New director flying solo

Solo (M)
Director: Morgan O'Neill
Stars: Colin Friels, Lionel Haft
Rating: 2.5/5

In his debut feature, director and screenwriter, Morgan O'Neill visits well-trodden territory and makes a valiant effort to make his own mark on the film noir genre.
Starring veteran Australian actor Colin Friels, Solo wanders the back alleys of Sydney's underworld, peopled by drug addicts, prostitutes, corrupt cops and the worst of crime heavies.
Jack Barrett (Friels) has reached a point in his nigh-on 30-year career, where money cannot come close to compensate for the sickness he feels in his soul at the grotty work he must do.
When he tries to explain this to his boss, Reno (Lionel Haft), there is less sympathy, more laughing contempt; yet Barrett is determined to retire.
The problem is that no-one is content to let an enforcer like Barrett to simply walk away.
Suddenly he has crooked cops, the Vietnamese mafia and his own employers gunning for him, and the only way out seems to be one final contract to take out Billie (Bojana Novakovic) a student who doesn't have the good sense to keep her nose out of business that doesn't concern her.
To his credit, O'Neill has assembled an impressive cast of Austalian actors including Vince Colosimo, Chris Hayward, Angie Milliken and Bruce Spence to play his grotty little characters, and they do a great job.
The problem lies in the fact that there's nothing really new in Barrett's story, even with the nice little twist at the end of the film.
This would be okay, if not for the pacing in the film, which leaves uncomfortable lulls in the tension, which in this sort of film should never let up. It may not quite get there, but Solo is a good sign that as a director, O'Neill shows a lot of promise.

These canoes should travel far

Ten Canoes (M)
Director: Rolf de Heer
Stars: Jamie Dayindi Dalaithngu
Rating: 4/5

Touted as the first story ever filmed predominantly in an indigenous Australian language (Arnhem Land's Ganalbingu people), Ten Canoes is one of those very special films that should be screened far and wide.
Director Rolf de Heer and a production team and cast including a number of Ganalbingu locals have crafted a story straight out of the rich oral history of Australia's first nation.
With David Gulpilil Kidjimiraril Dalaithngu as a mischievous contemporary narrator, Ten Canoes is essentially a series of nested narratives.
The film opens with a camera soaring above a wild landscape in the northern Australian Arafura Swamp where a deep, wide rivers flows, infested with crocodiles and all manner of other wildlife.
Gulipilil - delightfully tongue-in-cheek -shares a story of his ancestors living long before the white man ever set foot on their shores.
In the first story, a young man jealous of his elder brother's three wives is taken aside by his brother while on a hunting trip. Over the process of a few days, he hears a story similar to his own, taken from their ancestral history, and containing a very relevant moral.
Starring Jamie Dayindi Dalaithngu (Gulpilil's son) and a delightfully fresh cast assembled from the Ganalbingu tribe, Ten Canoes is a very entertaining examination of the vast differences and close similarities between our own culture and those in the mists of indigenous history.

Grubby role gives Dillon a chance to shine at last

Factotum (M)
Director: Bent Hamer
Stars: Matt Dillon, Marisa Tomei, Lili Taylor
Rating: 4/5

It's been a while since Matt Dillon had a lead role he could really sink his teeth into; his work in Crash last year was good but Drugstore Cowboy (1989) is the last lead role he could call his own.
With Factotum, however, things have changed, and Dillon in the role of Hank Chinaski is truly something to behold.
Bent Hamer adapted and directed this film based on the novels and experiences of legendary drinker and misanthropist Charles Bukowski, and it's a fascinating journey into a world where the craft of writing is paramount, and everything else - from relationships and sex to employment - takes second place.
Chinaski takes the title role - a word that means "somebody who does many jobs - and the screw-up that he is, Chinaski wanders from one deadbeat job to the next. He never aspires to anything really significant beyond existing hand to mouth, as long as the words continue to spill from his pen to the paper and along into the envelopes he perpetually sends off to publishers.
Nothing stands in the way of his desire to write, and grungy relationships with streetwalkers like Laura (Marisa Tomei) or Jan (Lili Taylor) pay the price. Everything about this film from the craftsmanship to the performances of all involved is the highest quality.
Despite the grubbiness of Chinaski's lifestyle, I found myself admiring the commitment he gives to his cause. I'm just not sure I could lower myself to sleeping on a park bench in the pursuit of a perfect sentence.