Available at Amazon.com
Metal Skin
Director:
Geoffrey Wright
Cast
Aden Young .Joe
Tara Morice .Savina
Nadine Garner .Roslyn
Ben Mendelsohn .Dazey
DVD Release Date: September 25, 2007
Rating: Unrated
Running time: 1:55
Metal Skin claims to be in the same category as The Road Warrior and Mad Max with adrenaline-fueled car chases, heart-stopping action scenes, and hard as metal anti-heroes who straddle the line between society and chaos. The DVD cover promises “Speeding Cars,” “Crazy Women,” and “Devil Worship,” but in reality, this movie plays more like an ugly, disjointed Australian attempt at The Outsiders or The Last Picture Show than anything George Miller made.
The movie centers on Psycho Joe, a dispirited, unlucky guy living in Melbourne, Australia. Joe has to take care of his senile father—a Hungarian immigrant and former award-winning sharpshooter. In his spare time, Joe works in his garage (a converted dining room) on new ways to trick out his car, but to support himself and his father, he takes a job at Westbarn Wholesalers, which seems like the Australian equivalent of Sam’s Club. There he befriends Dazey, a womanizing slacker who races at night and helps out in his father’s garage, and Savina, the object of his affection. Unfortunately, Savina loves Dazey, and does everything from using Joe to get closer to Dazey to casting inept love spells. Dazey, though, has no use for her other than sex, and in fact loves Roslyn, his on and off again girlfriend who was burned in a car wreck Dazey caused. This awkward love triangle quickly spins out of control and ends in blood and tears.
Surprisingly, Metal Skin won two Australian Film Institute awards for production design and sound and was nominated for the Stockholm Film Festival’s Bronze Horse Award. While the production quality is fine (and here I may be biased considering I know next to nothing about Australian cinema besides the Mad Max trilogy and Happy Feet) the story, editing, and acting were terrible.
The movie’s greatest problem lay in plotting. Apparently Australia is a vortex of non-linear time, probably resulting from a space-time singularity caused by excess quantities of Foster’s beer and Vegemite. The movie continually jumps in time, sometimes giving brief glimpses of the future or the past. Flashbacks and forwards are slammed into the narrative, making it nearly impossible to really understand who the characters are or even what is going on for the first thirty minutes or so. At times it literally felt like the editor threw the scenes into the air and spliced them together based on where they fell. A non-linear narrative can be a tricky device even in the hands of a skilled movie maker, and frankly, Wright does not have the talent to pull this off. Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be a need for this storytelling strategy. It seems more like a gimmick used to cover up a weak plot than anything else.
Unfortunately, the plot problems are compounded by the baffling, despicable characters that drive it. Joe constantly yells at his senile father and genuinely seems to have a borderline learning disability. His hero, Dazey, feels guilty about burning his girlfriend, but doesn’t let that stop him from constantly cheating on her, even with women his friends are interested in. And Savina makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Her witchcraft and devil worship seem to have no logical reason other than perhaps as a vague way of rebelling against her parents, who appear to be Catholic; however, she takes it far beyond simple teenage/young adult rebellion into the realm of pathology. In the end, these are ugly, lost people doing ugly, lost things to the people around them for no apparent reason. Unlike The Outsiders or The Last Picture Show, which had an internal logic behind the characters’ actions and an overall theme pulling it all together, Metal Skin practically lashes out randomly with no reason for the ugliness on screen than for the sake of ugliness itself.
Video
The video is presented in 16:9 ratio for widescreen TVs, but the quality is more in keeping of a movie from the 70s than one shot in the 1990s.
Audio
I listened to the Dolby 5.1 surround track and had no real problems, but the filmmakers did not take advantage of directionality. Practically all of the sound came from the center channel. Also, there were a few moments when I had difficulty hearing some of the dialogue, but I attribute that more to the actors mumbling than problems with the actual audio track.
Extra Features
Making of Metal Skin (running time: 33:55)
There really isn’t much to say about this feature except that the people involved seemed sincere in their attempt at a movie. You do gain an insight into Geoffrey Wright’s film philosophy when he talks about wanting to portray the reality of being a disenfranchised teenager in Melbourne, Australia, and that he’s not into happy endings.
Loverboy (running time: 57:29)
Loverboy was Geoffrey Wright’s first film. In some ways this was better than Metal Skin: the narrative was tighter, and it had the potential to be a real story about people. The plot seems like your basic porn story. Sally, who is in her forties, is a recent divorcee who befriends fifteen-year-old Mick. They have a brief affair, which Sally cuts off when she realizes just what she’s doing and goes back to her ex-husband. This film could have been an interesting, thoughtful view of what would actually happen in this kind of situation, but unfortunately it ends with what I’m beginning to think of as a typical Geoffrey Wright nihilistic “I-hate-the-world-and-so-should-you” ending.
