I love Australian films, there's just something about them; unpretentious, never flashy, always with strong characters, and a deadpan, black kind of humour (I'm thinking of 'Chopper', 'The Castle' or 'Priscilla, Queen of the Desert' here). Well 'Bad Boy Bubby' is about as dark as you can get whilst remaining humorous and engaging: incest, animal suffocation, incarceration, alcoholism, disability, parental murder... And yet, this film manages to arrive at one of the most upbeat, life-affirming endings to a movie I've ever seen. It also, along the way, manages to touch upon issues of the nature/nurture conundrum, the way in which we acquire language/thought, the rites-of-passage we go through in becoming 'adult', issues of the 'alien' or the 'other', issues of taste concerning comedy and humour (I'm referring here to the stand-up routine Bubby does at the band's gig: one of the funniest things I've ever seen in a film) and much else besides. It's a film that, even though great on a first viewing, can be enjoyed repeatedly for the depth of its themes and for one of the most extraordinary performances (by Nicolas Hope) ever captured on film (echoes of Herzog's 'The Enigma of Kasper Hauser'...God, I'm a pretentious name-dropper!). Sure, it certainly starts off in a very dark and bleak way indeed, but if you stay with it you'll be rewarded with what, in my opinion, is a masterpiece.
Review of Bad Boy Bubby
