Reviews
Starstruck's initial critical reception was mainly positive - though, as producer David Elfick noted, the film tended to polarise critics, and some gave it short shrift. Here is a sampling of reviews from both Australia and America.
Australian Reviews
American Reviews
Australian Reviews
Canberra Times - 12 May 1982
Having Great Fun Avoiding Hazards
Dougal MacDonald
A ROCK musical set mainly in a pub in Sydney's Rocks area might not seem all that much of a good idea, yet Gillian Armstrong's film makes the most of the genre at the same time as being great fun.
Scriptwriter Stephen MacLean has re-invented the simple plot about a girl prepared to do anything to be noticed on her climb to singing stardom, then embellished it with enough serious ideas to keep it from wasting its time. MacLean says he had the teeny-bopper audience in mind, from 9 to 18. It's a measure of the film's quality that an old fogey like me found it agreeably entertaining.
It's very easy to make a bad film around rock mu sic, based on the notion of a great talent frustrated by absence of recognition yet winning through against all opposition to reach the final reel in a burst of success and acclamation. The idea is simplistic, excessively cutesy and burdened by more than half a century of over-exposure. 'Starstruck' en counters all these hazards and disposes of them. How it does so is worth examining.
Both writer and director have let the Him find its own pace. Never forcing it, they accept its occasional stumbles and get it moving again, the dramatic action and the musical numbers taking separate paths and crossing in a manner at once logical and relaxed.
One should resist the temptation to compare this with the counterpart elements in 'Fame', since the two films have quite different purposes. Instead, one can admire for its own sake the energy that pervades 'Starstruck' and take pleasure from both the production values of its musical numbers and the cultural accuracy of its dramatic content.
There is a bigness about the musical production and a nice satirical quality to most of the staging of the songs.
Jackie (Jo Kennedy) goes on a TV talent-quest program for the obligatory "I blew it" number and to the Opera House for the big finale against a backdrop of the Bridge in flashing lights.
The love-song is small, tightly controlled, and full of the pathos of Jackie's shock at finding out that her femaleness cuts no ice with Terry, the TV compere (John O'May) who wants her only for her voice, his sexual preferences being of his own gender.
Linking the songs is a story of life at the Harbour View, a pub for the work ing man and woman, a neighbourhood escape from boredom, a surrogate family, a place where the counter-lunches are some thing that, in one drinker's words, you wouldn't serve to a Jap on Anzac Day (the film was finished before the brown dog became in famous).
The pub is a reference point with reality, from which Jackie and her younger cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) launch their campaign to take the entertainment world by storm. To win, they must defeat the entrenched forces of family and public fickleness. The battle is a lot of fun for the film-goer.
That the material from which the film is fashioned is slight does not detract from its effectiveness. The talent of the young per formers is manifest and major, especially Jo Kennedy. The music is adequate of its kind and once or twice excellent. And there are enough meaty ideas to be found in the script to lift the film above the epithet of mindless.
The Age (Melbourne) - 12 April 1982
‘Starstruck’ is Armstrong’s brilliant satire
Neil Jillett
Gillian Armstrong’s Starstruck (Midcity) is a brilliant bombshell of a film, perhaps the first satire thrown up by the Australian cinema’s New Wave.
But will the public accept it for what it is, or even see what it is?
Armstrong’s first feature, ‘My Brilliant Career’ (1979), was little more than nostalgia clumsily dressed in feminist drag; yet it won extravagant praise. Its successor, a much better film in nearly every way, seems to be in danger of being misinterpreted or dismissed out of hand. If this is to be its fate, the promotional campaign and Armstrong’s own comments will be partly to blame.
In a campaign that might have been designed to scare off anyone older than 25, the publicity for 'Starstruck' announces the arrival of "the first Aussie modern musical comedy" and spouts other waffle about the pop/rock scene. And Armstrong is quoted as saying that she signed up as a director because "I wanted to work with Australian pop music at a time when it's beginning to get the international recognition it deserves."
That explanation sounds sanctimonious. It certainly underestimates Armstrong's achievement with 'Starstruck'. It encourages a general impression that the film is a spin-off from the TV show 'Countdown', garbage for the adolescent drive-in trade. 'Starstruck' does owe a debt to 'Countdown,' but an unusual and complex one.
'Countdown' is a fascinating programme, if only because it shows the ABC's persistence in using taxpayers' money to promote and subsidise local and overseas record companies and other branches of commercial showbiz in their campaign to extract millions of dollars from teenyboppers by selling them a largely worthless product.
In the pop/rock industry the packaging is usually the product. Promotion is more important than talent. It is 'Starstruck's witty awareness of this point that makes it such a fine film.
The plot, economically laid down by Stephen Maclean's screenplay, looks at what happens when a group of youngsters turn the manipulative tables on the exploiters. The kids are not particularly talented - their music is as imitatively bland as anyone else's - but they use their own promotion tactics to fool the media and to subvert a competition being run by a TV talent show.
The leaders of this children's crusade are Jackie, an 18-year-old singing barmaid, and Angus, her 14-year-old cousin and manager. On their devious way to the top we are subjected to much rocking and popping, dancing and singing, mainly through the efforts of music director Mark Moffatt and a New Zealand group, The Swingers. The result does not sound any different to the average contribution to 'Countdown', but the visual style is far more exciting, and the performances have a sense of real rather than contrived enjoyment.
Jackie and Angus live in their family's pub. near the Southern pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and this setting is exploited by the film - visually and as a plot device.
The pub is almost broke and may be closed by the brewery, and the attempt to keep it open is shown in entertainingly corny tandem with the kids' efforts to hit the pop big time. The pub's customers are mainly people of the age of the 'Countdown' generation's parents, and while the kids are out laying siege to the TV show and storming the top 10s barricades, the adults are behaving in a no less grotesque way back at the pub, having boozy fun when they are not crying into their beer.
The generations sneer at each other until they are united by the realisation that they have a common enemy. The System (represented by the TV show and the brewery), which can be beaten by a united front. The adults and the kids are not going to abandon their drugs (beer and music), but they have learned to become masters of their own dosage.
The film moves with tremendous energy through Brian Thomson's attractively garish sets, which are recorded with sympathetic boldness by Russell Boyd's busy, wide-angled camerawork.
Armstrong lets the pace drag only twice, in love scenes between Jackie (Jo Kennedy, who has the right bounce in the rest of the film) and her true love, Robbie (Ned Lander, with the fixedly prognathic expression familiar from 'The Restless Years'). As Angus, the ferrety cousin, Ross O'Donovan is sometimes uncertain, though at his best he has an amused and amusing swagger.
There are some top line performances in the smaller, older roles. New Zealander Pat Evison is a superb caricature of a fat, smelly but still loveable old Nana; and Dennis Miller as Angus's Dad, dashingly garbed in signet and see-through shirt, is very funny having quick fumbles with Margo Lee as Jo's agreeably surprised Mum.
In the musical scenes the sound is at a merciful level, though lips and words sometimes seem out of synch. In the general rhubarb that too often accompanies the dialogue some good lines may have been lost, but one survived and will stay with me for a long time. "Geez," says a pub customer looking at his counter lunch, "you wouldn't give that to a Jap on Anzac Day!"
Whatever the quality of the talk and music, 'Starstruck' is always a good-looking film, thanks several times to the choreography of David Atkins. His best effort is an Esther Williams parody in which the homosexual compere Terry (a neatly defined cameo by John O'May) cavorts in a rooftop pool with a balletic corps of male surf lifesavers. In this dig at images of Australian masculinity the satire, as in the rest of the film, is sharp without being cruel.
The lifesaver scene is also typical of what I would hope is this film's broad appeal. As a spectacle, it can be enjoyed by all ages. It gives all of us - but perhaps most obviously those around the 18 and 40 year marks - a chance to laugh at ourselves and each other. And on a more serious level 'Starstruck', in its entrancing and comically romantic depiction of Australian youth and middle-age, is a rather alarming record of the values which this country holds most dear.
