I've seen some dysfunctional families in my time, but Thomas REALLY has it rough. His mother is about to give birth and doesn't get off his case, his dad seems to take orders from a teddy called Rex, as well as being completely useless... and there's his brother Charlie. Who happens to be severely autistic. We're talking about constantly rocking back and forth, unable to communicate apart from with sign language, having random fits in public and rushing into total stranger's houses to use their bathroom facilities. To call him a 'handful' would be a gross understatement.Thomas wants out. He's fed up of doing everything around the house, his sibling embarrassing him in public and being bullied at school due to his 'situation'. Then, thanks in part to his brother's antics, he meets a lovely girl called Jackie, and things start looking up. Not only is she a beautiful, warm, compassionate human being, she can seemingly look past Charlie's bizarre behaviour and appreciate who he is. Even if he does steal tampons from her bag and suck on them...The key to the success of The Black Balloon is it really puts us in Thomas's shoes, and we suffer alongside him as he tries to make the best of a very stressful lifestyle. It's bad enough having to watch his brother 24/7, but when he starts acting up around people who don't understand his condition and they just look on with contempt, what can he do? He hates his brother due to the unwanted attention he attracts everywhere, and you can understand why he lashes out at Charlie several times. Only judge if you've worked a mile in their shoes, etc.The performances are out of this world, is Luke Ford (as Charlie) not disabled in real life? Every little detail, from the facial expressions, to the little tics he displays rings true. Note to Dustin Hoffman: THIS is someone with a serious handicap, not your card-counting, won't-go-on-plane has-difficulty-dancing social misfit from Rain Man. We dislike Charlie for the way he disrupts everyone's lives... but he can't help it, and he still shows enough during his quieter moments to demonstrate he can be very good-natured. Rhys Wakefield also effectively garners sympathy as the woe-be-gone Thomas, and Toni Collette as usual adds a touch of class as the mum of this chaotic brood.Filled with heartbreaking and inspirational moments, it's a treasure of a film... especially for those who have to live this way. If it teaches us anything, it's that should never give up on those you love. The more you put in, the more you'll get back in the long run... 8/10

Lots of water symbolism in this movie, like with Charlie's Noah's Ark play, and his brother Thomas' lifeguard training. And there's a bathtub scene at the end! There's also a scene at an abandoned army training field with Thomas' girlfriend who kind of looks like Amanda Seyfried that probably also has some symbolic undercurrent, like after Thomas gives her a "beautiful" empty ammunition shell pendant (during a rain storm), she tells him to close his eyes, and says she imagines beyond the fuzzy blackness, she can see her mom. Charlie is there too!Thomas' mom's name is Maggie, which is a diminutive of Margaret, which derives from the Greek word for pearl. So maybe the shell had something to do with mom (pearl)? Mom's portrayed by Toni Collette, who later had a role on the United States of Leeland (Tara) as a mom of a daughter who sat on balloons for a web-cam fetish site. Coincidence!?! Probably! She's a good actress! Thomas' dad works for the Army. His name is Simon and he consults a teddy bear named Rex for advice, and his home life is a disaster! The part where he finally outwits the bullies and rides around the block on his big-wheel is probably the best part of the film!See this movie, even if it's Australian and doesn't have Noah Taylor. It features an artistic kid rubbing poop into carpet and has a great soundtrack!

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.

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?