Shameless Self Expression

Tale of a likeable working class plumber (Shane Jacobson, in a star-making turn), his love of his much maligned job (we not only see him ‘on the job’ but attending a toiletry expo of some kind), but also the love he has for his son (he’s a single father). Hell, he even falls in love with a nice air hostess (Eve von Bibra, formerly of the Aussie girl group The Chantoozies, though I didn’t recognise her at first) when he takes his first-ever flight on a plane for a corporate gig. But that’s about it for plot, I’m afraid. 2006 Aussie fave of both audiences, and rather astonishingly, critics. These are the same critics that had previously bemoaned the state of our film industry that featured ambitious but flawed films by the bucket-load and lame ‘ocker’ comedies (Including such laugh-free flicks as “A Man’s Gotta Do” , “The Honourable Wally Norman” , “You and Your Stupid Mate” and countless others). Now that our industry is back to a reasonable state (due mostly to an embrace of h...

Review: Snowtown True-crime tale set in working class Adelaide, South Australia in the 1990s, where John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) enters the lives of young Jamie (Lucas Pittaway) and his mum (Louise Harris). The outwardly affable Bunting has already become a father figure to young Jamie (who has suffered sexual abuse within his family but also via a neighbour), when acting as a sort of community leader, Bunting comes up with a plan to get rid of all the undesirables in the area, paedophiles in particular. Bunting whoops the outraged locals up into such frenzy and homophobic outrage that he’s able to convince several of them to join him in a killing spree. Young Jamie is one such follower. Before long, it’s not just paedophiles being offed, it’s anyone Bunting doesn’t like, and then...well, it just seems like killing for Bunting’s own sick pleasure/drive. I’ve vaguely heard of John Bunting and the ‘Bodies in the Barrels’ case, one of Australia’s worst serial killing cases. I ...

Set in Lowell, Massachusetts in the early 1990s, Mark Wahlberg stars as real-life junior welterweight boxer “Irish” Micky Ward, who is either too loyal or too dumb to realise that his manager mother Alice (Melissa Leo) is a selfish control freak, and his older half-brother and sparring partner Dicky (Christian Bale) is a crack-addicted has-been and perennial screw-up who is so far gone he doesn’t even realise that the HBO doco being made on him is about crack addiction, not a ‘comeback’ story. Dicky is somewhat of a fading local hero who still claims to have once knocked Sugar Ray Leonard off his feet (he might’ve just slipped, though). They’re no good for him or his career, but things start to turn around when Micky meets tough but loving waitress Charlene (Amy Adams- sporting a tramp stamp), who makes him see his family (and the hangers on) for what they are. He gets a new manager, and local cop Mickey (Mickey O’Keefe, playing himself) becomes his new trainer. Obviously, this does no...

Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman meet as adolescents and bump into each other from time to time. There’s chemistry there, but they never do anything about it, until one day, circumstances lead them to having sex. Portman in particular rather likes the sex, so long as it doesn’t come with anything else. You know, like a relationship or love. She doesn’t want that, and as a med student, she hasn’t got the time anyway. Kutcher, obviously, would like more than just sex, you can see it all over his face from the first moment. But he goes along with the idea of ‘friends with benefits’ nonetheless. So off they go on a navel-gazing journey with commitment-free sex. But when it becomes obvious to Portman that Kutcher wants more, she cools things. All she wanted was sex, right?...Right? Lake Bell plays Kutcher’s gawky co-worker with obvious hots for him, Kevin Kline is his pot-smoking douchebag dad, a former TV star who steals his ex-girlfriend (Olivia Lovibond). Ludacris and Jake Johnson ar...

Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson stars as ‘Driver’, fresh out of jail after 10 years for bank robbery (he was the getaway driver), and not wasting any time in exacting his plan of revenge against the group of crims who were responsible for his brother’s death and taking off with the robbery loot. A bullet to the head saw that Driver never got away, though he was perhaps lucky to have not actually died. Now he has a list, and he’s hell-bent on not wavering from it (or driving anything other than his classic Chevelle), whilst heroin addicted ‘Cop’ played by Billy Bob Thornton (and a few weeks from retirement, I might add, though he looks to have mentally checked out long ago), and a British-accented assassin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) are out to stop him. The latter, by the way, considers killing to be ‘fun’ and boasts that he just ‘beat yoga’. But who is the mystery person behind the assassin? Carla Gugino plays Thornton’s partner, Moon Bloodgood plays Thornton’s estranged wife, and Maggie Grace...

Cop Byung-hun Lee is distraught when depraved serial killer Min-sik Choi adds the police sergeant’s fiancé to his list of victims. Rather than go through any normal or accepted grieving process, our good policeman has other ideas. He tracks the killer down, beats him within an inch of his life and...let’s him go. Then he follows him, picks him up again and repeats the process, and so on. After a while, the line between good and evil, cop and killer become seriously blurred as Byung-hun Lee allows Min-sik Choi to continue his killing spree in the pursuit of his own warped sense of revenge/justice. This little sicko game seems to only encourage Min-sik Choi to play along, and eventually turn things back against the grieving cop. This dour 2010 South Korean thriller/vigilante film from co-writer/director Kim Jee-won (the interesting “A Tale of Two Sisters” and the bizarro “The Quiet Family” ) wastes a fascinating killer played brilliantly by “Oldboy” star Min-sik Choi with an increa...