Passing time - Mark Pierce attends the Sapphire League AFL Grand Final between the Narooma Lions and the Pambula Panthers

I have often been charmed by the advertisement which declares that: It’s not country footy. It’s footy country. I decided to test whether that was still true by turning up at the Grand Final of the Sapphire Coast AFL comp, at Narooma on the far South Coast of New South Wales. 

The victorious Narooma Lions, Sapphire League Premiers, 2025

That experience was charmingly odd from the start. Entry to the ground was free. Hot food offerings were limited to dim sums, a noodle cup and chips, offering two nods of a sort to multicultural Australia. Perhaps mixed Asian greens could have been served as a side. 

Cars were parked everywhere outside the ground but, regrettably, nobody has adopted the American practice of tail-gating. That would have involved opening the boot after parking the car, removing a portable barbeque, pulling the tab on a beer or two, then grilling up sausages in the shade of the boot lid.

Instead, many locals had parked their utes inside the ground, with the back tray abutting the boundary fence. Three or four blokes then had enough room to stretch out, watching the game from their own personal mini-grandstand. Extra points for ingenuity were due to the family which had plonked a two-seater sofa on the tray of their ute, then squashed four family members together on it. 

A veteran of many AFL Grand Finals once told me that finals were altogether different from roster games: more noise and bustle in the rooms; warmer, drier days; game played on harder surfaces; easy to under-estimate the opposition’s resolution.  This Grand Final was different again, in all manner of good ways.

A light sea breeze blew across the ground. (After all, the sea was only a few hundred metres away; the surf would have been even closer if the game had been played at Bermagui.) Seagulls and pelicans browsed overhead. Unlike their raucously biased counterparts at home AFL games in Adelaide and Perth, the crowd was civil, applauding good play from either side. 

As Australians everywhere do, the spectators yelled out “ball” and “high” and “gone”, often indiscriminately but always with a good-humoured banter in the advice tendered to the umpires. Swearing was more or less rationed, which means you could only swear when exasperated, and – happily – betting was nowhere to be seen. 

One boundary umpire was so short he needed to come in a few steps from the boundary line before turning his back to throw the ball in.  All the umpiring team (none of whom we are now allowed to call “maggots”) adjusted to the fact that they could hear individual barrackers, not just a wave of crowd roar. Both the umpire and the offending player deigned to notice me when, after one bloke was walloped,  I reminded the bash-artist that he was a mongrel. 

The other audible oddity was that you could wander out to listen to the coaches at quarter and three-quarter time. That is vintage footy country stuff.  When I was a kid, North Hobart’s coach yelled out that one aged rover would give his bloody right arm to see the Robins win that day. The old warrior then held up his left arm in agreement and salute. When I was older, I listened to Ron Barassi telling his ‘Roos to kick long bombs to Snake in the square. Now that is all past history; long bombs are now deemed wasteful, full forwards do not lurk in the square, players with names like Jai and Tye are not usually nicknamed Snake. 

For the South coast teams, the coaches’ messages were distinctly retro, pure footy country. The game was to be won with grit and grip, the constituents of guts. Everyone was to give everything they had. The inference – a correct one in footy country – was that footy was not just a game and that there was no such thing as next year. 

All the teams played well. The winners were marshalled in their forward line by a burly bloke with a head either shaven or bald, chunky legs, arms like hams, fast on the sprint and tough all the way through. Were he playing Rugby League, he would have had no neck, a body festooned with tattoos and a fair few gaps among his teeth. Footy, though, is a rather more sophisticated pursuit.  When the teams changed ends, it turned out that they were playing another bloke – perhaps a brother – who looked exactly the same and controlled the back line. Both were top footballers, of the crash-through, break-a-pack variety.

Nothing about the game, not the ground, the players nor the spectators was anything less than terrific, good fun. A few blokes were hurt a bit, a few took speccies, drop kicks and stab kicks were still shunned, one side won while the other lost, but nobody on either side of the fence made a dill of themselves. We could do worse than adopting some of the rule book from footy country. 

