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The Advertiser
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
An unhinged Nicolas Cage takes to the beach in this surreal trip
The Surfer (MA, 103 minutes) 4 stars You wanna make a wacked-out psychotropic trip of a movie, who you gonna call? Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan shot his film The Surfer in the sand dunes of Perth's beach suburbs and has none other than the kookiest of today's working actors, Nicolas Cage, in the 0lead. I'm totally here for it, as Cage's special kind of unhinged works perfectly for a film that feels like Point Break meets Wake in Fright. Cage plays a man, we don't learn his name, returned to his hometown in Australia from a lifetime living in America, just wanting to share the joys of surfing the local breaks with his teenage son (Finn Little). He has plans to buy his old family home that has come back on the market too, but one by one his plans are dashed before his eyes. A bunch of surfie thugs led by the grizzled Scally (Julian McMahon) tell the father and son that the beach is for locals only and intimidate them back to the car park, where the man's ex-wife calls to demand the son come home. Coming back to the beach later that day in his Lexus, with his work suit a little dishevelled, the man spends the afternoon on the phone to the estate agent selling his old family home (Rahel Romahn) and a finance company, trying to huckster cash to buy the house. His desperation is palpable, his dream of the beach home restoring a lost job and a broken marriage a disappearing illusion, and as the summer sun beats down, it seems there is more to lose. The surfer thugs continue to intimidate every visitor to the beach, especially an old man (Nicholas Cassim) who claims they have killed his son and dog. As days go by, the man is drawn to the very edge of his sanity, taunted by the surfers and feeling like everybody he meets is against him. It's an interesting concept that screenwriter Thomas Martin proposes for a low-budget film, the setting across five days not straying too far from a beach car park. But the film doesn't feel cheap and Martin's screenplay is a fascinating thought-piece into a modern masculinised culture fed by the Joe Rogans and Andrew Tates, of domination and performative brutalisation. And it also feels, as the sweat pours through Cage's orange Cheeto dust makeup, like a beautiful homage to Australian horror like the brutal Wake in Fright. There's a lot of Turkish dentistry going on in this film, I should say allegedly, with Cage and McMahon sporting fiercely white choppers that interestingly give some kind of backstory to these two international figures that find themselves squaring off on a Western Australian beach. Julian McMahon could almost be playing Patrick Swayze's Bodhi character from Point Break, a charismatic and physical surfer king leading loyal disciples. He holds focus even against Cage who is just bonkers, but good bonkers. Nobody Cages like Cage Cages. This posse of apparent bad guys who intimidate visitors with their "Don't live here, don't surf here" mantra have their own stories, and its the kind of nonsense I keep getting ads and infomercials for on my feeds. Lorcan Finnegan directs with a frenzy at times, plenty of movement to his camera, plenty of lens flare reinforcing the acid trip impression, probably just trying to keep up with Cage and hoping it all works. It does; it's the kind of film, if I had a cinema of my own, I would be programming for late late shows. It's perfect for the smoke-affected university students who stay up for these kids of things. The Surfer (MA, 103 minutes) 4 stars You wanna make a wacked-out psychotropic trip of a movie, who you gonna call? Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan shot his film The Surfer in the sand dunes of Perth's beach suburbs and has none other than the kookiest of today's working actors, Nicolas Cage, in the 0lead. I'm totally here for it, as Cage's special kind of unhinged works perfectly for a film that feels like Point Break meets Wake in Fright. Cage plays a man, we don't learn his name, returned to his hometown in Australia from a lifetime living in America, just wanting to share the joys of surfing the local breaks with his teenage son (Finn Little). He has plans to buy his old family home that has come back on the market too, but one by one his plans are dashed before his eyes. A bunch of surfie thugs led by the grizzled Scally (Julian McMahon) tell the father and son that the beach is for locals only and intimidate them back to the car park, where the man's ex-wife calls to demand the son come home. Coming back to the beach later that day in