Any Questions for Ben?

» THERE was The Castle, there was The Dish, and now Any Questions for Ben?

A decade and a year after The Dish, the highly successful Working Dog gang has now come up with its new film Any Questions for Ben? written by Rob Sitch (who directs the movie), Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner.

In the ensemble cast are Josh Lawson, Rachael Taylor, Daniel Henshall, Christian Clark and Felicity Ward.

It's a school reunion film where somehow, uncharacteristically, no one asks a question of Ben (Lawson).

Are there any questions for Working Dog?

Happy Feet Two

» GEORGE Miller's sequel to his award-winning animated feature, Happy Feet, opened in North American cinemas on November 18 and will be flapping its flightless wings to Sydney on Boxing Day.

The 2006 film Happy Feet was named best animated feature film at the 2007 US Academy Awards and at the BAFTA Awards the same year. In Australia, Miller received the global achievement award from the Australian Film Institute.

Now, after five years, Happy Feet Two, produced in Sydney and released in North America in digital 3D and Imax 3D, is following in the dancing steps of nimble-footed Mumble who now has a son, Erik, who — shock! horror! — can't or won't dance.

Elijah Wood again voices Mumble, with Robin Williams as Ramon/Lovelace and Pink as Gloria (voiced by Brittany Murphy in the 2006 film). Other voices in Happy Feet Two include those of Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Hank Azaria, Magda Szubanski, Hugo Weaving and Anthony LaPaglia.

Happy Feet Two recounts a catastrophe that hits the penguin world, consequently putting Erik's life at risk, and Mumble must bring together the penguin nations and other sea creatures, from tiny krill to giant elephant seals, to set things right with their world again.

Burning Man

» SYDNEY-born director Jonathan Teplitzky (Better than Sex, Gettin' Square) uses Bondi Beach as the setting of his latest film, Burning Man. In Better than Sex it was, of course, Sydney and partly London, and in Gettin' Square the Gold Coast.

Teplitzky, who was nominated for best director at the Australian Film Institute Awards in 2000 and 2003 for his first two feature films, captures the spirit and sense of place of a distinctively contemporary Australian mileu, in which his film stories play out.

Burning Man casts British actor Matthew Goode as a Bondi-based chef into a simmering Trelitzky mix with Aussie actresses Bojana Novakovic, Essie Davis, Kate Beahan, Rachel Griffiths and New Zealander Kerry Fox. It's a recipe of much complication that Trelitzky brews.

Burning Man screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and opened in Sydney this month.

Warrior

» JOEL Edgerton, twice winner of the Australian Film Institute Award for acting, plays one of two brothers in a family broken by alcohol and abuse in the Gavin O'Connor film Warrior.

The film, which has a fine triumvirate of actors in Tom Hardy, Edgerton and Nick Nolte, has had strong US box office results and there's been much favorable critical response.

Marked by brutal mixed-martial-arts fights, the film traces the way the brothers, with great depth of character, head inexorably into a showdown in the ring.

Blacktown-born Edgerton, who won the best supporting actor AFI award last year for his role in Animal KIngdom, also received the best actor award in a TV drama for The Secret Life of Us in 2001.

In 2009, he starred alongside Cate Blanchett as Stanley in the Sydney Theatre Company production of A Streetcar Named Desire. A production of this play was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music later that year.

Edgerton is in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby now being filmed in Sydney.

The Hunter

» THE Tasmanian tiger, believed to be now extinct, is the hunter's prey in the new film by Porchlight Films, producers of prize-winning Aussie film Animal Kingdom.

The film is The Hunter, directed by Sydney-based Daniel Nettheim and starring Willem Dafoe with Caroline O'Connor and Sam Neill.

It was filmed in the wilds of Tasmania and opened early this month in Sydney.

The film is based on the novel by Julia Leigh who debuted as director of the film Sleeping Beauty which screened at several film festivals and so is no stranger to filmmaking herself. The Hunter was Leigh's first novel.

Dafoe plays a Canadian mercenary who has been tasked by a mysterious biotech company with capturing a Tasmanian tiger whose existence has been fuelled by reports of sightings.

O'Connor plays the mother of two children whose husband has been missing in the wilderness for months. On the suggestion of a local (Neill), her house becomes a base for the Tasmanian tiger hunter.

The Hunter was screened at the Toronto Film Festival where Leigh's film was also being shown.

Eye of the Storm

» NOBEL laureate Patrick White's novel Eye of the Storm has been translated into film by director Fred Schepsi with a cast, aside from English actress Charlotte Rampling, headed by Australians Geofrrey Rush and Judy Davis.

Also in the cast are Colin Friels, Robyn Nevin, Helen Morse and John Gaden.

This is Schepisi's first local film since Evil Angels in 1988. Since his acclaimed work in Australian films The Devil's Playground and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith in the late 1970s, Schepisi had mostly worked in the US on such films as The Russia House, Six Degrees of Separation and Last Orders.

Eye of the Storm is White's first novel to be adapted and made into film, and concerns an aging socialite whose children pick over their inheritance.

It was screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival earlier this year where it received The Age Critics Award for the best Australian feature.

Red Dog

» THE story of Western Australia's lovable hitchhiking Red Dog has won the inaugural Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Award for best film.

Red Dog also swept the earlier IF Awards field by winning in seven categories including best feature film and best box office achievement.

The film Red Dog, directed by Kriv Stenders, tells the story of the red kelpie who adopted new families and touched hearts all over the Pilbara region.

Starring in Red Dog are Koko as Red Dog and actors Josh Lucas, Rachael Taylor, Noah Taylor and Keisha Castle-Hughes.

Stenders won the IF Award for best director with Lucas named best actor. Red Dog also won awards for best script (Daniel Taplitz), best music ( Cezary Skubiszewski) and best cinematography ( Geoff Hall).

The IF Awards were held on November 16 at Luna Park.

Prize-winning Red Dog is based on the book by British novelist Louis de Bernières, who sourced it from Australian publications and newspaper clippings in local Western Australia libraries.

Red Dog was famous for hitchhiking to various Western Australia destinations, usually running in front of incoming vehicles to force them to stop and give him a ride.

He became such a beloved Pilbara character that once, when he was pushed off a bus by a new woman driver, the passengers walked off in protest.

A statue has been erected in Dampier, Western Australia, to honor Red Dog.

The True Story of Red Dog.

is published weekly except in the last two weeks in December and the first two weeks in January. Copyright 2012 Larry Rivera