The Best (And Most Underseen) Australian Films of 2014
Forget the kitchen-sink drama stereotype; 2014 was Australia’s year of genre films. Here's some you might have missed.
The Mule, dir. Tony Mahony and Angus Sampson
The Australian film industry is making the transition to a new distribution model, in which the cinema is just one way to reach audiences — and The Mule is as entertaining as it is innovative. The first Australian film to skip cinemas and screen directly to internet audiences, it’s a jet-black crime comedy set deep in the near-feudal 1980s, when a naïve drug smuggler is holed up in a shitty motel room withholding condoms filled with heroin in his belly.
Noni Hazlehurst is a controlling mother whose family is her entire world; Hugo Weaving is a pathetically dickheadish bad cop; and co-director/writer Angus Sampson is that passive Aussie Bloke who cluelessly strays into a world of crime. And with a surprising third act that belies what could have been a dead-end narrative, The Mule goes beyond toilet humour to deliver a sly and sometimes sadly funny picture of the weirdest elements of working-class Australia. The man-boy local footy teams, the overcooked lamp chops, the bogan-holidays-gone wrong to South-East Asia, the alcoholic suburbs stretching to infinity – it’s all scarily familiar, and smarter and tenser than its scatological premise suggests.
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Or try: 100 Bloody Acres (Colin & Cameron Cairnes, 2013), Gettin Square (Jonathan Teplitzky, 2004)