his Lexus, with his work suit a little dishevelled, the man spends the afternoon on the phone to the estate agent selling his old family home (Rahel Romahn) and a finance company, trying to huckster cash to buy the house. His desperation is palpable, his dream of the beach home restoring a lost job and a broken marriage a disappearing illusion, and as the summer sun beats down, it seems there is more to lose. The surfer thugs continue to intimidate every visitor to the beach, especially an old man (Nicholas Cassim) who claims they have killed his son and dog. As days go by, the man is drawn to the very edge of his sanity, taunted by the surfers and feeling like everybody he meets is against him. It's an interesting concept that screenwriter Thomas Martin proposes for a low-budget film, the setting across five days not straying too far from a beach car park. But the film doesn't feel cheap and Martin's screenplay is a fascinating thought-piece into a modern masculinised culture fed by the Joe Rogans and Andrew Tates, of domination and performative brutalisation. And it also feels, as the sweat pours through Cage's orange Cheeto dust makeup, like a beautiful homage to Australian horror like the brutal Wake in Fright. There's a lot of Turkish dentistry going on in this film, I should say allegedly, with Cage and McMahon sporting fiercely white choppers that interestingly give some kind of backstory to these two international figures that find themselves squaring off on a Western Australian beach. Julian McMahon could almost be playing Patrick Swayze's Bodhi character from Point Break, a charismatic and physical surfer king leading loyal disciples. He holds focus even against Cage who is just bonkers, but good bonkers. Nobody Cages like Cage Cages. This posse of apparent bad guys who intimidate visitors with their "Don't live here, don't surf here" mantra have their own stories, and its the kind of nonsense I keep getting ads and infomercials for on my feeds. Lorcan Finnegan directs with a frenzy at times, plenty of movement to his camera, plenty of lens flare reinforcing the acid trip impression, probably just trying to keep up with Cage and hoping it all works. It does; it's the kind of film, if I had a cinema of my own, I would be programming for late late shows. It's perfect for the smoke-affected university students who stay up for these kids of things. The Surfer (MA, 103 minutes) 4 stars You wanna make a wacked-out psychotropic trip of a movie, who you gonna call? Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan shot his film The Surfer in the sand dunes of Perth's beach suburbs and has none other than the kookiest of today's working actors, Nicolas Cage, in the 0lead. I'm totally here for it, as Cage's special kind of unhinged works perfectly for a film that feels like Point Break meets Wake in Fright. Cage plays a man, we don't learn his name, returned to his hometown in Australia from a lifetime living in America, just wanting to share the joys of surfing the local breaks with his teenage son (Finn Little). He has plans to buy his old family home that has come back on the market too, but one by one his plans are dashed before his eyes. A bunch of surfie thugs led by the grizzled Scally (Julian McMahon) tell the father and son that the beach is for locals only and intimidate them back to the car park, where the man's ex-wife calls to demand the son come home. Coming back to the beach later that day in his Lexus, with his work suit a little dishevelled, the man spends the afternoon on the phone to the estate agent selling his old family home (Rahel Romahn) and a finance company, trying to huckster cash to buy the house. His desperation is palpable, his dream of the beach home restoring a lost job and a broken marriage a disappearing illusion, and as the summer sun beats down, it seems there is more to lose. The surfer thugs continue to intimidate every visitor to the beach, especially an old man (Nicholas Cassim) who claims they have killed his son and dog. As days go by, the man is drawn to the very edge of his sanity, taunted by the surfers and feeling like everybody he meets is against him. It's an interesting concept that screenwriter Thomas Martin proposes for a low-budget film, the setting across five days not straying too far from a beach car park. But the film doesn't feel cheap and Martin's screenplay is a fascinating thought-piece into a modern masculinised culture fed by the Joe Rogans and Andrew Tates, of domination and performative brutalisation. And it also feels, as the sweat pours through Cage's orange Cheeto dust makeup, like a beautiful homage to Australian horror like the brutal Wake in Fright. There's a lot of Turkish dentistry