Bigger Than Tina

If cringe value alone could boost a film’s appeal Bigger Than Tina would score 10/10. The idea of a hugely untalented performer and his attempt to make the big time has great comic potential but writer/director’s Neil Foley mistakes an unrelenting display of pathetic self-delusion and chronic low achievement with humour.

Possibly had the film been played as a straight fiction this could have been funny (compare for instance Elaine May’s Ishtar, 1987, or Scorsese’s King Of Comedy, 1983) but, no doubt for lack of budget, the film is presented in digital video mockumentary style. Not only is it the faux-verisimilitude not convincingly realized at the level of both performance (too obviously contrived) and plot (who but a mother could think this fool talented?) but the supposed realism makes the sadness of the central character, Dan Vardy-Cobb (Michael Dalley, who is quite outstanding in a back-handed sort of way), a balding, pudgy 30-something living on the outskirts of Melbourne with his parents, then with his plain, pudgy kitchen-hand girlfriend (Sally Lightfoot), most unappealing viewing.

Not surprising then that according to the website of the title song writers, The Fauves, (the royalty statements intended for the film’s long-since-vanished production company, Backyard Productions, having been re-directed to them ) Foley’s film “in all its commercial guises, earned $23.39 in the period January to March 2003, leaving an unrecouped debt of $34, 069.76".

 

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