The Age (Melbourne) - 7 June 1984
Energy and Wit
John Hindle
Starstruck (Channel 9, 8:30pm Friday): Australia's first musical and one of the best films to come from our boom years. At least, that's what I think.
Starstruck was directed by Gillian Armstrong with considerable verve. The film has a deal of energy and wit.
The story, such as it is, centres on the inhabitants of a splendidly kitsch Sydney pub, which is situated under the Harbour Bridge.
From this seminal site, our culture is investigated. Jackie (Jo Kennedy), an aspiring singer and entertainer, is insinuated into showbiz by her cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) who is, at 14, just four years younger than his protege.
This unlikely duo lives in the pub with a pleasing collection of eccentric relatives, bar staff and customers. Pat Evison, Margot Lee, Max Cullen, Dennis Miller and John O'May all do well.
The music is catchy, the style - throughout - is interesting and the performances of the two young principals are delightful. Add to these plusses the fact that the film actually has something to say about such things as the media, antipodean life, mateship and cultural pluralism, and it can be seen that Starstruck is a rare and valuable Australian film.
Starstruck can be viewed as a modern fable. It perpetuates the Australian myth that effort will be rewarded by success - but, at the same time, it is affectionate in its view of our society.
I recommend Starstruck. I hope everyone watches it.
Sydney Morning Herald - 11 June 1984
Rags-to-riches with an Aussie drawl.
Robyn Ferrell
It's called rags-to-riches and it's the oldest plot in the book.
Take a working class kid, a dream of stardom and a family facing ruin. Then find a talent contest with a big cash prize …
It's a classic American movie story. With Starstruck on 9 at 8:30pm, director put it into the Australian drawl and made it work again.
A rundown pub down in The Rocks offers a great source of traditional Aussie character. The public bar is done out in bathroom tiles and one of the regulars has a felt hat and a pet cocky that squawks. Nana is huge, wears floral pines and runs the pub with Mum, whose peroxide blonde reminds us that she was once the Golden Girl of Radio.
Our young heroes offer a contrasting world in the new wave music scene of our very own big city. Jackie is 18, works as a barmaid, and wears her hair a la holocaust. Angus, 14, is her cousin, a professional truant and entrepreneur.
Jackie wants to be a star and Angus is going to make her one. Along the way, we collect four bashful boys in the band and one all-that-glitters pop show host. Jackie, like all good-time girls, cracks onto the guitar player but dumps him for a giant crush on the pop show host.
Meanwhile, Angus is busy hunting publicity for his cousin which takes them through a dance sequence at the Lizard Lounge and across a tightrope five storeys above the street.
This is a musical, by the way, featuring Australian rock music. Names like Tim Finn and Molly Meldrum jump out from the credits. The music and dance routines are great fun and very good.
The great charm of Starstruck is its unpretentious exuberance. Everything is tolerated, and it all works out fine in the end.
There's some friendly satire for everyone. The pop show host has a dance sequence in which his blow-wave boys ride blow-up sharks in a roof-top swimming pool. Meanwhile, the boys in the band are so cool they've strapped a lounge chair to the roof of their van.
Jackie discovers her idol is gay and utters the irony in a tone of outrage: "He only wanted to be my friend!"
Then follow some quieter moments before we crank it up again for a furious ending.
Jackie makes it up with the guitarist in the bar late at night.
And her mum has her heart, and the week's takings, stolen by her ratbag brother-in-law. "That's people for you," she says bitterly. "They just trample all over y' dreams."
But the pathos is fleeting. The next we know our heroes are bringing down the (Opera) house, in front of an audience of 1,000 teenage extras. The pop show host presses the cheque into her hand and presto! the pub is saved and our hero is a rock star.
In this film, if not in life, there is no conflict between the desire for fame and humble beginnings. There is also no generation gap, and the new wave culture does not alienate the oldies, nor are their less eventful lives the butt of their children's rebellion.
On the contrary: Jackie howls into a microphone in front of national television cameras and, back in the pub, Mum and Nana and all the regulars perch on their stools and watch with pride.
Australian Reviews
- Canberra Times - 12 May 1982
- The Age (Melbourne) - 12 April 1982
- The Age (Melbourne) - 7 June 1984
- Sydney Morning Herald - 11 June 1984
American Reviews
- Variety - 26 October 1982
- New York Times - 10 November 1982
- Pittsburgh Press - 27 May 1983
- The Boston Phoenix - 8 March 1983
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - 28 May 1983
- Spokane Chronicle (Spokane, Washington) - 10 August 1984
- Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah) - 12 August 1983
- Sumter Daily Item (Sumter, North Carolina) - 13 April 1983
Australian Reviews
Canberra Times - 12 May 1982
Having Great Fun Avoiding Hazards
Dougal MacDonald
A ROCK musical set mainly in a pub in Sydney's Rocks area might not seem all that much of a good idea, yet Gillian Armstrong's film makes the most of the genre at the same time as being great fun.
Scriptwriter Stephen MacLean has re-invented the simple plot about a girl prepared to do anything to be noticed on her climb to singing stardom, then embellished it with enough serious ideas to keep it from wasting its time. MacLean says he had the teeny-bopper audience in mind, from 9 to 18. It's a measure of the film's quality that an old fogey like me found it agreeably entertaining.
It's very easy to make a bad film around rock mu sic, based on the notion of a great talent frustrated by absence of recognition yet winning through against all opposition to reach the final reel in a burst of success and acclamation. The idea is simplistic, excessively cutesy and burdened by more than half a century of over-exposure. 'Starstruck' en counters all these hazards and disposes of them. How it does so is worth examining.
Both writer and director have let the Him find its own pace. Never forcing it, they accept its occasional stumbles and get it moving again, the dramatic action and the musical numbers taking separate paths and crossing in a manner at once logical and relaxed.
One should resist the temptation to compare this with the counterpart elements in 'Fame', since the two films have quite different purposes. Instead, one can admire for its own sake the energy that pervades 'Starstruck' and take pleasure from both the production values of its musical numbers and the cultural accuracy of its dramatic content.
There is a bigness about the musical production and a nice satirical quality to most of the staging of the songs.
Jackie (Jo Kennedy) goes on a TV talent-quest program for the obligatory "I blew it" number and to the Opera House for the big finale against a backdrop of the Bridge in flashing lights.
The love-song is small, tightly controlled, and full of the pathos of Jackie's shock at finding out that her femaleness cuts no ice with Terry, the TV compere (John O'May) who wants her only for her voice, his sexual preferences being of his own gender.
Linking the songs is a story of life at the Harbour View, a pub for the work ing man and woman, a neighbourhood escape from boredom, a surrogate family, a place where the counter-lunches are some thing that, in one drinker's words, you wouldn't serve to a Jap on Anzac Day (the film was finished before the brown dog became in famous).
The pub is a reference point with reality, from which Jackie and her younger cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) launch their campaign to take the entertainment world by storm. To win, they must defeat the entrenched forces of family and public fickleness. The battle is a lot of fun for the film-goer.
That the material from which the film is fashioned is slight does not detract from its effectiveness. The talent of the young per formers is manifest and major, especially Jo Kennedy. The music is adequate of its kind and once or twice excellent. And there are enough meaty ideas to be found in the script to lift the film above the epithet of mindless.
The Age (Melbourne) - 12 April 1982
‘Starstruck’ is Armstrong’s brilliant satire
Neil Jillett
Gillian Armstrong’s Starstruck (Midcity) is a brilliant bombshell of a film, perhaps the first satire thrown up by the Australian cinema’s New Wave.
But will the public accept it for what it is, or even see what it is?
