Review: Solo

Next week is the premiere of a new Australian film, Solo. It's always good to see a new Australian film, but this one doesn't seem to be saying anything new. Here's my review (fresh from the media screening!):

Perhaps the greatest fear of any actor is to be typecast. Stuck always playing the same style of characters in the same thespian groove can be a tough problem to overcome. Typecast as a bad guy, and you're a lifelong anti-hero, the one audiences love to hate. Typecast as a good guy, though, and audiences will struggle to buy your dark side. This is the problem afflicting Colin Friels. Friels is a legend of screens big and small, but seems to revel in playing quiet, likable everymen. In Solo, though, his character Jack Barrett is a veteran gangster, moving in a world of drugs, violence and sleaze, who decides he's dumped one too many dead bodies in a river. The problem is not so much believing that Friels’ character wants to leave the Underworld: the problem is believing that he's the kind of guy who would get caught up in it in the first place.">Perhaps the greatest fear of any actor is to be typecast. Stuck always playing the same style of characters in the same thespian groove can be a tough problem to overcome. Typecast as a bad guy, and you're a lifelong anti-hero, the one audiences love to hate. Typecast as a good guy, though, and audiences will struggle to buy your dark side. This is the problem afflicting Colin Friels. Friels is a legend of screens big and small, but seems to revel in playing quiet, likable everymen. In Solo, though, his character Jack Barrett is a veteran gangster, moving in a world of drugs, violence and sleaze, who decides he's dumped one too many dead bodies in a river. The problem is not so much believing that Friels’ character wants to leave the Underworld: the problem is believing that he's the kind of guy who would get caught up in it in the first place.

Solo marks the directorial debut of Morgan O'Neill, who also wrote the screenplay. O'Neill shows a deft confidence that defies his relative inexperience. The story contains a strong narrative that weaves together several stories with style and subtlety. The cinematography is garish without being overstated, beautifully capturing the seediness of the crime underworld it seeks to depict. Rather than focusing on the neon façade of Kings Cross and the smooth perfection of young bodies, director of photography Hugh Miller shows every gutter, every wrinkle and every bruise with gritty honesty.

Read the rest at The Program.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Editing, Ari, editing. We got that paragraph twice.
5 July 2006 at 11:22
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thanks for all the fish

After 13 years with Blogspot, I've shifted blogging platform. So (drumroll, please), you can find my new blog here . Ari on the Web will stay online, so you can scroll through the archives for all sorts of embarrassing tidbits. To make it easier to find some of my writing on particular themes, I've grouped some pieces together under a few labels: Cancer Fatherhood Indonesia travels North Korea travels United States travels Undergraduate days   So as they say here in my new home of Japan, so long, and thanks for the all the fish.
Read more

Can conspicuous consumption save the news business?

Image
It’s a dire time for the news industry. Readers are flooding to social media for content, advertisers are moving with them and costs are being cut at a brutal rate in a desperate bid to meet falling revenue. It is increasingly clear that business models that depend on amassing large audiences in order to provide a forum for advertising will always struggle against the “niche of one” audience that social media platforms can provide for advertisers. There’s been lots of talk lately about ways to fund public interest journalism. One idea is to tax the online aggregators – Facebook and Google, primarily – that sell advertising against the news content of others to support news organisations. Another is to make news subscriptions or donations to its producers tax deductible.  Both ideas are worth considering, but they do not abrogate the need for news organisations to seek better ways to draw revenue from consumers.  (It is alarming that discussion of efforts to...
Read more

A place to rest my head

Image
I dream one day of visiting Pyongyang and staying in the wonderfully pyramidic Ryugyong Hotel. The outer shell of this hotel which dominates the Pyongyang skyline was built in the 1980s, and the interior was, well, never built. It seems possible that the project was commenced in a pique of optimism as North Korea put in a claim to share the 1988 Olympic Games with its southern brothers, but just as the offer was rejected - just like the bid to share the 2002 Soccer World Cup failed on the basis of North Korea's request to host the Opening Ceremony, Semi Finals and Final - the hotel was never completed. Nowadays, in stands pointing to the sky much the way that Kim Il Sung's statue does, both perhaps as a symbol of the excesses of North Korean enthusiasm. Instead of the Ryugyong, like most foriegn visitors to Pyongyang I found myself staying at the Yanggakdo Hotel. The Yanggakdo Hotel is a slice of Cold War Bondesque paranoia writ large. The hotel is located on an isla...
Read more