On DVDs of unknown origin - Finally a viewing of Maurice Pialat's LA MAISON DES BOIS (France, 1971)

It was long, long ago when I first read somewhere, I think a note by Adrian Martin, about watching, over a  weekend, a 16mm copy (the format on which it was filmed), from the then French Embassy collection, of Maurice Pialat's seven part 1971 TV series La Maison des Bois. Set during and shortly after the 1914-18 World War, Pialat's story of a 'family' of father, mother, two late teen children and three boys fostered into the home by mothers whose men have gone off to war. For the kids it's the time of their lives, most especially for Hervé, the only one of the three whose mother does not visit him. One of the eps makes this time of your life moment clearer when the family go off, possibly in homage to Renoir, for a day's picnic and fishing.  

A friend in the UK provided me with two subtitled DVDs which look like they have come off VHS copies or else recorded off TV and fanboy subtitles added. So finally I can tick it off the must see list. If you are curious it is being offered by The Movie Detective but I have no idea of the quality or indeed the legality.

Hervé (Hervé Lévy)

It's been 54 years but the effect is still astonishing. Sequence after sequence just rattles you and the number of single shot sequences involving intricate camera movements to record quite extraordinary detail is remarkable. Most notable is the shot/sequence where, as the guns get louder and the Germans closer, there is a mass-evacuation from the village. Horses, carts, people, wandering children, trucks carrying soldiers, are all caught up.

Pialat himself plays the role of the local school teacher. He has to deal with children whose emotions are constantly veering towards sadness but who still have all the naivete, all the wonder. His direction of the children is remarkable no moment more so when the two boys are in bed reading from a book. The sequence lasts for minutes, it's sense of the natural totally acute. The post-war tristesse of the mother who looks after the children and her family, who loses her son in the war's last days, and then sees the children reclaimed by parents, is sad beyond measure. The cast contains hardly an actor known to even the most devoted. That anonymity of course works to heighten the authenticity.

Maurice Pialat as the schoolteacher

1971 was an extraordinary year for French cinema. Pialat's series was made in the same year as Jacques Rivette's Out One. To add to those major TV events you can find an extensive  list of everything else. Major films by Truffaut, Malle, Tati, Marcel Ophuls, Chabrol, Bresson and André Delvaux included. Even Marcel Carné and Abel Gance made films that year. But Pialat's TV series may well be the greatest of them all...

One odd feature..there is no credit for a writer. Wikipedia  tells us it was written by René Wheeler, a veteran of French cinema whose credits go back to the 30s but do include a credit on Rififi. The credit at the beginning and the end is "Realisation Maurice Pialat".

The Current Cinema - KANGAROO ISLAND (Dir:Tim Piper, Sc: Sally Gifford, Australia, 2024)

Rebecca Breeds, Erik Thomson, Adelaide Clemens, Kangaroo Island

We've already had one Australian movie this year about the kids coming back home. Birthright was tough, smart, risky and its source material, ( I figured the Coens, Noah Hawley's TV Fargo and maybe, probably unlikely, even a nod to Miike Takashi's provocations) was miles away from TV soap with its contrivances, sentimentality and every so often giant leaps of scripting to move things along.

The latter is what struck me about the origins of Kangaroo Island,  produced in South Australia with money from the Adelaide Film Festival which premiered the film last year. It's a debut feature from Tim Piper from a script by Sally Gifford who also has a role in the film.

Lou (Rebecca Breeds) is living the desperate life of an alcoholic failed actress in Los Angeles. An unfortunate run in with a cop sees her on a plane back home courtesy of a ticket sent to her by her father (Erik Thomson). She ends up back on Kangaroo Island and we cue a good running gag about her 'lost' luggage. Then the scripting really starts.... Sister Freya (Adelaide Clemens) has  gone evangelical Christian and cant wait to slip Lou a tome about Jesus, ex-boyfriend Ben (Joel Jackson) has married Freya but is a philanderer. There's a car accident that moves the plot along and later in a throw away we learn the ex-boyfriend has gambled away the family money hence sister has leased the incredibly photogenic property to a religious cult...and (spoiler alert) her old man is actually dying which is why he gave Lou the ticket. 

There's a joke somewhere about Home and Away  as well. 

