What makes a film good

This article first appeared in the Age on March 13, 2004

A Decade Under the Influence (2pm, Sunday 14 March) is an exploration of that great decade in film making, the 1970s. While not as edgy as Peter Biskind's remarkable book on the same subject, Easy Rider Raging Bull, this doco boasts interviews with Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Roger Corman and Paul Schrader, all of whom revolutionized mainstream movies. Think The Godfather, The Exorcist, Shampoo and Taxi Driver. Think too of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, which went on to become a perfect metaphor for what the studios in the Eighties would do to the Seventies more personal form of cinema.

A Decade Under the Influence will leave you considering what makes a good film and what makes a bad. So will two Australian movies screening this week, Go Big (Channel 10, Sunday, 8.30pm) and The President vs. David Hicks (SBS, Thursday, 8.30pm).

In January 2002 David Hicks was picked up in Afghanistan and handed over to the US military. He was taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for interrogation and has been held there in a small cage ever since. He is allowed none of the rights of ordinary prisoners-of-war. No charges have been laid against him and until very recently he had no access to a lawyer. The film follows the journey made by his father, Terry, who traces his son's footsteps in an attempt to understand what has happened. Terry is a hero in the noblest sense of the word, even though he isn't articulate, and the son who he defends has clearly become an extreme fundamentalist. Never having left Australia before Terry travels to the Islamic school in Pakistan where David studied to become a Muslim missionary and then crosses deep into Afghanistan to visit a bombed out Al Qaeda camp where David may have received training. These travels are 'narrated' by extracts from the letters David has sent him over the years. Terry's is a brave journey - the journey of a man who seeks to understand his son as well as the journey of a man who embodies the notion that human rights are not conditional: they are the most fundamental right of human beings in a democracy. This documentary is a gripping piece of film making that doesn't simply rely on interesting content to make it work: it is also beautifully constructed.

Go Big, a telemovie starring Tom Long, Justine Clarke and Alex Dimitriades, is frustrating because it shies away from the hard story at the core - a story half based, it would seem, on Jamie Packer and the OneTel scandal. So anxious is this film to be a good old Aussie crowd pleaser - a la Strictly Ballroom and Muriel's Wedding - that it lurches from screwball comedy to political satire to a critique on the dark side of the Australian Dream grinning out at its audience nervously all the while, like some failed contestant from Australian Idol.

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