I am probably over critical of most Australian movies, basically on account of the cringe factor, ie,"Gees, they're not going to show THAT somewhere else, are they." Once in a while though, you come across a domestic gem, like "Muriels Wedding", "The Dish", "The Castle", and "Paperback Hero", which I just love to bits, and they seem to put the Australian idiom into some kind of sense, and I love ém. Well anyway, I just found another one to add to that list."Mr Reliable." I remember the incident in the late sixties, when Wally Mellish held his girlfriend/de facto, Beryl Muddle (Yes folks, they were their real names) up in a hostage situation for 5 or 6 days, and it was the talk of the media for a long while. Anyway, it is a lovely, funny, easy to watch little movie that is well worth wasting a couple of hours of your life on. I doubt very much whether Wally was such a likable idiot in real life, and Beryls legs probably didn't go all the way to the ground like they did in the movie, but it is a good watch. You can see the various scrapes that they get into coming a mile away, which really only give the whole thing a sense of inevitability. And it is a great snapshot of mid sixties Australia, in so many respects. The summer heat, the cars, the crowds, the emerging hippy culture, the xenophobia as regards "new Australians", the black and white television. Well worth a look.
