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MED231 Australian Cinema
Assignment 2: Critical Film Review and Bibliography
By: Richard Vilensky
Lecturer: Dr. Garry Gillard
Date: 25/4/2004

Part 1 - Film Information:
Crew:
Director: Jonathan Teplitzky (Better Than Sex, 2000)
Screenwriter: Chris Nyst (Co-producer and Winner: Best Script IF Award, 2003)
Cinematographer: Garry Phillips (Better Than Sex, 2000)
Producers: Martin Fabinyi (Exec. Producer: Horseplay, 2002 and Chopper, 2000)
Trish Lake
Editor: Ken Sallows (Winner: Best Editing IF Award, 2003)
Music: Machine Gun Fellatio (Winner: Best Music "3K Short" IF Award, 2003)
Sound: Antony Gray (The Quiet American, 2002 and Snow Falling on Cedars, 1999)
Ian McLoughlin
Art Direction: Jenny O'Connell

Cast:
Barry Wirth: Sam Worthington (Bootmen-2000, Dirty Deeds-2001, Harts War-2002)
Johnny 'Spit' Spitieri: David Wenham (The Boys-1997, Better Than Sex-2000, The Bank-2001, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King-2003)
Darren Barrington: Timothy Spall (Secrets & Lies-1996, All or Nothing-2002, The Last Samurai-2003)
Chika Martin: Gary Sweet (The Tracker-2001, Alexandra's Project-2003, TV's Stingers)
Arnie DeViers: David Field (Two Hands-1999, Chopper-2000, The Night We Called it A'Day-2003)
Annie Flynn: Freya Stafford (TV's White Collar Blue)
Craig 'Crusher' Knob: Richard Carter (The Man Who Sued God-2001, TV's White Collar Blue)
Con Katsakis: Mitchell Butel (Dark City-1998, The Bank-2001)
Joey Wirth: Luke Pegler

Cameos:
'Aussie' Joe Bugner (former Olympic Boxer): Big Mick
Gretel Killeen (host of Big Brother): Rhonda Halliwell
Ugly Dave Gray (Music and TV personality of the 70s and 80s): Jack Cullan

Running Time: 98 minutes
Production Company: Macquarie Film Corporation, Mushroom Pictures, Working Title Films (Aus) and Nine Network

Release Dates:
Australia Box office: 2nd October 2003
Australia Video and DVD: 14th April 2004

Box Office Figures: (Domestic takings for 2003)*
2nd - 5th October: $40, 372
9th - 12th October: $359, 197
16th - 19th October: $261,446
23rd - 26th October: $162,314
30th October - 2nd November: $128,406
6th - 9th November: $109,969
13th - 16th November: $108,672
20th - 23rd November: $105,178
27th - 30th November: $77,100
4th - 7th December: $65,580
Total Box Office Gross in 2003: $2,122,239
* Does not include revenues generated from DVD sales or UK, New Zealand and European Box office takings.
Note: Gettin' Square received a good response from Australian filmgoers with an above average 2 million plus at the box office alone. It's release onto DVD Australia wide in early to mid April of 2004 could see that figure rise beyond the 3 million dollar mark. The film's DVD was distributed to all major Video/DVD outlets and has had a lot of promotional backing. DVD sales add a new dimension to a films revenue generating capacity and can generate figures something similar to an opening two weekends with nationwide distribution.
However, internationally Gettin' Square lacked genuine appeal outside of New Zealand (whose contribution to the Australian box office is not greatly significant). Gettin' Square did not qualify for any international film festivals in 2003 and hence did not get the international exposure of such films as Japanese Story, which was screened all over the world at various European, American and Asian film festivals, raising it's revenue beyond 4 million dollars not including DVD sales.