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison is disappointed by Jackie Chan in THE SHADOW'S EDGE (Larry Yang, China 2025)

It’s a bit like the Paul Hogan in Australia story, a genuine international movie star and his home industry has no idea what to do with him. Jackie Chan is well on the way to being the most famous actor of all time but, since his return to Mainland China, his films have been dispiriting. The new Bu Feng Zhui Ying / The Shadow's Edge offered hope. It has been a hit, running in Sydney for a month where Feng Xiaogang’s (much better) We Girls scraped through a week. Jackie is front and center doing what he was famous for - kicking ass - and it is a big production aimed at the international market. It comes directed & written by Larry Yang, who handled Jackie in the horse picture Ride On, which I never got around to.  With action now broken into edits, his film has a more contemporary style than the sustained full-body shots that made the seventies HK material go. Ingenious staging, moving camera and rapid cutting show more accomplished technique than most of the Asian film I see.

The opening impresses with best ‘Scope production values and the luxurious Macao Wynn Tower Casino setting, where new generation bad hats use their costume quick changes and parkour, backed by the latest computer skills, to do a major cryptocurrency robbery, taking out the territory’s police communications system in the process and escaping on parachute gliders.  Reviewing the security camera footage at HQ, the cops have to admit that their own electronic skills are not equal to the challenge. Time to call in the retired commander whose legendary use of live surveillance personnel will not be compromised by the new menace of AI. Guess who?

Jackie, is still a mover but looks his seventy years. He shows up, immediately circles details on their wall of screens display and agrees to form his own dedicated unit, rejecting , with a handshake, members of the line of  Policia Macao recruits offered for the project, saying they look too much like cops.  We notice diminutive Zhang Zifeng among the officers selected. So far so good but at this point they start filling in back stories at great and not particularly interesting length.

Zhang Zifeng, The Shadow's Edge

Zifeng ’s dad Yu Rongguang was killed in a surveillance where he was Jackie’s partner. She takes a dim view of being the one left in the van after getting coffee - plot stream about female equality. Turns out that they are up against The Shadow, an equally senior knife wielding master, who beats up his own young recruits for not preventing his photo being taken for the first time in his life of crime. Stare hard and you recognise the now mature Big Tony Ka Fai Leung from Golden Age Hong Kong productions like Ringo Lam’s Gam yuk fung wan/Prison on Fire or Tsui Hark’s San lung moon hak chan / Dragon Inn.

The exercise becomes getting Solid Intel without Tony knowing, to make it possible to recover the massive crypto loss. Jackie’s imitation street people operatives converge on the bleak wall of apartment buildings, after a pursuit through a produce market where Zifeng hits on searching under a stall with her phone light to avoid being spotted.

The film’s most successful scene (it is often picked out in reviews) is the friendly and chatty home cooked meal the two veterans share, bolstered by the tension from them being likely to start hitting one another with sharp furniture after any false move. However the film goes on forever ( two and a half hours of forever) so that the final sustained battle with the stars crashing through the cafe roof, arrives too late to perk up interest.  While the technique may be state of the art, writing does not match it.

into his 70s, Jackie Chan, The Shadow's Edge

The Shadow’s Edge comes with the now obligatory final out -take compilation - nice bit where everyone, including the girl athlete she's been fighting, congratulates actress Zifeng on the action she's just managed. Jackie makes a point of having a second camera on him when the stunt car flips to within feet of where he’s been standing. He includes a shot where he declares he’ll be doing this for another twenty years. I’m inclined to believe it and ignore the fact that he once told me he didn’t want to be a sixty year old action hero like Clint Eastwood.

He may not be up for crashing down three storey buildings or being dragged behind city busses anymore but his comic timing is still impeccable. It would be nice to see his industry find a worthwhile use for that. 

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison enjoys HONEY DON'T! (Ethan Coen, USA, 2025)

Margaret Qualley

I rate Honey Don't! Pretty much the most enjoyable movie since - well - Drive Away Dolls, the first part of Ethan Coen's proposed trilogy with Margaret Qualley in her P.I. Honey O'Donahue character. The new instalment offers all the things that make these enjoyable - raunchy sex, ultra-violence, bad taste, smart film craft and substantial borrowings from some of the best crime films that pre-date it - The Big Sleep, The Naked City, Chinatown - Hitchcock represented by lots of Psycho,  along with Torn Curtain & Topaz. Throw in Jessica Jones and add the parched Bakersfield L.A. settings they absorbed from Fat City.  

