Volker Schlöndorff's hallucinatory adaptation of Günter Grass' novel is a slow build. Like Apocalypse Now, with whom it shared the 1979 Palme D'Or at Cannes, it's an allegorical war movie with a trippy central conceit—three-year-old Oskar (David Bennent), disgusted by petty-bourgeois post-war Poland, refuses to mature into adulthood and instead opts for a surreal journey into the dark heart of Nazism. While his Danzig neighbourhood is consumed by Hitler frenzy, Oskar is subjected to Nazi dwarves, decapitated donkeys and suicide by raw eel overdose.
A kind of Australian answer to Lock, Stock...without the masturbatory middle-class fascination with lowlife machismo, David Caesar's exuberant yarn about slot machine wars in 1960s Sydney is a riot of garish hues and lurid trouser suits. Toni Collette rises above a routine plot and meaty cast (Bryan Brown, Sam Neill) with her sassy gangster's moll routine.
Adams' career is fast becoming a blizzard of lost possibilities and abandoned trails, with his 'proper' album releases, such as Gold and Rock'n'Roll, punctuated by closet-clearing collections of outtakes like Demolition and now Love Is Hell Pt 1, the first instalment of the album supposedly deemed too much of a downer to be the 'proper' follow-up to Gold.
