More corn, more hype, more Australiana

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12 October 2009Lynden Barber has a solution to the malaise affecting the Australian film industry — and middle class arty types aren't gonna like it, he warns in New Matilda.

The scale of the audience crisis facing Australian films became dramatically clear to me last year when I went with my partner to see a new road movie called Cactus at Sydney's Chauvel cinema. The screening was a depressing experience. Not because of the film, which we both enjoyed. The downer was the fact that our seats were the only ones of the cinema's 365 to be occupied.

This, please note, was not at the end of the film's run or on a quiet, rainy night — it was on the film's opening Sunday, with generally favourable (three and three and a half star) reviews, still fresh in the memory from the weekend's newspapers.

We asked a staff member on the way out what the problem was and if the film had been getting more of an audience in other sessions. His reply: "You're the first people to turn up in three sessions".

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