Category: cinema

As a longtime admirer of the hit song Hot Potato, a profoundly poetic if slightly repetitive celebration of simple cuisine and the temperature at which it can be served, I was excited to have its origins unpacked in a new film exploring its creators.

Early in, director Sally Aitken’s bubbly and quite well-made documentary about the Wiggles – the phenomenally successful troupe up there with Bluey and Bananas in Pyjamas as Australia’s biggest family friendly exports – we hear a sound bite of veteran interviewer Andrew Denton suggesting these barmy, toot-tooting, Shimmie Shaking entertainers ought to be taken seriously.

“Do not be fooled by their simplicity,” he says, “for their music is up there with the greatest.” So: Beethoven, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Wiggles? A refreshingly different perspective on musical greatness.

Thankfully, that early Denton grab notwithstanding, Hot Potato: The Story of the Wiggles doesn’t have the gushingly fawning tone of many docos about artists, such as this year’s enjoyable if idolatry John Farnham film Finding the Voice. It does, however, begin by addressing the big questions – big, at least, in the Wiggleverse: a bright world of catchy lyrics, costumed animals and a big red car. Including how the original members – Jeff Fatt, Anthony Field, Greg Page and Murray Cook – feel towards the colour with which their professional legacies would be forever associated.

In Quentin Tarantino’s heist drama Reservoir Dogs, a group of thieves were assigned the name of a colour but had no choice which one they got, Lawrence Tierney’s mob boss explaining that, “You get four guys all fighting over who’s gonna be Mr Black.” Conversely, in Hot Potato, we hear about the colour nobody wanted. Field (AKA the Blue Wiggle) drops a bomb (again, relative to the Wiggleverse) by reflecting on how, when Page got yellow, “all of us were glad”. After a quick pause he adds: “No offence to anybody who loves yellow.”

I found this moment rather cute: the suggestion some people are so besotted with yellow and the various Wiggles who have worn it (including Page, Emma Watkins and Tsehay Hawkins) that they might be personally offended by the comment. And to be fair, it’s an entirely reasonable assumption given the intense emotional connections the group has forged with many of its fans.

Like Finding the Voice, this film is an authorised work. But whereas Farnsy was occasionally heard but never seen in his doco, the Wiggles front the camera in theirs, sitting down for interviews and seeming to genuinely enjoy the process, coming across as down-to-earth and likable. While this is hardly an exposé filled with skeletons tumbling out of the closet, it does touch on issues that could’ve been minimised or ignored – from recollections of brutal feedback (one ABC producer for instance told them “your videos make us cringe”) to canvassing various personal and health issues, including Field’s struggle with depression and Page suffering a heart attack in 2020.

When Fatt reflects on how, one day, he “had a blackout while I was driving and ran into a tree”, I realised I was emotionally invested in this story; these wearers of bright skivvies had wiggled their way to my heart. Hot Potato gets more convoluted and less affecting when it moves through latter-era Wiggles history, the originals substituted for various replacements who I lost track of.

An early mention of Field, Cook and Page studying early childhood education in their pre-Wiggles life kickstarts the film’s most interesting element: a scattered series of brief insights into how the group channeled academic theory into an act that took its responsibility to children seriously. Despite this review’s slightly facetious introduction, it’s clear their knowledge of youngsters was thoughtfully applied to their work, at times in small but telling ways. Field, for instance, decided that whenever anybody was talking on stage, every member of the group needed to be looking at that person. This marked a shift in which they were “no longer a band” and “became a show”.

We also learn how the Wiggles encouraged “parallel play”, which essentially refers to a kind of disconnected form of dancing that encourages safe social interactions and boundaries. There’s quite a few interesting nuggets strewn across a 104-minute runtime that does feel a little chunky towards the end. Aitken nevertheless creates a nice ebb and flow; you might say the wheels of the film go round and round, round and round, round and round …

One unintended consequence of this year’s Hollywood strikes is that we get a chance to see who the nice guys are. There are several levels to this. The bottom rung, obviously, are the outliers who choose the short-term personal gain of working on a project affected by strikes over the collective good. A step higher are the visible strikers, the performers and writers who are outside the studios picketing.

Then, another level up, are those who have found ways to fund their crews. This is important, since the crew members who are not in the striking unions are struggling to find work. Projects such as the recent Hollywood auction (where people could bid to have Natasha Lyonne help them complete a crossword) and Strike Force Five (in which the late-night talkshow hosts made a podcast designed to raise money for their crews) are perfect examples of this.

