Re: Australian movies

The Laughing Man (the_laughing_man@hotmail.com)
Tue, 30 Nov 1999 13:44:47 +0000 (GMT)

>From: Camille Scaysbrook <verona_beach@hotpop.com>
>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.

For me, the primary value of the movie – besides the strikingly good acting 
– was the development of the male character. She was pretty much the same 
throughout the film, but through their destructive and yet caring 
relationship, he developed a sense of self-value he didn’t have before. I 
found a genuine tone in there, which made me warm inside. I can react to 
focusing on “the beauty of the ugly”, like a modern freak-show, but this 
wasn’t only that. Not to me.

>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

I liked Romper Stomper. As I remember it, there wasn’t that irritating easy 
to swallow morality served with the film, as in for example Once were 
Warriors (which has the strongest wife abuse scene I’ve ever seen, but I 
can’t stand those finger pointing moral cakes served in the end).

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).

Yup. Second that.

In the past
>year or two, the best Australian films have been `Two Hands', `Blackrock'
>and `The Castle'.

Two Hands showed at the Film Festival, but I am so tired of gangster dramas 
just now, I didn’t prioritize it. I shall remember you recommending it 
though.

/TLM

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