Awards: (won)
AFI Awards (2003):
Best Actor in a Leading Role - David Wenham
* Gettin' Square was the favourite to sweep the AFI awards in 2003 with a record equalling 14 nominations (equalling Newsfront). However, Japanese Story, directed by Sue Brooks, pipped it at just about every post to win Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography. The judges went for the low-key, art house love Tragedy over the slick caper film. Much was made of Gettin' Square's single win from 14 nominations. Many believed the judging process was determined by outside factors such as the fact that similar films had won in previous years (Two Hands, Chopper, Dirty Deeds). There was also much controversy over the nomination of Ned Kelly in many of the technical categories as it had at 20 million dollar greater budget than all the other films nominated and was an American/Australian co-production. Had Ned Kelly not been included, Gettin' Square might have walked away with the awards for Best Sound and Best Production Design.

IF Awards (2003):
Best Actor - David Wenham
Best Script - Chris Nyst
Best Music - 'Machine Gun Fellatio'
Best Editing - Ken Sallows
Best Sound - Antony Gray and Ian McLoughlin
* Japanese Story won Best Film again.



Bibliographical Details: (Reviews, Write ups, Articles, Discussions)
Gettin' Square was never short of media attention throughout its stint at the box office. It premiered on the second of October across Australia and within a week, there had been major reviews in most of the major newspapers.
The Sydney Morning Herald reviewed the film on 9th October, as did Melbourne's The Age. The West Australian Had a two page spread and double feature article about Sam Worthington (Local boy) followed by a film review on the opposite page. This was on the 11th of October.
Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton reviewed the film on the nationally syndicated SBS program, The Movie Show. Both raved about the fantastic performance of Wenham, Teplitzky's slick direction and Nyst's sassy and witty script. Margaret gave it four stars and David gave it four and a half. The writ up was available on the Internet in The Movie Show website's archives.
ABC Radio did an interview with Chris Nyst, the writer of the film. The release of the film was a major media event in Brisbane and Surfer's Paradise for obvious reasons.
The Internet presence of the film is not particularly strong with the homepage being simply a ninemsn web link and the only site with detailed information about the film being imdb.com, which did not have any photo galleries, internal reviews, film quotes or a synopsis. The website, rottentomatoes.com is the only Internet site that ha these newspaper articles and reviews archived aside from The Movie Show site. There was not direct link from the newspapers themselves, which was perplexing.
David Wenham also received much media attention and appeared on 60 Minutes, Rove Live and Foxtel's Showtime to promote the film (Wenham's profile was raised a great deal by his role in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Return of the King and hence this made him the film's major drawcard even with the presence of international actor, Timothy Spall).
The website, moviemarshal.com had detailed information about The film's domestic box office but it's total takings were difficult to come up with as the film has not yet been released in some countries. There was no news from the UK box office about Gettin' Square and it did not qualify for any international festivals.






Part 2 - Synopsis and Critical Film Discussion:

