Read an interview with director Rob Sitch here.

The 27 moviegoers who saw and loved The Castle will be happy to know that the follow-up from the same Australian writing/directing team is even better (an incredible revelation, considering that the thought of the kick-boxer on the wedding cake still makes my eyes water).  The Dish offers more of the same type of comedy but is fleshed out with a better story  - a true one, no less - with more characters that have more depth.  It's likely to be one of the year's funniest films and should establish the filmmakers as major players in the industry.

The Dish is set in the summer of 1969, in the sleepy sheepy Australian town of Parkes.  The area's big claim to fame is a giant radio telescope – the largest in the southern hemisphere - which is used primarily for ... well, for its three dish employees to use as a concave cricket field during their breaks.  Cliff Buxton (Sam Neill, Bicentennial Man) is the boss, while Mitch (Kevin Harrington) and Glenn (Tom Long) are his underlings in what seems like a pretty uneventful scientific job.

The Parkes dish, which was to be used as a backup for NASA's main dish in California for the Apollo 11 mission, quickly finds itself in the international spotlight when the moon-bound craft alters its landing schedule, leaving the three protagonists responsible for tracking Apollo and broadcasting its live video signal to television sets all over the world.

Hilarity ensues in the forms of a no-nonsense NASA engineer (Patrick Warburton, Puddy from Seinfeld) who is sent to Parkes to supervise Cliff and his crew, a beaming Mayor (Roy Billing) and his slightly dysfunctional family, the impending arrival of the Australian Prime Minister and U.S. Ambassador, an overly ambitious security guard (Tayler Kane) and - worst of all – a power failure that causes the Parkes dish to lose contact with Apollo just before the moon landing.

The film, which is shown in flashback as a present-day Cliff goes back to Parkes to longingly gaze at the dish, does a very good job of recreating the bedlam that must have been routine for a live television broadcast 40 years ago (they didn't even have the capability to show the Olympics on live TV back then).  It's also nice to see the moon landing from a different perspective - through the eyes of the proud Parkes residents, as opposed to those of American families, who were proud for an entirely different reason. The clips of space travel and Kennedy's promise to stick a U.S. flag on the moon by the end of the decade could have been ditched, but it didn't affect the final product too greatly.

Neill turns in a typically strong performance, but has the scenes stolen from him by a bunch of unknowns.  Long, who will be appearing in the upcoming insurance fraud film Risk, is extremely likeable as the shy electronics engineer and looks like a mid '60s Mick Jagger.  But even Long is trumped by Kane, who creates one of the funnier roles in recent memory as the dish's go-getting security guard.

The Dish was directed by Rob Sitch, who co-wrote the script with his Working Dog partners Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Jane Kennedy (they all assumed the same jobs for The Castle).  It's an extremely well-written film for something this side-splittingly, bent-over-at-the-waist, kick-boxer-on-the-wedding-cake funny - but then again, we just may not be used to comedies that aren't about bodily functions and/or secretions in this country.  Like Billy Elliot, The Dish might just snap North American viewers out of the poop joke rut.

1:44 –

(yet) but contains adult language