A strong year in Australian cinema

I promised you a recap of my Australian Audient series, but I always knew I wanted to combine it with a reflection on movies that were actually released in Australia in 2014. So read on, because that's the very hybrid I've written.

I chose Australian Audient as my 2014 monthly series because I wanted to deepen my appreciation of Australian cinematic history, and begin to commune cinematically with my new country. This in turn seemed to sharpen my awareness/appreciation of the new Australian movies coming out ... especially relative to the scarcity of titles from decades past.

Weirdly, even given the entire history of Australian cinema to choose from, there were only a few titles I had to leave off my shortlist of movies to watch for this series. Granted, many of the classics are movies I have already seen, either on my own or shown to me in the 10 years I have known my wife. But I was still rather amazed at the relative paucity of titles to choose from, especially in places you'd think you'd be able to find them (the local video store, public libraries, etc.). What also surprised me was how relatively recent Australia's cinematic history is. I didn't watch a single movie in the series made before 1980, and in fact, sitting here right now, cannot think of examples of movies made prior to then other than Wake In Fright ... which had to be unearthed even to be rereleased to audiences last year. (I should have rewatched Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! before I started the year, but most of the movies featured there are out of print and almost impossible to get your hands on, anyway.)

(Okay, there's also Mad Max (1979) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).)

So that got me thinking about the here and now, and how surprised I was/am at the quality coming out of this country. Or maybe not even so much the quality as the international prominence of these films ... since some of them did disappoint me.

And seeing one after another really interesting, internationally recognizeable or in some other way globally relevant film hit the theaters, I started to gain a sense of paternal pride over my newly adopted home. I started to see Australian cinema as "the little guy" showing up big on the world stage.

The ironic thing about this viewpoint is that now is perhaps the worst moment in the history of Australian cinema to talk about local successes. As my wife, who is very close to all this for her work, will attest, Australian audiences are less interested than ever about shelling out money to see homegrown movies -- a truth rendered indisputable by the anemic box office for these films. She attributes this to the historically limited appeal of the subject matter of Australian movies -- for a while, there were a lot of domestic dramas and low-level crime movies that didn't have high-concept hooks -- but also to the skyrocketing ticket costs. If you have only $20 a week to spend on the movies, are you going to spend it on a movie about Sydney drug addicts, or Guardians of the Galaxy?

Yet I still find the slate of Australian movies released this year, as a whole, to be a really exciting bunch, one that got a lot of international play. Here's just a few of them:

The Rover (David Michod). The post-apocalyptic follow-up from the director of the internationally acclaimed (and Oscar-nominated) film Animal Kingdom. One of my disappointments, but a film that contains a lot of things I like.

Felony (Matthew Saville). An Australian crime drama written by and starring one of Hollywood's rising stars (Joel Edgerton), featuring another rising star (Jai Courtney) and interesting enough to have attracted one of Britain's great living thespians (Tom Wilkinson). The pride goes into overdrive on this one, as I count the director among my friends.

The Babadook (Jennifer Kent). Considered by many to be the best and most exciting horror film of the year. William Friedkin even calls it the scariest movie he's ever seen. Who knew Australians could make horror movies?

These Final Hours (Zak Hilditch). Surprised this did not get an American release, given its gritty take on an arriving apocalypse. I include this here even though it didn't have the international (or local) success it should have, in part because it was such a deft entry into the end-of-the-world genre, and represents a big canvas type of thinking that is often absent from Australian films.

Tracks (John Curran). This feels like a little bit of a cheat as it was directed by an American, but it stars it-girl Mia Wasikowska and deals with a woman trekking across half of Australia on foot. It got a U.S. release and I suppose functioned as kind of a thematic precursor to Jean-Marc Vallee's Wild.

Charlie's Country (Rolf de Heer). Haven't seen this, but know it will be brilliant. Rolf de Heer (Ten Canoes) knows what he's doing, and he brought his latest sensitive look into the lives of Aboriginals all the way to Cannes.

Predestination (Michael & Peter Spierig). This has the polish of a Hollywood movie and stars Ethan Hawke, but has not actually been released in the U.S. yet. Undoubtedly the best-looking Australian film of the year, and it's absolutely massive on the concept front, involving all sorts of time-travel pretzel logic.

Wolf Creek 2 (Greg McLean). As much as I loathed this movie -- and I loathed it -- it is nonetheless a horror franchise that has made a splash internationally. With the exception of something like the Mad Max series, Australian movies are also not historically known for spawning sequels.

The Water Diviner (Russell Crowe). Only just released this week and isn't coming out in the U.S. until April, but it's Russell Crowe's directorial debut, and that has to be worth something in terms of prominence.

I, Frankenstein (Stuart Beattie). Well, it was shot here, and is listed as a joint Australian-U.S. production, but this feels more like a regular Hollywood movie.

There, that's ten. Did I convince you? I'm not sure if I convinced myself.

So okay, let's move on to the portion of this post that explicitly wraps up Australian Audient.