David Z. Obadiah’s attention-getting titles have the camera rolling through that scorched desert suburb and locking onto local business names painted on walls, proving to be the film’s credits. The most conspicuous streetscape feature is  coach stop benches.  These get to be significant. Lera Abova, the Russian lady from Luc Besson’s Anna, shows up on her moped at a remote highway car smash, where the wreck has rolled into an isolated ravine. The suspended body of the girl driver is still bleeding.  Abova prizes the “Four Way Temple” ring off a dead hand before going off to float naked in an abandoned mine pond.

 

Some time later Margaret Qualley drives her classic turquoise Chevy SS up to what has now become plainclothes cop Charlie Day’s crime scene and there’s this exchange about what either one is doing at a traffic accident.  Day keeps on coming on for Qualley, tall in her loose fitting outfit and heels, despite her telling him “I like girls.” She gets better information out of records storage-cage  officer Aubrey Plaza.

 

Turns out the dead girl had hired Qualley before they had a chance to meet. Her working an already closed case is the most Chandler element. The piece is closer to Mickey Spillane. Think of Honey Don’t! as the Kiss Me Deadly of our time. 

 

Chris Evans

Investigations keep on indicating charismatic Reverend  Chris Evans, who pounces on the chance to come on as something other than Captain America with a beard. As with Drive Away Dolls’ Congressman Mat Damon, also promoted with family values bill boards, Rev. Evans is a sleazy populist leader. His shadowy Russian connections, add to  the character’s contemporary resonance.

 

The service he gives to a congregation of marginals in their best clothes, about God’s demands and noodle, is a super-charged highlight. The Preacher also has other interests including Motel Parking Lot dope deals and threesomes with bondage gear girls in the Sacristy. These get to involve vengeful henchman Jacnier, who we were just getting to like. Qualley/O'Donahue finds a choir smock and fetishist leather and chains under the bed in her late client’s family home. 

 

There’s maybe related complications in the chaotic domestic situation of the investigator’s sister Kristen Connolly and punk niece, diner waitress Talia Ryder, who shows up roughed up by a trailer-trash boy friend. The scene where Qualley sorts him out (smashing his sawn-off proves harder than it looks) is another of the film’s surprise highlights.

 

With her secretary Gabby Beans giving Qualley a hard time when her boss picks up the ‘phone calls that are her job, it’s all a bit much for her and she finds release with Plaza in material more explicit than we’ve seen either do before. The downwards take of the pair of them, naked, smoking in bed, is done in a single run of the camera. Critics who seem to miss everything else in the film pick up on the shot of dildos (also pivotal in Drive Away Dolls) soaking in the sink next morning. Think the ripped papers flushed in Pyscho’s toilet bowl for a similar disruption of movie taboos that hadn’t occurred to us before.

 

Along with the shock value material and the nostalgia content, Honey Don’t! keeps on fielding walk-ons that could have classed up earlier Coen Brothers efforts - Patrick Swayze’s brother as the piano bar man who makes his line about smiling register by a menacing leer, Michael Gmur’s brief, unmotivated monologue about the bus he’s driving or homeless man Kale Browne who proves to be more than he seems. In any other film they would stand out. 

 

Aubrey Plaza, Margaret Qualley

It takes a while to establish that there’s something going on here than we never got in Drive Away Dolls but wait. One of the film’s core purposes is to set Qualley’s star status but it’s more remarkable to see Aubrey Plaza, conspicuous for a decade, abruptly finding her character. Think Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat.

We’ve now got IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes (both U.S. but incorporating some foreign language sources) and an alarming thing is that reviewers all seem to be queuing up to say the same thing  - like the bogus consensus of that Sight & Sound poll. They all home in on the dildos. However the Mickey Spillane thing totally passes them by. They can’t all be too young for that. One element that puts writers off is apparently unmotivated content. In a scheme where information is planted with such precision (the retrieved ring, a Rolodex that doesn’t have Plaza’s address, green lipstick on the tea cup) it seems hard to believe that we are not going to get more clues. I’m still wondering about who offed the car smash client but my guess is that all is to be revealed in Go Beavers, the proposed third film. No word yet on how that one is going. Personally, I've had such a kick out of the first pair I can’t wait.

NOIR NOVEMBER IN BRISBANE - Joel Archer presents CHARMING UNDESIRABLES

 

Brisbane's own supercinephile Joel Archer is back with another special selection of classic noir. He writes: we are thrilled to announce we will be returning in Mid-November 2025 for Brisbane's 4th Annual Film Noir Festival: Noir November 2025: Charming Undesirables. 

