That's not to say I was disappointed to watch either of these films, just that they wouldn't have naturally been the first two out of the chute if all else were equal.
As it happens, both were Australian in subject matter. I'll address each with its own sub heading.
The late (January 24th) end to watching 2022 movies meant that I could only take one night off (I watched the Australian Open, which I've been doing all week) before I had to get right back on the horse.
See, January 26th is Australia Day, and last year I started a tradition that I hope to do every year: watch a movie that deals in some way with the plight of indigenous Australians.
Australia Day is called Invasion Day by many indigenous people, because it marks the arrival of Europeans in this country. So while some Australian-born cinephiles might recognize the day watching something that celebrates Australians of European descent, I think it's more on the side of social justice to mourn their arrival alongside the people whose history they permanently altered. (I of course am not an Australian-born cinephile, but more on that in a moment.)
And so I watched High Ground, a film by Stephen Maxwell Johnson that has a 2020 date on IMDB but was not actually released in Australia until the end of January the next year. (It must have played a festival because it certainly wasn't released anywhere else before it was released in Australia.)
The plot is inspired by a real incident in which a couple dozen indigenous people were slaughtered by police around 1919, which was covered up to avoid the consequences. Yes, fortunately there were starting to be consequences for that sort of thing. A young man and his nephew, a child at the time, survive the incident, but are separated, with the boy being taken in by a local Christian mission and raised by them. Twelve years later, the uncle is creating havoc on local farmsteads, and some of the police want to track him down to bring him to justice, while the boy -- now a young man -- wants to get ahead and warn him. There are both sympathetic and monstrous white characters who fall on either side of the divide.
I wish I could say it was as fulfilling as the first film in the series, Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout from 1971, but Johnson is no Roeg. It has some strong parts while overall being a bit underwhelming. Still in the range of a recommendation on Letterboxd, earning three stars out of five.
So instead of using this space to sing its praises, I'll use this space to discuss something that identifies the main villain as such -- and something I share in common with him.
The Australian character actor Callan Mulvey is a nasty looking fellow. I don't mean he's ugly, just that he has a menacing look in his eyes. He can't help it, it was the way he was born, but he's certainly leaned into it to get similar work along the lines of his role in High Ground, such as Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Avengers: Endgame. So he's doing quite fine for himself, thank you very much.
Here he plays the nastiest of the group of policy officers, who range from virtuous with a regrettable past, to just following the rules, to this guy, who takes a sadistic pleasure in the idea of killing the indigenous. And you can tell he's bad -- or at least not from around here -- with how he handles the everpresent flies of the Australian outback.
Now, if you've never seen a film set here, you might not know that the characters in these movies have flies landing on their face and flying off again. It's just what happens. Spend enough time around it -- like, say, from birth -- and you adapt. You stop brushing them away and train your skin to deal with little pairs of legs landing on it constantly and possibly crawling around.
Not this guy. He's always telling the flies to fuck off and shooing them away vigorously.
This does serve the purpose of demonstrating that he's a cruel person -- literally, he would hurt a fly -- but I think more than anything it's shorthand for the fact that he doesn't belong here. If this person were truly designed for this climate and this country, he'd have made peace with the flies long ago.
I sympathize with the villain in this case -- and this case only -- because I, too, cannot handle the flies. I hope it's not because I'm the unwitting star in the movie of my life and the director of that movie is trying to demonstrate my cruelty. But I'm okay with the director indicating that this is not the place I grew up. Indeed, the most I start to approach insanity in my normal daily life is when I'm in a place where there are a lot of flies and I just can't get them to leave me alone. I get pretty vocal about it.
Oh well. At least I watch movies about indigenous people on Australia Day, so I hope that makes up for it.
I tend to forget what an impact Crocodile Dundee, the character and the movie, had on Hollywood in the late 1980s. The Rescuers Down Under reminded me.
The 1990 film was my January draw for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, the monthly film exchange I do with other members of the Flickcharters group on Facebook, where you are randomly assigned another person and watch their highest ranked film you haven't seen. I wouldn't have thought The Rescuers Down Under would have been this movie for me on many if any lists out there, but then again, I was 16 and 17 in 1990. For someone who was eight it might have been a totally different story.
It seemed appropriate to finally get to this movie considering where I now live, but I didn't consider that it owed its existence to Crocodile Dundee until I went to add it to the list of movies from 1990 that I'd seen.
Alphabetically, it landed directly next to Quigley Down Under, the Australian set western starring Tom Selleck.
Again I only caught this because of their alphabetical proximity. I checked the other 78 movies I've seen from 1990 and there were no other people who spent any time down under that year, at least not among the movies I've seen.
The curious thing about this particular film set down under is its lack of trying to feel authentically Australian.
It gets some of the settings right. The landscape has some fantastical elements that I don't believe exist anywhere in Australia, like these massive waterfalls in the middle of the outback. Drought tends to be more of a problem in those parts of the country than having too much water. But overall they were going for accuracy, I would say, including starting in on an impressive shot near Uluru. They've also got some good sound effects of uniquely Australian birds and that sort of thing.
The birds may sound like Australian birds, but the people don't sound like Australian people.
There are two human characters we spend any significant amount of time with: a boy named Cody, voiced by an American boy named Adam Ryen, and a poacher named McLeach, voiced by an American man named George C. Scott. Neither had much of a career after this. (Scott actually continued working up to his death in 1999.)
Why no Australians?
My wife tells me that the prevailing wisdom at the time was that Australians could not play Australians in films intended for American audiences. See, we dumb Americans couldn't understand the accents well enough.
You might have thought Crocodile Dundee would change that. That movie obviously would not have been a hit if Paul Hogan had sounded like Paul Giamatti. But Disney was not ready to stick its neck out and take the risk.
Weirdly, though, the animal creatures -- those hailing from Australia, anyway -- do mostly have Australian accents. They're mostly side characters because our three animals with the most lines of dialogue are not from here: the two lead mice and the albatross that imports them to Australia, who are voiced by Bob Newhart, Eva Gabor and John Candy. (Gabor really didn't have much of a career after this. It was her final film role.) But the fourth most lines of dialogue go to a mouse named Jake, who is voiced by Melbourne native Tristan Rogers, and whose dialogue is perfectly intelligible.
I guess casting directors didn't realize back then that if Australians can do perfect American accents, they can certainly do more accessible versions of an Australian accent.
I'll leave the question of why two mice needed to be imported from New York City to save a child kidnapped in the outback by a poacher for another day.
I ended the Australian streak by watching You People, the new Kenya Barris-directed film on Netflix, which starts off my 2023 movie list. It had no references to Australia that I noticed.
And I think now for a while you will be spared from posts that involve the last something of 2022 or the first something of 2023. You've earned it.
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