Armstrong’s first feature, ‘My Brilliant Career’ (1979), was little more than nostalgia clumsily dressed in feminist drag; yet it won extravagant praise. Its successor, a much better film in nearly every way, seems to be in danger of being misinterpreted or dismissed out of hand. If this is to be its fate, the promotional campaign and Armstrong’s own comments will be partly to blame.
In a campaign that might have been designed to scare off anyone older than 25, the publicity for 'Starstruck' announces the arrival of "the first Aussie modern musical comedy" and spouts other waffle about the pop/rock scene. And Armstrong is quoted as saying that she signed up as a director because "I wanted to work with Australian pop music at a time when it's beginning to get the international recognition it deserves."
That explanation sounds sanctimonious. It certainly underestimates Armstrong's achievement with 'Starstruck'. It encourages a general impression that the film is a spin-off from the TV show 'Countdown', garbage for the adolescent drive-in trade. 'Starstruck' does owe a debt to 'Countdown,' but an unusual and complex one.
'Countdown' is a fascinating programme, if only because it shows the ABC's persistence in using taxpayers' money to promote and subsidise local and overseas record companies and other branches of commercial showbiz in their campaign to extract millions of dollars from teenyboppers by selling them a largely worthless product.
In the pop/rock industry the packaging is usually the product. Promotion is more important than talent. It is 'Starstruck's witty awareness of this point that makes it such a fine film.
The plot, economically laid down by Stephen Maclean's screenplay, looks at what happens when a group of youngsters turn the manipulative tables on the exploiters. The kids are not particularly talented - their music is as imitatively bland as anyone else's - but they use their own promotion tactics to fool the media and to subvert a competition being run by a TV talent show.
The leaders of this children's crusade are Jackie, an 18-year-old singing barmaid, and Angus, her 14-year-old cousin and manager. On their devious way to the top we are subjected to much rocking and popping, dancing and singing, mainly through the efforts of music director Mark Moffatt and a New Zealand group, The Swingers. The result does not sound any different to the average contribution to 'Countdown', but the visual style is far more exciting, and the performances have a sense of real rather than contrived enjoyment.
Jackie and Angus live in their family's pub. near the Southern pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and this setting is exploited by the film - visually and as a plot device.
The pub is almost broke and may be closed by the brewery, and the attempt to keep it open is shown in entertainingly corny tandem with the kids' efforts to hit the pop big time. The pub's customers are mainly people of the age of the 'Countdown' generation's parents, and while the kids are out laying siege to the TV show and storming the top 10s barricades, the adults are behaving in a no less grotesque way back at the pub, having boozy fun when they are not crying into their beer.
The generations sneer at each other until they are united by the realisation that they have a common enemy. The System (represented by the TV show and the brewery), which can be beaten by a united front. The adults and the kids are not going to abandon their drugs (beer and music), but they have learned to become masters of their own dosage.
The film moves with tremendous energy through Brian Thomson's attractively garish sets, which are recorded with sympathetic boldness by Russell Boyd's busy, wide-angled camerawork.
Armstrong lets the pace drag only twice, in love scenes between Jackie (Jo Kennedy, who has the right bounce in the rest of the film) and her true love, Robbie (Ned Lander, with the fixedly prognathic expression familiar from 'The Restless Years'). As Angus, the ferrety cousin, Ross O'Donovan is sometimes uncertain, though at his best he has an amused and amusing swagger.
There are some top line performances in the smaller, older roles. New Zealander Pat Evison is a superb caricature of a fat, smelly but still loveable old Nana; and Dennis Miller as Angus's Dad, dashingly garbed in signet and see-through shirt, is very funny having quick fumbles with Margo Lee as Jo's agreeably surprised Mum.
In the musical scenes the sound is at a merciful level, though lips and words sometimes seem out of synch. In the general rhubarb that too often accompanies the dialogue some good lines may have been lost, but one survived and will stay with me for a long time. "Geez," says a pub customer looking at his counter lunch, "you wouldn't give that to a Jap on Anzac Day!"
Whatever the quality of the talk and music, 'Starstruck' is always a good-looking film, thanks several times to the choreography of David Atkins. His best effort is an Esther Williams parody in which the homosexual compere Terry (a neatly defined cameo by John O'May) cavorts in a rooftop pool with a balletic corps of male surf lifesavers. In this dig at images of Australian masculinity the satire, as in the rest of the film, is sharp without being cruel.
The lifesaver scene is also typical of what I would hope is this film's broad appeal. As a spectacle, it can be enjoyed by all ages. It gives all of us - but perhaps most obviously those around the 18 and 40 year marks - a chance to laugh at ourselves and each other. And on a more serious level 'Starstruck', in its entrancing and comically romantic depiction of Australian youth and middle-age, is a rather alarming record of the values which this country holds most dear.
The Age (Melbourne) - 7 June 1984
Energy and Wit
John Hindle
Starstruck (Channel 9, 8:30pm Friday): Australia's first musical and one of the best films to come from our boom years. At least, that's what I think.
Starstruck was directed by Gillian Armstrong with considerable verve. The film has a deal of energy and wit.
The story, such as it is, centres on the inhabitants of a splendidly kitsch Sydney pub, which is situated under the Harbour Bridge.
From this seminal site, our culture is investigated. Jackie (Jo Kennedy), an aspiring singer and entertainer, is insinuated into showbiz by her cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) who is, at 14, just four years younger than his protege.
This unlikely duo lives in the pub with a pleasing collection of eccentric relatives, bar staff and customers. Pat Evison, Margot Lee, Max Cullen, Dennis Miller and John O'May all do well.
The music is catchy, the style - throughout - is interesting and the performances of the two young principals are delightful. Add to these plusses the fact that the film actually has something to say about such things as the media, antipodean life, mateship and cultural pluralism, and it can be seen that Starstruck is a rare and valuable Australian film.
Starstruck can be viewed as a modern fable. It perpetuates the Australian myth that effort will be rewarded by success - but, at the same time, it is affectionate in its view of our society.
I recommend Starstruck. I hope everyone watches it.
Sydney Morning Herald - 11 June 1984
Rags-to-riches with an Aussie drawl.
Robyn Ferrell
It's called rags-to-riches and it's the oldest plot in the book.
Take a working class kid, a dream of stardom and a family facing ruin. Then find a talent contest with a big cash prize …
It's a classic American movie story. With Starstruck on 9 at 8:30pm, director put it into the Australian drawl and made it work again.
A rundown pub down in The Rocks offers a great source of traditional Aussie character. The public bar is done out in bathroom tiles and one of the regulars has a felt hat and a pet cocky that squawks. Nana is huge, wears floral pines and runs the pub with Mum, whose peroxide blonde reminds us that she was once the Golden Girl of Radio.
Our young heroes offer a contrasting world in the new wave music scene of our very own big city. Jackie is 18, works as a barmaid, and wears her hair a la holocaust. Angus, 14, is her cousin, a professional truant and entrepreneur.
Jackie wants to be a star and Angus is going to make her one. Along the way, we collect four bashful boys in the band and one all-that-glitters pop show host. Jackie, like all good-time girls, cracks onto the guitar player but dumps him for a giant crush on the pop show host.
Meanwhile, Angus is busy hunting publicity for his cousin which takes them through a dance sequence at the Lizard Lounge and across a tightrope five storeys above the street.
This is a musical, by the way, featuring Australian rock music. Names like Tim Finn and Molly Meldrum jump out from the credits. The music and dance routines are great fun and very good.
The great charm of Starstruck is its unpretentious exuberance. Everything is tolerated, and it all works out fine in the end.
There's some friendly satire for everyone. The pop show host has a dance sequence in which his blow-wave boys ride blow-up sharks in a roof-top swimming pool. Meanwhile, the boys in the band are so cool they've strapped a lounge chair to the roof of their van.
Jackie discovers her idol is gay and utters the irony in a tone of outrage: "He only wanted to be my friend!"