going on in this film, I should say allegedly, with Cage and McMahon sporting fiercely white choppers that interestingly give some kind of backstory to these two international figures that find themselves squaring off on a Western Australian beach. Julian McMahon could almost be playing Patrick Swayze's Bodhi character from Point Break, a charismatic and physical surfer king leading loyal disciples. He holds focus even against Cage who is just bonkers, but good bonkers. Nobody Cages like Cage Cages. This posse of apparent bad guys who intimidate visitors with their "Don't live here, don't surf here" mantra have their own stories, and its the kind of nonsense I keep getting ads and infomercials for on my feeds. Lorcan Finnegan directs with a frenzy at times, plenty of movement to his camera, plenty of lens flare reinforcing the acid trip impression, probably just trying to keep up with Cage and hoping it all works. It does; it's the kind of film, if I had a cinema of my own, I would be programming for late late shows. It's perfect for the smoke-affected university students who stay up for these kids of things. The Surfer (MA, 103 minutes) 4 stars You wanna make a wacked-out psychotropic trip of a movie, who you gonna call? Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan shot his film The Surfer in the sand dunes of Perth's beach suburbs and has none other than the kookiest of today's working actors, Nicolas Cage, in the 0lead. I'm totally here for it, as Cage's special kind of unhinged works perfectly for a film that feels like Point Break meets Wake in Fright. Cage plays a man, we don't learn his name, returned to his hometown in Australia from a lifetime living in America, just wanting to share the joys of surfing the local breaks with his teenage son (Finn Little). He has plans to buy his old family home that has come back on the market too, but one by one his plans are dashed before his eyes. A bunch of surfie thugs led by the grizzled Scally (Julian McMahon) tell the father and son that the beach is for locals only and intimidate them back to the car park, where the man's ex-wife calls to demand the son come home. Coming back to the beach later that day in his Lexus, with his work suit a little dishevelled, the man spends the afternoon on the phone to the estate agent selling his old family home (Rahel Romahn) and a finance company, trying to huckster cash to buy the house. His desperation is palpable, his dream of the beach home restoring a lost job and a broken marriage a disappearing illusion, and as the summer sun beats down, it seems there is more to lose. The surfer thugs continue to intimidate every visitor to the beach, especially an old man (Nicholas Cassim) who claims they have killed his son and dog. As days go by, the man is drawn to the very edge of his sanity, taunted by the surfers and feeling like everybody he meets is against him. It's an interesting concept that screenwriter Thomas Martin proposes for a low-budget film, the setting across five days not straying too far from a beach car park. But the film doesn't feel cheap and Martin's screenplay is a fascinating thought-piece into a modern masculinised culture fed by the Joe Rogans and Andrew Tates, of domination and performative brutalisation. And it also feels, as the sweat pours through Cage's orange Cheeto dust makeup, like a beautiful homage to Australian horror like the brutal Wake in Fright. There's a lot of Turkish dentistry going on in this film, I should say allegedly, with Cage and McMahon sporting fiercely white choppers that interestingly give some kind of backstory to these two international figures that find themselves squaring off on a Western Australian beach. Julian McMahon could almost be playing Patrick Swayze's Bodhi character from Point Break, a charismatic and physical surfer king leading loyal disciples. He holds focus even against Cage who is just bonkers, but good bonkers. Nobody Cages like Cage Cages. This posse of apparent bad guys who intimidate visitors with their "Don't live here, don't surf here" mantra have their own stories, and its the kind of nonsense I keep getting ads and infomercials for on my feeds. Lorcan Finnegan directs with a frenzy at times, plenty of movement to his camera, plenty of lens flare reinforcing the acid trip impression, probably just trying to keep up with Cage and hoping it all works. It does; it's the kind of film, if I had a cinema of my own, I would be programming for late late shows. It's perfect for the smoke-affected university students who stay up for these kids of things.
The Advertiser
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Like Home and Away on crack: will Aussies bristle at toxic beach Ockers?
