The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 16

The Svdnev Morning Herald. Thursday. ADtil 9. 1987 Page 16 DSITS SMS) EOTTOMMKOT BULKS 5C A flwi fedkle its So LES PATTERSON SAVES THE WORLD Directed by George Miller. Written by Barry Humphries and Diane Millstead.

Rated M. Hoyts and suburbs. -Reviews by PAUL BYRNES 'XTJ riATCHING Dr Sir Leslie Colin Patterson KBE burp, fart, slobber and ogle his way through his The farm next door is owned by the hateful Murphy father and sons, who terrorise the district in their big black chopper1, stealing deer and frightening the sheep. Down the road is the Footrot Flats footy ground, where Wal has a big game coming up. Throw in a storm, a river patrolled by the dreaded crocopigs (a dangerous crossbreed), a cat called Horse, a white rat called Vernon the Vermin, a heavy-breasted blonde known as Cheeky Hobson, and you have the basic comic ingredients of the story.

Most of the animation was done in Sydney, and the team has done a good job. The colours are rich and deep, the movements realistic and Richard Zal-oudek's background paintings give a superb sense of the texture of rural New Zealand. Part of the movie's appeal is that it is not prim. The characters swear mildly and the animals are anatomically sound, so there is an earthy, realistic dimension to it. The great big bull has not been gelded, as Disney might have done.

A crucial point in any animated movie is the voices, and they are one of the movie's main weaknesses. Most of them sound strained, the product of actor's forcing themselves into difficult registers, which weakens the characterisations. John Clarke sounds normal as Wal, but not surprisingly, he's too much like Fred Dagg. It doesn't defeat the basic charm of the characters, but it keeps them from achieving the realism and dimension that the animators have striven for. The movie is still a good giggle.

OPENINGS FOOTROT FLATS THE DOG'S TALE: Likable, funny animated movie from New Zealand, based on the comic strip about Wal Footrot and his faithful dog, Dog. Hoyts and suburbs. LES PATTERSON SAVES THE WORLD: Unlikable, unfunny capers of an Australian cultural dinosaur, with lots of limp jokes about freckles, foreigners and faggots. Hoyts and suburbs. POLICE ACADEMY 4: Unpreviewed, but you know what to expect.

Village Cinema City. NIGHT. OF THE CREEPS: Unpreviewed horror teen pic. Hoyts. THE SACRIFICE: The extraordinary last film of Russian director, Andrei Tarkovskij, about a man who makes a deal with God.

Beautiful, intense, moving and demanding. Chauvel. THE WHOOPEE BOYS: Turgid gutter comedy, about two New York crumbps trying to eat the rich in Florida. Greater Union Centre. asking God to spare his family.

In return, he will give up all that he loves, sacrificing his own ego as a gift to God. Tarkovsky presents this as one way of "recapturing moral integrity, which you might expect from a director who was deeply religious. Alexander, though his actions appear mad to the people around him, regains his freedom and renews himself in his own eyes. Tarkovsky, the son of a Russian poet, made only six films in his homeland over 25 years, and was plagued by problems of suppression and censorship, which ultimately forced him to leave Russia in 1984. Though he made few films, he had the ability and the courage to want to transport both mind and spirit, as other great directors like Bergman, Kurosawa and Ray have wanted before him.

The Sacrifice is such a film, and a fitting epitaph. NZ's Dog-led film recovery FOOTROT FLATS -THE DOC'S TALE Directed by Murray Ball. Written by Ball and Tom Scott. Rated PG. Hoyts.

rpgOOTROT FLATS THE DOG'S TALE is a bouncy, likable piece of animated bush bosh, drawn from Murray Ball's successful comic strip about Wal Footrot and his faithful dog. It's full of Ball's charming but unorthodox sense of humour, which works off a blend of New Zealand's national symbols sheep, sheepdogs, rugby football, beautiful countryside and farmers in floppy hats and gumboots. The only thing missing is butter. In New Zealand, the movie has become the most popular local product ever, probably because of its dogged nationalism. The movie is still funny over here, but I suspect it's funnier over there.

It suffers from an episodic structure, separated into comic set-pieces rather than integrated scenes. There is a story, but it goes in leaps and bounds (a sheep joke), so that pacing is interrupted by big blocks of gaggery. The Dog is the central character (wagging the tale, so to speak). He looks after Wal Footrot, a hulking great fellow whose wardrobe consists of half a dozen blue singlets and a raincoat. He also looks -after Jess, a beautiful black and white bitch.

around in platform brogues and ankle freezers, feasting on baked beans, and chugging vodka in the. toilet. When a combination of his flatulence and a cigarette lighter sets fire to an Arab leader in the UN General Assembly, a disgraced Les is posted as ambassador to Abu Niveah, where the singed Ayatollah Mustafa Toul (Garth Meade) plans his revenge, with a camel fed on laxatives. Fate intervenes, Les escapes and meets Dr Charles Herpes (Henri Szeps), who has diagnosed a cure for a virulent virus called H.E.L.P., which makes people's faces swell up and spurt pus (it'll have them rolling in the aisles at St Vincent's). The story then becomes a spy thriller, with Dame Edna Everage as a super spook, Joan Rivers as the US President, Pamela Stephenson as a chesty French-girl and a supporting cast of similarly overwrought characters.