Then follow some quieter moments before we crank it up again for a furious ending.
Jackie makes it up with the guitarist in the bar late at night.
And her mum has her heart, and the week's takings, stolen by her ratbag brother-in-law. "That's people for you," she says bitterly. "They just trample all over y' dreams."
But the pathos is fleeting. The next we know our heroes are bringing down the (Opera) house, in front of an audience of 1,000 teenage extras. The pop show host presses the cheque into her hand and presto! the pub is saved and our hero is a rock star.
In this film, if not in life, there is no conflict between the desire for fame and humble beginnings. There is also no generation gap, and the new wave culture does not alienate the oldies, nor are their less eventful lives the butt of their children's rebellion.
On the contrary: Jackie howls into a microphone in front of national television cameras and, back in the pub, Mum and Nana and all the regulars perch on their stools and watch with pride.
American Reviews
Variety - 26 October 1982
Review: Star Struck
Variety Staff Writers
Picture is a raucous, ‘let’s put on a show’ musical with a punk rock beat. Story centers on an enterprising 14-year-old entrepreneur Ross O’Donovan who has big career plans for his cousin, singer Jo Kennedy. Grooming (?) her in the punk mode, O’Donovan has his sights on copping first prize on a New Year’s television talent show.
However, he can’t get the attention of a powerful Sydney disk jockey until he stages a daring balancing tightrope stunt for Kennedy. Suddenly, she’s a media star quickly homogenized for home consumption.
Meanwhile, the family hotel-bar is on the verge of bankruptcy. The $25,000 talent prize becomes all-important to save the failing establishment.
Script is pure fantasy material offering director Gillian Armstrong the opportunity to send-up the likes of Busby Berkeley and Garland-Rooney musicals. The film certainly doesn’t lack energy. Camerawork by Russell Boyd is glossy and fluid and song-and-dance routines are loud and splashy. Regrettably, the choreography is uninspired.
New York Times - 10 November 1982
“Starstruck” Down Under ...
by Janet Maslin
LIKE Gillian Armstrong's first film, ''My Brilliant Career,'' her second has a red-haired heroine with decidedly headstrong ways. That's where the resemblance ends, however, since ''My Brilliant Career'' was set in turn-of-the-century rural Australia, and the new film takes place among the punk-rock vanguard of modern Sydney.
''Starstruck'' is the story of Jackie (Jo Kennedy), who will stop at nothing to get herself on television, and who during the course of the story dresses up as, among other things, a long-playing record, a topless tightrope walker and a red kangaroo. Is this the sort of thing that would make a movie lovable? I think it is, but there will be those who don't. They are advised to avoid the Sutton theater, where ''Starstruck'' opens today in all its dizzy, impudent, highspirited glory. On the other hand, anyone who finds this intriguing probably ought to hurry over.
''Starstruck'' doesn't have much of a plot; it tries to get by mostly on charm, and its charm is of a singular and limited sort. First and foremost, this movie is a costumer's dream. Jackie never fails to be dressed in something appealingly ridiculous, and her mother is apt to appear in ruffly pastels of mid-60's vintage, with little bunches of fake fruit at her neck and ears. The wit of Luciana Arrighi and Terry Ryan's costumes is rivaled by the set decoration of Brian Thomson, who also did the sets for ''The Rocky Horror Show.'' It is Mr. Thomson, presumably, who was responsible for giving Jackie an inflatable sandbox in her beach-wallpapered bedroom (she sleeps on a Mondrian print raft in the middle), or for giving her little cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) Elvis Presley bedsheets.
The pub where Jackie sometimes works as a barmaid is another bit of masterful decor, and it is full of older-generation types liable to break out into spontaneous singing and dancing as Jackie trots across the countertops. ''Starstruck'' is silly through and through, but it's also full of happy, musical surprises. You may never again see a swimming pool sequence featuring chorus boys flanked by a line of inflatable plastic sharks. On the other hand, you may never want to see such a thing even once, and that's something that can easily be determined ahead of time.
On the rare moments when the story makes itself obtrusive, it does seem old-hat. Jackie is just another sweet kid who wants to break into show business. There's a nice boy who cares for her and another, more jaded fellow who catches her eye. And Jackie hopes to enter a television talent contest just as her mother's business is about to be foreclosed. Will she win? ''Starstruck'' is too cheerful a movie to spring any unhappy surprises, and in any case Jackie's indomitable optimism is established from the very start. Even with a woebegone cockatoo on her shoulder - the costumes are always unusual, as pointed out previously - she retains her assurance and her cool. Incidentally, the bird-on-the-shoulder look proves so successful that it is eventually adopted by Jackie's entire band.
''Do you like the Beatles?'' an older character asks Jackie. She replies, with a superior sniff, ''They broke up when I was two.'' The movie shares a little of Jackie's overconfidence; even at times when she might have tried harder to win a wider audience, Miss Armstrong is content to adopt a take-it-or-leave-it stance. That, and the relative ordinariness of the music, and the fact that it all lasts a bit longer than it needs to, are perhaps the film's biggest drawbacks.
But ''Starstruck'' is an original, and an energetic and funny one at that. It reveals a new side of Australia to anyone whose principal film memories are of the Outback. And now that ''My Brilliant Career'' has established Miss Armstrong's talent, this one demonstrates her versatility in no uncertain terms. She may be an original, too.
The Pittsburgh Press - 27 May 1983
'Starstruck' Shines Brightly at Times
By JIM DAVIDSON
Jackie is a rambunctious 17-year-old determined to become a singing star. Angus, her cousin, is a twerp of 14 who fancies himself as her promoter and manager. He promises to make a star so bright she'll set Sydney, Australia on its ear.
Such is the gossamer storyline of "Starstruck," a refreshing Australian musical comedy that opens today at the Kings Court.
Peculiar movie. Not unlike the Scottish import "Local Hero," it has an understated sense of humour that dares a moviegoer to love it or hate it. "Starstruck" is either dopey or charming, take your pick.
Betcha the marketing executives didn't know what to make of it all. And it remains to be seen whether the rock music audience will buy its sweetness, upbeat fantasy and jaunty rock 'n roll.
The style owes something to "Fame." One moment "Starstruck" shows ordinary pub patrons quaffing their ordinary beers and minding their ordinary business. Suddenly music blows up from somewhere, and the old ladies and gents turn into a conga line. Or suddenly Jackie is practicing her high-wire act on a rope strung above the bar.
"I want a band, I want amplifiers, I want I want I want," says Jackie (Jo Kennedy) at the start of the movie, just as she notices a kangaroo suit in a store window. She wants that, too, and winds up wearing it to amateur night at the Lizard Lounge. In that get up, she looks smashing on her cousin Angus's (Ross O'Donovan's) motor scooter.
This is the younger generation, replete with post-punk costumes and music. Wise-guy Angus, proud of his generation, brags that he was 2 years old when the Beatles broke up.
Jackie's innocent dream is an old movie dream, and her fate is an old movie fate. Thanks to some crafty wrangling by Angus, Jackie meets writer/TV host Terry Lambert (John O'May) and her career starts rolling. The grand finale talent show is staged in Australia's most famous building, the Sydney Opera House.
"Starstruck" is all surface. Director Gillian Armstrong, coming back from a four-year hiatus after "My Brilliant Career," settles for a winsome tone and doesn't try and explain her characters' psychology or account for their zany stunts. Spectacle is enough, especially when Jackie is on her high wire.
The production designer is Brian Thompson, credited in the small print with the set design for "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." The new movie uses confectionery colours, garish costumes, impossible hairstyles and lots of offhand weirdness like the Elvis Presley sheets on Angus's bed.
Most of it is tasteful and inoffensive, although poolside spoofs of Busby Berkeley and Esther Williams are certainly old hat by now.