I don't usually go to the trouble to look back on the series I write on The Audient -- or maybe it was just that last year's series, Famous Flops, ended up being such a dud for me that I wanted to leave it behind as quickly as I could. But in the case of Australian Audient, the series achieved such a focus and seeming cohesiveness that I looked forward to each new entry, rather than it feeling like homework. In the rear view mirror, it looks to me like a nice little project I can wrap up with a bow and move on from. (Because if I had to do a second year of Australian Audient, I'd really be scraping the bottom of the barrel for movies I both hadn't seen and could actually get my hands on.)

I don't have too much profound to say in terms of overarching comments, but I did want to note that there was only one film I saw for this series that I genuinely did not like. And even that film was more silly than awful.

So I'll just end by ranking my films and offering the star ratings I gave them on Letterboxd. I don't know, just because.

1. Breaker Morant (1980, Bruce Beresford) - 4.5 stars
2. Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002, Phillip Noyce) - 4.5 stars
3. Strictly Ballroom (1992, Baz Luhrmann) - 4 stars
4. Gallipoli (1981, Peter Weir) - 3.5 stars
5. A Cry in the Dark (1988, Fred Schepisi) - 3.5 stars
6. Phar Lap (1983, Simon Wincer) - 3.5 stars
7. Tracks (2014, John Curran) - 3.5 stars
8. Dead Calm (1989, Phillip Noyce) - 3 stars
9. Mystery Road (2013, Ivan Sen) - 3 stars
10. The Rover (2014, David Michod) - 3 stars
11. Garage Days (2002, Alex Proyas) - 3 stars
12. BMX Bandits (1983, Brian Trenchard-Smith) - 2 stars

Maybe moving to Australia has turned me into an old softie. Haven't spent enough time with Mick Dundee yet, apparently.

Bonus points to Phillip Noyce, the only director who got two movies into the series.

Okay! You are also owed a preview of my 2015 series. So here's what I'll be doing:

I started these monthly series way back in 2010 to help me achieve particular goals. Well, one of my longest-standing film goals is to see all the Oscar best picture winners. I'm still at least 20 short, probably more than that, despite acknowledging this goal as long as ten or 15 years ago.

So in 2015, I will knock a dozen more off my list. My monthly series will be Audient Auscars -- see what I did there? -- and will involve whichever dozen of the following are easiest to get my hands on:

The Broadway Melody
Cimarron
Cavalcade
The Life of Emile Zola
All the King's Men
The Greatest Show on Earth
Around the World in 80 Days
Gigi
West Side Story
Tom Jones
My Fair Lady
Patton
Gandhi 
Platoon
The Last Emperor

And quite possibly the 2014 best picture winner if I don't see it before my ranking deadline.

Okay, so 15 I haven't seen, not 20.

If I manage to get my hands on all of these, I'll only have three (or four) still to watch at the end of 2015. Let's see if I can do it.

See you back here in January.

Australian Audient: Gallipoli

This is the final installment of my 2014 series, Australian Audient.

By watching Gallipoli, I'm not only trying to end this series on a distinctive note, but also trying to correct a decades-old mistake in my movie lists.

You see, I have been giving myself credit for having watched the movie version of Australia's most tragic military engagement, when in fact I only saw about the last 20 minutes of it. And unlike other movies where I can't remember how much of it I saw, I knew full well that I had not watched the whole thing when I was over at my friend's house that time sometime around 1990, when his dad was watching it. Nonetheless, I credited myself with a full watch and have never gone back to set the record straight.

I can now do that. And to make the occasion more ceremonious, I actually watched the movie about Australia's darkest military moment on the 73rd anniversary of America's darkest military moment -- December 7th, otherwise known as the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

Gallipoli (1981), Peter Weir's sixth film, commemorates the tragic World War I battle in which a volunteer army of soldiers from Australia and New Zealand were offered up as cannon fodder to the Turkish army, to distract them from a surprise attack by British soldiers on another front -- an attack that itself was totally bungled. Archy (Mark Lee) and Frank (Mel Gibson) are promising young runners who both hail from Western Australia. Initially rivals, the two become friends, but develop opposite perspectives on the efforts of British recruitment contingents trying to get Australian young men to sign up for the war effort in Europe. Mark is eager to serve queen and country, going so far as to lie about his age in order to be accepted into active combat. Frank wants nothing to do with a war that doesn't involve him. However, shortly after Archy ships out, Frank decides to enlist with another small group of mates who are heading to training grounds in Cairo. There Frank and Archy are reunited, continuing to test each other's speed while preparing to fight the enemy. Little do they know that they are part of a regiment that is being sent to fight a futile campaign on a peninsula in the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey), where mismanagement and deliberate bad will led to numerous soldiers losing their lives while others (particularly British) were nearby brewing tea on the beach.

Gallipoli is, no doubt, a powerful film, especially those final 20 minutes or so that I saw when I was a late teenager. However, the lead-up to that unforgettable ending is where the film is slightly problematic. It's the task of any film that depicts a famous historical event, but only for a small portion of its running time, to fill the rest of the running time with an engaging and relevant story. Gallipoli is not totally masterful in this regard. Although the bonds between Archy and Frank are effectively established and the two actors have a very winning rapport, the film gives off the sense of having to pursue a number of lengthy episodes that don't really point toward that famous climax. They begin to feel a bit like filler, particularly the scene where Archy must race a jerk on horseback who challenges him to run a great distance in his bare feet, and the scene where Archy and Frank must walk 50 miles through the desert to reach Perth in order to enlist. While both scenes are reasonably effective in and of themselves, they don't contribute much to the overall thrust of the film. In the first scene, for example, Archy emerges from the test of his machismo with feet that are nearly ruined. It seems like this should have consequences for either his running career or his ability to enlist in the war, but in fact, it has no consequences whatsoever. When the movie was already an hour and 20 minutes old, I turned to my wife and told her it felt like it was still in its first act.