SYNOPSIS:
Barry Worth (Sam Worthington) is your classic ordinary decent criminal, doing time in a Brisbane gaol after taking the fall for manslaughter several years earlier in place of his employer at the time and mother's boyfriend and small time crime boss, Chika Martin (Gary Sweet). He denies having committed the crime but does not give up the name of the real killer for fear of what may happen to his mother and younger brother, Joey (Luke Pegler). When heartless, corrupt detective Arnie DeViers (David Field) tactlessly and cruelly breaks the news that Barry's ailing mother has died, Barry's parole is fast tracked so that Barry can take care of his younger brother under the supervision of his caseworker, the beautiful Annie Flynn (Freya Stafford).
He says goodbye to his inmate and best friend, Johnny Spitieri and makes a promise to not get sucked into the criminal world again, to make a clean break and get an honest job or in other words, get square. This from the moment of his release begins to prove a difficult task when his brother shows up with Chika Martin, to pick him up. Joey is working for Chika and Chika has DeViers in his back pocket. Still Barry refuses the help of Chika, stronger in his resolve to get square.
Meanwhile in surfer's paradise, Former crime boss, Darren Barrington (Timothy Spall) is having some problems of his own getting square with his first honest venture, a restaurant, becoming more and more unprofitable having been bereft of customers and decent food. He strikes up a complex deal to buy some prime property and get his finances out of the doldrums but has plans to use two hundred thousand dollars of dirty money his accountant, Warren Halliwell (Steven Tandy) creatively hid from the government years before Darren went square, as a deposit. When a bizarre chain of events triggers Warren's wife, played by Gretel Killeen, to turn him over to the government agency, The CIC, Darren's money is seized and he too comes under investigation. However, despite the money trail, the only solid thing linking Barrington to Halliwell is the man who delivered the money every month, Johnny 'Spit' Spitieri, recently released from Gaol and not having much luck staying of "the shit".
Barry at this stage is having little luck finding a good job as a cook with the stigma of being an ex con hanging over his head and DeViers breathing down his neck, looking to put him back inside. Barry gets a job at a service station and it is there he is reunited with Spit, his old prison mate. Spit, unwittingly tries to hold up the servo with a screwdriver, a situation Barry responds to by saying "What are you gonna do with that, put up some shelves?" Barry lets Spit take the cash from the till and when he meets up with spit again, hears about his newest job, selling crack for Chika Martin. Barry also hears about a job in the kitchen at Darren Barrington's restaurant. There he finds work but is once again being drawn back into the world of crime when Chika draws the battle lines against his old competition for numero uno in Surfers Paradise, Barrington, after Barrington declines a dirty business proposal.
Here, in true crime caper fashion, the characters and story lines begin to overlap and become one. Barrington needs the CIC off his back in order to finance his newest venture, Worth needs to get DeViers and hence Chika out f the way before he destroys his life once again and that of his younger, impressionable brother and Spit needs to find a way to beat a drug trafficking charge that could see him go away for 20 more years as well as convince a High commission he has never done any work for Warren Halliwell or Darren Barrington. So in true Crime film fashion, Barry conceives of a plan to solve everybody's problems at once with a complex array of schemes and of course, a slick and highly thought out heist that bamboozles everybody, especially the viewer.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS:
The films editors and perhaps it's director, Jonathan Teplitzky, seemed overly intent on the overused technique in crime films worldwide of starting with a scene from the end and then flashing back only to repeat the sequence with new meaning given that the audience is now aware of the context. The fist scene of the film is the climactic heist sequence. It seemed rather pointless given that nobody watching the film would be able to understand what was going on. The attempt to recap and explain later on only made things more complex, with I believe, vital pieces of information, purposefully left out for the sake of simplification of the plot. However, in leaving out the reasons why things happened the way they did, the audience is left guessing which makes the ending, which is always intended to be clever and slick in these sorts of films, a bit of a let down. The plot is lost in the confusion and the later attempts to recover it are a little obvious and put a somewhat formulaic and rose coloured air to what was otherwise a cool and witty crime film. Getting' Square has been compared, as it would, to films like Two Hands (1999) for its representation of criminal life and ironic, dark humour and Blue Murder (1988) for it's context of high commissions and dirty cops. Getting' Square had it's good points. Firstly, it was stylish and cool in the vein of recent international successes such as Snatch (1999). It had some hilarious dialogue and characters too. David Wenham absolutely steals the spotlight as Spit, the drugged out, mullet sporting, tragically dressed addict. His role won him the best actor award at the 2003 AFI ceremony (although I feel it was more of a supporting role). The scene where he appears in front of the commission had me in stitches. Another great character I felt was Barrington's stereotypical Greek lawyer, Con Katsakis, played by Mitchell Butel (Vince Collosimo must have been unavailable) who is constantly bluffing his way out of being completely out of his depth.