"I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic." Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage. Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up. He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage. But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn. "Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face. But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach. It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point. As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind. Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real. Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978). Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek). Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits. "When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend. "So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian." But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians. "This isn't a critique of Australia," he says. "It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis." Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity. The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark. But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places. At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss. Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus. "We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that." Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours. He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack. "Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it." What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk! "I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic." Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage. Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up. He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage. But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn. "Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face. But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach. It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point. As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind. Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real. Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978). Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek). Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits. "When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend. "So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian." But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians. "This isn't a critique of Australia," he says. "It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis." Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity. The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark. But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places. At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss. Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus. "We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that." Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours. He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack. "Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it." What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk! "I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic." Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage. Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up. He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage. But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn. "Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face. But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach. It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point. As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind. Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real. Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978). Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek). Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits. "When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend. "So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian." But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians. "This isn't a critique of Australia," he says. "It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis." Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity. The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark. But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places. At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss. Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus. "We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that." Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours. He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack. "Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it." What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk! "I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic." Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage. Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up. He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage. But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn. "Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face. But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach. It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point. As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind. Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real. Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978). Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek). Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits. "When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend. "So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian." But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians. "This isn't a critique of Australia," he says. "It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis." Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity. The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark. But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places. At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss. Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus. "We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that." Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours. He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack. "Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it." What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
