Parker Lewis Dustin Nguyen is one of my favorite actors, and he was a major standout in 21 Jump Street (the TV series). He features in Little Fish, along with other stars such as Cate Blanchett and Sam Neill. Little Fish explores with much honesty the effect of drugs in Sydney, and the destruction it causes amongst regular folk.One of the best scenes is the choir of school children (The Sacred Heart School Choir from Cabramatta) singing Cold Chisel's Flame Trees. Catch it on Youtube if you can. It's quite a moving piece and it represents a poke in the eye to isolationist policies of the government at the time.

Scottles I found Little Fish way too slow and even turgid, it has a ponderousness which is at times nice, but frequently boring. The big problem is most of the dramatic action that is effecting the characters has already happened years before the film takes place, and at times when the various characters have intense moments about these long gone events it just makes the acting seem melodramatic because we haven't seen or felt the events they are talking about. In fact the whole piece comes across as a third act in a much larger story, and if we'd seen these original events the characters and their actions would seem much more natural.Unlike Animal Kingdom which has similar pacing but which only grows in intensity as the characters unravel because of things they are doing now, the pacing here just slows everything and waters down what interesting content there is. It's alright for the theme to be looking at people struggling with their lives after these big events, except there was way too much of them struggling with these past events rather than their lives now - all of the emotional and narrative action is centred around things we haven't seen and which aren't really explained clearly either.Hugo Weaving is brilliant and the film is worth seeing just for his performance alone. There was something about Cate Blanchett's performance I didn't like - it seemed just a bit too much of a one note take on her - there was lots of hair flicking and annoyance - but the character wasn't infused with any kind of nobility as she tried to overcome the effects of her past wrongs - that would have made for a much more engaging performance and given us some empathy for her. But then again maybe she really did hit the nail on the head because if she's selfish enough to become a drug addict in the first place there's no reason why some of those character traits wouldn't have carried over afterwards as well.Maybe as film maker myself I find it frustrating that a film that is clearly not ready to be made simply because of the script, can get made with a good budget and a good cast. The photography and music were very nice though.

johnnyboyz There is no surprise here that director Rowan Woods has gone for the more exploratory, more ambiguous and more artistic approach to his film Little Fish. The man has a relatively long line of experience in film-making and moving image production on the whole but here and now when this film was made in 2004, he persists on the exploratory and the artistic despite being given an extremely heavyweight cast that he must've known would've attracted attention abroad. And although I am all for the artistic and the experimental, the effort here just does not cut it – wearing off after about forty-five minutes.Little Fish reminded me of a BBC produced Scottish drama made in 2002 named Morvern Callar. Both films are exploratory and somewhat ambiguous in their atmosphere; both centre around a confused young female as they live out their days in a respective place that is simple and unspectacular but all the more realistic for it. Both women are faced with an immediate moral choice regarding an event in which the repercussions would be severe: unreported suicide in Morvern Callar and the re-introduction to drugs in Little Fish. Cate Blanchett plays Tracy, an Australian woman in a Sydney suburb tempted back into the world of drug dealing after suffering a prior tragedy, years ago. Blanchett does her usual oblivious faced, soft spoken role that almost demands the audience feel sorry for her or at least 'side' with her – see Elizabeth and Bandits for other examples. She has some friends, some family, a cute little job in a video store and generally gets on well with life following her prior excursion into the world of the 'don't go there'.But complications arise and the film begins to loose its focus around about the hour mark. Little Fish is not really about too much when you break things down for the first hour or so bar life in Australia, circa 2004 or 2005 depending on weather you want to go by shooting dates or release dates. Given this fact, the film could really be set anywhere and at anytime in history providing the location is developed enough to have a video rental store. The characters in this film are cardboard and uninteresting, most of the time the film will be more interested in giving them funky sounding ring-tones than developing them beyond mere people who stand and talk for minutes on end. What do we know about Lionel played by acting heavyweight Hugo Weaving? We know that he was an Aussie Rules footballer but that is only through the various shots of posters displaying him in action. Apart from this, any dialogue or individual scenes are uninteresting and bland with that distinct annoying feeling you get when a film is trying to pile on an artistic presence.But then the film brings in its weak attempt at a narrative and its unexciting character development. The people in this film are uninteresting people with uninteresting goals. One character wants to get a new floor for her apartment; Tracy herself wants to open a shop in the said area and the general plot goal throughout is to generally avoid the drugs business and stay away from the wrong people – how exciting. But after being rejected for various loans in two of only very few scenes early on that actually further the film, it seems Tracy's ideas about participating in a drug deal may be too strong to turn down. She will after all, get a lot of money out of it for not much. Primarily, people come and then they go in the film without doing or saying that much. Jonny (Nguyen) is an ex-flame and a somewhat boring love interest that slows the film down needlessly; the scenes around Lionel and constant reminder of his past glories are old after the first time and after pottering about with Tracy for a long while whilst revolving around her past drug problem and how 'stable' she actually is, it just gets tiresome.The film throws in a lot of unneeded shots of Tracy swimming and the romantic interest of Jonny gives Dustin Nguyen an excuse to show us his muscles (the film was written by a woman, mind) but the underwater shots exist to merely force the film into the realm of the 'artistic' and the inserted TV footage is a silly attempt at getting the film labelled post-modern. The camera shakes a few times and is generally hand-held but so what? Are you that desperate for an artistic labelling? The bizarre music feels recycled from better, much better, films like Donnie Darko and Morven Callar while the narrative drive of drugs and a drug problem feels old. Little Fish may be 'out there' and a somewhat breakaway from formula but it is a film that should stay in the pond with the rest of the minors rather than attempt to get out and swim with the sharks.

awillawill Reading some through some of the reviews already posted, I began to wonder if my wife and I had seen an entirely different film called Little Fish. But no. Cate Blanchett was definitely in the one we saw. There she was, acting her little heart out with admirable skill and determination, but nothing could save the film from itself. It simply failed to engage.The script was unnecessarily meandering and complex and didn't move the story on at a satisfying pace. There is definitely a story to be told on this theme, but it struck us as though the director had used an early script draft by mistake. If the script did go through the usual very necessary rewrite-after-rewrite development then one can only speculate about just how awful the first couple of drafts must have been.Frankly, it is a dud that can best be summed up as "a film about losers who stay losers". And did we care? No, not one bit. Sorry guys!Andy Williams