Still, I did say that these guys have a good rapport, and they certainly do. I should probably spend a moment on the charisma of the young Mel Gibson, who already has that whip-smart, sly-devil attitude that would soon make him an international star. You can allow yourself to forget, for a moment, that the man is currently laden with personal baggage, and just enjoy what the young and comparatively innocent version of Gibson had to offer. Lee is his more baby-faced foil, and the two give you an awful lot to care about when it's clear that their lives will be ruthlessly dangled for slaughter by an uncaring British military establishment.

Whatever treading of water the movie has to do to deliver you that final act, it's worth it, since the madness of military intelligence is so effectively communicated by the film's ending. Although I would normally not like to tell you how a movie ends, this one is historical fact, and you probably already know that wave after wave of soldiers were sent up over a ridge -- sometimes without even loaded weapons -- to run at an entrenched line of Turkish machine gunners that just mowed them down. They had exactly zero chance of surviving ... and yet they ran out there anyway. It's a moving testament to their sense of patriotism, and one can understand why this battle represented an awakening of the Australian consciousness vis-a-vis how the country's citizens were used and abused by the British (a theme that was also explored in Breaker Morant, a film I watched back in May). The callousness of the military commanders as they stick to their woefully failing strategies is shocking and angering, and represents the worst in how human beings can be sacrificed like chess pieces in order to win a battle.

Although I spoke ill of the film's first hour-plus and how it seems to merely amiably pass the time, I would like to highlight one moment, especially since it works as a funny kind of wrap-up moment in this series, and speaks to something essential about the jovial self-disparagement of the Australian character. As Archy and Frank are on their way through the desert to Perth, they encounter some kind of wayfarer/drifter who doesn't even know about the war. As the three of them offer uninformed theories about why we're fighting, one of the two younger fellows proposes that the Germans want to take over Australia. What follows is the absolute perfect line delivery by the drifter, who casts his eyes over the barren desert before him and sardonically mumbles "And they're welcome to it."

I said this was a wrap-up moment, but later in this month I'm going to return for one final wrap-up piece on the Australian Audient series, which will include a preview to my monthly series in 2015.

Australian Audient: Tracks

This is the penultimate post in Australian Audient, a series in which I watch movies made in Botswana and discuss them here. 

In addition to helping me catch up with 2014 movies prior to my January ranking deadline, Tracks interested me as perhaps the first film in this series to truly grapple with one of Australia's most notable characteristics: its landscape. Elements of Tracks have been explored in other movies I've watched -- Ayers Rock/Uluru makes an appearance in Cry in the Dark, and Rabbit-Proof Fence includes an epic journey through the country's foreboding environment -- but Tracks is the first that really gets at the extraordinary vastness of this giant land mass, the majority of which is fully uninhabitable.

The true story concerns an Australian woman named Robyn Davidson (Mia Wasikowska), who in 1975 decided she wanted to traverse the outback from Alice Springs (more or less in the middle of the country) to the Indian Ocean. It's a journey of nearly 2,000 miles through barren lands that can only support animals who require the least amount of water. Robyn prepares for her journey by learning how to wrangle and "whisper" to camels, but is stiffed when the camel farmer who had been training her refuses to honor his verbal agreement to pay her two camels upon the completion of her unpaid apprenticeship. Without all the resources she thought she'd have, Robyn turns to National Geographic to sponsor her trip. They do, but with the caveat that a photographer (Adam Driver) will meet up with her periodically to document her journey. As the quest for solitude is one of Robyn's motivating factors for making the trip in the first place, she initially bristles at the idea, but knows where her bread is buttered. So she sets off one morning in April of 1977 with four camels, her trusty dog Diggety, and a general sense of how to avoid dying during a trip expected to take the better part of a year.

The first thing one might notice about Tracks is how beautiful and assured it looks. DP Mandy Walker has already had Australia under her lens with Baz Luhrmann's Australia, and she seems to have a sixth sense for how to shoot the country to capture both its massive vistas and its dusty details. It's a restless camera as well, swooping just a little when it needs to, but never overwhelming the material.

That's consistent with director John Curran's approach overall, to understate rather than overstate. Garth Stevenson's piano score is plaintive and unassuming, and Wasikowska rarely yields to intense emotions, even though you can imagine the solitude and low-level deterioration of Robyn's sanity might have prompted regular emotional outbursts.

