Skin Deep

With nine #1 albums to his name, Jimmy Barnes is one of Australia’s greatest rock icons. But his success masked a life of hardship and abuse, where the music that once saved him from oblivion almost came back to destroy him. Before Jimmy Barnes was Jimmy Barnes, he was James Dixon Swan, a troubled kid from the mean streets of Glasgow – and the even meaner streets of North Adelaide – trying to survive against a backdrop of addiction, alcoholism, poverty and abuse. For Jimmy, escape was the only option and he found it with a band called Cold Chisel. But the rock’n’roll lifestyle has its own temptations and the scars of childhood are always waiting to take you home. Based on the bestselling memoir and directed by veteran Australian filmmaker Mark Joffe, Working Class Boy is both an inspiring story of rock and redemption told in Barnes’ own words and an unflinchingly honest reflection on fame, creativity and depression.

Marcy, a worker in the reelection campaign of bumbling Senator John McGlory, is sent to Ireland on a quest to find the Irish ancestry of Sen. McGlory, to help him win the Irish vote. But when Marcy arrives in the small village of Ballinagra, she finds herself in the middle of a matchmaking festival, and the local matchmaker is determined to pair her off with one of the local bachelors.

Robbie and his girlfriend, Amy, are among a group of students who play their private night games in the romantic thriller that catapulted Kidman to center stage. On screen throughout, Kidman discovers what will happen when a friendly game becomes real life ... and real life becomes a deadly game.

When Detective Bennett O'Mara finds a chocolate wrapper on a strangled girl, it leads him to enigmatic chocolatier Juliana Lovece. Just as this perceptive woman gets under his hardened skin, he suspects she may be at the centre of an increasing murder count.

Wallace is an efficiency expert, managing the high-profile downsizing of a major auto parts factory. But when he is hired to evaluate a small moccasin factory which seems from another era, Wallace has to reconsider the rapid modernization he advocates, as he is confronted by the human faces such plans hurt.

A lawyer becomes a fisherman from frustration. When his one piece of property, his boat, is struck by lightning and destroyed he is denied insurance money because it was “an act of God”. He re-registers as a lawyer and sues the insurance company and, as God’s representative, The Church.

Lewis, a young amateur theater director, is offered a job with a governmental program for the rehabilitation of mentally ill patients in a Sydney institution. His project is overrun by one of the patients who wants to stage the opera Cosi Fan Tutte by Mozart despite the fact that none of the patients are able to sing and none of them speak Italian. A comedy of errors ensues, but one which unifies the patients and their director in unexpected ways.

A schoolteacher (John Waters) becomes obsessed with the idea that his wife (Joy Bell) did not die in a car accident, as everyone else thinks.

Water Rats is an Australian TV police procedural broadcast on the Nine Network from 1996 to 2001.

The action moves along quickly, jumping over holes in the script, in this made-for-television drama about Eve, an ex-terrorist from Germany who is forced to escape to Australia with her teenage daughter Chrissie when she is sought by Riley, a lover from 17 years in the past. In turn, the IRA has sent two members after Riley because he shot an IRA soldier and must pay the consequences. The two IRA operatives looking for Riley come across a really nasty biker who wants vengeance on Eve for setting his car on fire -- and the three men finally track her and Chrissie to the wine-growing country of Barossa Valley. The final denouement is about to explode, as Riley also arrives on the scene. With under-par acting and a patchy plot, this film was never released theatrically.