American Military News
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- American Military News
Ted Kotcheff, ‘First Blood' and ‘Weekend at Bernie's' director, dies at 94
Prolific Canadian-born filmmaker Ted Kotcheff, who directed the films 'First Blood,' 'Weekend at Bernie's,' 'Wake in Fright,' 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,' 'Fun With Dick and Jane' and 'North Dallas Forty,' in addition to a long run as an executive producer on 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,' has died. He was 94. Kotcheff's daughter Kate Kotcheff said via email that he died peacefully while under sedation Thursday night in a hospital in Nuevo Nayarit, Mexico. In a 1975 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Kotcheff said, 'The sense of being outside of the mainstream of the community has always attracted me. All my pictures deal with people outside or people who don't know what's driving them.' Born in Toronto on April 7, 1931, to Bulgarian immigrants, Kotcheff began working in television in the early 1950s. He later moved to the U.K., directing for both stage and television. In 1971, he directed 'Wake in Fright' in Australia, which a Times review upon its 2012 re-release called, 'raw, unsettling and mesmerizing.' Returning to Canada in the early 1970s, Kotcheff directed 1974's adaptation of Mordecai Richler's 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz' starring Richard Dreyfuss that would win the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival and earn writer Lionel Chetwynd an Academy Award nomination for adapted screenplay. Kotcheff found huge success in Hollywood with 1982's 'First Blood,' which first introduced the traumatized Vietnam veteran John Rambo played by Sylvester Stallone. Reviewing 'First Blood,' Times critic Sheila Benson wrote, 'this violent and disturbing film is exceptionally well made.' Benson added, 'If it is possible to dislike and admire a film in almost equal measure, then 'First Blood' would win on that split ticket. … Kotcheff has seared so many lingering examples of exultant nihilism into our brains that words to the contrary are so much sop. It's action, not words, that makes 'First Blood' run, and the action is frightening, indeed.' If 'First Blood' tapped into the despair and anxiety of post-Vietnam America, 1989's 'Weekend at Bernie's' became an unlikely cultural touchstone for its carefree, freewheeling playfulness, displaying Kotcheff's versatility. The film follows two ambitious young men (played by Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman) who create a series of elaborate ruses over the course of a hectic weekend that their sketchy boss (Terry Kiser) actually isn't dead. In a review of 'Bernie's,' Times critic Kevin Thomas wrote that, 'a weekend among the rich, the jaded and the corrupt is just the right cup of tea for an acid social satirist such as Kotcheff,' also noting the filmmaker's small cameo in the film as father to one of the young men. Eventually Kotcheff returned to television, working for more than 10 years and on nearly 300 episodes of 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.' In 2011, Kotcheff received a lifetime achievement award from the Directors Guild of Canada. He published a memoir, 'Director's Cut: My Life in Film,' in 2017. Kotcheff is survived by his wife, Laifun Chung, and children Kate and Thomas Kotcheff. He is predeceased by his first wife, actress Sylvia Kay, with whom he had three children. ___ © 2025 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ted Kotcheff obituary
The Canadian film-maker Ted Kotcheff, who has died aged 94, was denied entry to the US for being a suspected communist, banned for life from the Royal Albert Hall for organising a 1968 anti-apartheid charity show that ended with the burning of the American flag, and directed a TV play, broadcast live, in which one of the actors died during the second act. If this suggests a calamitous career, the reality was very different. Kotcheff's beginnings as a hired hand in Canadian television left him well-placed to become one of the most versatile directors in commercial cinema. How could the same man who made the terrifying thriller Wake in Fright (1971), which Martin Scorsese called 'disturbing' and 'beautifully calibrated', be responsible also for the lively coming-of-age comedy The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) starring a young, zingy Richard Dreyfuss? How could one film-maker leap from the gritty First Blood (1982), with Sylvester Stallone as the Vietnam veteran and proto-survivalist John Rambo, to the macabre slapstick of Weekend at Bernie's (1989), in which two insurance company employees try to pass off their dead boss as living? Kotcheff did. And he did it exceedingly well, without ever repeating himself. He turned down the sequel to First Blood, reasoning that Rambo was 'a man who abhorred violence [and] wrestled with the moral dilemma of violence in Vietnam' whereas the follow-up turned him into 'a gratuitous killing machine'. He also declined to direct the Weekend at Bernie's sequel, saying he had 'run out of dead man jokes, or at least the desire to stage them'. It was more his style to make, say, a TV version of Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice with Ingrid Bergman, which he did in 1967, or Billy Two Hats (1974), starring Gregory Peck, which had the distinction of being the first western shot in Israel. He was born William Kotcheff in