Thursday, April 11, 2019

Movie review - "The Coolangatta Gold" (1984) **

What's good about this:
* the photography and locations and sets
* the visuals
* some of the acting - Joss McWilliam is green but very well cast, Colin Friels is good, Robyn Nevin, Grant Kenny looks the part (of himself!)
* Nick Tate is very well cast - he just needed to be reined in
* the core conflict is fantastic - Cain and Abel, the younger son wanting approval
What's not so good:
* all the unresolved subplots - like the band Joss manages not wanting to move to Sydney, what happens to that? Or whether the ballet dancer is going to want to move to Sydney and Seattle?
* all the unexploited subplots -  Grant Kennedy could have been a character - ditto his father. Why have the karate guy in it at all? It would have made sense had he trained Joss but he doesn't. Why not do something more with mum? (They may as well have killed off the character)
* time wasted on things like the night club sequence - they listen to a whole song, and then pretty much a whole other song. It's like 6 minutes in the middle of the film.
What's not as bad as you think:* Josephine Smulders copped a lot of blame and she isn't very good but she's not the main problem this didn't work - that's with script issues.
* iron man races don't seem to be that exciting - but the racing on the sand stuff at the end works very well... so I think it could just be how the earlier stuff was shot.
Australia should do another iron man film. Learn from this one, don't let its failure scare filmmakers away.

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