More corn, more hype, more Australiana

Lynden Barber has a solution to the malaise affecting the Australian film industry — and middle class arty types aren\u27t gonna like it, he warns in New Matilda. The scale of the audience crisis facing Australian films became dramatically clear to me last year when I went with my partner to see a new road movie called Cactus at Sydney\u27s Chauvel cinema. The screening was a depressing experience. Not because of the film, which we both enjoyed. The downer was the fact that our seats were the only ones of the cinema\u27s 365 to be occupied. This, please note, was not at the end of the film\u27s run or on a quiet, rainy night — it was on the film\u27s opening Sunday, with generally favourable (three and three and a half star) reviews, still fresh in the memory from the weekend\u27s newspapers. We asked a staff member on the way out what the problem was and if the film had been getting more of an audience in other sessions. His reply: "You\u27re the first people to turn up in three sessions". READ THE FULL TEXT in NEW MATILD