BEFORE: Well, as long as I made the trip to Australia, I might as well stick around for another day. Ben Mendelsohn carries over again from "Quigley Down Under"
THE PLOT: A seventeen-year-old navigates his survival among an explosive criminal family and the detective who thinks he can save him.
AFTER: I'm not that familiar with this film's director, but maybe I should be? - he also directed "The King" and "War Machine", which I have seen, but also he wrote and produced the recent series version of "Catch-22" and apparently there's a whole TV show also called "Animal Kingdon", which is based on this movie - which is, in turn, based on a real-life crime family in Australia, the Pettengills. Sometimes I'll just put a movie on my list because it's available on cable or just came to my attention through a random occurence, but it turns out to be a peek into another whole corner of the entertainment world that I was previously unaware of. I really should pay as much attention to directors as I do to actors, because you just never know where a spin through someone's filmography will lead.
This film has the same takeaway as "Quigley Down Under", though - that Australia is full of criminals. Well, geez, what do you expect when your country starts off as a U.K. penal colony? Sure, let's ship all our criminals off to a giant island to form a new society, what could possibly go wrong? You fast forward a couple centuries, and then in Melbourne you can't tell the criminals from the dirty cops, that's what. So when teenager Josh's mother dies from a drug overdose - hey, at least she went out doing what she loved - he tracks down her relatives, the ones that his mother tried to keep away from him, and soon learns that they're all criminals. Drug dealers and bank robbers - at least, one would assume from the opening credits sequence, though we never see them rob any banks during the course of this story. Don't worry, there's plenty of other mischief and bad things for them to do.
Three films with Ben Mendelsohn in a row, and he played a villain each time - yeah, that seems about right. Here he plays Pope Cody, the eldest of Josh's three uncles, but also the most brutal one, who's not above taking out anybody who knows just a bit too much, or even if they might. Josh gets roped into his schemes by going to pick up a stolen car, without asking what it's going to be used for - but that's Australia for you, I guess, you boost a car for your uncle and the next thing you know you're being arrested in connection with the murder of two cops. Who, to be fair, would rather kill their armed robbery suspects than arrest them, because who needs to deal with all that paperwork, am I right?
Guy Pearce plays the one (?) honest cop in the Melbourne police force, which took me a while to figure out, because with that actor, honestly, it could go either way. The next few films I'll watch will all feature Guy Pearce, which probably is going to make me want to re-watch "Memento" and "Ravenous". Hey, it's a long holiday weekend, maybe I can squeeze them in somewhere. Anyway, it's hard to suss out Detective Sergeant Leckie's motives at first, because he puts the squeeze on the one honest member of the Cody family. I thought at first he was doing this just to be a dick, and not the kind of dick thats short for detective - but I guess he was generally trying to get Josh to do the right thing and flip on his family, for Josh's own safety and the benefit of the populace at large. We'd like to think that maybe it worked, that Josh remained uncorrupted by the influence of his criminal relatives, but the ending here does suggest otherwise.
This film was a Sundance darling back in 2010, it won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema category, and a bunch of other festival awards throughout 2010-2011. I've been entering a new short film in festivals over the last two months, and it took a long while just to get a few acceptances - to be fair, we were aiming very high at Toronto, Venice and Telluride, and that's a tough hill to climb for an animated short. What we got instead was premieres at HollyShorts and Woodstock Film Festivals, which are fine festivals, just not A-list like Venice and Telluride. That's OK, we're going to promote the hell out of the 7 screenings we have lined up, and who knows, maybe we can get some traction and a Sundance slot down the road. (Sundance doesn't get all hung up on premiere status when it comes to shorts, the rules are a little looser, but nobody then really knows what the criteria for shorts selection is.)
I don't have time to watch "Animal Kingdom", the TV series, not if I want to stay on track - I've got to watch 18 films in the remaining 26 days of September (easy peasy) but also start training on Sept. 15 for my new part-time gig, and also try not to fall further behind on the TV shows that I do watch - which right now is the first season of "Titans", and I'm behind on "Restaurant: Impossible", "Bar Rescue" and about a year's worth of "Chopped" episodes. But I'm current on "Hell's Kitchen", "Master Chef" and "America's Got Talent", plus I did binge-watch the last three seasons of "Bizarre Foods: Delicious Destinations" along with "Carnival Eats" and "Food Truck Nation", so I'm mostly caught up on food shows, except for "Food Paradise". Then I snuck in all 7 episodes of "The Queen's Gambit" over the last week - that's one of those shows that everybody watched to pass the time during lockdown, like "Tiger King", so I figured I had to. But eh, I'm not that impressed by "Queen's Gambit" - it's too far-fetched, plus I'm not crazy about the message it sends out, that men who play chess study games and strategies for days to get better, but a girl just has to over-indulge in tranquilizers and alcohol so that she can hallucinate chess strategies while she sleeps her way to the top of the chess world. I complained about this to my wife, who had already watched the season, and she said, "But otherwise nobody would watch it!" And she's right, but she's also wrong, because if the show were about a girl studying chess for real, and succeeding by learning and working hard, I would watch that, and I think I'd enjoy it more. That's the right message to send out to the kids, too.
Like the message here in "Animal Kingdom" is a good one, mostly - once you get involved in crime then the clock is ticking, and your story then either ends with you in jail or dead. See, it's not that hard to get your ducks in a row and come up with a good takeaway.
Also starring James Frecheville (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Guy Pearce (last seen in "Results"), Jacki Weaver (last seen in "Zeroville"), Joel Edgerton (last seen in "Warrior"), Sullivan Stapleton (last seen in "300: Rise of an Empire"), Luke Ford, Laura Wheelwright, Dan Wyllie (last seen in "Muriel's Wedding"), Anthony Hayes (last seen in "The Light Between Oceans"), Mirrah Foulkes (last seen in "War Machine"), Justin Rosniak (ditto), Susan Prior, Clayton Jacobson, Anna Lise Phillips, Tim Phillipps, Josh Helman (last seen in "Monster Hunter"), Kieran Darcy-Smith, Jack Heanly, Andy McPhee (last seen in "Slow West"), Christina Azucena, Jacqueline Brennan, David Michod.
RATING: 5 out of 10 safe houses
No comments:
Post a Comment