Pre-release Screening: “Mental”

Dodge College students are invited to attend a pre-release screening of “Mental” this Wednesday – catch the film in Marion Knott Studios before it hits theaters!

PJ Hogan, screenwriter for side-splitting comedies Muriel’s Wedding and Confessions of a Shopaholic, as well as Peter Pan, has a new film coming out about a similarly dysfunctional family group, simply titled Mental, which is slated to hit theaters next Friday, March 29.

A charismatic, crazy hothead transforms a family’s life when she becomes the nanny of five girls whose mother has cracked from her husband’s political ambitions and his infidelity.

But
all Dodge College

students
are welcome to check out this brand new film
before
the rest of America!

Our screening takes place
Wednesday, March 20 at 7:00 p.m. in Folino Theater. 
Screenwriting students especially will want to stick around after the credits, because PJ will be onhand to answer questions about the industry from the audience!

In an interview with
The Sunday Morning Herald
, Hogan describes the impetus for the film with his uniquely quirky panache:

The starting point for the film came with my mother’s nervous breakdown while I was 12

Screenwriter PJ Hogan

My dad, who was up for re-election, did not tell us or anybody that she’d had a breakdown and been committed. As we’d often hear him say: ‘Nobody’s going to vote for a guy whose wife’s in a nuthouse.’

I came home from school and there was this strange woman rolling a cigarette, knife in her boot, dog beside her, and she said, ‘Bit of a mess in here, innit?

That was the woman who took care of us … she pretty much lived with us, I remember, for six to eight months, even after my mum returned home, because they got on.