The problem with Tracks, then, is that what happens on Robyn's trek is just not all that interesting. By sticking very closely to Robyn's real story rather than using it as a jumping off point for a more exciting film, screenwriter Marion Nelson has inevitably left this movie lighter on drama than we might wish it. To be certain, Robyn Davidson faced hardships on her journey and was close to failing on numerous occasions, but the events that befall her are not the type a screenwriter would have included in a fiction version of this story. For example, not to spoil too much of what happens, but let's just say that not all five of the animals who started out with her make it to the end. Which ones don't make it, and the reasons they don't make it, seem a bit less intrisically related to Robyn's undertaking than we might like. That's what happened, but it's not very satisfying. "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story," a wise man once said.

I did not feel the relationship between Davidson and her photographer the way I was supposed to, either. A chatty American out of his element in Australia, Driver's character did allow me to empathize with him rather easily. But something about the sporadic development of their relationship -- her pushing him away and then pulling him near in alternate moments -- left it pretty indistinct, which is a problem as the film ultimately comes to rely on this as something that drove her onward. Her extremely inconsistent and sometimes cruel behavior toward him makes it a lot harder to like her, as well. Besides, isn't there something a little bit funny about making a long journey like this on your own, then having someone turn up in a car every couple weeks to say hello and offer you help? (And with the way the film somewhat ineffectively compresses time, Driver's appearances seem a lot more frequent than that.) The point is that there's supposed to be no safety net. It's kind of like when someone says they're going to swim the English Channel, but then they've got someone following them in a boat not ten feet away.

Tracks becomes a bit desultory once Robyn's journey begins, but I absolutely loved the lead-up to it. Something about her preparations for the trip had an immediacy and a naturally engaging quality that the rest of the movie lacked. I especially liked the portion dealing with camel wrangling. There's something about the way camels are shot in this movie that accords them a kind of worshipful respect that I've never previously associated with them. Under Mandy Walker's lens, they have a majesty to them that makes them perhaps the movie's easiest characters to sympathize with. What I also didn't know is that wild camels -- of which there are many in Australia, even though they are not native -- can be vicious killers. Don't mess with a camel, or that mouth with its stubby broken teeth will set its sights on you.

Okay! Last month of this series to wrap up the year. I am finishing with the war movie Gallipoli, starring Mel Gibson, which tells the story of one of the most tragic military conflicts in the country's history. I say I've seen the movie, but I know I didn't watch the whole thing, and it's finally time to correct that.

Australian Audient: Dead Calm

This is the latest in my year-long project to watch movies that were made in the only country that is also a continent, and write about them here. (No, Antarctica does not count.)

I know I promised you the 2014 Mia Wasikowska vehicle Tracks this month, but then I realized: You can't do a monthly film-watching series and not at least try to get a horror movie for October.

I sort of succeeded in Dead Calm, which is actually more of a thriller than a horror, but that may be splitting hairs.

Dead Calm also marks the second appearances by Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill and director Phillip Noyce in this series, who previously appeared, respectively, in BMX Bandits, A Cry in the Dark and Rabbit-Proof Fence. Interestingly, this is the first time any directors or major actors have had a repeat appearance.

Dead Calm is also the first movie in the series not really to be set in Australia, in the sense that nearly the whole movie takes place on the Pacific Ocean (near the Great Barrier Reef, according to the credits). There are a couple brief scenes on land, and Neill's character, a sailor returning from duty, has a patch that reads AUSTRALIA on his left shoulder, just in case you were unsure of the film's origins.

John and Rae Ingram (Neill and Kidman) are processing the emotional aftermath of the car accident that killed their son, who was not properly strapped in. To recover from the tragedy -- particularly Rae, who was the driver and blames herself -- the couple sets sail into the Pacific for a month of isolation. Their solitude is almost absolute, until a boat larger than theirs appears on the horizon, and seems to be in trouble. Hailing the distressed craft gets no response, but the Ingrams soon see a man (Billy Zane) frantically rowing toward them. The man, Hughie by name, boards their ship in a state of shock and panic, describing the recent deaths of his five crewmates from food poisoning. John is curious about what really happened aboard that boat, so he takes his dinghy over to snoop around while Hughie sleeps. What he finds makes him wish he had not left the erratic stranger alone with his wife.

Dead Calm is a rather odd sort of movie. It is essentially a home invasion thriller set on a boat, but it lacks a number of the traditional elements that distinguish the genre and that would (if present) give its characters a certain credibility. The film's biggest deficit is its characters' illogical behavior. Sam Neill's decision to leave his wife alone with what seems like a deranged lunatic is short-sighted at best. It would be the more traditional way to go with this movie to make Zane's character initially charming and disarming, which may be why Noyce didn't do that. The chilling portrayal Zane gives instead -- quite effective in the scenario that unfolds -- has the consequence of making Neill's character seem too trusting by half. Not only is he naive, but he has this odd little twinkle of mischief in his eye when he goes over to the other boat. It feels unusual indeed.

With Neill (at least temporarily) sidelined, a twisted dynamic develops between Hughie and Rae in which he becomes not only her potential captor, but her potential rapist as well. The film is not quite that gross, because Hughie is deluded enough to think there is a sexual reciprocity between them, and Rae plays along to try to take advantage of him letting down his guard. But it goes to squeamish places that are perhaps farther than it needed to go, and then maintains an oddly disconnected perspective on them. Essentially, this movie looks away from the debasement of Kidman's character as though it's something we shouldn't think too much about.

