'Starstruck’ does owe a debt to 'Countdown,’ but an unusual and complex one. It encourages a general impression that the film is a spin-off from the TV show 'Countdown’, garbage for the adolescent drive-in trade. It certainly underestimates Armstrong’s achievement with 'Starstruck’. And Armstrong is quoted as saying that she signed up as a director because “I wanted to work with Australian pop music at a time when it’s beginning to get the international recognition it deserves.” In a campaign that might have been designed to scare off anyone older than 25, the publicity for 'Starstruck’ announces the arrival of “the first Aussie modern musical comedy” and spouts other waffle about the pop/rock scene. If this is to be its fate, the promotional campaign and Armstrong’s own comments will be partly to blame. Its successor, a much better film in nearly every way, seems to be in danger of being misinterpreted or dismissed out of hand. Gillian Armstrong’s Starstruck (Midcity) is a brilliant bombshell of a film, perhaps the first satire thrown up by the Australian cinema’s New Wave.īut will the public accept it for what it is, or even see what it is?Īrmstrong’s first feature, ‘My Brilliant Career’ (1979), was little more than nostalgia clumsily dressed in feminist drag yet it won extravagant praise. ‘Starstruck’ is Armstrong’s brilliant satire And there are enough meaty ideas to be found in the script to lift the film above the epithet of mindless. The music is adequate of its kind and once or twice excellent. The talent of the young per formers is manifest and major, especially Jo Ken nedy. That the material from which the film is fashioned is slight does not detract from its effectiveness. The battle is a lot of fun for the film-goer. To win, they must defeat the entrenched forces of family and public fickleness. The pub is a reference point with reality, from which Jackie and her younger cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) launch their campaign to take the entertainment world by storm. Linking the songs is a story of life at the Harbour View, a pub for the work ing man and woman, a neighbourhood escape from boredom, a surrogate family, a place where the counter-lunches are some thing that, in one drinker’s words, you wouldn’t serve to a Jap on Anzac Day (the film was finished before the brown dog became in famous). The love-song is small, tightly controlled, and full of the pathos of Jackie’s shock at finding out that her femaleness cuts no ice with Terry, the TV compere (John O'May) who wants her only for her voice, his sexual preferences being of his own gender. Jackie (Jo Kennedy) goes on a TV talent-quest program for the obligatory “I blew it” number and to the Opera House for the big finale against a backdrop of the Bridge in flashing lights. There is a bigness about the musical production and a nice satirical quality to most of the staging of the songs. Instead, one can admire for its own sake the energy that pervades 'Starstruck’ and take pleasure from both the production values of its musical numbers and the cultural accuracy of its dramatic content. One should resist the temptation to compare this with the counterpart elements in 'Fame’, since the two films have quite different purposes. Never forcing it, they accept its occasional stumbles and get it moving again, the dramatic action and the musical numbers taking separate paths and crossing in a manner at once logical and relaxed. ![]() How it does so is worth examining.īoth writer and director have let the Him find its own pace. ‘Starstruck’ en counters all these hazards and disposes of them. The idea is simplistic, excessively cutesy and burdened by more than half a century of over-exposure. It’s very easy to make a bad film around rock mu sic, based on the notion of a great talent frustrated by absence of recognition yet winning through against all opposition to reach the final reel in a burst of success and acclamation. It’s a measure of the film’s quality that an old fogey like me found it agreeably entertaining. MacLean says he had the teeny-bopper audience in mind, from 9 to 18. Scriptwriter Stephen MacLean has re-invented the simple plot about a girl prepared to do anything to be noticed on her climb to singing stardom, then embellished it with enough serious ideas to keep it from wasting its time. A ROCK musical set mainly in a pub in Sydney’s Rocks area might not seem all that much of a good idea, yet Gillian Armstrong’s film makes the most of the genre at the same time as being great fun.
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