Boy from Chinese peasant family gets plucked from obscurity and is sent skyrocketing onto ballet stages. Boy travels to America, achieves stardom and falls in love, but is facing a forced return to his homeland. Boy faces dilemma – will he ever see his family again?

That essentially wraps up Mao’s Last Dancer, which is based on the true story of Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin (played by Chi Cao).

Those people over in Tinseltown have been running out of ideas since, well, forever – but with remakes coming ever sooner to the next generation of cinema-goers, how are audiences not expected to go with what’s offered to them? At the time of writing, kids in Australia on school holidays are being offered family-oriented features, as is the norm. While Fame may sit on the edge of this boundary because of a more mature theme, this ‘re-imagining’ of the 1980 cult hit still aims to appeal to a younger audience. It doesn’t have the ‘sex factor’ of Centre Stage, Step Up or even TV’s Glee, which from what we’ve seen is shaping up to be a more comedic (but still intense) look at the desires of performers. While those who’ve seen the original are sure to have different opinions and comparisons to those who haven’t, Fame in its 2009 form doesn’t appear as a remake – but it fails to make a significant mark.

If you’re familiar with Seth McFarlane’s Family Guy, then you’ll know that a majority of the show’s funniest moments are those quick cutaway gags that often have little to do with the plot or central characters. Seth McFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy is essentially fifty of these cutaway gags slapped on a DVD and played back to back. No continuing plot, no overriding characters, no particular order. Just raw, uncensored hilarity… for fifty short, expensive minutes.

I feel it important to state up front that the kitchen and I do not get along. While we inevitably cross paths from time to time, I try not to make eye contact let alone a meal. This might explain why Julie & Julia didn’t remotely appease my appetite. It’s a film that spends so much time celebrating the art of cooking, it forgets to be about anything else. It’s not a drama, as there is hardly a moment of drama to speak of (conflict, what conflict?). It’s not a romance, as everyone in the film is already happily partnered up. It’s not even a comedy, as the funniest moment on offer is a replay of Dan Aykroyd’s impersonation of Julia Child in a Saturday Night Live skit. It is, however, a biography. Two, in fact.

It seems to be that stories of war, whether they are films, history books or otherwise, focus on one of two perspectives: the Anglo-American, or the German. It’s either English speaking diggers and GIs, or it’s blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nazi’s sauntering around and Heil-ing Hitler. It’s not often that Russian participation is considered, nor is the impact that World War II may still be having on the current generation of young Russians.

Indigenous writer/director Richard J. Frankland talks to us about breaking the mould with his film ‘Stone Bros.’, the first ever Aboriginal comedy in Australia.