By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to 1992’s Strictly Ballroom, Baz Luhrmann’s much-loved debut film starring Paul Mercurio and Tara Morice.
Too soon? The Butcher can already hear the jeers and boos. “You can’t butcher Strictly Ballroom! It’s an Australian classic! You should support Australian cinema!” Really? Here are three words for you: fuck Australian cinema! It’s just as bad as American cinema, British cinema, and Romanian cinema, so why treat it like an endangered species?
And Strictly Ballroom? Well, we’re sure that superstar director Baz Luhrmann can cop a little stick, and this very website has gone embarrassingly nuts about his new Elvis movie, so what the hell, right?
Strictly Ballroom was first devised by Baz as a stage production while he was studying at The National Institute Of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) in the mid-eighties…and it shows. Why? Because most people who were studying at tertiary educational institutions in the mid-eighties were sniffing glue and listening to Duran Duran, Nik Kershaw, Bananarama and Sigue Sigue Sputnik. In other words, they didn’t exactly have all their wits about them, and when Baz adapted his play into a movie in 1992, he must have been experiencing a few after-shocks.
How else can you explain a flick which revolves around a camper-than-thou dance contest, and features a horrendous leading performance from Paul Mercurio, a dancer who was soon revealed to be a very ordinary actor in subsequent films like Back Of Beyond and Exit To Eden.
Full of “oddball humour”, “eccentric characters”, and an arch, showy visual style, Strictly Ballroom helped to usher in a raging whirl of “quirky” Aussie movies that irritated audiences so much that Australia’s entire film industry nearly vanished in a sea of sequins and ABBA songs. The film also marked the rebirth of John Paul Young, inspired a ballroom dancing craze, and launched the career of Sonia Kruger…so it has a lot to answer for. Strictly Ballroom? Strictly awful.
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against Donnie Darko, Psycho, 12 Years A Slave, Red Dog, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Breathless, Elizabeth, Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