Chris Nyst, The writer of the film is himself a criminal lawyer in Queensland and attempts to recreate the world that he knows so well in the film's script. It is his first screenplay and much of it, including the scene where spit presents to the commission, is based on true events. Incidentally, I found it interesting that Nyst is Pauline Hanson's Lawyer and knowing this going into the viewing of the film; I was surprised there was no character based on the woman Australia love to hate. The film uses irony but this time, instead of playing on the obvious, iconic Australianisms as Two Hands did to great success, Chris Nyst and Jonathan Teplitzky play on the tacky, touristy and metro-sexual wares of Surfers Paradise. In the same way Bryan Brown's character in Two Hands has a rosy fatherly persona, Timothy Spall's character is obsessed with weight loss and counting calories or "points" as he would say. There is a great scene where Barrington is talking to his strong-arm offsider, 'Crusher' Knob, about how many "points" are in light beer as opposed to regular beer and how many "points" he has cut out of his diet by switching to white wine. The irony is great as is the stylish cinematography that really captures the tacky backdrop of Surfers Paradise. However, I felt that the character of Arnie DeViers, played by David Field and Chika Martin played by Gary Sweet were a little stock barrel. True to say both were in their element with these roles, treading familiar territory. Field has been a staple in Aussie caper films of late with appearances in Chopper, Two Hands and The Hard Word all as the un-likable, cartoonish scoundrel. He is a great actor, proven in his hilarious take on Bob Hawke in the film, The Night We Called It A Day, a performance that almost redeemed the whole movie (almost). Sweet is proving to be anything but that with his recent run of 'bad guy' roles and this is one of them. Neither Chika nor DeViers display redeeming characteristics in this film, which makes things once again a little too clear-cut. There was little subtlety in the defining of good guys and bad guys. The fact that the film paints a criminal as a hero and a cop as a villain so clearly is testament to that. The film loses credibility in that sense. As a first time screen writer, I felt Nyst fell into a few of the traps of the Hollywood formula which tainted the films ability to really find it own identity. Placing characters into boxes marked hero and villain was one, but the other that comes to mind was the pitiful and underdeveloped romance sub-plot between Annie Flynn, Joey's caseworker and Barry, the protagonist. As a watcher of White Collar Blue I felt conflicted because on the one hand, I felt Freya Stafford was underused. But on the other hand, watching the film in isolation from her as an actor, the love element was rather unnecessary. At the end of the day she is "the girl" and in the fantasy, macho world of crime cinema, no film is complete without a beautiful girl who the protagonist gets in the end. She served little purpose other than that. The element of romance is old hat and ties the film up for too long. I would say the film is not plot driven enough and is too concerned with the inclusion of standard plot elements.
Teplitzky and the films editors do not recognise this. There is too much time spent on the romance and not enough time spent articulating the heist sequence. The heist scene, supposedly the climax and high point of the film, was messily edited and poorly portrayed. Teplitzky should have watched Ocean's Eleven and taken a leaf out of the book of Steve Soderbergh or even Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown for their cool and precise handling of heist sequences involving a number of characters and sub-plots. In Getting' Square, everything is happening at once. We go from the robbery to the surveillance to the office block all at random. There is no calculation. As a viewer, I had absolutely no idea what was happening and I normally can follow a convoluted plot pretty well. Teplitzky seemed to be under the misapprehension that the point of the scene was to make sure nobody knew what was going on when in fact, ensuring that everybody was fully aware of what was happening was the crux of the film's ending. The fact that I was confused and needed to rewind several times before I got the gist of it, made the ending a far less satisfying. Nyst, I'm sure, would have been disappointed, after having thought out such a clever plot climax, that much of the shrewdness was lost in the editing process.
The question is, how does Gettin' Square rate in relation to other Australian crime films? I have read articles and reviews that scale it along side Two Hands, Chopper and Dirty Deeds as one of the great Australian Film achievements recent years. Those sentiments were echoed by the Australian film industry when it received a record equalling 14 nominations at the AFI awards, a remarkable achievement given there were only 14 categories the film could be nominated in. Personally, I felt Getting' Square was not a scratch on any of the films mentioned. I believe what got people so excited about Getting' Square was it's production values which were high and gave the film a very stylish aesthetic. There are two schools of thought on Australian film. One is that it should be attempting to emulate the American industry with bigger budgets and more international appeal. The other is that Australian cinema should stay small and concentrate on the quality of the films rather than making money off them. Gettin' Square follows the formers' school with the recruitment of international talent and the mimicking of international styles of film direction. Gettin' Square is a good movie but is nothing special. It has some of the best production values in Australian film history but lacked the genuine originality that made films like Chopper and Dirty Deeds so highly regarded. The best part of the film was David Wenham's character Johnny 'Spit' Spitieri, who I believe joins Dale Kerrigan, Chopper Read and perhaps even Crocodile Dundee as one of the great characters of Australian cinema.

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