film Last Ride (starring Hugo Weaving) was released on DVD yesterday. Director Glendyn Ivin says it was on torrent sites as early as last night & in 16 hours had been downloaded (illegally...) 7000+ times.

Ivin's philosophical comment: "Well at least it's getting out there..." My comment: Perhaps we should add this to the box office stats. Shows there's a desire to see it.

Last Ride recently won major prizes at the Rome and Middle East (Dubai) film festivals

When it comes to political solutions, Moore = Less

Over at newmatilda I go hunting for the missing-in=action politics of Michael Moore

Please post any comments on the full article please.

Extract:

"So is Moore an anarcho-syndicalist or a communist? He talks about moving "beyond socialism" — yet what he advocates sounds quite a lot like socialism. Or is he merely thinking of the kind of democratised industrial relations system in Germany, where workers can elect representatives on to corporate boards? Alas, the film doesn't explain.

"Nor did he make matters any clearer when he was a guest on ABC TV's Lateline Business last week. Asked by host Ali Moore to explain what his system to replace capitalism would look like, Moore paused for an awkwardly long moment before uttering the words: 'I dunno'.

Film agency to shift funding to more commercial, bigger-budgeted productions

The Australian Financial Review today (Thursday) quoted Screen Australia chief Ruth Harley (pictured) signalling that the agency will fund fewer films, but at higher budgets - $15 million and above.

There will be a squeeze on films budgeted at $15 million and below - no surprise given the general collapse of the market for lower budget Australian films documented on this blog and elsewhere.

However the producer's tax offset will remain an option for films budgeted above $1 million (that figure being the seemingly arbitrary cut-off point) - so I wouldn't write off the chances of, say, the next Samson & Delilah appearing just yet.

This extract is not from the AFR article (which I can't find - it seems to be behind the newspaper's pay wall) but from a report on it from Ron Brown of Independent Content Creators Association Australia, who's quoted in the piece.

"Screen Australia's production funds have been cut by government to counter the increase in indirect funding through the offset, the result being it will fund nine films this year, down from more than 20 a few years ago.

"Harley says with it's limited funds , the organisation will focus more on films with mainstream appeal and that can be released on more than 100 screens, all with a view to raising the success of Australian films at the box office. She agrees there will be a downside to this.

"I suspect little credit card films will carry on as before, big films like Guardians (of Ga'hoole) and Happy Feet 2 will carry on as before, but there will be a squeeze on those in the $4 million to $15 million bracket, " she says.

(Image: Victoria Birkinshaw, victoriabirkinshaw.com)

The boys - and girls - are back

In The Australian today I take a look at the cinematic trend towards films about teens for adult audiences , including AN EDUCATION, SAMSON & DELILAH, YOUNG VICTORIA & GENOVA & the upcoming NOWHERE BOY, FRENCH KISSERS, PRECIOUS & THE BOYS ARE BACK (Aaron Johson as the young John Lennon pictured above)

Extract:
"...What's striking about these new titles is that they're told from an adult perspective and clearly aimed at audiences aged 20 and older. These films have broken free of the chains of genre as they find new and unexpected ways to examine adolescence. They make the 1980s hits of John Hughes (The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and so on) seem not so much distant memories as beings from another planet..."