Acting
A rush-hour fender-bender on New York City's crowded FDR Drive, under most circumstances, wouldn't set off a chain reaction that could decimate two people's lives. But on this day, at this time, a minor collision will turn two complete strangers into vicious adversaries. Their means of destroying each other might be different, but their goals, ultimately, will be the same: Each will systematically try to dismantle the other's life in a reckless effort to reclaim something he has lost.
High school is over, and everybody in the small town just up the Hudson from New York City where Jim lives has made plans and moved on. Everybody except Jim. While his buddies head off to one Ivy League college or another, Jim rejects their upwardly-mobile choices and takes a job driving for the local cab company instead, which allows him plenty of free time to hang out, drink with the locals at John's Bar and Grill, and think back on the love affair with a married woman that, for the exquisite moment it lasted, brought passion and meaning to his life. Drawing partially on events from his own life, first time writer/director Peter Callahan tells a poignant and sometimes hilarious story about what happens when life moves on and you're not quite ready to move with it.
Every September Sydney's inner-suburban Leichhardt Council re-elects it mayor. Incumbent Larry Hand was popular with the citizenry but they don't vote for mayor - the 12 councillors do - and after three years of Larry, at least four councillors were after his job. When film-makers Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson settled in at Leichhardt Council in early 1994 the knives were already being sharpened. A battle royal was in the making, and so it came to pass. By the end of September Larry had fought the fight of his life, with Connolly and Anderson documenting every bit of it on film. Ambition, courage, envy, hatred, loyalty, betrayal, disaster, triumph... in other words, a classic study in politics.
