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Review:
 When is an
urban legend not an urban legend? When it’s true. The tale of the
fellow who tied balloons to his lawn chair and wound fifty
thousand feet up actually happened(but this movie is totally
fiction). It’s a wonder that something like this movie wasn’t made
twenty years ago.
Danny Morgan(Rhys Ifans) drives a cement truck in a suburb of
Sydney, Australia and lives with his long-time girlfriend Trudy
Dunphy(Justine Clarke). Your typical sitcom situation if there
ever was one.
Danny has given up on doing something great with his life, but
Trudy hasn’t.She’s a real estate agent, and when superstar news
anchor Sandy Upman(Rhys Muldoon) shows up looking for a house,
well, that camping trip that she and Danny have been planning goes
out the window…leaving poor Danny with nothing to do for a week.
Then he inadvertently finds out what’s REALLY going on. He decided
to get back at Trudy by doing something weird at the party thrown
to take the place of the aborted vacation.
It all goes wrong of course, but if it went right we wouldn’t have
any movie now would we?
So Danny goes off on his magical flight to Never-Never land,
which for our purposes we’ll call Clarence. A delightful little
berg somewhere in the wilds of New South Wales, where almost
everybody is nice, especially Glenda Lake (Miranda Otto), the
towns meter maid, on who’s property Danny finally lands on when
the balloons explode in a thunderstorm.
We then follow two tracks where Danny and Trudy re-invent
themselves. Trudy becomes a celebrity of sorts what with her
boyfriend gone missing in such a spectacular manner, and Danny,
who takes the identity of one of Glenda’s old professors. Soon
both are in love with new people and are seemingly much better for
it.
Does this new idyll last forever? Or do Danny and Trudy get
back together? Ahhh! That would be telling.
The acting is wonderful Ifans is at his charming best, and Otto
is even better as his love interest. It’s nice to see her get one
of the best parts of any "Lord of the Rings" alumni. See it.
Eric Lurio
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