Mental Syncs

 

I wrote about how I came to win this double pass (pictured above) in my blog-post here;
That Movie Guy 
The night of the screening just happened to fall on the day I had taken a redundancy from a job I was more, or less kicked out of, by a company I had worked for for 24+ years.

Looking back after the escape;-)

Sitting down and contemplating my freedom;-)

Freedom At Last After 24+ Years 
I had said my good-byes to most of the people who worked there, that were friends, or at least not arse-holes and then walked away thinking how good it felt to be really out of there ... not just for a day, or a holiday period, but for good.
My only real concern was that my wife's government job was cutting back the workforce from 176 positions to 45 less the next day, and she thought she might be one of those 45.

I had asked her if she wanted to go to the movies with me that night to see Mental, but she said that she was too worried about losing her job to enjoy the night out ... so I went by myself.

I tried to get my mate Warrick to go with me, but he had to work until 7pm.
He tried desperately to get someone to cover his shift, because he knew PJ Hogan was going to be there and wanted desperately to meet him, because Warrick is a filmmaker himself, check out his latest short film -

Valtari ~ Sigur Rós 
I wrote about Warrick here in this post below -
My Night in Motherland

Warrick, my former co-worker in the big blue box

 He is quite a talented guy, and could have easily met PJ Hogan if he wanted to, on the night.
 Oh well, not to be for Warrick.

My seat number on the night.

I got to the theatre, grabbed a glass of white wine and took a seat 3 rows from the front, right in front of where PJ Hogan would be sitting after the film. 
I thought how lucky is this? 
Then I put my wine glass down to find an upside-down 13 staring back at me.

PJ Hogan before the screening introducing the film

 PJ came out and did an intro to the film and then let it roll.
And then the syncs started flowing.

The Story Bridge, Brisbane

The film starts off by flashing the name of the production company 
Story Bridge Films onto the screen.
I've done a number of posts on this Bridge.
Another Dark Story to My Favourite Bridge 
and 
Story About a Bridge 
So, it is a structure quite familiar to my world.
Story Bridge Films are also the production company involved in the new shark movie Bait in 3-D.

The film starts off with Shirley Moochmore singing  
The Hills Are Alive in her backyard on the Gold Coast.
Then there is a helicopter shot that flies over the top of Mt. Warning

Mt. Warning was one of the first bush-walks that I ever did.
A group of us from work started to do bush-walking treks and this walk was selected as our first walk.
We repeated it a few weeks later, as a few co-workers had missed the first walk, so we did it again a few weeks later.
One of the group that had left work contacted me a few weeks ago and asked if I wanted to do it again sometime soon.
I told him that it depended on my work roster, as I worked every second weekend.

 Soon as I had accepted the redundancy Monday morning the first thing I thought of was that now I should ring my old pal Pete and tell him that I'm free to do the Mt. Warning climb any weekend now.
So, I was stunned when the film opened to this scene of 
The Hills Are Alive and the overhead shot of Mt. Warning.

 PJ Hogan went to school at Mt St Patrick College,  Murwillumbah
The school badge has a cross with Mt. Warning behind it.
And if you click that link above, it will take you to the school's page about the badge.
And I like what it says about why Mt. Warning is on the badge -
"Mt.Warning is the geographical centre of the Tweed Valley and signifies the area for which the students are enrolled.  
Mt. Warning is a challenge to climb.
It symbolizes the challenges we face as we strive for excellence in our daily journeys through life.
As we journey up the mountain, we will fall, occasionally take the wrong path and may lose sight of the mountain peak. 
Faith encourages us to keep climbing and to seek the beauty we know exists at the top of the mountain.
That beauty is the love of God evident in the many little journeys of daily life."   

Marc also wrote in That Movie Book how some films use the claim that the movie was based on true events to their advantage, by really not telling it like it was at all, pointing out that the Von trap family didn't really don their lederhosen and climb a mountain to freedom like in the climax to The Sound of Music. 
They were put on a crowed train to Italy in real life apparently.

Scene from the movie Mental

Now the odd thing about this movie is that PJ Hogan claims it is a semi-autobiographical movie about the situations in his own life.
His mother would would often sing along to The Sound of Music soundtrack to escape the reality of everyday life.
 He said at the preview screening, that he came from a family of seven brothers and sisters
and that his sister had once had a nervous breakdown and spent time in mental hospitals as well, so he knows first hand about mental illness in the family.

My brother in a Byron Bay restaurant last year

 My own brother suffered a nervous breakdown in 2001 and it took about ten electro-shock sessions to bring him back to near his old self.
He was literally a zombie before the shock therapy, staring right through anyone who would visit him in hospital.
He suffered another one this year in August. 
After the Byron Bay Writers Festival I got to learn from my mother that he had tried to take himself off his medication and was now back in the mental section of the PA hospital in Brisbane.
I spent a few days visiting him with my mother, when my sister couldn't take her.
I can tell you it is a pretty depressing environment being in there.
The thought crossed my mind, more than a few times, that you would be better off dead, than to be stuck in this place full-time.  

Liev Schreiber stars as Trevor Blundell in Mental

The other main star apart from Liev Schreiber , Toni Collette and Anthony LaPaglia, in this movie, is a dead shark.
Which is synchronistically quite odd, for a number of reasons.