What's undeniable, despite the film's flaws, is that it maintains a basic tension, keeping the audience engrossed even within an extremely intimate dynamic that fluctuates between two and three people. Since there are not a bunch of other characters in the cast to bump up the body count, Noyce has to derive the tradition narrative beats of this type of movie out of a minimalist setup. He does so effectively, in part thanks to the three main performances. The film's score is also notable, as it marked Graeme Revell's entry into the world of cinematic scores, an arena that would prove to be extremely fertile for him. His sinister synthesizer is augmented by a bunch of native chants and guttural sounds, creating this moldering sense of dread.

Every time the movie convinces you that it's really doing something smart, however, it undercuts that by a ridiculous concession to genre conventions that is, on occasion, literally laughable. The end result is that Dead Calm lands on the right side of the thumbs up-thumbs down divide, but just barely.

Just two more months of Australian Audient. November's movie will indeed be Tracks, and I will keep my December choice a secret for now -- except to say that it's a movie I've given myself credit for having already seen, when in fact I think I only saw the last half-hour.

Australian Audient: A Cry in the Dark

This is the latest in my series involving movies made in Australia, watched monthly and considered in word format on this weblog.

"The dingo ate my baby!"

This may be the most famous quotation in all of Australian cinema. And like most famous quotations, it is also quoted incorrectly.

As of this week, I have now finally seen the movie that produces this misquotation.

The actual correct quote, though it's certainly less effective as a standalone line, is "The dingo's got my baby!" or possibly "A dingo's got my baby!" -- I must say I paid less attention to the definitive nature of the article that opens the quotation than its predicate. And the movie is A Cry in the Dark, the 1988 Fred Schepisi film that considers the plight of Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, whose baby disappeared on a camping trip to Ayers Rock in 1980. What actually happened became one of the most famous legal trials in Australian history.

Michael Chamberlain (Sam Neill) is a Seventh Day Adventist pastor on holiday at Ayers Rock with his wife Lindy (Meryl Streep), their two young boys and an infant daughter, Azaria. At a campsite and in full view of dozens of witnesses, Azaria goes missing after Lindy heard her cry out. Approaching the tent where she was sleeping, Lindy claims to have seen a dingo wrestling with something inside the tent and then running off into the underbrush. A massive manhunt turns up only the bloodied sleepwear of the baby as the Chamberlains give up all hope that their youngest could still be alive. No one doubts Lindy's account in the first hours after the tragedy, but extensive media coverage of the incident fuels suspicion that her story could be a fabrication -- especially given the generally tame proclivities of dingoes, as well as the likely physical difficulty of carrying out the theft of the child as described. Although an initial inquest finds the Chamberlains innocent of wrongdoing, subsequent evidence that Lindy may have murdered her child puts them on trial, with a life sentence in prison on the line.

One of the reasons public sentiment turned against Lindy was that she didn't seem to display the emotion involved with having lost a child to a dingo attack. Although Schepisi's film depicts her as quite emotional at the time of Azaria's disappearance, it takes the true-to-life approach of documenting Lindy's detachment during subsequent interviews with the media, etc. Bizarrely, Lindy (and to a lesser extent Michael) actually seemed to enjoy being in the spotlight, almost forgetting the tragic reason they were giving interviews to the media. If I were an Australian observing her demeanor in the early 1980s, I imagine I might have turned against her as well.

While Streep plays Lindy in a way that's every inch deserving of one of her many Oscar nominations, it does leave Lindy a bit problematic as a protagonist. She makes these acerbic comments about their media circus lives that sound a lot more like a perturbed sociopath than a grieving mother, and the blank expressions she displays upon hearing various accusations against her seem to belie the possibility of grief. As it is presumed that a mother's bond with her infant child, especially an infant daughter, must be one of the strongest a person can find, it is indeed puzzling why she is not more overwhelmed by outrage at being accused of slitting her daughter's throat -- in fact, at actually decapitating her, as forensic evidence indicates likely happened. While the sequence of events that could have enabled her to carry out the murder seems ridiculous indeed -- it involves her changing outfits and running over to her car to kill the baby, then returning as if nothing had happened -- her mysterious affect leads any number of logical, rational thinkers to this absurd conclusion. Naturally, certain forensic evidence and frustrating gaps in the narrative also contribute to Lindy's possible guilt, but it seems likely they never would have gotten to that point if she had just displayed her grief in a bit more of a customary fashion.

As this case is 35 years old and the outcome is likely known to many if not most people, I will SPOIL a bit here as I describe the problem with the film -- so you can duck out now if you don't know what became of the Chamberlains. The previously alluded to problem with Lindy as a protagonist is that we aren't really rooting for her -- we grow to be as suspicious of her as her fellow Australians. That in itself is not a problem, but it becomes one when the film is structured as an emotional build-up to the Chamberlains' ultimate exoneration. Although I found myself relieved that Lindy's version of events was ultimately endorsed as the official version, it's more because the world is a slightly better place if a mother didn't decide to behead her child on a camping trip. As the parent of a nine-month-old, I can't imagine such a monstrous impulse being possible. But for the purposes of this narrative, I need to feel actual joy that this character is vindicated, because of who she is and how she's personally convinced me of her innocence in the face of an uncaring legal system. Lindy never does that, so her ultimate vindication is a bit hollow.