The dense accumulation of details - some of them perhaps hard to spot until a second or third viewing - suggest "Starstruck" could wind up as a cult movie on the midnight circuit.
Miss Kennedy is irresistible in the finale, "It's the Monkey in Me," bounding gawkily about the stage and singing with a studio echo to her voice.
"New wave" is the rage they're sticking on the music, but to these ears it's like the Tommy James and the Shondells hits of the late '60s.
Most numbers are on the saccharine side, and many look as if they were engineered especially for the MTV network on cable television. The segments are brief, colourful, full of quick and jarring cuts, and basically empty - just like the videos on MTV.
Jackie defines star quality as "that little something extra." She has it, and so does the movie.
The Boston Phoenix - 8 March 1983
A star is stillborn
by Alan Stern
In the Australian musical Starstruck, a singer named Jackie Mullens, a Sydney waif who aspires to new-wave superstardom. With her heavily outlined eyes, plaster-of-Paris make-up, and reddish black lipstick, Jackie looks like death warmed over, and when she dances, her twitching appendages suggest a stomped-on centipede. When Jackie talks, Dristan commercials with drawings of blocked nasal passages dance in your head; when she sings, her rheumy voice acquires a timbre of glass shards scraping against a blackboard. Sounds like any other new-wave superstar, right? And yet there's something about Jackie that makes it difficult to accept her as the centrepiece of this star-is-born saga: the woman is dull. For all its discordances and weird modulations, her voice has a soporific effect, and whenever her vacant, pasty face comes into close-up, you find yourself scanning the corners of the screen for signs of life.
If this were a less idiotic film, one might bemoan the shaky casting and then diligently unearth Starstruck's more solid virtues. But the film is as dumb as they come - a hapless combination of kitchen-sink melodrama and Rocky Horror camp. Beneath the monstrous production numbers resides a little morality tale about a girl who, abandoned by her mother and living in her grandmother's pub, yearns to be noticed. Jackie and her younger cousin, Angus (Ross O'Donovan), devise a series of attention-getting schemes. Dressed in a mouse costume, Jackie crashes a disco and commandeers the band. When that fails to excite the press, she walks a tightrope above the streets of downtown Sydney in a sort of flesh-coloured body stocking. This yields some coverage on the 6 o'clock news, but stardom doesn't come fast enough, so Jackie conspires to seduce Terry Lambert, the pretty-boy host of a TV variety show. Blimey! He turns out to be gay. Chastened, Jackie returns to the guitarist who's been waiting in the wings, and her newly acquired moral strength somehow enables her to win a rock contest. Only in the movies.
Starstruck alternates drab scenes of prole philosophising ("Life's just a matter of what you want: you want a Volkswagen, you end up with a Volkswagen") with musical fantasy sequences, but everything has the same mucky consistency. The pub scenes, with their jolly beer guzzlers, beg for slice-of-life realism; the musical numbers are so lacklustre that they don't provide any escape from Jackie's hemmed-in existence. Most of the songs, like the costumes and choreography, recall the Time Warp number from Rocky Horror (production designer Brian Thompson also worked on that midnight classic). But the movie's piece de resistance - a water ballet with 20 gay men paddling in Busby Berkely formations while a school of inflatable sharks encircles them - was inspired by that even campier extravaganza, Can't Stop the Music.
The big surprise is that this dreck was directed by Gillian Armstrong, who reportedly waited two years for a script that would provide a worthy follow-up to her first film, My Brilliant Career. Whatever you thought of Career, you had to give it credit for intelligence and stylishness - two words that bear no relation to Starstruck. What both films have in common, however, is a willingness to bend plausibility in order to accommodate the heroine's naive fantasies. If Armstrong has trouble finding a subject for her next movie, she might want to try filming her own life story. She can call it My Bungled Career.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - 28 May 1983
New Wave musical is delightful fun
by Marylynn Uricchio
More than anything, Jackie wants to be a rock singer.
Though by day she helps her mother run a working-class bar in downtown Sydney, Australia, she spends her hours behind the counter dancing and singing and plotting the road to success with her 14-year-old cousin and manager, Angus.
When Angus lines up a guest appearance at the popular Lizard Lounge, Jackie is elated, and she promptly insists they both get their hair done for the occasion. Jackie walks out of the salon with a bright red teased mop anchored by a bone, and poor Angus gets a royal blue dye job that leaves him cowering in embarrassment.
"They're not looking at you," she reassures him, even though everybody on the street is. "They're looking at me. I've got that certain kind of animal magnetism."
Starstruck, an ebullient New Wave Australian musical, is an absolutely delightful romp through adolescent dreamland. Though the film is badly disorganised, it generates an irresistible combination of infectious energy and good will. The movie opens today at the Kings Court Theater in Oakland.
"Do you like the Beatles?" someone asks Angus at one point in the film. "They broke up when he was 2," Jackie, who's all of 17, dryly replies. Given this frame of reference, Starstruck provides an enchanting glimpse into post-punk pubescence, a world where the costumes are gaudy, love is quick and honest, and lyrics like "it's the monkey in me that makes me do it." bring the house down.
Yet there's nothing alienating about the film's characters.They're wholesome little devils, like contemporary Beaver Cleavers, who like to have a bit of fun. Jackie's mother and dotty aunt are tolerant and even indulgent of the kids. They scream at Angus, who lives with them above the pub, for cutting school, but they also join the teen-age crowd on Terry Lambert's smash TV show to watch Jackie perform.
"Starstruck" is structured like a 30s musical, and it takes a minute to realise that reality is not what Gillian Armstrong, who previously directed "My Brilliant Career," is after. Jackie wows the audience during her first gig, singing all over the place without a microphone while the crowd dances in unison. Later, in the pub, the middle-aged customers jump un on the bar and repeat the same New Wave dances in a hilarious closing of the generation gap.
To get a booking on the Terry Lambert show, Angus decides they need a publicity gimmick. So Jackie walks a tightrope between two office buildings, wearing falsies that make her look nude from a distance. Predictably, the TV crews show up and Lambert hires Jackie on the spot. It's just a short step from there to stardom - ah, the movies - but there are a few lessons to be learned along the way.
The musical numbers are upbeat and sparkling, whether they take place in a studio hallway, on a bridge, or in a swimming pool, where Lambert and his buddies do a stunning Esther Williams style water ballet. For some reason, Armstrong chooses to accurately represent the sound, so the Dolby stereo turns on and off depending on the location of the characters, an unnecessary touch that could convince an audience the speakers are bad.
Jo Kennedy, lead singer of an Australian band called Crashing Planes, played Jackie with charm and a great deal of presence. Ross O'Donovan is a locale, feisty Angus, and Ned Lander plays Robbie, who fronts Jackie's band and wins her heart.
Spokane Chronicle - 10 August 1984
Punk-in-Cheek Starstruck Sparkles
By Richard Freedman
Newhouse News Service
Resembling a newly hatched egret with a red Elsa Lanchester fright wig, the perky aspiring punk rocker heroine of "Starstruck" claims she was only 2 when the Beatles split up.
But in its disarming daffiness, this Australian musical somewhat recalls the classic Beatles extravaganza, "A Hard Day's Night."
Directed by Gillian Armstrong, who made her film debut with the vastly different "My Brilliant Career," it is both energetic and laid back at the same time.
Determine to make her way from the Lizard Lounge to Australian prime-time television, 18-year-old Jackie Mullens (Jo Kennedy) enlists the aid of her 14-year-old cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) as her manager.
Angus is a prodigy amongst promoters. He can even con his way out of going to school by stretching out his pajama-clad body in a busy intersection, defying the madly honking drivers to run him over.
So he's just the lad to concoct a publicity scheme involving Jackie's appearance as a semi-clad trapeze artist on a tightrope high above Sydney's busy business district.
