Aussie Would, Hollywood Wouldn't
Sun Herald
Sunday December 17, 2000
American movies followed the Dumb And Dumber creed while Australian cinema provided three unexpected hits in 2000.
THE YEAR 2000 in movies? Well, some Hollywood actors spent the year with their hands out while others spent it with a foot in the mouth.
But hooray! the year 2000 also proved that there was nothing wrong with the Australian industry that a good movie or three or five couldn't fix.
Budgets went up and plot coherence went down in American movies. Some inane flicks made you wonder whether US movies were just a hyphen in the pay-TV-videos-soundtracks-product-placement-merchandising food chain.
All the money in the world couldn't save Battlefield Earth and a dreadlocked, platform-shoe-wearing John Travolta from universal ridicule. All the money, etc, couldn't stop the continuity flaws in M:I-2 check out that disappearing seatbelt on car-racing Tom Cruise.
As war rocked Africa, the Pacific and Russia, and famine killed children from Korea to Sierra Leone, US stars' salaries went north of $36 million per movie. Big buck winners were Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts, Jim Carrey, Mel Gibson and Will Smith. Tom Cruise reportedly earned $130 million just for producing and starring in M:I-2.
All that money couldn't help stupidity. Even Hollywood blushed at the brain-dead behaviour of stars such as Ashley Judd, who demanded water be served at 28C exactly. Jennifer Lopez absolutely positively could only sleep on sheets with a 250-thread count.
Drug-using Lost Boys has-been Corey Feldman publicly complained that he wasn't getting the roles offered to Matt Damon. Kevin Costner publicly complained that studio executives showing rare good taste wouldn't allow him to appear totally nude, with Little Kevin on display, in For Love Of The Game.
Proving that Hollywood simply never learns, the most expensive movie yet went into production. Pearl Harbour, directed by Armageddon's Michael Bay, has a shooting budget of $250 million. Expect another $80 million to be spent on publicising it.
Elizabeth Hurley said that if she were as fat as Marilyn Monroe she'd kill herself. Hurley, star of upcoming US film Bedazzled, also filmed a cosmetics commercial during an American actors' strike.
Picketed as ``Elizabeth Scabley" at the film's premiere, she claimed she didn't know about the strike, which has been running since May.
That's odd, Liz. This is the first round in what is potentially Hollywood's biggest disaster: a massive showdown by actors, writers and possibly directors against entertainment companies over their shares in profits made on the internet, cable, foreign sales and DVDs.
Hollywood executives must be squirming after a year of bad press. In September, US Senator John McCain, the head of a Senate inquiry into the marketing of violent movies to children, slammed high profile studios Sony, Dreamworks, Disney and Warner Bros.
The inquiry was a result of 1999's Columbine high school shooting. Appalling details emerged: Sony showed the gory I Still Don't Know What You Did Last Summer (R-rated in America) to nine-year-olds while Disney showed children clips from the gun-toting R-rated Judge Dredd.
But if a film is only as intelligent as the stupidest people associated with it, then Australia can feel rather brainy.
A bumper year saw three local films open in the number one box office spot. The Dish went on to earn $16.5 million, The Wog Boy made $12 million and Chopper $5.5 million. Other stand-outs were AFI award-winner Looking For Alibrandi ($8.5 million), Me Myself I ($2.5 million) and dance flick Bootmen, $2.3 million in five weeks. (However, depressingly, re viewer interest in local films, the similarly themed UK dance comedy, Billy Elliott, made $4.5 million in four weeks.)
A $1 million-plus take is a good showing for any local film but after four weeks, heavily promoted offerings such as the Yahoo Serious comedy Mr Accident made only $1.5 million while Better Than Sex, with Susie Porter and David Wenham, underperformed with $1.1 million.
My Mother Frank, with Sinead Cusack and Matt Newton, had a disastrous $64,582 first-week take before dropping off the top 20. Angst flopped with $27,939 for its first week while Muggers imploded with a $835 per screen average.
Ironically, the much-criticised horror spoof Cut made $403,466 in two weeks before dropping off the chart. But, according to film reps, Cut was in profit before it even opened in Australia, having been sold to 85 per cent of targeted foreign markets.
Not opening at a cinema near you is the high-profile Moulin Rouge, starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor. Now bumped to a May 2001 release, the period musical directed by Strictly Ballroom's Baz Luhrmann is rumoured to be incomprehensible and needing massive editing.
Moulin Rouge was filmed at Sydney's Fox Studios, one of the few Australian movies to do so. A year after its opening, the studio is perceived by many in the local industry as catering only to big-budget American movies (M:I-2, Star Wars II, Red Planet), and out of the price range of most local films.
Happily, Australian exports are doing just fine. Headlines such as ``The Heat From Down Under" publicised the break-out Hollywood success of Russell Crowe (The Insider, Gladiator); Heath Ledger (The Patriot); Hugh Jackman (X-Men), Guy Pearce (Rules Of Engagement; the upcoming The Count Of Monte Cristo); Bootmen's Adam Garcia (plus the upcoming Coyote Ugly) and Simon Baker (Red Planet).
Meanwhile, Toni Collette made Shaft, Miranda Otto had a snippet in What Lies Beneath with Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett made The Gift with Keanu Reeves, The Man Who Cried with Johnny Depp and now teams with Bruce Willis.
The biggest break-out was Frances O'Connor. The Barbara Hershey lookalike jumped from Australia's Kiss Or Kill to England's Mansfield Park; scored a role opposite The Mummy's Brendan Fraser in Bedazzled and was signed by Steven Spielberg for AI.
Now, if we could just get them all home again...
© 2000 Sun Herald
Share This