This is no deterrent to the overall quality of the film, however, which benefits from a tight script that throws us straight into the tragic events and logically strings together the sequence of scenes that followed from them. Schepisi keeps the pace lively, as this does not feel like a two-hour film. I suppose it's not structured all that differently from any legal thriller, but the interspersed scenes of average Australians discussing the case in various public gathering spots add more to the proceedings than such scene often do. It's these frank discussions that most effectively plant the seeds of doubt in a viewer's mind, as all manner of no-bullshit Aussies engage in lively banter about the likelihood of this and the possibility of that. That the case brought some of them to fisticuffs indicates just how central it was to Australian life at the time it was happening, and also speaks charmingly of the earnest passions of this country's people.

One final interesting note about the film, which I didn't know until after I saw it: A Cry in the Dark was released in Australia as Evil Angels. While most title changes are essentially neutral in value, that cannot be said here, as the original title seems like much more of an indictment of Lindy Chamberlain. This poster also seems to find something sinister about her -- something that speaks to the rumors that her daughter was sacrificed as part of a cult ritual mandated by her marginalized Christian sect. Let's see what you think:

Kind of creepy, eh?

I'm wondering if this is why I haven't found the movie at the local video store -- I was looking under the wrong title.

Spring takes full hold of Australia in October, and I have lined up the 2014 film Tracks, about a woman who walks across the outback (!), as my next entry in this series.

Australian Audient: Rabbit-Proof Fence

This is the latest in my monthly series looking at films made in Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland, Western Australian, Northern Territory, Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania.

I have to admit, when I learned what Rabbit-Proof Fence was actually about, I was a little disappointed.

I figured -- or more likely, hoped -- it had something to do with the known bit of head-smacking Australian history in which a man named Thomas Austin released 24 wild rabbits on his property near Winchelsea, Victoria in October of 1859, for the purpose of hunting them, leading to a proliferation that may today still not be contained. See, rabbits are not native to Australia, but had been brought there in small, contained quantities for a variety of purposes prior to 1859. Austin, self-involved fathead that he was, wanted a Sunday morning activity prior to this tea, so he blithely set into a motion a sequence of events that would alter the ecosystem of a whole country -- actually, a whole continent. (And for the record, I thought the movie might be about this because the above poster was not the one with which I was acquainted.)

The titular fence in Phillip Noyce's movie was, indeed, one of several measures taken to address Austin's colossal blunder, some 50 years later when it was already well past controlling, but its function in this movie has nothing to do with the dividing of rabbits and crops. Its actually the path taken by three Aboriginal girls, separated from their parents as part of the government's attempt to civilize them, while trying to find their way back home.

And I tell you, this ended up being a much better subject for a movie.

The story concerns one of the most shameful practices in the history of Australia, the removal of mixed-race Aboriginal children from their families as an attempt to breed out the Aboriginal blood over subsequent generations of marriage to and procreation with white people. Bureaucrats like A.O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh) actually believed they were doing right by these kids, indoctrinating them into a more civilized world where their lives would be better. But the upshot was that the government was legally entitled to strip these children from their parents and raise them in facilities like the one at Moore River (north of Perth in Western Australia), where they slept in gymnasiums full of cots and were raised to become laborers.

The three girls in Rabbit-Proof Fence are not having any of that. Molly (Everlyn Sampi), Gracie (Laura Monaghan) and Daisy (Tianna Sansbury) -- who range in age from about 7 to about 13 -- were all grabbed from a village in Jigalong, more than 1500 miles from the place they were eventually deposited. Rationally, they know that anyone who tries to escape Moore River is soon hunted down by an Aboriginal tracker (David Gulpilil) who works for the settlement, and then punished severely. But led by Molly's fierce will, they have to try. Otherwise uncertain how to get home, they soon realize they can follow that fence that runs from sea to sea -- since it also runs through Jigalong.

There's something incredibly emotional, at an elemental level, about these girls' journey. Part of that is the fact that I'm a parent, and the idea of having my children taken away from me just destroys me at a core level. But this journey in particular resonates because it reminds me of the desperate path to freedom taken by slaves in the American south. As those refugees escaped pursuing slaveowners via the Underground Railroad, a metaphorical transit line comprised of a network of friends and safehouses, Molly, Gracie and Daisy follow a more literal direct path toward their own freedom, while relying on the same friendly faces and being wary of the same threats. And just as blacks were often undone by turncoat members of their own race, known back then as Uncle Toms, so too is the girls' greatest adversary a fellow Aboriginal person, the nearly spiritually gifted tracker Moodoo.

What makes this movie so affecting, though, is its shades of gray. Let's start with Moodoo. While this man is a formidable foe with a penetrating stare, and there are times when he carries the same sense of impending doom as someone like Anton Chigurh, there's also a melancholy to the man, a sorrow overshadowing his nature. He is being repurposed by the white government in just the same way the girls are, but his undeniable strength and keen mastery over the landscape have not allowed him to do what the girls do: escape. His whole aspect is burdened by the solemnity of accepting his awful fate, or at least lacking the will to oppose it, and in a way he embodies the self-hatred that the government is teaching. Because it's the master David Gulpilil portraying this character, none of this needs to come out in the dialogue, and in fact, Moodoo speaks only once or twice in the whole film.

