Three Dollars
Talk about the Australian film industry as a disaster zone, and you get the usual explanations, excuses, apologies and lame bleats. Come on down this week's loser, worth more than fifty cents, worth a whole Three Dollars ...
Truth to tell, people don’t want to watch Australian films because of the kind of product that’s developed, funded and screened. Yep, talking about you, Mr and Ms Bureaucrat
Take Three Dollars for example. Well don’t actually, save your cash until it hits the weekly bin, and join the Aussie theatrical audience who could only rustle up A$1.1 million in box office hard earned cash when the show hit the screen.
Made by the creative team responsible for The Bank – a cold and indifferent misfire – Three Dollars has all the kind of good hearted social conscience you might have found Mosfilm churning out in Russia back in the nineteen fifties.
The story centres on David Wenham – who managed single-handedly to destroy the balance of Getting Square by doing a ham junkie turn as a flip flopper in shorts – playing a guy with a wife, a kid and three bucks. He gets caught up in a crisis as a chemical engineer investigating a new residential development. You know the riff, developers bad, decent Aussies who just want to hug solar windmills good, and so it goes.
Maybe toddle off to the library instead and pick up Elliot Perlman’s source novel, so you can drift off to sleep while reading in bed, or get it out on a cold night because you have more than a passing interest in the talented Sarah Wynter (24) or Frances O’Connor, who cannot in any way be blamed for the mess that was A.I.
Now there’s a theory that this kind of arthouse product is doing well when it hits the million dollar mark, but given the budget of the show, and the audience reach, Three Dollars is just another nail in the coffin of an industry done down by either Macquarie financed comedy drivel (funded by them and their stupid mates) or by well meaning dross like this, which has all the dynamism of fairy floss made with a socially uplifting sugar substitute.
The show will hit rental stores September 28th, and is worth a couple of stars for being such a stolid piece of solemn film-making, a bit like the way The Bank tried to have it both ways, social commentary and thriller, and ended up lumpy gravy. Still, if you’re one of the rare breed that liked The Bank, here’s more of the same.
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