Little Fish - 26th July 2006

Oh dear, another incredibly boring film. I didn't find it offensively boring like some others but there was nothing to capture my interest. I managed to fall asleep briefly but sadly woke up a short while afterwards. There were some interesting (ish) ideas, dealing with the past and the possibly inevitable slide into drugs and petty crime but you could find the same things in an average episode of Neighbours and they would be resolved after 15 minutes and then go on to a comedy scene featuring Harold Bishop. Things here just kind of fizzled out, no progress was ever made and no-one seemed to learn anything (except me - I'm never going to watch a 2 hour film at the Cornerhouse in the middle of a heatwave ever again.)

The acting, however, was brilliant. Cate Blanchett was great and completely believable as her character but she never got the chance to have a go at anything really juicy... the narrative just kind of meandered for a while. Hugo Weaving I will watch in anything and has proven to be extremely versatile (drag queen, elf, computer program) and was a brilliant retired-sportsman junkie. I think more could have been done with him and Sam Neill's character whom I found the most interesting and unusual of the lot of them.

Even at the end, when the film was working towards a climax and actually threatened to get interesting: all the disparate characters came together to one location. And then... they left again. True, some of them were dead, but it was not what I would class as a value-for-money climax. The worst bit was the ending: the three of them frolicking in the ocean, leaving Hugo Weaving's corpse on the beach, nicely decomposing in the Australian sun. No mention of what Cate was going to do about all the money or her relationship with Johnny or what they were going to do with the dead body that was, by this time, starting to attract flies...

The film gets points for being Australian and featuring Hugo Weaving but I probably could have done something more constructive with those two hours (like watching 4 whole episodes of Neighbours.) 3/10.