You liked `Praise'? It was, to coin a phrase, very much praised over here but I thought it was awful. Not on a performance level, all of that was excellent (the actress, Sascha Horler, just won both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress in the Australian Film Institute Awards - with the first two films she ever made!), I am just so sick of ugly people doing ugly things which is all I could really get out of book or movie. There seems to be a strong belief in the Australian film industry that you must either be Priscilla, Queen of the Desert or Romper Stomper (a movie about hardcore neo-nazis in Melbourne), nothing in between That's not to say I'm very much more interested in beautiful people doing beautiful things, which is pretty much all `Strange Planet' is (look out for the director's first film `Love and Other Catastrophes', it's far far better and very funny). In the past year or two, the best Australian films have been `Two Hands', `Blackrock' and `The Castle'. The fact that only one of these that I know of got a wide release in America and it bombed like crazy is sadly indicative of an industry stuck between a rock and a hard place. Oh well. You don't need to hear the complexities of the Australian film industry from me ... (: Camille > In a small but honest attempt to get our Camille on the right mood, I'd like > to say a little something about an excellent Australian film I watched at > the Stockholm film festival last week. It was called "Praise" and told the > story about a twenty-something couple in a destructive and emotional > relationship superficially "based" on sex and drugs. Cinematically splendid, > this dripping tale of a woman with a bad eczema and a man with low > self-esteem doesn't leave you indifferent. > > A true movie movie. The novel is a best selling piece of some kind, but I > doubt it will be as good as this film. > > The day before, I watched another Australian film, Strange Planets, which > was a shallow but amusing comedy. For a moment there, I was getting used to > the thought of spending New Years Eve drinking champagne to cool down from > mid summer heat. > > /TLM > > ______________________________________________________ > Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com >