Toronto, to immigrant parents – Theodore, a Macedonian restaurateur, and Diana (nee Christoff), who was Bulgarian – and raised in the slum neighbourhood known as Cabbagetown. He accompanied his parents to rehearsals for their leftwing theatre group, which put on plays in a Bulgarian-Macedonian hall, and appeared on stage at the age of five as a village child in The Macedonian Blood Wedding. He was educated at Silverthorn public school and Runnymede collegiate institute and graduated in 1952 from the University of Toronto with a degree in English. It was during his early days at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that he changed his first name: the company already had 12 Bills working there, so he promoted one of his middle names (Theodore), though he reverted to William for the credits on his first film, the comedy-drama Tiara Tahiti (1962), starring James Mason. In 1953, he travelled with a fellow CBC stagehand to New York for a holiday, only to have his entry to the US barred because of his brief membership, six years earlier, of the Left Wing Book Club in Toronto. The ban shaped the next few decades of his career. 'It marooned me professionally in Canada, which had no film industry whatsoever at that time,' he said. Nevertheless, he quickly made his mark in television, directing a major anthology series at 24 and proceeding to live TV drama. Eager to expand his talents, he was stymied by the lack of a national cinema and the monopoly that British directors had on directing Canadian theatre. While compatriots such as Arthur Hiller and Norman Jewison had relocated to Hollywood, Kotcheff headed for the UK, where he found TV and theatre work. It was during the transmission of his live TV play Underground (1958), about survivors of a bomb attack on London, that the actor Gareth Jones, who played the villain, suffered a fatal heart attack. As Jones was stretchered away, Kotcheff hastily rejigged the third act to conceal the sudden absence of the drama's chief antagonist. 'One TV critic thought it was a brilliant narrative device of mine to eliminate the character,' he said. His second film, Life at the Top (1965), followed the main character from the kitchen sink drama Room at the Top, again played by Laurence Harvey and now married with two children but with a wandering eye and vague political ambitions. It brought Kotcheff to the attention of Michelangelo Antonioni, who sought his advice on cutting 20 minutes from his existential thriller Blow-Up (1966). 'He ended up using practically all of my suggestions,' Kotcheff said. His stock continued to rise with the award-winning TV film Edna, the Inebriate Woman, broadcast in 1971 as a BBC Play for Today to an audience of more than nine million. Written by Jeremy Sandford, also responsible for Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home (1966), it starred Patricia Hayes as the title character, who is unhoused and alcoholic. The choice of a predominantly comic actor to play dramatic material was inspired, though Kotcheff had to plead with ITV to release Hayes from her filming commitments on The Benny Hill Show. In the same year, Wake in Fright had its premiere at Cannes, where the young Scorsese expressed his admiration for the film vocally throughout the screening. Evan Jones, with whom Kotcheff had collaborated on the race drama Two Gentlemen Sharing (1969), adapted Wake in Fright from Kenneth Cook's novel about a schoolteacher who loses all his money gambling in the outback and ends up stranded there. Kotcheff, who shot the film in punishing conditions ('110 degrees in the shade – and there was no shade'), described it as 'one man's descent into hell'. He evoked that infernal mood masterfully, not least in harrowing climactic footage of a real-life kangaroo hunt. But the devil was in the tiniest details, too. Kotcheff specified to the design and costume departments that there should be no cool colours on screen ('I want the intense heat of the outback to be omnipresent,' he told them). He also sprayed the interiors with dust that was tinted the colour of the outback desert, and released small quantities of flies on to the set during every take. His next film, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, was adapted by his friend Mordecai Richler from Richler's own 1959 novel about an ambitious and restless young man bouncing from one money-making venture to the next in Montreal's Jewish area. In one, Duddy (Dreyfuss) hires an over-the-hill documentary maker (Denholm Elliott) to shoot a barmitzvah. In a genius move, Kotcheff includes the hilariously highfalutin result as a film-within-the-film. He described The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival, as 'his entrée into Hollywood', and found that previous objections to him entering the US had evaporated. He made his Hollywood debut with the comedy Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), starring Jane Fonda and George Segal as a middle-class couple who turn to crime when their fortunes take a downturn. Segal was also the star of Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978), AKA Too Many Chefs, an eccentric and underrated black comedy to which Kotcheff brought his customary flair and eye for detail. Shooting in Michelin-starred restaurants, it was the only one of his films during which he gained rather than lost weight. North Dallas Forty (1979) was an unsentimental study of life inside the NFL, with Nick Nolte superb as a veteran wide receiver bruised and buffeted by the sport. The NFL refused to cooperate with the production, and it was rumoured that former players who did were later shunned by the organisation. First Blood and another Vietnam-oriented project, Uncommon Valour (1983), with Gene Hackman as a former Marine colonel who returns to Laos to find his missing son, were sandwiched between two films starring James Woods: In Split Image (1982), he was a brutal cult deprogrammer, while in Joshua: Then and Now (1984), again adapted by Richler from one of his novels, he was