I wanted to but couldn't!

Gripping story with well-crafted characters

A Masterpiece!

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Before Hugh Jackman became the Hollywood Superstar that he is today and became known to Comic Book fans as Wolverine from the X-Men franchise,he starred in this Australian Romantic Comedy where he plays a handsome truck driver named Jack who has a secret. He loves writing romantic novels and since no one wants to hear of a man writing a romantic novel he used his best friend's name Ruby Vale to keep up his fascade. But later in the film we meet a woman named Ziggy who wants Ruby to go to Sydney to talk about the book that she was suppose to write unaware its really Jack that wrote it,so Jack and Ruby decide to go to Sydney to promote the book but when they spend some time together Jack falls for his best friend Ruby.But how long will this fascade last for and does Ziggy smell a rat and has a thing for Jack and will Jack admit that he loves Ruby despite the fact she is getting married to someone else?Now the only Australian film I seen Jackman in was Australia with Nicole Kidman and seeing him use his own accent in this film was a delight. Also he was rather young this time. I enjoyed this movie as its incredibly underrated and we get to hear Jackman sing Crying with his female co-star. Bottom line if you never heard of Jackman and you are new to him,well be my guest and check him out in his film debut from his hometown before he starred in big budget films in Hollywood and became one of Hollywood's attractive leading men and a versatile actor. I became a fan of Hugh Jackman since Kate & Leopold and the original X-Men movies not to mention his my favorite celeb crush too as his a very handsome man.My advice just find the movie Paperback Hero and check it out. It reminded me of that film Hugh Jackman starred in next to Ashley Judd Someone Like You only a male version of that film.7/10

Sometimes it's good to watch a film that tells a simple story well, has characters who are all decent human beings, has actors who play those characters straightforwardly and sympathetically, and doesn't take itself too seriously. This is one of those films. Australia has only a small film industry by world standards, and it suffers from the fact that when anyone of real talent emerges, he or she is invariably whisked off to the dollars of Hollywood very rapidly, so that most of our best people, not only actors but directors and all the others who work to make a film, don't make films in Australia. It's therefore a welcome surprise when an Australian film turns out to be good. One very common problem is the lack of good screenplays: most of them have fundamental problems of structure, and nearly all of them have not been developed sufficiently. This one's a good one. The idea of a truck driver writing Mills and Boon romances is interesting in itself; the enlisting of a local girl to "front" for the real author is a predictable but acceptable nest step: and the romance that slowly but surely emerges out of the background to take over towards the end is also predictable but very nicely and gently done.The film didn't make much of a public stir when it was released, in fact I don't recall it in cinemas at all. It comes up every now and again on TV, and it's much underrated. It also deserves a much higher user rating than its current 6.1. Perhaps it's the lack of pretension itself that leads viewers to mark it down. If you're looking at IMDb wondering whether to bother with this film, then my suggestion is to bother. It won't change your world, but it will amuse you and leave you feeling happy.

While this is not Romeo and Juliet, neither is anything else, except for Romeo and Juliet. (And, if I dare speak the heresy, it seems to me that even with that august work, for those of us who are not English Lit graduates the enjoyment would be enhanced if 'twere rendered into more accessible English, without losing the rhythm).Finally, an Australian filmmaker has (largely) resisted the temptation to portray rural Australians as cardboard Bruces and Sheilas that say 'fair dinkum' and call each other 'cobber' with thick, fabricated accents, a too-common tendency that has held the otherwise sophisticated local film industry back for years.This is a simple enough romantic tale of boy/girl finding each other - after the catalyst of being thrown together through circumstance lets them break through the barrier of friendship - and it is a movie that is hard not to like. If it does not move you greatly, it should at least cheer you up.

Paperback Hero was repeated last night on TV and having watched it last night after seeing it at the cinema years ago when it was first released my wife and I found ourselves enjoying it even more than we did the first time around.I found Bowman's direction to be particularly compatible with the script he had written: the way in which he composed the camera shots, the pace in which the film unrolled as well as the composition of each scene which left this viewer lingering over each segment rather than mindlessly being rushed through as so often happens with Hollywood fare.Other commentators have written that they found Bowman's script ragged in spots and I'm sure this is a very valid comment but I was carried along to such an extent by the movie's visuals and by the totality of what was happening on the screen that I didn't notice whether or not the script was seamlessly unrolling.If you haven't seen this film you owe it to yourself to do so-if you have seen it you owe it to yourself to see it again.