Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Starstruck was renowned Australian director Gillian Armstrong's second feature. After making a name for herself with My Brilliant Career (1979), a romantic period drama which garnered a number of awards and critical acclaim, Armstrong apparently wanted to get involved in a completely different project to prove herself to be a versatile filmmaker. And that she did.

Made in 1982 in Sydney, Australia, Starstruck is a campy and energetic teen musical that delightfully captures a time when that country's new wave music scene was erupting. Featuring a wonderfully silly soundtrack with rock and punkish inclinations by pop band The Swingers (supposedly they were selected over INXS and Men at Work who were also interested in writing music for the film), the movie follows Jackie (Jo Kennedy) and her cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) as they try to sing and dance their way out of their seemingly mundane lives into a successful music career. Due to certain plots twists, which feel more as extra excuses to break out into frantic dancing than points advancing the story, things don't go exactly as planned for the two cousins, but fear not; in the end valuable lessons are learned and everybody is happy.

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Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

School's out and unlike the fantasies of liberation depicted in Dazed and Confused, Fast Times, et al, the kids in Richard Wong's Colma: The Musical are in paralysis. With no ambition to leave, no community to build an identity with and not even a car to get out of town (it's set in a suburb south of San Francisco famous for having many more dead people than living), these three friends are left with nothing but time to weigh upon their own turgid angst.

And it's this middling stage of life that lends itself so well to indulgences of their imagination: the dull commute to your deadening mall job is vastly improved with a dancebeat; a boring party is livened up with a sassy proclamation of how lame everyone else is; scoring a fake ID leads to a beerhall shanty; and a lonely walk through one of town's many cemeteries becomes a waltz with memories of the dead.

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Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****

It's often said that we're again living in an era in which our entertainment is politicized, unseen since the muted tones of the seventies. Though the decade that brought us The Candidate, The Parallax View and Nashville is clearly an influence on cynical filmmaking today, I think we should cast our collective eyes to an earlier time, when we mixed our politics with fluffy romantic comedy, when highly-synchronized dancers ironically sang "We're in the Money" in Pig Latin.

Released at the height of the depression, Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933, sets the scene quickly with the aforementioned routine featuring rows of chorus girls sporting plate-sized, gold coin crotch pieces, doing Busby Berkeley (the dance director of the picture) routines, as Ginger Rogers sings "Let's lend it, spend it, send it rolling along," before the revelry is shut down by the Sherriff's Office for unpaid debts. By way of explaining the scene, Ginger exclaims "It's the Depression, dearie!"

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Posted by at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)