The Worst Film Ever

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Esther is an outcast at a private school. The uniformity of the school is shown to the extreme. Esther wants to be part of the crowd, yet at the same time strives not to be part of the group. She attempts to talk to her parents, but they ignore her to excess. Esther meets Sunni (Keisha Castle-Hughes), a public school student. They connect and become friends and she also makes friends with Sunni's mom (Toni Collette) who works as a dancer. Esther decides to stop going to Rowan and attend public school with the unorthodox Sunni...without really telling anyone. Here she finds her comfort zone.The story is basically a witty coming of age story. The story becomes serious and sad toward the end, which I thought ruined the flow.No f-bombs, sex, or nudity. Sex is mentioned and the film has ummm- err-ah....those female things.

As soon as I read the description of "Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger" on the DVD box I wanted to rent the film. I've never seen an Australian movie about Jewish people; moreover, I've never come across very many accounts of Australian Jews. "Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger" is unusual; while there are many films that reference Bar Mitzvahs, the coming of age ceremony for Jewish boys, I can't think of any other movie that features the Bat Mitzvah, the ceremony for girls. It's very quirky, like "1966", which portrays a British boy worrying about his upcoming Bar Mitzvah ceremony and party during the summer of that year, while England was hosting the World Cup. However, while "1966" presents the Bar Mitzvah boy and his parents and their friends as multilayered individuals, Esther and her friend Sonni are the most fully realised characters in "Esther Blueburger". Esther's parents are stereotypes of the upwardly mobile but distant mother and father. The audience doesn't discover why it's so important to them to send their children to private schools. After Esther's brother claims he's been suffering from anti-Semitism at his school, he's sent to a Jewish private school, but Esther isn't asked to attend the school as well. Perhaps it's an all boys school, but I would think they would also try to protect their daughter from prejudice and find a Jewish girls' school for her. At any rate, I found Esther's brother the most interesting of all the characters aside from the two female leads; his conversion from a number obsessed nerd bordering on violent weirdo to a devout praying stickler for ritual at the dining table is very funny. I loved how he insisted on saying a blessing at the dining table and made his father cover his head with a napkin: he reminded me of many of my Jewish friends I met at school growing up in Miami.The film would have benefited from further exploring what Judaism signifies to Esther and her family; aside from their accents, the relatives at the Bat/Bar Mitzvah party are straight out of central casting for any Bar Mitzvah sequence in a Hollywood movie. The story the father tells about the bread falling schmaltz side up feels authentic at first, but alas otherwise the Jewishness is portrayed as schmaltz -- or shtick, rather. So too is Esther's journey as she tries to truly become a woman. It felt like many films and made for TV movies about girls struggling to break away from their upbringing and find their identities as adults. I smiled at Esther customising her Bat Mitzvah dress, turning the yellow embroidered ruffles into a multi layered mini dress with a halter top, and covering her white high heels with red glitter. Her makeover doesn't go much further than cosmetic. I can't see how her Swedish act would win over the public school girls and her private school fellows so quickly. Her transformation seems like a fantasy she dreams up after being emotionally shattered by the brutality of her school and the girls her mother wants her to befriend: it comes too easily, and too painlessly, aside from her split from Sonni and the loss of Sonni's mother. I agree that the nightclub scenes are too gritty; surely Esther would love to dress up for clubbing and maybe take a swig of booze but at her age would find wandering the strip and giving boys oral sex way too frightening. I take the point that she scared Sonni by behaving coarsely, but that was suggested by Esther mugging her old school friend for her raincoat. I wish I could have just walked in another school and life so smoothly, without the school ever contacting my parents or challenging me about my absence. Furthermore, it's not clear why Sonni is sent to the Ladies College once in her relatives' care."Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger" is an entertaining movie about the passage from adolescence to young adulthood, and teenage girls would certainly find much in it that they could identify with. But it doesn't travel much further than the stages usually followed by films about young girls growing up. It's a shame, because the film has the potential to be an engrossing study of how Esther and her family find new ways of fulfilling themselves and engaging with their community.

