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    		•

    FILMS

    The Dish (2000)
  • Starring Sam Neill, Kevin Harrington, Tom Long, Patrick Warburton, Genevieve Mooy, Tayler Kane, Bille Brown, Roy Billing

  • Directed by Rob Sitch

    • There are times when I wish the world was how this film portrays it. I wish that everyone was as nice as these people. Everyone has their oddities and quirks but they're nice foibles that are easily looked over or easily laughed off. I wish that I lived in this tiny town in Australia, where you have a satellite dish in a sheep paddock.

    Most of all, I wish Sam Neill's character was someone I knew in real life. He's even-tempered and fatherly and somehow wiser than his years. He's the type of guy that you want to sit down with in a pub, or go to his home during the winter and sit in front of the fireplace and listen to his stories. He just looks like he's ready to dispense loads of good advice at any moment. Maybe it's because he wears a three-button cardigan sweater—a very grandfatherly article of clothing. Or maybe it's the fact that he smokes a pipe. My own father used to smoke a pipe. Maybe that's where I'm making the connection. Pipe-smokers always seem smarter because they're so pensive as they puff and tap and reload and pack and re-light and continue puffing. I always get the feeling that they're weighing heavy issues, considering each element with delicate and deliberate thought.

    The Dish is based on a true story though I'm fairly certain that some facts are tweaked to dramatic effect.

    The year is 1969, and in a few weeks Neil Armstrong will be the first man on the moon. In Parkes, a small backwater town in Australia, a gigantic multidirectional dish sits in a sheep field. It was built there because the weather is good all year long. Nice and mild and perfect. NASA makes an agreement to set up an interface with Parkes so that they can track Apollo 11 every hour of the day. The townspeople are very excited to be a part of the Apollo moon-landing, an event that the entire world will be watching.

    The movie is cute in the way that most things Australian are cute to Americans. We just can't get enough of those guys. (That may sound like a hack at the country or the culture down under, but it's really not. I enjoyed this film immensely, and I think Hollywood scriptwriters would do themselves a favor by reading and watching The Dish. They might learn a trick or two.)

    I think, perhaps, we don't get enough of Australian culture (through film or music or art), so we end up settling for shit like Outback Steakhouse, Paul Hogan, and Yahoo Serious. This movie is none of those things. So, here's a cry to my fellow Americans: This film has Australian's aplenty. Their accents are fun and the cast is full characters doing odd things like playing cricket in the dish, or bullshitting NASA about a few things. Go rent it.

    This is the type of movie that makes you feel good by the end of it. There's a job well done and afterwards, I felt happy about accomplishing something important—like insuring the lines of communication stayed open between the first man on the moon and NASA's headquarters. Of course, I didn't do jack-crap. I sat on my ass for two hours. But that's not the point. The movie makes you feel like you are a part of it. It's a nice feeling.

    A final side note: Patrick Warburton—"Puddy" from Seinfeld—delivers a very un-Puddy role. He's technical and formal and, well, he's a NASA scientist. It don't get much farther from Seinfeld than that.