David Stratton’s newest book – a weighty tome chronicling contemporary Australian cinema – will probably be the last published material from the beloved critic and former television presenter who, now 85, has several health issues including a disease that has caused him to lose much of his sight. This is the reason, Stratton tells me, that he retired from reviewing in 2023.
“I’m not completely blind,” he says, “but I can’t see well enough to review films any more. Everything is a little out of focus. I’m not in the best of health at the moment. When you get to my age, I guess you expect these things. I was pleased that I managed to finish the book.”
Attempting to cover every locally produced feature made between 1990 and 2020, Australia at the Movies is a work of archeology as much as criticism. It compiles around 650 reviews, encompassing the big hitters – think Muriel’s Wedding, Strictly Ballroom, Mad Max: Fury Road – as well as championing smaller productions that barely saw the light of day or fizzled at the box office. These include, among many others, Partho Sen-Gupta’s portrait of a Palestinian Australian slam poet, Slam (“convincing and enthralling”), and Serhat Caradee’s dialogue-heavy Sydney-set drama A Lion Returns (“hermetic and potent”). This is Stratton’s sixth book, including two others on Australian cinema: 1980’s The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival, and 1990’s The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry.
Stratton rewatched all the films and formed Australia at the Movies from rough notes written over many years; he estimates he has notes on around 35,000 films stored in loose-leaf folders at his home in the Blue Mountains. The octogenarian is an old-school, dyed-in-the-wool cinema lover: he never got into scripted television, let alone streaming. He’s “very fascinated by politics” and watches the nightly news, plus ABC shows such as Media Watch and Insiders, but “apart from that I don’t watch TV at all”.
But much of the best content these days is on the small screen, I say. “Yeah, I know,” Stratton replies. “Everybody tells me. I have tried. One time, when I was doing a Q and A with Jane Campion, I think I upset her a little because I said I tried to watch Top of the Lake. But you know, it’s padded. It’s a bit elephantine … the one series I did recently really like was Ripley. I thought it was so beautifully shot. Again, a bit padded, but I thought it was pretty damn good. So there’s hope for me yet.”
When I suggest Stratton should carve out time for the terrific new series Thou Shalt Not Steal from director Dylan River – son of auteur Warwick Thornton and producer Penelope McDonald – he says: “I’ll try watching that, because I think he’s a great talent. God, they’re a talented family.”
The last chapter of Stratton’s film-reviewing career, which began in the 1980s and included co-hosting ABC TV’s At the Movies and SBS’s The Movie Show, overlapped with the rise and dominance of superhero movies, which shot to the centre of the zeitgeist in the last couple of decades. He and I feel similarly about them: sympathetic to the view espoused by Martin Scorsese, who famously compared Marvel productions to theme park rides.
“Marty’s right,” says Stratton. “I never enjoyed those films. It seemed to me they were all the same, with clever visual effects but very little variation.”
On the subject of productions that Stratton has changed his mind about over the years, Rob Sitch’s oft-quoted 1997 classic The Castle is the first that springs to mind. He initially “thought it looked like a telemovie” and “the humour didn’t appeal to me very much”, awarding the film one-and-a-half stars. “[But] I was sort of jilted upright by how popular it became. So I watched it again, and have two or three times since, and now I really enjoy it,” he says. “I think Tiriel Mora is hilarious, talking about ‘the vibe’. Things can improve when you look at them a second or third time.”
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Among the veteran reviewer’s bugbears is the idea that films become “dated”. He tells me he prohibited students from using that word during his 35-year stint teaching cinema at University of Sydney, and is perhaps particularly relevant during an era of heightened sensitivities and political awareness.
“Films are not dated,” he says. “They are a reflection of the era in which they were made. It’s like that famous quote from The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.’ You don’t expect the same attitudes we have today to be reflected in a film made in the 1950s … and in 20 years’ time, when we’re watching now-current films, they’ll be a reflection of the attitudes of today too.
“That’s one reason I love the cinema – because it doesn’t change. We can always see the young Greta Garbo, the young James Stewart, the young Cary Grant … they’re always the same. I love that.”