SnoopyStyle Fifteen year old Thomas Mollison (Rhys Wakefield) moves to a new place with his parents (Toni Collette, Erik Thomson) and his autistic brother Charlie (Luke Ford). Thomas is awkward and embarrassed about his brother. Charlie runs into Jackie Masters (Gemma Ward)'s home to use the toilet while she's in the shower. Maggie's pregnancy gets difficult and she has to stay in the hospital. With their father away with the Army much of the time, Thomas becomes stuck taking care of Charlie. Jackie befriends Thomas and Charlie.Thomas is a whiny embarrassed teenager. That can be very off-putting. I can't blame the character but it keeps the movie from being a lovable coming-of-age story. It's a tougher more painful thing. It comes with poo and all. Gemma Ward injects a lightness to the movie. It does miss Toni Collette for long stretches. Her absence is keenly felt. The movie drags on a little too long after the climatic blowup but it's still a compelling family drama.

tarunverma911 Being a clinical psychologist myself, I have to work with autistic children. And being a movie freak, I once decided to download as many movies as possible depicting mental illnesses. When looking for autism I happened to find some very brilliant ones, like Ben-X and this movie.So far I have found Black Balloon to be one of the best ones in which autism has been displayed as accurately as possible. Acting by Luke Ford (Charlie in the movie) as the autistic child is brilliant, never losing the actual flavor of autism. Reality is shown at its core and the unfolding of the character of Charlie's brother, Thomas has again been displayed brilliantly. The film never bores you and the intensity of relations that emerge in last few minutes thrill you in several ways. The way the character of Thomas has developed might not just be confined to such specific relationships. When interacting with such children, and especially when there is such a child in the family, such realizations are bound to happen to anyone involved.Surprisingly for therapists too. As a therapist too, one may expect a lot from such children to improve in therapy but the reality is not always fair. Anyone working with such children may get frustrated and exhausted by the repetitive failures and disappointments, but it should be kept in mind that success need not be quantitative, rather qualitative. A simple and minor change in behavior is enough to be considered of significance. Acceptance of the real condition of such children is the key to work successfully with them.

Rizar When the Mollison family move to town, the neighbors don't come over to say "hello", they don't send their kids over to play, and they don't miss a chance to stare in annoyance. The Mollison's are mostly normal except for one major difference, they care for a severely disabled, autistic and ADD son, Charlie. But his mother sometimes refers to him as her little "Cheeky Monkey". He introduces himself to the neighbors by sitting in the yard banging large, wooden spoons or sticks repeatedly. Everyone stares at the unusual, new family, and little kids ride up to ask the other son, Thomas, about Charlie's condition."The Black Balloon" is a quirky and enjoyable film for the realistic way it approaches a family's struggle to cope with bringing up an autistic child. They could easily be any typical family. If they were normal, they would be in the upper level of ideal families: two parents, two children, and another one on the way. You can easily imagine the issues they encounter since they seem to react the way any normal family would react to fairly outrageous situations.The director, Elissa Down, has personal experience with two autistic brothers and was able to model Charlie after one of them. This makes for some oddball behavior that a writer probably wouldn't stumble upon by chance. If you don't keep a constant watch on Charlie, he's liable to run out the door in nothing but his colorful undies and invade a neighbor's house to use their bathroom. Locks sometimes help. But if you lock him in his room without keeping an eye on him, he might just entertain himself by splattering the carpet with poo and joyfully playing with it.So you can see his brother Thomas (Rhys Wakefield) has issues to overcome. Much of the film is about Thomas and his difficulty dealing with an atypical childhood. He's new at school and quickly happens to meet one of the cutest girls there, Jackie Masters (Gemma Ward, a successful model at the time she did the role). Many of his first encounters with Jackie are with Charlie at his side chewing on tampons or running down a hall naked. The film holds nothing back and fearlessly portrays the real world odd behaviors that consume an autistic family.One possible advantage is that Thomas matures to real world situations early in his life, which he's hesitant to accept. Thomas has a mix of awkward moments at the school pool (he's not very good at swimming and the gym teacher makes him wear ridiculous yellow swim shorts). He frequently smiles at the odd things going on around him (perhaps a few too many stationary smile scenes). He juggles his desire for Jackie with his hope at having a normal brother one day. Gemma Ward not only has amazing good looks but she also performs Jackie effortlessly, holding back her unexpected capacity for acceptance and understanding until just the right moments.Toni Collette plays the mother, Maggie, with tenacity and playfulness. She's a natural in a chaotic family. Maggie tries to manage her pregnancy and run a household to the point of putting herself in the hospital. She accepts Charlie's limitations and knows he will probably need lifelong care. In one of her best scenes, she cleans up Charlie's feces while she tries to convince Thomas to accept his brother as he is and appreciate that he will have opportunities that Charlie never will.Besides the family struggles, the film has a vivid sense of detail and a wonderful script. It's the sort of intelligent script that makes you want to test out its ideas. This one works: as Jackie and Thomas come out of a lake to get out of the rain and head for cover under a bridge (it's the romance scene of the movie, of course, but first it has a nice little analogy), Jackie tells Thomas to close his eyes and observe what he sees. At first he sees pure blackness, then spots of dancing color, and then finally specks of white dots ingrained in blackness like static on a TV. It never goes away. (Try it sometime; it's true.) The point for the story, however, is that Charlie may have a similar condition in which some features of his experience may never change. Thomas doesn't fully compute the message as he's more interested in other things.The location is in Australia with school uniforms, dorky bike helmets, and 80s-90s clothing (the time period of the story is the early 90s; Super Nintendo being the main game system). The Australian native, Elissa Down, had a part in writing the story as well as directing. Her previous experience was working on short films. She treats the subject with respect, but she also adds a lot of quirky details that make the story enjoyable. Luke Ford plays a convincing version of an autistic child as Charlie. It's not a unique story. It follows in the tradition of "Rain Man" and "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" But it has enough unique wit and pervasive reality to make it well worth watching. It isn't as funny as something like "Little Miss Sunshine", but it's on the same wavelength.

westhamu Osmosis, I don't care whether you liked the film or not. That's a personal choice. Personally, I thought it was great. 'Fraudulently obtained' taxpayer money? Fraudulently obtained obviously because you didn't like it. It didn't fit into your box. Does a film that you like that I don't (that has been funded by Government Filmcorps) also fall into the 'fraudulently obtained' category. I'm guessing not. I've always been amazed at this line of thought. Money wasted you say. I'm quite happy to let Government bodies fund crap films until the cows come home. As long as about one in ten is a classic. Which usually happens. Good public money spent! And what is a quasi-plagiarist rip-off? You're either a plagiarist or you're not (no quasi about it) and plagiarist rip-off is the oxymoron of all oxymorons. And I've got to add: "Obviously the American Film Industry has been totally conned into believing our mainstream people have talent which explains the constant stream of ever worsening quality of films these days." That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Do you mean the American Film Industry has taken all our talent so now there's no-one left and as a result our films are crap or do you mean that Americans are making our films huge box-office hits, through their naivety (being conned), and so we keep making the films you don't like. The latter premise is nonsense because our films don't make big Hollywood money whilst the first premise is self-evident by your logic. As Tarantino had Michael Madsen say 'I'm betting you're a big Lee Marvin fan'. I'm betting you're a big Crocodile Dundee fan. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I have it myself. But there's different ways to watch different films. I hate Elton John's music but I can understand why people like it. You obviously have an oligarchical problem with some film board. Script rejected?