It’s the Footy Season… Now also on DVD
As summer dwindles and autumn entices winter, there’s only one thing that can
warm diehard souls as the days grow short and the nights chill over – FOOTY
SEASON!!
If you thought going to matches, keeping an eye on scores, reading the sports
section, talking to mates and surfing the net for tribunal results was enough –
think again! DVD also has a plethora of football titles to offer avid fans,
whatever code you follow.
The most recent film to dive into football culture in Australia is
Khoa Do’s
Footy Legends (2006), his second film after the runaway success of
social-realist drama,
The Finished People (2005).
Footy Legends is a modestly-made, sweetly funny film about hard
lucksters trying to change their in the local rugby comp. Squarely aimed at The
Full Monty “feel good” underdog turf, Footy Legends features
Do’s actor brother Anh in the lead role as Luc Vu, a first generation
Vietnamese-Australian looking after his young sister and infirmed granddad.
Unable to get ahead – or a job – he decides to rally his friends and field a
team in the local competition where a big cash prize is on offer. While we’ve
seen it all before and dramatically the film often misses its mark, comedically
it’s more on the money, with the rugby matches often hilarious and thrilling.
In spite of its well-worn formula and overt flaws, “at the end of the day”
Footy Legends makes it through the sticks because it has great heart
and isn’t afraid to be silly.
To this day one of the best football films is
The Club (1980),
Bruce Beresford’s very entertaining adaptation of David Williamson’s
iconic play about AFL - when it was still the “VFL”. Williamson drop punts us
right into the middle of the big business of sport in this very funny and
political look behind the clubroom doors of one of the most historic clubs in
the code: Collingwood.
Better-known for his roles in
All Saints and
Jindabyne, actor
John Howard plays green (in more ways than one) rising footy star,
“Geoff Hayward”, eventually disheartened by the politics of the game.
Jack Thompson gives one of his greatest, most visceral performances as
passionate coach “Laurie Holden”, a man who will not compromise. And Graham
Kennedy – underrated film actor that he was – is equal parts pathetic and
sympathetic spineless club president “Ted Parker”, a man with too many
allegiances for his own good.
The
Club was prophetic, heralding the cheque book recruitment future of the
game and the inevitable corporatisation of the AFL. This is Williamson – and
Australian filmmaking - at its best. And look out for 70s Renee Kink and Ronnie
Wearmouth in cameo roles…
More recently Australian film offered up a very different take on an Aussie
rules story with a film called just that:
Australian Rules (2002). It was Suburban Mayhem director
Paul Goldman’s first feature, another adaptation, this time of Phillip
Gwynne’s hotly-debated, biographical novel Deadly Unna? Playing football can be
dangerous - especially if you live in a town divided by skin colour and
bigotry.
Footy star Gary Black (Nathan
Phillips) is best mates with Aboriginal footy legend Dumby Red (Luke
Carroll) and falls for his sister, Clarence (Lisa
Flanagan). After an accidental tragedy ‘Blackie’ is forced to take
sides but instead takes a stand, against his family and the racism bubbling
beneath the surface of his town.
Australian Rules is a little let down by its earnestness, more
‘educational’ than dramatic in tone. But it also boasts some beautifully
performed – and directed – emotional scenes, and introduced us to a raft of
excellent young actors who have gone on to kick a bunch of goals in local and
international film.
- Megan
Megan Spencer has spent way too much of her life in the dark, all for a good
cause though - watching movies as a professional film critic. For the last six
and a half years she has been serving the ever-increasing hunger for film and
DVD reviews as radio triple j's resident film critic, and a year ago joined the
new line up of long-running SBS-TV film review program, The Movie Show.
Every now and then she pops up into the light to make her own films,
documentaries (her latest is 'Fantastic Brutality', a documentary about an
obsessed wrestling fan, to be released next year). She has also written about
film for many publications including J-Mag, Limelight, Inside Film Magazine and
the Age Green Guide.
And the impossible question to ask a film critic: what's her favourite film?
"Blue Velvet would be at the top of the list, so would Fight Club... But then
again American In Paris makes me cry every time."
Megan has also been part of the Foxtel's Project Greenlight Australia as an
on-air panelist and judge.