Before plunging into the net the puzzled firemen below have stretched for her, she manages to grant a breathless interview to television newsmen hanging out the windows.
Jackie, in short, is a character. She sleeps in what seems to be a raft floating in an inflated sandbox, appears at social events garbed variously as a kangaroo or a giant phonograph record, and thinks nothing of belting out her rock numbers atop the bar of the blue-collar pub where she occasionally works.
As she explains to her mother, who reasonably wants to know "why do you keep singing these pointless songs?" she "only wants to spark things up a bit."
And spark them up she does, with Angus' ingenious help.
Jackie and the band she sings with often sport white cockatoos perched on their shoulders. At a rooftop pool party there's a zany Busby Berkeley-type water ballet, with Jackie as a scrawnier, peppier Esther Williams and the lifeguards playing with inflated plastic sharks as if they were rubber duckies in a bathtub.
So prime time may not be ready for Jackie, whose appearance reminds one television makeup woman of someone who had "just left the Yorkshire ripper." But her single-minded assault on the pinnacles of stardom is fun to watch - for a while.
As in many Australian movies of less than the first rank, though, "Starstrack" goes slack from time to time. Ebullient as it is, director Armstrong could have tightened up its meandering, inconsequential plot considerably.
Still, it boats one lovely touch not likely to appear in American movies. When Jackie does her stuff in the pub, old barflies as well as youths join in the resulting production numbers.
Apparently in Australia, rock - even punk rock - is not seen as a grim challenge thrown in the faces of a disapproving older generation by their scruffy descendants. As in most of this cheerfully chaotic movie, everybody has a good time.
The Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah) - 12 August 1983
Zany Pop Trip from Down Under
By Christopher Hicks
Starstruck is a zany, weird pop musical from Australia. And though it is directed by Gillian Armstrong, who gave us the wonderful 'My Brilliant Career,' this film couldn't be more unlike that one.
In fact, Starstruck looks like it could have been directed by Richard Lester some years ago, so much does it resemble "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!"
And as such, it's interesting to note a passing line of dialogue. As the two main characters sit in a police station, the desk sergeant asks of a 14-year-old boy, "You like the Beatles?"
The girl sitting next to the boy notes, "He was 2 when they broke up."
There's more to that than just a laugh line, or the ring of truth in recognition. It has to be something of a homage to Lester's style.
Jo Kennedy, an energetic actress with a sly sense of humour, plays Jackie, the young girl who wants to be a star - a rock star, specifically. As a singer, she's only fair, and in fact none of the songs in Starstruck are particularly memorable, but Jackie's enthusiasm in her pursuit of fame and adoration is contagious, and you'll be cheering her on before you know it.
The story is simple, with Jackie's goals foremost in the screenwriter's mind. Jackie's younger cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) scrambles throughout the film to make her known to the public, which he reasons is the best way to bring her to the attention of a promoter who will get her on a TV show. So Angus comes up with all sorts of gimmicks - and the one that attracts the most attention is a nude (not really) high-wire act that ends in comical disaster.
Then the plot quickly turns into an attempt to win a big purse on a talent show so as to save Mum's pub.
"Starstruck" is fairly predictable and not much on story development, but it is loaded with quirky characters and stylised dance sequences, and a lot of loud music that will have you tapping your toes and cheering for Jackie.
And Kennedy and O'Donovan are a winning team, both delightful young actors whom you will love before the film is over.
The Sumter Daily Item (Sumter, North Carolina) - 13 April 1983
'Starstruck' is Full Of Youthful Zany Fun
By Yardena Arar
Associated Press Writer
"Starstruck," the latest effort by Australian director Gillian Armstrong of "My Brilliant Career' fame, is a new wave rock musical-fairy tale aimed at the teen audience but likely to elicit a chuckle or two from whatever members of the older crowd it manages to attract.
Jo Kennedy stars as a tightrope-walking teen-age singer who is launched to stardom by her plucky young cousin (Russ O'Donovan) and guitar-playing boyfriend (Ned Lander). They are briefly sidetracked by a good-looking impresario (John O'May) who persuades his dazzled protégée to sing middle-of-the-road mush. But rock and roll prevails and the kids even save the family's Sydney pub from foreclosure.
Miss Armstrong's sense of humour and style go a long way to redeem the lacklustre music and humdrum plot. The dance numbers are particularly engaging. Miss Kennedy and O'Donovan are appealingly offbeat and the entire film is permeated with a sense of youthful, zany fun.
Variety - 26 October 1982
Review: Star Struck
Variety Staff Writers
Picture is a raucous, ‘let’s put on a show’ musical with a punk rock beat. Story centers on an enterprising 14-year-old entrepreneur Ross O’Donovan who has big career plans for his cousin, singer Jo Kennedy. Grooming (?) her in the punk mode, O’Donovan has his sights on copping first prize on a New Year’s television talent show.
However, he can’t get the attention of a powerful Sydney disk jockey until he stages a daring balancing tightrope stunt for Kennedy. Suddenly, she’s a media star quickly homogenized for home consumption.
Meanwhile, the family hotel-bar is on the verge of bankruptcy. The $25,000 talent prize becomes all-important to save the failing establishment.
Script is pure fantasy material offering director Gillian Armstrong the opportunity to send-up the likes of Busby Berkeley and Garland-Rooney musicals. The film certainly doesn’t lack energy. Camerawork by Russell Boyd is glossy and fluid and song-and-dance routines are loud and splashy. Regrettably, the choreography is uninspired.
New York Times - 10 November 1982
“Starstruck” Down Under ...
by Janet Maslin
LIKE Gillian Armstrong's first film, ''My Brilliant Career,'' her second has a red-haired heroine with decidedly headstrong ways. That's where the resemblance ends, however, since ''My Brilliant Career'' was set in turn-of-the-century rural Australia, and the new film takes place among the punk-rock vanguard of modern Sydney.
''Starstruck'' is the story of Jackie (Jo Kennedy), who will stop at nothing to get herself on television, and who during the course of the story dresses up as, among other things, a long-playing record, a topless tightrope walker and a red kangaroo. Is this the sort of thing that would make a movie lovable? I think it is, but there will be those who don't. They are advised to avoid the Sutton theater, where ''Starstruck'' opens today in all its dizzy, impudent, highspirited glory. On the other hand, anyone who finds this intriguing probably ought to hurry over.
''Starstruck'' doesn't have much of a plot; it tries to get by mostly on charm, and its charm is of a singular and limited sort. First and foremost, this movie is a costumer's dream. Jackie never fails to be dressed in something appealingly ridiculous, and her mother is apt to appear in ruffly pastels of mid-60's vintage, with little bunches of fake fruit at her neck and ears. The wit of Luciana Arrighi and Terry Ryan's costumes is rivaled by the set decoration of Brian Thomson, who also did the sets for ''The Rocky Horror Show.'' It is Mr. Thomson, presumably, who was responsible for giving Jackie an inflatable sandbox in her beach-wallpapered bedroom (she sleeps on a Mondrian print raft in the middle), or for giving her little cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) Elvis Presley bedsheets.
The pub where Jackie sometimes works as a barmaid is another bit of masterful decor, and it is full of older-generation types liable to break out into spontaneous singing and dancing as Jackie trots across the countertops. ''Starstruck'' is silly through and through, but it's also full of happy, musical surprises. You may never again see a swimming pool sequence featuring chorus boys flanked by a line of inflatable plastic sharks. On the other hand, you may never want to see such a thing even once, and that's something that can easily be determined ahead of time.
On the rare moments when the story makes itself obtrusive, it does seem old-hat. Jackie is just another sweet kid who wants to break into show business. There's a nice boy who cares for her and another, more jaded fellow who catches her eye. And Jackie hopes to enter a television talent contest just as her mother's business is about to be foreclosed. Will she win? ''Starstruck'' is too cheerful a movie to spring any unhappy surprises, and in any case Jackie's indomitable optimism is established from the very start. Even with a woebegone cockatoo on her shoulder - the costumes are always unusual, as pointed out previously - she retains her assurance and her cool. Incidentally, the bird-on-the-shoulder look proves so successful that it is eventually adopted by Jackie's entire band.