And then, right at the top of the tree, are those who have found work for their crews, keeping them employed without resorting to charity. Emblematic of this last group is Tom Cruise, who has chosen to put his resting Mission: Impossible crew to work making a music video for Rick Astley.

Astley has made his first album for five years, and a forthcoming single, Forever and More, needed a video. The video already had a director in Simon Pegg, and Pegg reportedly roped in Cruise to help fill out the crew. “Tom has worked with a number of them on many films so he wanted to be loyal and help out during tough times,” a source told the Sun newspaper. “After discussions with Simon and the label, he’s got them all to cross over and work on the video.”

Which is obviously very wonderful for everyone involved. The crew gets to make an honest day’s work during a situation that is out of their control. Pegg (who previously directed a music video where Pom Klementieff trash-talked the Avengers) gets a chance to showcase his skills. Astley gets a splashy new video for a song that nobody will care about during concerts because it isn’t Never Gonna Give You Up. And Cruise gets to bask in the continued glory of being the saviour of All Of Cinema During Uncertain Times.

Which isn’t to say that you should expect Cruise to appear in the video. He is a performer, and so he is prohibited from performing until Sag-Aftra reaches an agreement with the studios. But this absence means that Astley now has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to step the hell up. He is working with a crew that has grown used to fulfilling the death-defying whims of a man dedicated to total audience satisfaction. Tom Cruise has spent his entire career jumping off things, or riding motorbikes on things, or riding motorbikes on to things and then jumping off them. He has climbed skyscrapers. He has shattered bones. At one point he ate two full-sized curries in a row. And, as such, this is what his crew now expects from Rick Astley.

As yet, nobody knows what the Forever and More video is actually like. For all anyone knows, it’s just Astley miming into an unplugged microphone on a soundstage somewhere. However, this would be a hugely wasted opportunity. If Pegg had any sense, he would utilise the talent of the M:I crew by strapping Astley to the bonnet of a car and then driving it off a bridge, or shoving him feet-first into a cannon and firing him through several panes of sheet glass, or any other of the madcap faux-Jackass stunts that people have come to expect of Tom Cruise.

Because, if he does this, then Rick Astley would be able to write his own future. Impress Tom Cruise with unflinching devotion to physical peril, and the world is yours. Perhaps, once the strikes are over, Cruise might employ Astley in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two. Maybe he’d be a new sidekick, or a hired goon. Perhaps, even, he could be the key to the film’s entire conclusion. After all, what better way to destroy a world-endangering AI program than by overloading its artificial brain with repeated performances of Never Gonna Give You Up? This is Rick Astley’s destiny – if only he’s willing to really, really hurt himself on camera.

There’s a rich mix of ingredients in this heartfelt and likably acted film from co-directors Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, set in a chaotic, favela-type London housing estate of the near future, nicknamed “the Kitchen”. It takes something from the French banlieue movies of Mathieu Kassovitz and Ladj Ly, while running a seedier and more downbeat version of the postmodern alienation of Total Recall or Blade Runner. But it is also a slightly sentimental-realist family drama, and I felt that for all its high-energy pyrotechnics, in its final moments The Kitchen paints itself into a bit of a narrative corner.

The Kitchen setting itself is tremendously fabricated on screen, with top-notch special effects work; it is a spectacularly rundown housing block surrounded on all sides by glitzy new apartment buildings for the heartless better off. The city authorities have in fact decided on the Kitchen’s demolition and high-handedly ordered residents to leave, but the people are refusing on the grounds that this is where they have built their community and homes – for all its poverty, there is a bustling, vivid atmosphere.

Izi (played by actor and musician Kane Robinson) is a hardworking guy, employed by a rather creepy eco-funeral business called Life After Life; it offers to mix post-cremation remains with seedlings and create a memorial plant. Izi is under no illusions as to what it’s actually like living in the Kitchen, and he is saving up for a brand-new modern flat, part of precisely that sprawling property development which is putting pressure on the Kitchen. And here the film cleverly allows you to notice the living-death quality in both these apartments and the funeral plant gardens.