Audio Commentary With Cast and Crew
Still Gallery
Trailers
Normally, I wouldn’t bother commenting on the trailers except that in this case the movies Subversive decided to preview are so bizarre/disturbing. With the exception of Metal Skin and Blue Murder, most of the movies look to have been made in the seventies and seem to all focus on violence and misogyny. I felt like I needed to take a shower or read some Dr. Seuss books to wash off the filth.
Blue Murder
Director:
Michael Jenkins
Cast
Richard Roxburgh .Roger “Dodger” Rogerson
Tony Martin .Tony “Neddy” Smith
Steve Bastoni .Michael Drury
Gary Day .Bill Crofton
Steve Jacobs .Mal Rivers
Peter Phelps .Ado Henry
Marcus Graham .Alan Williams
DVD Release Date: September 25, 2007
Rating: Unrated
There are some story formulas that are hard to screw up. Sports movies and crime movies spring immediately to mind. Even when they are bad, you can usually find something to enjoy, whether it’s the tried and true story of the underdogs winning the big game, or secretly rooting for the evil, cruel, yet charismatic villain waltz his (or her) way through the movie without a scratch. Unfortunately, formula can only carry a story so far, and if the story is choppy, confusing, and downright boring, then nothing can save it.
This brings us to Blue Murder, which has all the hallmarks of a decent—maybe even great—crime mini-series: You have the unlikely friendship between a career criminal and a corrupt cop, the obligatory glimpse into the corruption that police power can have in even the best of people, and multi-faceted characters; yet for a variety of reasons, these elements never really come together to create a cohesive story.
The mini-series focuses on the relationship between Roger “Dodger” Rogerson, New South Wales’s best police officer, and his friend, Arthur “Neddy” Smith, a career criminal. At first their friendship begins as purely business, with Neddy doing favors for Roger in exchange for protection. However, the two become more or less friends and Roger gives Neddy carte blanche to steal and deal drugs in 1980’s Sydney, Australia. The two run into trouble when office Michael Drury refuses to take a bribe Rogerson offers to protect one of Neddy’s men. This leads to a clumsy assassination attempt which causes a chain reaction that eventually ends with Rogerson and Smith’s arrests.
The strength of this mini-series lies in the Roxburgh and Martin’s performances. The two actors bring a complexity to the roles that the characters require to be more than paper cut-outs. Roxburgh in particular does a great job of showing Rogerson’s indignation at the eventual police inquest at the end. He truly feels like he’s a good cop who’s just doing his job. And Martin convincingly portrays Neddy’s genuine affection for Rogerson, despite the fact that the officer treats him like dirt most of the time.
However, these two performances can’t save this movie from choppy story-telling and an overload of boring, talky scenes. Though the mini-series isn’t as bad as Metal Skin in terms of plot progression, many times the scenes play like small vignettes in the lives of these two men that randomly lead from one to another. In fact, the majority of the mini-series is Rogerson and Neddy drinking and talking in a pub. This may not have been so bad except that the audio was so poor that I had a very difficult time understanding what the characters were saying, making me wish there was a subtitle option.
Adding to the choppiness is the shift in point-of-view. The mini-series begins with Neddy narrating the first time he met Rogerson. However, the voice-over shifts later to Drury’s inner monologue, then Rogerson, and then maybe back again. At one point I couldn’t tell who exactly was narrating the story. If the story had kept the focus on Neddy’s point of view, it might have flowed more smoothly.
This mini-series bills itself as “the original The Shield.” Trust me, go watch that instead. The only way this movie would be enjoyable is if you had two sassy robot pals to quipping along with you.
Video
Right at the beginning the DVD warns you that the mini-series was shot on a Super 16 camera and edited on analog tape. Considering this, Subversive does a good job of transferring, but there is still a great deal of graininess to the video, which may annoy some viewers.
Audio
The DVD has two audio tracks: Dolby 5.1 Surround and 2.0 Surround. I listened to the 5.1 channel, but had a great deal of difficulty understanding the actors.
Extra Features
Disk One
Cast Bios
Text biographies of Michael Jenkins, Ian David, Richard Roxburgh, Tony Martin, Gary Sweet, Steve Bastoni, and Bill Hunter.
Trailers
Disk One featured the same trailers as Metal Skin.
Stills
DVD Credits
Disk Two
Blood Brothers: The Making of Blue Murder (running time: 23:26)
The most interesting part of this feature is the writer, producer, and director candidly talking about the difficulties they had writing this mini-series, especially in the area of coherence.
Rewind: Editing Blue Murder (running time: 21:10)
This is an interesting walk-through/demonstration of how editors do their job. The editor dissects a courtroom scene to show how editing can change the tone and meaning of scene.
Trailers
There are three trailers in this section, Battlefield Stadium, Living Hell, and The Witch Who Came From the Sea. The first two look like bad Japanese movies from the sixties, and the third looks like some kind of cannibal porn. None of them caught my interest.
DVD Credits
The Inside Pulse
Considering this was billed as Aussie Action there was very little action that actually happens. Unless you collect Australian films I wouldn’t even rent these movies. Do yourself a favor and rewatch Mad Max.