''Do you like the Beatles?'' an older character asks Jackie. She replies, with a superior sniff, ''They broke up when I was two.'' The movie shares a little of Jackie's overconfidence; even at times when she might have tried harder to win a wider audience, Miss Armstrong is content to adopt a take-it-or-leave-it stance. That, and the relative ordinariness of the music, and the fact that it all lasts a bit longer than it needs to, are perhaps the film's biggest drawbacks.
But ''Starstruck'' is an original, and an energetic and funny one at that. It reveals a new side of Australia to anyone whose principal film memories are of the Outback. And now that ''My Brilliant Career'' has established Miss Armstrong's talent, this one demonstrates her versatility in no uncertain terms. She may be an original, too.
The Pittsburgh Press - 27 May 1983
'Starstruck' Shines Brightly at Times
By JIM DAVIDSON
Jackie is a rambunctious 17-year-old determined to become a singing star. Angus, her cousin, is a twerp of 14 who fancies himself as her promoter and manager. He promises to make a star so bright she'll set Sydney, Australia on its ear.
Such is the gossamer storyline of "Starstruck," a refreshing Australian musical comedy that opens today at the Kings Court.
Peculiar movie. Not unlike the Scottish import "Local Hero," it has an understated sense of humour that dares a moviegoer to love it or hate it. "Starstruck" is either dopey or charming, take your pick.
Betcha the marketing executives didn't know what to make of it all. And it remains to be seen whether the rock music audience will buy its sweetness, upbeat fantasy and jaunty rock 'n roll.
The style owes something to "Fame." One moment "Starstruck" shows ordinary pub patrons quaffing their ordinary beers and minding their ordinary business. Suddenly music blows up from somewhere, and the old ladies and gents turn into a conga line. Or suddenly Jackie is practicing her high-wire act on a rope strung above the bar.
"I want a band, I want amplifiers, I want I want I want," says Jackie (Jo Kennedy) at the start of the movie, just as she notices a kangaroo suit in a store window. She wants that, too, and winds up wearing it to amateur night at the Lizard Lounge. In that get up, she looks smashing on her cousin Angus's (Ross O'Donovan's) motor scooter.
This is the younger generation, replete with post-punk costumes and music. Wise-guy Angus, proud of his generation, brags that he was 2 years old when the Beatles broke up.
Jackie's innocent dream is an old movie dream, and her fate is an old movie fate. Thanks to some crafty wrangling by Angus, Jackie meets writer/TV host Terry Lambert (John O'May) and her career starts rolling. The grand finale talent show is staged in Australia's most famous building, the Sydney Opera House.
"Starstruck" is all surface. Director Gillian Armstrong, coming back from a four-year hiatus after "My Brilliant Career," settles for a winsome tone and doesn't try and explain her characters' psychology or account for their zany stunts. Spectacle is enough, especially when Jackie is on her high wire.
The production designer is Brian Thompson, credited in the small print with the set design for "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." The new movie uses confectionery colours, garish costumes, impossible hairstyles and lots of offhand weirdness like the Elvis Presley sheets on Angus's bed.
Most of it is tasteful and inoffensive, although poolside spoofs of Busby Berkeley and Esther Williams are certainly old hat by now.
The dense accumulation of details - some of them perhaps hard to spot until a second or third viewing - suggest "Starstruck" could wind up as a cult movie on the midnight circuit.
Miss Kennedy is irresistible in the finale, "It's the Monkey in Me," bounding gawkily about the stage and singing with a studio echo to her voice.
"New wave" is the rage they're sticking on the music, but to these ears it's like the Tommy James and the Shondells hits of the late '60s.
Most numbers are on the saccharine side, and many look as if they were engineered especially for the MTV network on cable television. The segments are brief, colourful, full of quick and jarring cuts, and basically empty - just like the videos on MTV.
Jackie defines star quality as "that little something extra." She has it, and so does the movie.
The Boston Phoenix - 8 March 1983
A star is stillborn
by Alan Stern
In the Australian musical Starstruck, a singer named Jackie Mullens, a Sydney waif who aspires to new-wave superstardom. With her heavily outlined eyes, plaster-of-Paris make-up, and reddish black lipstick, Jackie looks like death warmed over, and when she dances, her twitching appendages suggest a stomped-on centipede. When Jackie talks, Dristan commercials with drawings of blocked nasal passages dance in your head; when she sings, her rheumy voice acquires a timbre of glass shards scraping against a blackboard. Sounds like any other new-wave superstar, right? And yet there's something about Jackie that makes it difficult to accept her as the centrepiece of this star-is-born saga: the woman is dull. For all its discordances and weird modulations, her voice has a soporific effect, and whenever her vacant, pasty face comes into close-up, you find yourself scanning the corners of the screen for signs of life.
If this were a less idiotic film, one might bemoan the shaky casting and then diligently unearth Starstruck's more solid virtues. But the film is as dumb as they come - a hapless combination of kitchen-sink melodrama and Rocky Horror camp. Beneath the monstrous production numbers resides a little morality tale about a girl who, abandoned by her mother and living in her grandmother's pub, yearns to be noticed. Jackie and her younger cousin, Angus (Ross O'Donovan), devise a series of attention-getting schemes. Dressed in a mouse costume, Jackie crashes a disco and commandeers the band. When that fails to excite the press, she walks a tightrope above the streets of downtown Sydney in a sort of flesh-coloured body stocking. This yields some coverage on the 6 o'clock news, but stardom doesn't come fast enough, so Jackie conspires to seduce Terry Lambert, the pretty-boy host of a TV variety show. Blimey! He turns out to be gay. Chastened, Jackie returns to the guitarist who's been waiting in the wings, and her newly acquired moral strength somehow enables her to win a rock contest. Only in the movies.
Starstruck alternates drab scenes of prole philosophising ("Life's just a matter of what you want: you want a Volkswagen, you end up with a Volkswagen") with musical fantasy sequences, but everything has the same mucky consistency. The pub scenes, with their jolly beer guzzlers, beg for slice-of-life realism; the musical numbers are so lacklustre that they don't provide any escape from Jackie's hemmed-in existence. Most of the songs, like the costumes and choreography, recall the Time Warp number from Rocky Horror (production designer Brian Thompson also worked on that midnight classic). But the movie's piece de resistance - a water ballet with 20 gay men paddling in Busby Berkely formations while a school of inflatable sharks encircles them - was inspired by that even campier extravaganza, Can't Stop the Music.
The big surprise is that this dreck was directed by Gillian Armstrong, who reportedly waited two years for a script that would provide a worthy follow-up to her first film, My Brilliant Career. Whatever you thought of Career, you had to give it credit for intelligence and stylishness - two words that bear no relation to Starstruck. What both films have in common, however, is a willingness to bend plausibility in order to accommodate the heroine's naive fantasies. If Armstrong has trouble finding a subject for her next movie, she might want to try filming her own life story. She can call it My Bungled Career.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - 28 May 1983
New Wave musical is delightful fun
by Marylynn Uricchio
More than anything, Jackie wants to be a rock singer.
Though by day she helps her mother run a working-class bar in downtown Sydney, Australia, she spends her hours behind the counter dancing and singing and plotting the road to success with her 14-year-old cousin and manager, Angus.
When Angus lines up a guest appearance at the popular Lizard Lounge, Jackie is elated, and she promptly insists they both get their hair done for the occasion. Jackie walks out of the salon with a bright red teased mop anchored by a bone, and poor Angus gets a royal blue dye job that leaves him cowering in embarrassment.
