Idiot Box (1997)

Excellent but underrated film

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

A realistic and stark view of life in the western suburbs of Sydney seen through the eyes of two testosterone filled young men Kev and Mick and the people they come across. From their boredom and lack of direction in life they plan an audacious bank robbery to solve their financial situation.Unfortunately for me the plot didn't flow all that well despite being a good concept, it seems to rely too much on violence and excessive swearing,and in some cases corny dialogue as filler for the most part.By leaving out the drug dealing husband and his heroin addict wife I believe the story might have been a lot better and more consistently. The characters themselves are either poorly fleshed out or stereotyped. One example of this is the 'Anyone comes near me and I'll knock their $%#!ing head off', personality of Kev will grind after a while,as does Mick's attempts to seduce the girl working at the bottle shop(which does work in the end).All in all 'Idiot Box' is a total and utter piece of 90's rubbish and should only be viewed in the genre it is classified as,dark comedy.

A rip-snortingly good seriocomic Australian crime caper romp about Kev and Mick, who are a couple of slothful, shiftless, luckless, jobless, penniless, hopelessly dumb and perpetually beer-blasted couch potato twentysomething slacker meatheads who are constantly hard up for booze money. The dim-witted duo decide to reverse their misfortune by robbing a bank. Naturally, things don't go as planned, with a rival gang of clown-masked stick-up boys who've been holding up banks all over the city gumming up the works. This delightfully offbeat feature scores a 100% smack dab on the money bull's eye thanks to its engagingly off-kilter sense of raucously wiggy humor, keenly observant feel for and genuine sympathy towards miserably impoverished, just barely scraping by bottom-of-the-socioeconomic-ladder lower-class people, uniformly bang-up acting, fluid photography, and commendably unpredictable loosey-goosey narrative structure. Writer/director David Caesar tells the whole manic story with dynamic, barn-storming panache and punchy, pacy, rat-a-tat-tat bravura style to burn, adroitly pulling off a difficult balancing act of laugh-out-loud uproarious comedy and quietly affecting low-key drama (a subplot concerning the leader of the rival gang needing the stolen loot to support his junkie wife's drug habit proves to be especially poignant). The robbery itself is a marvelously tense and thrilling tour-de-force set piece. Best of all, Ben Mendelsohn as the hostile, dangerously temperamental Kev and Jeremy Simms as Kev's more laid-back, long-suffering bud Mick display a wonderfully edgy and oftentimes downright electric chemistry. While the main characters are unarguable losers, the film overall is a total winner.

What is needed for this film is a cultural reference point, that is some sort of experience/insight to suburban Australian life.As anyone who has ever lived or spent time in the western suburbs of Sydney will no doubt know, the options for fun and excitement are, to say the least, somewhat limited. All that exists is a cycle of bad straight tovideo movies, longnecks in the park, and conversations with a selection of dodgy blokes in pubs... Now with that background in place, we come to idiot box. The film, although a comedy, is no satire. It is more an accurate representation of the pointlessness and utter boredom of the Sydney suburbs an draws its humor from such. A feeling of subdued frustration prevails in this film, in fact it is the general theme of it. The characters plan to rob a bank, however woefully conceived, is an extension on this, a philosophy that it does not matter whether they succeed, fail or even try, it matters only that they have done SOMETHING. Idiot Box resonates with Sydneysiders, with Australians, it is an extremely relevant and poignant representation of a culture of boredom and frustration,a culture that lays its blame for this othersat the feet of others. It is not a film that translates well to other cultures.

I recently described Idiot Box to somebody as an Australian "Twin Town". They asked "what's Twin Town?". I replied "a Welsh Trainspotting".What could have been a run of the mill movie about two likeable hoons on the wrong side of the law ( but you root for them anyway ), was saved by some great flashes of direction and an exceptional performance by Ben Mendelsohn as Kev. it is a tribute to his characterization, that no matter how many times I see this film, I find the ending as shocking and as moving as the first time I saw it.Kev's motto is great "maximum fear, minimum time", but not one I profess to live by.Good music too.