At work one day, Izi notices that one of the soulless services routinely taking place in the facility’s antiseptic chapel-style memorial zones is for a woman that he used to date. This woman’s troubled teen son Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman) is there too, the only mourner, and a fellow Kitchen resident. Izi and Benji strike up an uneasy cross-generational friendship, each aware of a certain possibility that can hardly be said out loud. And back in the Kitchen itself, where armed police are getting ready to move in with tyrannical force, Benji has to decide if he wants to hang out with radical hoodlums or with caring, flawed Izi. But then Izi, too, must decide if he can imagine a future with Benji.

There are some big-ticket action sequences: the robbing of an online food delivery van and a smash-and-grab raid on a jeweller in a posh part of town. They are impressive setpieces, not precisely exciting in the way they would be in a more generic thriller, but fiercely presented as symptoms of inequality. It is with the actual relationship between Izi and Benji that I felt that the movie moved with a heavier tread, though there are also some sharp notes of humour – the film providing a big laugh when Izi has to answer the flat-rental company’s infuriatingly bland auto-generated voice prompts when he arrives to pay his deposit. A worthwhile, engaged film.

Sean S Cunningham’s teen horror classic from 1980 is now rereleased: this is the original movie, the ancestral prequel or origin myth machine-tooled to create a franchise, that readies the noisome and mostly offscreen figure of Jason Voorhees as an almost supernatural surviving villain of the future series – although this went against the idea of his supposed death in this film as the premise for a more rational psychological thriller. This franchise clearly arose from the wild popularity of John Carpenter’s Halloween, although Friday the 13th openly borrows from a much more venerable model, Hitchcock’s Psycho, in the screeching Herrmannesque strings and the oedipal complex behind the horror – although this one being rather ingeniously showed from the point of view of the mother, Mrs Pamela Voorhees, played by Betsy Palmer.

The action of the movie now seems markedly, even experimentally slow, as the summer camp counsellors (that is, the young adult supervisors hired to look after the children) show up early on the fateful date to help with last-minute building and decorating work on the recently re-opened Camp Crystal Lake in New Jersey. The site is an Edenic paradise but notorious for being the location of an unsolved 1958 murder of two teenagers who were having sex; this outrage is shown in flashback from the killer’s point of view.

The young people in the present day (including a fresh-faced Kevin Bacon) fulfil their narrative function by hanging around in swimsuits or underwear until they are picked off one by one, generally with gruesome prosthetics work: seeping slash wounds on the throat and a decapitation revealing a horribly meaty circular stump. And of course there is the “final girl”: the character who is revealed to have artistic skills and a more substantial inner life, and whose final ordeal takes place on the rippling lake itself. Plus there is broad comedy in the figure of Crazy Ralph, played by Walt Gorney, a cranky old-timer who hangs around predicting disaster for everyone involved in Camp Crystal Lake like Pte Frazer in Dad’s Army, telling the incredulous kids: “You’re all doomed!”

There’s some bizarre fun in this (almost innocent) film, but maybe the fanbase are the ones to get most out of a revisit.

This comfortingly familiar Irish underdog sports movie deviates for not one single second of its running time from the formula. You can tell exactly where it’s going the moment you catch a glimpse of a rowdy women’s rowing team downing shots to celebrate a rare victory – they don’t have a hope in hell’s chance of making it to the tournament final. It’s a film so predictable that you could probably leave the room for 15 minutes and not miss a beat, but it has a big heart and enough easygoing banter to make it watchable. (The dialogue is Irish, and the English subtitles contain plenty of entertaining Irishisms: “Jesus Christ, I’m not completely fucking banjaxed!”)

Kelly Gough plays Aoife, a successful management consultant who has come back home to small-town Kerry to visit her dad, Bear, (Lorcan Cranitch) after he had a heart attack. (“I almost have to die for you to come,” he says, more resigned than bitter.) Aoife is brittle and emotionally distant with Bear. Then, one evening, down the pub, almost by accident, she joins the local women’s rowing team. But can she steer this scrappy mob – an exhausted mother of three, a failed actor and troubled but gifted teenager – to a stirring victory?

You already know the answer to that. Still, the film is directed with a steady hand by Declan Recks, who sensibly sets as much action in the pub as the rowing boat. The team hasn’t won in years. Under Aoife’s new management, we watch their hopeless practice sessions, the team bonding, a surprise win in the semis and an epic final. It’s gentle going and reasonably engaging, and the family dysfunction theme is nicely underplayed. When Aoife and Bear finally heal old wounds, it’s not with a sentimental speech but on a boat, Bear calmly passing his daughter a Wagon Wheel as a peace offering.