"They're not looking at you," she reassures him, even though everybody on the street is. "They're looking at me. I've got that certain kind of animal magnetism."
Starstruck, an ebullient New Wave Australian musical, is an absolutely delightful romp through adolescent dreamland. Though the film is badly disorganised, it generates an irresistible combination of infectious energy and good will. The movie opens today at the Kings Court Theater in Oakland.
"Do you like the Beatles?" someone asks Angus at one point in the film. "They broke up when he was 2," Jackie, who's all of 17, dryly replies. Given this frame of reference, Starstruck provides an enchanting glimpse into post-punk pubescence, a world where the costumes are gaudy, love is quick and honest, and lyrics like "it's the monkey in me that makes me do it." bring the house down.
Yet there's nothing alienating about the film's characters.They're wholesome little devils, like contemporary Beaver Cleavers, who like to have a bit of fun. Jackie's mother and dotty aunt are tolerant and even indulgent of the kids. They scream at Angus, who lives with them above the pub, for cutting school, but they also join the teen-age crowd on Terry Lambert's smash TV show to watch Jackie perform.
"Starstruck" is structured like a 30s musical, and it takes a minute to realise that reality is not what Gillian Armstrong, who previously directed "My Brilliant Career," is after. Jackie wows the audience during her first gig, singing all over the place without a microphone while the crowd dances in unison. Later, in the pub, the middle-aged customers jump un on the bar and repeat the same New Wave dances in a hilarious closing of the generation gap.
To get a booking on the Terry Lambert show, Angus decides they need a publicity gimmick. So Jackie walks a tightrope between two office buildings, wearing falsies that make her look nude from a distance. Predictably, the TV crews show up and Lambert hires Jackie on the spot. It's just a short step from there to stardom - ah, the movies - but there are a few lessons to be learned along the way.
The musical numbers are upbeat and sparkling, whether they take place in a studio hallway, on a bridge, or in a swimming pool, where Lambert and his buddies do a stunning Esther Williams style water ballet. For some reason, Armstrong chooses to accurately represent the sound, so the Dolby stereo turns on and off depending on the location of the characters, an unnecessary touch that could convince an audience the speakers are bad.
Jo Kennedy, lead singer of an Australian band called Crashing Planes, played Jackie with charm and a great deal of presence. Ross O'Donovan is a locale, feisty Angus, and Ned Lander plays Robbie, who fronts Jackie's band and wins her heart.
Spokane Chronicle - 10 August 1984
Punk-in-Cheek Starstruck Sparkles
By Richard Freedman
Newhouse News Service
Resembling a newly hatched egret with a red Elsa Lanchester fright wig, the perky aspiring punk rocker heroine of "Starstruck" claims she was only 2 when the Beatles split up.
But in its disarming daffiness, this Australian musical somewhat recalls the classic Beatles extravaganza, "A Hard Day's Night."
Directed by Gillian Armstrong, who made her film debut with the vastly different "My Brilliant Career," it is both energetic and laid back at the same time.
Determine to make her way from the Lizard Lounge to Australian prime-time television, 18-year-old Jackie Mullens (Jo Kennedy) enlists the aid of her 14-year-old cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) as her manager.
Angus is a prodigy amongst promoters. He can even con his way out of going to school by stretching out his pajama-clad body in a busy intersection, defying the madly honking drivers to run him over.
So he's just the lad to concoct a publicity scheme involving Jackie's appearance as a semi-clad trapeze artist on a tightrope high above Sydney's busy business district.
Before plunging into the net the puzzled firemen below have stretched for her, she manages to grant a breathless interview to television newsmen hanging out the windows.
Jackie, in short, is a character. She sleeps in what seems to be a raft floating in an inflated sandbox, appears at social events garbed variously as a kangaroo or a giant phonograph record, and thinks nothing of belting out her rock numbers atop the bar of the blue-collar pub where she occasionally works.
As she explains to her mother, who reasonably wants to know "why do you keep singing these pointless songs?" she "only wants to spark things up a bit."
And spark them up she does, with Angus' ingenious help.
Jackie and the band she sings with often sport white cockatoos perched on their shoulders. At a rooftop pool party there's a zany Busby Berkeley-type water ballet, with Jackie as a scrawnier, peppier Esther Williams and the lifeguards playing with inflated plastic sharks as if they were rubber duckies in a bathtub.
So prime time may not be ready for Jackie, whose appearance reminds one television makeup woman of someone who had "just left the Yorkshire ripper." But her single-minded assault on the pinnacles of stardom is fun to watch - for a while.
As in many Australian movies of less than the first rank, though, "Starstrack" goes slack from time to time. Ebullient as it is, director Armstrong could have tightened up its meandering, inconsequential plot considerably.
Still, it boats one lovely touch not likely to appear in American movies. When Jackie does her stuff in the pub, old barflies as well as youths join in the resulting production numbers.
Apparently in Australia, rock - even punk rock - is not seen as a grim challenge thrown in the faces of a disapproving older generation by their scruffy descendants. As in most of this cheerfully chaotic movie, everybody has a good time.
The Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah) - 12 August 1983
Zany Pop Trip from Down Under
By Christopher Hicks
Starstruck is a zany, weird pop musical from Australia. And though it is directed by Gillian Armstrong, who gave us the wonderful 'My Brilliant Career,' this film couldn't be more unlike that one.
In fact, Starstruck looks like it could have been directed by Richard Lester some years ago, so much does it resemble "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!"
And as such, it's interesting to note a passing line of dialogue. As the two main characters sit in a police station, the desk sergeant asks of a 14-year-old boy, "You like the Beatles?"
The girl sitting next to the boy notes, "He was 2 when they broke up."
There's more to that than just a laugh line, or the ring of truth in recognition. It has to be something of a homage to Lester's style.
Jo Kennedy, an energetic actress with a sly sense of humour, plays Jackie, the young girl who wants to be a star - a rock star, specifically. As a singer, she's only fair, and in fact none of the songs in Starstruck are particularly memorable, but Jackie's enthusiasm in her pursuit of fame and adoration is contagious, and you'll be cheering her on before you know it.
The story is simple, with Jackie's goals foremost in the screenwriter's mind. Jackie's younger cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) scrambles throughout the film to make her known to the public, which he reasons is the best way to bring her to the attention of a promoter who will get her on a TV show. So Angus comes up with all sorts of gimmicks - and the one that attracts the most attention is a nude (not really) high-wire act that ends in comical disaster.
Then the plot quickly turns into an attempt to win a big purse on a talent show so as to save Mum's pub.
"Starstruck" is fairly predictable and not much on story development, but it is loaded with quirky characters and stylised dance sequences, and a lot of loud music that will have you tapping your toes and cheering for Jackie.
And Kennedy and O'Donovan are a winning team, both delightful young actors whom you will love before the film is over.
The Sumter Daily Item (Sumter, North Carolina) - 13 April 1983
'Starstruck' is Full Of Youthful Zany Fun
By Yardena Arar
Associated Press Writer
"Starstruck," the latest effort by Australian director Gillian Armstrong of "My Brilliant Career' fame, is a new wave rock musical-fairy tale aimed at the teen audience but likely to elicit a chuckle or two from whatever members of the older crowd it manages to attract.
Jo Kennedy stars as a tightrope-walking teen-age singer who is launched to stardom by her plucky young cousin (Russ O'Donovan) and guitar-playing boyfriend (Ned Lander). They are briefly sidetracked by a good-looking impresario (John O'May) who persuades his dazzled protégée to sing middle-of-the-road mush. But rock and roll prevails and the kids even save the family's Sydney pub from foreclosure.
Miss Armstrong's sense of humour and style go a long way to redeem the lacklustre music and humdrum plot. The dance numbers are particularly engaging. Miss Kennedy and O'Donovan are appealingly offbeat and the entire film is permeated with a sense of youthful, zany fun.