a writer whose once-perfect life is in tatters. Switching Channels (1987), a comedy set at a TV station, was scuppered by the last-minute replacement of Michael Caine with Burt Reynolds, who sparred constantly with his co-star, Kathleen Turner. Kotcheff never had another box-office success after Weekend at Bernie's, and drifted instead into directing TV movies, though he had a sizeable small-screen hit on his hands as the producer of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which he ran between 2000 and 2012. In his 2017 autobiography, he proudly described his filmography as a 'gumbo', and said: 'The only thing I have never done is what others expected me to do.' He is survived by his second wife, Laifun Chung, and their children, Alexandra and Thomas, and by three children, Aaron, Katrina and Joshua, from his marriage to the actor Sylvia Kay (one of the stars of Wake in Fright), which ended in divorce. William Theodore Constantine Kotcheff, film director, born 7 April 1931; died 10 April 2025
The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ted Kotcheff, director of First Blood, Weekend at Bernie's and Wake in Fright, dies aged 94
Ted Kotcheff, the prolific Canadian director of films including First Blood, Weekend at Bernie's, Wake in Fright and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, has died aged 94. His daughter Kate Kotcheff told the Canadian Press that he had died of heart failure on Thursday in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, where he lived. His son Thomas said: 'He died of old age, peacefully, and surrounded by loved ones.' In an amazingly varied career, Kotcheff's work ranged from hardhitting TV plays and low-budget features in the UK, to hit Hollywood comedies and prestige-laden award-winners and cult films. Kate Kotcheff said: 'He was an amazing storyteller. He was an incredible, larger than life character [and] he was a director who could turn his hand to anything.' The son of Bulgarian/Macedonian immigrants to Canada, Kotcheff was born in 1931 in Toronto, and raised in the city's Cabbagetown district. After earning a degree in Ebglish literature from Toronto University, Kotcheff joined a fledgling CBC in the early 1950s, part of a remarkable generation that included Norman Jewison, Arthur Hiller, Sidney J Furie and Alvin Rakoff. Like them, he felt he had to move away to further his career, and Kotcheff came to London in 1957 and began making TV plays for strands including Hour of Mystery, Armchair Theatre and ITV Playhouse. These included an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones in 1958, written by Terry Southern and starring Kenneth Spencer and Harry H Corbett, No Trams to Lime Street in 1959, written by Alun Owen, and – infamously – Underground in 1958, in which actor Gareth Jones collapsed and died during a live transmission. Kotcheff moved into features in the early 60s, making his debut with the 1962 comedy Tiara Tahiti, starring James Mason and John Mills, following it up with Life at the Top, the sequel to hit kitchen sink drama Room at the Top, in 1965, and the race-issue drama Two Gentlemen Sharing in 1969. In the same period Kotcheff also directed the original production of Lionel Bart's celebrated musical Maggie May, which premiered in 1964. Kotcheff continued to work in TV, directing Ingrid Bergman in an adaptation of Jean Cocteau's La Voix Humaine in 1967, and achieving perhaps his high point with a contribution to Play for Today in 1971, starring Patricia Hayes as a homeless alcoholic in Edna the Inebriate Woman. However his career took an unexpected detour in the same year with the cult Australian film Wake in Fright, for which he was offered the job to direct despite never having visited the country. Despite being poorly received in its home country due to its uncompromising depiction of a brutally cruel Australian outback, including notorious scenes of a kangaroo hunt, Wake in Fright was selected for the Cannes film festival and went on to become celebrated as a landmark film, both as part of the Australian new wave of the 1970s and as a pioneering entry in the 'Ozploitation' subgenre. In 1974 Kotcheff finally realised his ambition of making a successful Canadian feature film with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; starring Richard Dreyfuss, it was adapted from a novel by his friend (and former housemate in London) Mordecai Richler, with whom he had worked on a string of British productions – including an Armchair Theatre adaptation of Duddy Kravitz in 1961. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival and was a major commercial success in Canada. As a result, Hollywood took notice and Kotcheff was hired to make satirical comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, starring George Segal and Jane Fonda as a successful married couple who turn to crime after Segal is fired. It was a hit on its release in 1977, and Kotcheff followed it up with another Segal comedy Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? and Nick Nolte American football film North Dallas Forty. Kotcheff then released arguably his most influential film: the Sylvester Stallone action film First Blood, which had numerous directors and lead actors attached to it before Kotcheff offered the role to Stallone and production got underway in 1981. A depiction of an emotionally embattled Vietnam veteran, First Blood was a sizeable hit and spawned two sequels, including Rambo: First Blood Part II which became a career-defining success for Stallone in 1985. Kotcheff had another big success at the end of the decade: the dead-body comedy Weekend at Bernie's, starring Andrew McCarthy. After the failure of the Tom Selleck comedy Folks! in 1992, Kotcheff returned to TV, and in 2000 joined the long running crime show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as executive producer and occasional director, where he remained for 12 seasons. Kotcheff was married twice, to Sylvia Kay between 1962 and 1972, and to Laifun Chung, who survives him.