Esther Blueburger (Danielle Catanzariti) is thirteen. She's from a Jewish family and attends a private school where she's an outsider. Her classmates cartwheel, dance and eat with geometric precision, while the victimised Esther spends her lunchtimes watching them from the confines of an upper-storey classroom.Esther crosses paths with Sonni (Keisha Castle-Hughes), an offbeat teen who attends a neighbouring State school. A friendship develops and it's not long before Esther decides to enrol at Sonni's school, without her parents knowing. There she enjoys a newfound popularity and very quickly uses it to victimise other outsiders. This doesn't impress Sonni one bit.The awkwardly-titled HEY HEY IT'S ESTHER BLUEBURGER sits uncomfortably between a Saturday morning children's television show and a more intense, coming-of-age drama. The supporting characters, like Esther's gullible parents, teachers and peers are caricatures, which is quite alright as they represent real people with which we're familiar. Esther's change of schools is far too easy for her. While many obvious questions about this are left unaddressed, we're willing to accept it because we understand this approach to story telling.But when Esther tries to prove her worth by fellating a boy in a dark alley one night, it just doesn't gel with what's gone before. It feels as though the screenplay needed some toughening up and the writer responded by throwing in this seriously out-of-place scene. And surely someone must have pointed out at the script stage that this would severely restrict the film's target audience, the tweens. (Footnote: Does anyone remember an equally unnecessary fellatio scene in Michael Thornhill's BETWEEN WARS (1974)?)Esther loses her appeal as the film progresses and we really don't care for her at all by the end. Yes, teenage years are confusing times but her use of her new popularity to belittle others makes her unlikeable. The rift between Esther and Sonni is of Esther's making. And the friendship between the two isn't explored anywhere near as well as it could have been. Neither is the difference between private and State schools. Neither is Esther's religion. The sad tale of Esther's duck, however, is most effective.Toni Collette appears briefly as Sonni's "cool" biker Mum. But the situation involving her character at the film's end is also gravely misplaced. So too is the final school assembly scene but by this stage, anything goes.HEY HEY IT'S ESTHER BLUEBURGER is the work of first-time writer/director Cathy Randall and first-time producer Miriam Stein. It shows. Comparisons to THE BLACK BALLOON, another recently released, coming-of-age Australian film are to be expected. THE BLACK BALLOON is vastly superior because its screenwriters have a much keener sense of character construction and plot development.HEY HEY IT'S ESTHER BLUEBURGER has some interesting things to say but it's unsure just how to say them. And I'm tired of films where the story continues as the credits roll. It's a sign of indecisiveness. Do we really need to hear about Esther's braces being removed? Maybe it makes a difference to the next boy she blows in a back alley.

Hey Hey it's Esther Blueburger is a cool flick telling the story of a young teenage girl's attempts to fit in. Esther, played wonderfully by the pixie like Danielle Cantanzariti, is trapped in a life of non-recognition by an idiosyncratic family and the lonely side of classic school yard tribal exclusion that everyone has experienced.After befriending local girl Sunni, (Keisha Castle Hughes of Whale Rider fame), Blueburger begins a double life that is both laugh out loud funny and touching as she looks for her place in the world.I saw Danielle & Keisha at the Sydney premiere and they are even cuter in person than on film. Danielle, although diminutive in size, projects large on screen & Keisha has a certain star power, especially on camera, which is undeniable. It's amazing that both Keisha (in Whale Rider) and Danielle in 'Esther' have been plucked from obscurity to give such fantastic debut performances especially seeing as both were in their early teens at the time. They are supported ably by their on screen parents (Essie Davis & Russell Dykstra) and Sunni's mum, Toni Colette who plays a character which is the anti-thesis of Esther's 'normal' parents, a source of fascination & enchantment for Esther.There's something about wanting to be in with the cool kids and the lengths we go to to do that that we all recognise. It's part of growing up and becoming the person you are. That's what makes this film funny, beautiful, and sad at the same time.This is an excellent film by first time writer & director Cathy Randall & I loved it. It's great to see talented writers and film-makers in Australia being given a chance & supported in an industry where much talent goes unnoticed and is usually substituted for 'celebrity'. It's definitely one of the better films to come out of Australia in recent years. Do yourself a favour and see this film. It's definitely not 'normal'!