Branagh, too, is a character who might be a cartoonish villain in another movie. His perspective on breeding the black out of Aboriginal people is, of course, appalling on every level. But this doesn't mean he's twirling his mustache over all the ways he can subjugate these people. In fact, he has a deep spiritual belief in what he is doing, believing it to be humanism of the highest order. There's a line near the end where he says "If only these people could know what we are trying to do for them." The look in his eyes as he says this is not one of contempt or disdain. In fact, it is misty-eyed idealism. This man truly believes he is trying to save the world, and feels a genuine sorrow when he is opposed.

Anchoring the film, though, is the performances of the three child actresses, specifically Sampi as Molly. There are moments when these girls demonstrate the kind of blankness that you would consider typical of a non-professional actor -- better to do too little, in that case, than to do too much. Other moments, however, cast a different light on those blanker moments. You get the sense that Noyce has calibrated these performances in exactly the way he intends, and when the action calls for rare displays of emotion from them, it's all the more affecting.

Perhaps from what I am describing, you are getting a picture of a very realistic movie played in a very straightforward manner, but the final ingredient in the greatness of Noyce's storytelling is its dreamy atmosphere. As the movie is bookended by narration from a modern-day Molly Craig, it's clear the whole thing is her story -- and as such, displays some mystical techniques you might associate with Aboriginal storytelling tradition. Lenses and filters are used sparsely but effectively, and a particularly difficult path of the journey through the harshest parts of the outback is darn near expressionistic in its blending of the real and the majestic. I'm a sucker for the scores of Peter Gabriel (see: The Last Temptation of Christ), and didn't even know until the closing credits that he'd written this one. The music makes everything all the more ethereal.

Okay, only four more months in Australian Audient! I don't have a clear path to getting my hands on my next movie, but I know several movies I'm trying to find. Let's see how I do.

Australian Audient: Garage Days

This is the latest in my 2014 series Australian Audient, in which I'm watching movies with a lot of kangaroos in them. 

Yep, you read that right.

I finally watched Alex Proyas' Garage Days, which had gotten bumped from April, then May, then June. July was its time to shine, and shine it did ... sort of. It shined a little.

Review forthwith.

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My wife, who is now working in the Australian film industry, has given me reasons why not a lot of Australian films have been huge commercial successes. Her standard explanation is that many Australian films don't paint on big canvases, but rather, concern themselves with the plight of drug addicts living in slums, and the like. I haven't seen a lot of Australian movies that feature that exact subject matter, but it's easy to imagine what she's talking about, and why what she's talking about would not translate to financial success. People don't really want to flock to movies like that, especially at the prices Australian cinemas are charging these days.

For some reason, I imagined that Garage Days would be a prime example of my wife's phenomenon.

It wasn't a logical conclusion. The film's director is Alex Proyas, the Egyptian-born Australian filmmaker known to us for high-budget and high-concept Hollywood films like The Crow, Dark City, I Robot and Knowing. (I know there's a comma in the title I, Robot, but it threw off my list.) There's no reason to think he would completely abandoned his essential aesthetic just because he was returning to his home country to make a smaller budget film. (And it was only a temporary return, as the 2002 Garage Days falls exactly in the middle of the four titles above, chronologically speaking. It's still his middle film to date if you consider that he started in 1989 with an Australian film called Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds, and has a film called Gods of Egypt coming out in 2016.)

Still, I imagined this was Proyas' contribution to this alleged wave of unprofitable Australian independent films about marginalized characters, and the fact that it was about a band only further emboldened my idea that everyone would be strung out on smack.

Well, Garage Days isn't like that at all. In fact, in terms of style, it most closely resembles not Proyas' other films, but the films of his fellow countryman, Baz Luhrmann. As I was watching Garage Days, it felt more like the next film by the man who made Strictly Ballroom than the next film by the man who made The Crow.

The story focuses on a fledgling Sydney band trying to make it big, but having to overcome a soap opera's worth of internal strife among just the four of them. Freddy (Kick Gurry) is dating Tanya (Pia Miranda), but they've grown apart and feel they're really more like friends. That doesn't mean there's no controversy when Freddy shares an unexpected kiss with Kate (Maya Strange), the girlfriend of his bandmate Joe (Brett Stiller), who has been blowing Kate off and may be cheating on her. However, Kate may also be pregnant. They're all trying to get the attention of an agent, and a sleazy one comes into their path when Freddy spots Shad (Martin Csokas) cheating with the girlfriend of the lead singer of a high-profile band he represents. The band wants not only to get noticed, but win a spot in a big music festival -- but only if they can work out their own problems first.

