Walk the Talk
Director: Shirley Barrett.
Starring: Salvatore Coco & Sacha Horler.
This movie made me want immediately to hire Funny Games in disgust, to remind myself of what really happens to people when you shoot bullets at them…
Joey Grasso (Salvatore Coco) is the archetypal dreamer-schemer who bites off more than he can chew. Bonita (Sacha Horler) is Joey’s paraplegic girlfriend, with compo money to burn, specifically to fund Joey’s ambitious schemes. Nikki is a forgotten club singer whose dreams of fame have been buried beneath a cynical exterior. Joey becomes obsessed with rekindling these dreams when he meets Nikki in a Gold Coast evangelical Christian establishment. His “acceptance is unacceptable” mentality is carried to unpleasant extremes in his pursuit of Nikki’s “star”.
This film displayed all the features typical of poor Australian “quirk” movies (cf. e.g. Spider and Rose, and, though it is not Australian, Million Dollar Hotel). Such movies share the following features: (a) they are invariably set in the eastern states, with accents as appropriate; (b) they feature quirky characters with what in the real world would be regarded as seriously annoying character defects, at whom we are yet supposed not only to laugh, but to direct feelings of endearment and empathy; (c) they have completely unrealistic plots with ridiculous and sometimes disgusting scenarios in which the “lovable” characters do things like shoot guns around the place randomly causing damage to property and/or persons (Walk the Talk), or have baths with naked people four times their age (Spider and Rose), displays which are supposed to endear us yet more to these severely deranged and inconsiderate “characters”. Now, fair enough if these characters are just being realistic (no-one’s perfect, everyone contains evil, right?); in this case, there is scope for the harsh realist movie. But not only are the characters in Walk the Talk etc. offputtingly naïve (Bonita) or irresponsible (Joey), they are also completely unrealistic; and they get away with things that in real life you’d almost certainly not get away with. OK, this film wasn’t nearly as excruciatingly painful as Million Dollar Hotel. I enjoyed Nikki Bennett’s role. And there were a few chuckles, especially at the start. But the worst thing about Walk the Talk was the ending, so be warned. If only it had been wrapped up differently, this movie might just have been brilliant. But ah what a tragedy! A tragedy it was ever made.
Big Bouncy Bee of Death