Naturally, the comedy is mostly anatomical. Sir Les leaves no bodily function, orifice or sexual appendage untouched, but his taste for low comedy quickly becomes repetitive. The jokes lumber into view like Mack trucks, and proceed in a straight line.9 How many times can you rework a line like "I want Twice is too many, but there are probably four or five of them here, the mark of a lazy script, and the same applies to jokes about freckles, foreigners and faggots. George "Snowy River" Miller's direction is similarly lax, particularly with the peripheral details. Many of the extras can hardly keep a straight face, and the stunts are often transparently fake.

When Les and Veronique (Pam Stephenson) make a dash, on a motorbike, Stephenson looks a little lifeless. That's because she has been replaced with a dummy, so plainly visible that the shot tends to make us feel under-estimated. The paradox is that even though they spent nearly $8 million making it, many of the sets are tinny, like the revolving restaurant with a painted skyline outside. If the crassness was actually full-on and straight-faced, the movie might have been much funnier, but it's mostly self-conscious and mechanical. The jokes lumber into view like Mack trucks, and proceed in a straight line.

There is no truth in these characters, this story, these jokes, nor any generosity. The joke, sadly, is on Sir Les. jit y-f miirii i i inli Erland Josephson as Mr Alexander (left) and Sven Wollter as the doctor in The Sacrifice. -own movie, I couldn't help feeling a 'twitch of nostalgia. Les now seems a man out of his own a relic of bygone days.

His biography says he achieved prominence as a minister in the Whitlam Government, after an august career in 4he Plasterers' Union. He seemed 1 in a nasty sort of way, when those times -were more familiar. Now, he's completely out of step with the spirit and image of Bob frightfully well-groomed Cabinet, a dinosaur in the company of minks and sables. (Barry Humphries, his creator, emphasises this when a Prime Ministerial minder tells him he's but of date. We think this idea is going to be developed but it never is.) He's also, I suspect, out of step with the mood of the audience, seduced as most of us have been by Paul Hogan's 'inimitable brand of flattery.

It's interesting that both Mick Dundee and Sir Les are drunk in their opening scenes. In a way, they have the 'same roots, in the folklore of the Australian ocker, but they could not be jnore different in interpretation. Humphries comes to bury the ocker, Hogan to praise him. Where Sir Les bungles on the world stage, Mick Dundee proves himself superbly capable. Where Humphries embarrasses our Hogan dignifies it.

Dundee is actually born of Patterson, "in a strange sort of way. Hogan created a stereotype partly out of his distaste "for the old, ugly one personified by Sir As Humphries satirises a character is beneath him, as well as the middle 'classes for sharing his contempt, Hogan "attacks the pretentions of those who themselves superior. None of this would be terribly relevant if Les Patterson Saves The World was a very funny movie, but alas, it's far from "it Bad taste can make good comedy and 'the pretentions of the middle classes have been ripe for Humphries's knife, but his blade here seems uncharacteristi-cally blunted. The first five minutes look promising, but that's because they contain all primary gags. We see Les in New York, goosing pretty women, clumping An unsettling epitaph THE SACRIFICE Written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Rated PG. Chauvel (subtitled). TP HE SACRIFICE was Andrei Tarkovsky's last film. He died of cancer late last year, after the film The boy, known as Little Man, is the son of the storyteller, Mr Alexander (Erland Josephson). They live nearby in a beautiful, stark wooden house; the man is a former actor, professor and journalist, a man of great learning who feels enchained by what he has learned.

He loves this house and this place, his friends, wife, daughter and son, but it's his' birthday, which makes him more troubled than usual. He's been around a long time, and he would like some answers before he some sign of hope, or an absolute truth. Much of his dialogue is with his own spirit, with a God he's not sure exists, and eventually with us, the rest of the human race. The is about the spirit shrivelled by a material world, the dread of nuclear holocaust, the dilemmas of religious belief. None of it is intellectually unfamiliar, but it has a great, heartfelt resolve, which is ultimately optimistic.

Mr Alexander reminded me of King Lear. As the evening comes, with the gloomy light of the midnight sun making everything look dream-like, the jets scream over-head and the Prime Minister comes on TV to say that the war has begun. In desperation, Alexander prays, There is the extraordinary opening scene, which runs 10 minutes and 50 seconds without a cut. An old man is replanting a fully grown tree on a piece of green, open Nordic coast He is talking to someone off camera, telling him a story of how a monk once replanted a tree-trunk, and kept watering it every day for 13 years, as he was instructed, until one day he came and the tree was bursting with blossom. As the story progresses, a small boy, with a bandage round his neck and a wide-brimmed white hat wanders over to help, rolling rocks around the tree to hold it in place.

"A method, a system, has its advantages," says the old man. So it does. All of this is shot from a distance of about 20 metres (by Sven Nykvist, Bergman's cameraman). We get no close-ups for a long time, so we are kept remote, mirroring the relationships between most of the other characters. I was irritated by the technique for a while, but it actually made me more involved later.

Tarkovsky holds us out deliberately, creating a world, then lets us in slowly. It sharpens one's awareness, so that late in the film, when the old man simply bumps his knee on a chair, I jumped in my seat. won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. It came second to The Mission, which is akin to the judges saying: "We don't know much about art but we know what we Films like The Sacrifice are out of fashion. It runs two hours 40 minutes, it's often obscure and remote, and it makes you work.

It's also unsettling, moving and often unforgettable. I'm still puzzling over it, but as I try to organise the ideas into some form, I keep drifting off into the dark, replaying scenes and images that startled or touched me. Its appeal is more emotional, than wholly rational. ARTS NEWS SPLENDID little booklet called Taxing Questions has Australian Customs Service 'been put together by Alan WORTH SEEIHG BETTY BLUE: High-pitched and dramatic romance about two young lovers, with a fair bit of sex and great performances from the two leads. Directed by Jean Jacques Beineix, who made Diva.

Academy Twin. MEN: Witty German comedy about a man who moves in with another who has cuckolded him, to have his revenge. Sophisticated and sensitive. Dendy. STAND BY ME: Most people will love this tender, melancholy story of four boys growing up fast in 1959.

It's charming and often very funny. Hoyts. SOMETHING WILD: An unpredictable, goofy sort of screwball comedy, with a straight guy kidnapped by a wild woman. Village Cinema City and suburbs. if -m SPECIAL grant from the NSW Government has enabled Marian Street to appoint Wayne Harrison as assistant director.

Mr Harrison has spent the past six years as dramaturg at the Sydney Theatre Company. He took up his appointment on Monday. Meanwhile, Toe Truck Theatre has a new chairman in Wayne Maddern, who succeeds Mark Carpenter. Mr Maddern, a former actor and stage manager in both the UK and Australia, was general manager of the State Theatre Company of South Australia from 1972-80 and became deputy GM of the Sydney Opera House Trust in 1984. PRELIMINARY NOTICE URAPUNGA STATION FOR SALE BY AUCTION MAY 1937 MONDAY 11th MAY 1987.

LOCATION: Situated approximately 200dm west of Kamerine and bordering trie southern portion of Arnhemland. Access is via the Roper Highway through Elsey Station and Roper Volley Station. TTTU: NT Pastoral lease No. 657 Volume 47 Folio 4 LAND: 1685 square kilometres (728 square miles) IMPtOVEMENTS: Improvements include large homesteod, 2 cottages, ablution block, workshop, power shed, shed, 4 demountobles, obattoirs, butchers shop, coolrooms etc PLANT I EQUIPMENT: An inventory of me plant and equipment will be availoble upon request. AUCTIONEERS COMMENT: Mr Ray Fryer has owned Uropungo for 22 yeors.

The property boasts its own successful abattoir which services remote Aboriginal communities in Atkins of Arts Law Centre in Sydney for the Australia Council. Advice in it would be worth its weight in gold for any novice taxpayer. But it is specifically designed for artists and deals with such matters as the new tax averaging scheme for artists and things like the donation of artworks to galleries. And the booklet is free, thanks to sponsorship from Australian Society of Accountants. Taxing Questions is obtainable from the Australia Council.

QUOTA Textiles, Clothing and Footwear Motor Vehicles 1988 Quota Tender Schemes Prospective tenderers for tariff quota in the 1988 tender quota schemes must register with: The Registrar of Quota Tender PO Box E223 QUEEN VICTORIA TERRACE ACT 2600 Australian Customs Notices 8739 TEXTILES, CLOTHING and FOOTWEAR and 87 40 MOTOR VEHICLES, available from Customs Houses, contain information on registration procedures and registration forms. Persons registered in previous schemes must now register agaia to be eligible to tender for 1 988 quota. Registrations close at 4.00 pm (AEST) on 21 May 1987. Late registrations will not be accepted. Arnhemland.

Due to family commitments in Queensland, Mr Fryer is selling this greot- Wayne Harrison property. Cattle numbers hove been estimated at 2500 head. Following on inspection the week beginning 23rd March, we will be able to further elaborate on numbers. TERMS: A 20 deposit shall be paid by the purchasers on the foil of the hammer I settlement within 60 days. NOTE: The vendor reserves the right to sell the property prior to auction.

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