The day before I saw this film my football team the  
Cronulla Sutherland Sharks died when they where beaten by the  
Canberra Raider's in a knockout finals match.
Their promising season came to an abrupt halt the same weekend my job did. 
Not only that, but legendary shark man Ron Taylor died the same day as the Sharks did -

Ron and Valerie Taylor

Pioneer shark expert Ron Taylor dies
" Ron Taylor, the Australian marine conservation pioneer who helped film some of the heart-stopping, iconic underwater footage in the movie "Jaws", has died. He was 78.
Wildlife conservationists led the tributes for Taylor, who died at a private hospital in Sydney on Sunday.
He had battled myeloid leukaemia for two years, the ABC reported.
"Today is a very sad day, Ron Taylor, long-time Australian shark conservationist has passed away," the Australian Anti Shark Finning Alliance wrote on Twitter. "
I have been a life member off the Sharks football club since 1988, which was also the year I started work for IKEA. 
So this weekend won't be forgotten in a hurry for me.

Also strange was that when I went to the  
Mt St Patrick Wikipedia page the only two noteworthy alumni were PJ Hogan and Luke Covell.
Covell was one of the stars of the Cronulla-Sutherland team before his retirement from the NRL.

Click to make photo bigger

I never thought I would have any synchronicities reading  
That Movie Book, but it's full of 'em for me.
As early as Page 10 Marc has a section subtitled  
A Beginner's Guide to Shark Movies and the first cab off the rank is Jaws.

Now here's another sync, if you watch the above trailer again
(you might have to put it to full screen size to see this)
at the 1:43 minute mark, when the two teenagers are walking through the shark jaws you'll see a   
"Meet Trevor Blundell - Shark Hunter - Sat 24th March"  
sign, next to the Liev Schrieber's character's cardboard cut-out. 
Interesting, because March 24th is my brother's birthday, and when he came home after 2-3 weeks of hospitalization he had a beard and looked a bit like the Trevor character in the movie, only a bit more big boned, shall we say;-)

Funny also was this poster I snapped at last years Woodford Folkfest of a send-up of the iconic "Jaws" poster of the seventies. 
I truly don't know what made me take this picture ... I nearly didn't,
but I had a niggling thought telling me I'd be sorry later if I didn't, so I snapped it.

Anthony LaPaglia playing
Barry Moochmore in Mental

This is the scene where BARRY says,"I should have had boys", and the girls say "boys have breakdowns, too, dad". 
And he retorts back "not Australian boys, they're too busy playing football".
Barry is a typical self-centered politician who only cares about himself, has affairs on the side of his marriage, and doesn't even know the names of his daughters, because he is away from home so much.

Fitting that my football team the Sharks should be knocked out by the Canberra Raiders in Australia's national capital and home of the politicians.

Weird how their mascot looks like the shark hunter out of Mental. 
Just needs a viking helmet on his head to complete the match, doesn't he?-)

Also funny was that the myth/story used by the shark hunter in the movie was that this was the shark that swallowed a real life Australian Prime-minister, Harold Holt, who in real life went for a swim in the ocean and was never seen again.

Lily Sullivan, PJ Hogan and a radio guy from the ABC

After the film had ended PJ Hogan came out and announced that he had a special guest -
Lily Sullivan, the young star of the movie who played the character Coral.

Lily Sullivan

Lily Sullivan and PJ Hogan

I wanted to go up afterwards and thank PJ for the great laugh he had given me on what in many ways was a day with nothing to laugh about for me, apart from the funny feeling of never having to go back into the big blue box.
But he was emotional taking about his sister's illness, which made me think of my brother's illness, not to mention my older brother who was born retarded at birth and still lives with my aging parents. 
So, I chickened out in case the dam burst. 
I didn't think it would, but I thought just to be safe, I wouldn't.
Unless fate would bump as together in the foyer ... which it didn't.
Although, I got to say hi to him and his wife when we were walking on the street outside the cinema going back to my car.
PJ said during question time that Lily came from Springwood,  just outside of Brisbane, which was where the first IKEA store in Brisbane was located...the one I started working for 24 years ago. 

The old IKEA store that was at Springwood, 
just outside Brisbane. Now gone

Another fitting chapter from
That Movie Book;-)

And yet one more fitting chapter it seems;-)

" While Kamprad today is known as a frugal billionaire who drives a ’93 Volvo, eats at middle-class restaurants, and outfits his home entirely in affordable IKEA products, his legacy is tainted by his past involvement with pro-Nazi organizations. Between 1942 and 1945, Kamprad joined, fund-raised, and recruited members for a fascist, Nazi-sympathizing group in Sweden. 
The news only came out in 1994, when his personal correspondence with fascist Per Engdahl was released to the public. 
Kamprad immediately apologized for his involvement and claimed it was the biggest regret of his young life. 
He also wrote to every Jewish employee on his staff to issue a personal apology.
Of course, none of this stopped the information from being a point of controversy when the store first arrived in Israel, but the world seems to have forgiven him."

Read the full text here: 
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/31198#ixzz26RdsBndr
--brought to you by Mental Floss!

Could be appropriate too?

Thanks to my blogging buddie King Uke for making me a going away tarot card, too.
You even got the seat number right that I chose on the night of the screening of Mental.

Just one last thing Marc (if you happen to read this post), PJ said that not many people know this, but even though Muriel's Wedding was made in Australia, it is just about fully owned by a French production company, because nobody in Australia wanted to fund it ... that is until it made $90 000 0000.  
C'est la Vie (such is life)