The answer is a lemon.

THOSE WITH a love of cinema--especially those of us with a lifelong affair with the flicks--would have cheered Sally Morell and her recent piece in the Melbourne Herald Sun (August 16) headlined, "Give unworthy Aussies the flick". She quoted Australian film-makers as saying that the Australian film industry was "stuffed". She agreed: as do I, and most people, by voting with our feet. But the reasons why were not those supplied by our filmmakers--for example lack of money, limited releases, and the overshadowing effects of more powerful rival film industries. Rather, it is because, as Sally Morell said, "most of the movies you turn out are simply not good enough to deserve either my time or my money".

Only eight of the 169 subsidised features made over the past fifteen years "attracted enough paying customers to make a profit", while "two thirds of local releases took less than one million dollars at the box office". Two of the best local films in recent times, Crocodile Dundee and The Castle, had no taxpayer funding. The conclusions are clear: our state-supported film industry is designed to produce lemons; with the occasional orange getting in by mistake.

The financial disasters are directly traceable to the cultural and ideological catastrophes which these films represent. Add technical incompetence, linked with the most impoverished contact with the reality principle--namely, the real world--and voila!

Morell cites critics who now talk of weak plots, underdeveloped characters, and not enough laughs in the comedies. But for a long, long time, our critics have praised everything home-made with a degree of hyperbole reminiscent of our restaurant guides to good living and newspaper real-estate propaganda. (Cash-for-comment, maybe?) Furthermore, theatrical and musical events, painting exhibitions and the like all get the elephant stamp. Meanwhile, book reviews were growing weaker and weaker, almost perfunctory--yet supposed to be puffs for anointed authors.

Australia has shown it can produce good films--though not, as yet, great films--so why the extraordinary morass of cultural inconsequence and financial calamity which is the local film industry?

If one listens to those in the industry, it comes down to who is getting the grants, and for what. The various swiftly-forgotten confections our film industry produces strongly resemble the gruel regularly forced down the necks of our defenceless schoolchildren, as well as featuring the concerns of our Year 10 public media. These films are derivative, infantile and suffused with ...