Tomorrow, when...

Wow. I have to say, watching Tomorrow, When the War Began the other night really drove home just how much I truly hate Blurred.

Now, let's just start by giving TWTWB its due praise: this movie rocks. It was enjoyable, pacy, well written, well acted, gripping and utterly believable (after the obviously necessary suspension of disbelief). It was thoughtful and intelligent without being artsy. The characters were fun and appealing without being "quirky". The story was dark and grim without being depressing. And, as if that wasn't enough, it was an action movie that would appeal equally to teenagers and adults, men and women.

In short, I'm still having some difficulty believing this was an Australian film.

We just don't make films like this. We make weird artsy depressing films that leave you wondering why you bothered going to the cinema. We make obnoxious unfunny comedies where every character is either "quirky" or a moron (or both). We make films we don't want to see, and then whine about the fact that no one watches our films.

TWTWB was not only an Australian film - it was an Australian film based on an Australian novel. And it still wasn't artsy and depressing. The book, Tomorrow, When the War Began was a phenomenon in Australian Young Adult Literature circles back in the 1990s, being one of the most popular books of the decade amongst teenagers and young adults. It took it's readers seriously, and treated both it's teenage characters and teenage audience like intelligent, capable people. The movie was pretty darn faithful to the book and did exactly the same thing - treated its characters and audience like intelligent, capable people.

Compare this with Blurred. Blurred was originally a play which was also something of a phenomenon in its day*. Part of a subgenre of Australian Drama known as "Australian Theatre For Young People" (I may have written a paper on this genre for my Honours in English Literature), the play was kind of artsy and depressing, but at the same time it had a bit of verve and a sense of humour. It treated its teenaged characters and audience like intelligent people. Lost, bewildered and far-too-eager-to-get-stoned-or-drunk, but intelligent none-the-less. Capable of thinking deep thoughts.

The movie took everything that made the play interesting and intelligent and replaced it with the least interesting cliches and tropes you can think of for a typical teenage comedy - you know, the kind that assumes teenagers don't actually think at all and are only interested in sex and fart jokes. The play wasn't my favourite play in the world (that would be a toss-up between The Importance of Being Earnest and Is That A Muffled Shriek?), but I liked it enough to be really disappointed with the movie.

And now, of course, now I know that Australian film makers actually are capable of making good movies that respect the source material and the audience. Now I know that we could have, if we wanted to, made a film version of Blurred that wasn't so depressingly awful. I never liked it. Now I just hate it.


* A bit of a fake phenomenon, it must be said. TWTWB was popular because kids just wanted to read it, so they bought it from bookshops or borrowed it from libraries. Blurred was just snaffled up by a lot of high school English and Drama courses because it seemed like a good idea at the time, so a lot of kids read it in class or performed sections of it (rarely the whole play) for assessment pieces. Not the same, I know, but it does mean a large number of Australian young adults were familiar with the play when the movie came out.