Re: Australian movies

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@hotpop.com)
Tue, 30 Nov 1999 10:20:57 +1100 

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
>
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