IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
THE DISH Directed by Rob Sitch With Sam Neill, Patrick Warburton De Vargas PG-13 104 mnin
It's not that there are no good movies. It's just that the chains can't be bothered to show them. Take The Dish, a delightful Australian comedy that picked up nine nominations from the Film Critics Circle down under, and has been an audience favorite at festivals. UA opened it here last Friday at the De Vargas, with no critics' screening or advance notice. By the time you read this it will most likely be gone. UA, you see, only brought it in for a week to keep a few seats warm until they hit us next week with the $100 million video game adaptation Tomb Raider, which they plan to spread across three screens, two at the North and one at De Vargas.
This is not to knock Tomb Raider, which for all we know may be the best thing since the Cooking Channel. But wouldn't two screens do? And leave us one for The Dish, as a sop to that small but deserving audience who would rather see a hilarious and moving little character-based comedy than watch Angelina Jolie riding a motorcycle and kicking ass.
But back to The Dish. The tiny town of Parkes, New South Wales is, in 1969, the proud home of the Southern Hemisphere's largest radio telescope - a 1,000 ton dish that towers over a sheep paddock. When NASA launches Apollo 11 toward the moon, it needs a backup facility to relay the signals from Neil Armstrong's historic "giant leap for mankind" when its Goldstone, California dish is on the wrong side of the planet.
Parkes is agog. The Prime Minister (Bille Brown) is coming. The American Ambassador (John McMartin) is coming. The Mayor (Roy Billing) and his wife Maisie (Genevieve Mooy) are beside themselves with the honor, even if their sullen rebel of a teenage daughter Marie (Lenka Kripac) is not. And out at the facility, the small team of scientists led by director Cliff Buxton (Sam Neill) and NASA overseer Al Burnett (Seinfeld's Patrick Warburton) is nervously preparing for its moment of history.
Director and co-writer Rob Sitch (The Castle) weaves the charm of a comedy of quirky small-town characters with the excitement of one of history's most world-uniting events, with 60 million people glued to their black-and-white televisions ("And do the people in India get to watch it?" sniffs Marie.) Neill anchors the movie with his tweedy, almost unflappable father-figure of a project director, and the rest of the cast is wonderful too. The movie is filled with little human things, some of them very real and understated, some of them played for character zaniness, but Sitch never crosses the line to comic condescension. Much of it is funny, some of it is thrilling, some of it brings a tear to the eye. It does have a few downside moments, such as having to listen to Oliver's "Good Morning, Starshine" warbling on the sound track, but it's a small price to pay.
If UA doesn't have the sense to hold The Dish over, keep an eye on The Screen over at CSF, where they'll be trying to get hold of it in the next few weeks.
The Screen, by the way, is going this week with a festival of Toto movies. No, not the little dog from Kansas, but the phenomenally popular Italian screen clown who at the height of his popularity in the '50s and '60s was regarded as one of cinema's greatest comics, on a par with Chaplin and Keaton. Toto was born in 1898 to impoverished gentility (he was a Neapolitan baron) but became a true aristocrat with his ascension to movie stardom after a successful career in Italian music hall, where he honed his comic persona, which was Chaplinesque, but also utterly and distinctively his own.
He was the titular character in a whole series of Toto comedies, a number of which will be at The Screen's festival and all of which are well worth seeing. But don't miss Big Deal on Madonna Street, in which Toto joins a cast headed by Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni to pull off a jewel heist in Rome. This classic 1958 comedy, directed by Mario Monicelli, has been unsuccessfully copied a couple of times in American cinema, most recently by Woody Allen as Small Time Crooks. The Screen will be showing it at 7:15 on Saturday and Monday evenings, with a 3:00 matinee on Sunday afternoon.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews