Blackbuster

Blackbuster (2012)

Produced by Lala Pictures/Andrew Arbuthnot
Writen and directed by SF Tusa
Cast: Jeremy Ambrum, Naomi Bowly, Roxanne McDonald, Martin Sacks, Kimi Swindells, Ben Taylor

Produced with the assistance of Screen Australia and Screen Queensland. Produced in association with the ABC.

The heroic fantasy of a young man striving to rescue, or just be noticed by, the object of his desire is at least as old as Homer. From Shakespeare’s star-cross’d lovers to the rival gangs of West Side Story to DreamWorks’s Shrek franchise, we’ve seen this story a thousand times. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, S.F. Tusa doesn’t take the story anywhere new. What we’re left with is a charming and whimsical ten minutes of cross-genre entertainment.

Blackbuster is a well constructed film. The photography is clean and the editing tight. For a small scale, (relatively) small budget production, it’s impossible to fault the acting. The principals are convincing and true to genre (all of them!). The Greek chorus of younger kids in particular is delightful. The film buff will find a playful grab bag of cinematic tropes, from the comic strip graphics of Quentin Tarantino and fast action cuts of Guy Ritchie, all the way to classic Jerome Robbins choreography.

But in the end I’m just not really sure what it is for. It’s not a new story, and other than the setting (a tropical Queensland pub) and cast (mostly Indigenous Australians) it doesn’t really tell the audience anything they didn’t already know.