 

Noir November 2025: Charming Undesirables is a celebration of one of the most edgy, dark, moody and atmospheric slices of Classic Hollywood. From Friday 14th November to Sunday 16th November 2025 at Palace Cinemas James St we will be screening no less than 10 films from this iconic genre. Two of them will be a Mystery Noir Double Bill screening in the heart of Last Man Standing Brewery in Milton in between the pipes and the barrels. We are also introducing a new segment this year called Noir before Noir in which we highlight films that have a distinct dark style to them from the 1920 + 1930's before the typical Film Noir Cycle. 

 

The selection this year includes:

IN A LONELY PLACE (Nicholas Ray, USA, 1950)

COVER UP (Alfred E Green, USA, 1949)

BEWARE MY LOVELY (Harry Horner, USA, 1952)

THE BIG HEAT (Fritz Lang, USA, 1953)

ANGEL FACE (Otto Preminger, 1952)

DANS LA NUIT (Charles Vanel, France, 1929)

THE SNIPER (Edward Dymytrk, USA, 1952)

KISS ME DEADLY (Robert Aldrich, USA, 1955)

We have tickets for each individual screenings but to experience the true scope of the festival you can't go past a Festival Pass you get access to all 8 films at Palace James St, a free Ticket to Last Man Standing Brewery Double Bill on Saturday 15th of November 2025, HardCover Book and more!

 

We encourage you to secure your pass before 24 October so you don't miss out on a HardCover book, any orders after 24 October may not include a HardCover Book. 

 

Below is the link to tickets and the Full Program for the weekend.... we are so excited to see you there! Come dressed up and enjoy a weekend of films that I can assure you are NOT on lacklustre streaming options. Noir November couldn’t be possible without the support of 4MBS Classic FM, Reel Moving Cinema & Last Man Standing Brewery Milton.

 

TO BUY TICKETS CLICK HERE

The Current Cinema - CAUGHT STEALING, (Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2025)

Hank (Austin Butler) being subtle, Caught Stealing

Darren Aronofsky has a reputation for attacking his subjects full on... I dont think he does subtlety much at all. For Caught Stealing he wanted "to go back to the basics, and let's make great entertainment" at least that's what he told Karl Quinn for a piece in the SMH yesterday. Paywalled so no link...

Nikita Kukushkin, Benito Martínez Ocasio, Yuri Kolokolnikov,
... bad guys in Caught Stealing

To set up the story, you have to be up for the sight of two bald Russian (or maybe Ukrainian, it's complicated) mobsters, (one nicknamed Microbe who sports either an abstract facial tattoo or eczema over the right side of his face) kicking the living bejesus out of our hero, alcoholic barman and ex-baseball big leaguer Hank (Austin Butler), to pretty much start proceedings off. That does happen after a warmup sex scene. After that, if violent sudden death is your bag then Caught Stealing  is entertainment. The early kicking is so severe, and seen so on screen, that Hank ends up in hospital minus a kidney. Later, to pry information out of him, one of the Russians/Ukrainians uses a pair of pliers to start removing the stitches that patched up the missing kidney. 

Liev Schreiber, Austin Butler, Vincent D'Onofrio

The entertainment includes a corrupt black female cop and two Jewish gangsters who (Spoiler Alert) dont mind killing people on the Sabbath but whose religion prevents them from driving a car on that day, hence they have to press Hank into service for that job, notwithstanding that Hank has had an aversion to driving ever since he killed his father (?) while driving drunk to spring training. The father's lack of a seatbelt sets up a later scene with another violent car death. 

It is a Darren Aronofsky movie and it is thus, as usual, 'excessive'. I'm not sure I'd adjudge it as entertainment or a 'fun film'. Karl Quinn speculated on possible sequels given that Hank is the hero of a series of three novels so far by author/scriptwriter Charlie Huston.  I'd be surprised.... but then again Donald Westlake's Parker, first iterated by Lee Marvin in Point Blank and similarly back then accused of excessive violence, was eventually also played by Michel Constantin, Anna Karina, Jim Brown, Robert Duvall, Peter Coyote, Mel Gibson, Jason Statham and Marc Wahlberg over forty years or so.