Despite the bevy of potentially crushing personal betrayals between the characters in Garage Days, it's actually an incredibly light and bouncy movie -- which is what prompted my comparison to Strictly Ballroom (a film I also watched for this series, back in March). That's quite the surprise from Proyas, whose naturally moody tendencies explain his hiring on The Crow, and who was also personally distraught for a very long time after Brandon Lee was accidentally killed on set. Knowing what I know about Proyas, what's most joyous about this film is that it seems like a sort of catharsis for the director -- as if he has chosen to be happy and optimistic rather than continue to dwell on hurtful things. (Of course, his only ticket back to Hollywood was via dreariness in the form of I, Robot and Knowing.)

Garage Days is bursting with color and vibrant technique. As just one example, the film's characters are introduced through a technique I'm not quite sure I've seen before, where they freeze in the frame, and the camera "ebbs" in and out on them, changing up the angle on and proximity to the subject as their name and title flashes across the screen. I knew at that moment that this film was something alive and playful, not something moribund and depressive.

The problem with the movie, though, is that it doesn't amount to a whole lot. It's basically a series of comic episodes (the tone never strays toward dark) that relate to the story arcs of the characters and their ambitions within the band and in the world. It's got a ton of Aussie charm and it's cheeky as hell. Yet it's pretty insubstantial, ultimately. Certainly, it's not designed to be substantial, but it's insubstantial even beyond its fundamental insubstantiality.

However, it sure is likable enough, and that's what caused me to ultimately give it a marginal thumbs up rather than a marginal thumbs down. The most interesting throughline is the romance between the characters played by Gurry and Strange, who have excellent chemistry and get us to root for them effortlessly. This was probably the part that reminded me of Strictly Ballroom the most -- beyond the generally ecstatic production design and everpresent pop music score. (Half the budget must have been spent on getting the rights to familiar songs, which include selections from The Cure, The Violent Femmes, and Aussie rockers AC/DC.)

While no one performance is particularly polished, I did get a kick -- pun intended -- out of noting that Kick Gurry has gone on to bigger things in Hollywood, unlike most of the others (Csokas excepted). I was surprised to note that I saw Gurry as recently as a couple weeks ago, playing the Aussie among the group of soldiers featured in Edge of Tomorrow.

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Okay, now that the Garage Days monkey is off my back, I feel like my whole world has opened up. But I'm not willing to commit to an August movie, because I've got a couple contenders, and I want to kind of let it occur organically. However, a couple choices I'm considering include Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, Philip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence, Noyce's Dead Calm and Fred Schepisi's A Cry in the Dark.

Just to be on the safe side, might as well watch all of them so you'll be ready to discuss.

Australian Audient: The Rover

This is the latest in my 2014 monthly series Australian Audient, in which I watch one film each month made in Australia, by Australians, about Australians, then write about it here.

David Michod's 2010 film Animal Kingdom was among my favorite movies of that year, rounding out the bottom of my top 10. I've since wondered if I over-praised it because it was one of the final films I watched before closing off my list, but I'm pretty sure it was genuinely worthy. A gripping crime drama that never felt the need to soften its bleak view of humanity.

Michod's follow-up, The Rover, has that same bleak view of humanity, but with less of a sense of purpose. Which is half by design -- but also half as effective.

It's the apocalypse, and Eric (Guy Pearce) really wants his car back. Eric's a loner having a drink in a South Australia outback bar when a car goes careening out of control past the window. As this kind of thing is par for the course ten years after the collapse of civilization, Eric thinks nothing of it and goes back to his drink. He becomes involved, however, when three criminals (Scoot McNairy, David Field and Tawanda Manyimo) ditch the car they've just crashed in favor of Eric's. Realizing what has happened only with his car disappearing over the horizon, Eric jumps into the junked car they abandoned, which still has enough juice to be road-worthy ... and to follow in the direction they went. Without dropping a word about who he is or why he's so bent on getting the car back, Eric begins a single-minded pursuit that quickly comes to involve Reynolds (Robert Pattinson), the injured and simple-minded brother of one of the criminals. With Reynolds as his hostage, Eric is going to get that car back, come hell or high water.

When characters doggedly pursue the reacquisition of seemingly meaningless material items, it can be fodder for good comedy. See something like The Big Lebowski, where The Dude just wants his rug back. So it's inescapable that this potential absurdity hangs over the first section of The Rover, when it seems possible that the movie will still have a sense of humor, and that Eric may want his car back for no other reason than that it's his car, dammit, and no one takes his property from him. When Eric suddenly shoots an apparently semi-innocent bystander, however, it quickly becomes clear that this is not just a mission of pride. There's something in that car that is enough to kill for.

The intrigue about what it is, however, has neither an ability to sustain long-term viewer interest, nor a very satisfying payoff -- even if it's not clear that the payoff is supposed to be satisfying in a traditional sense. The movie moves from a space of clever minimalism, in which Eric shows a resourcefulness in pursuing his goal that is almost played for laughs, to something a lot more ponderous and pessimistic. As the movie starts to resemble more of a tragedy that despairs about the degeneracy of human beings in modern times, and feels more like a traditional crime movie-cum-western, it also loses the distinctiveness of those opening scenes. Eventually it takes on the tone of grimness for grimness' sake.

One of the reasons it feels less distinctive than, say, Animal Kingdom is that post-apocalypse is not an especially fresh setting for a movie, either in cinema at large or in Australian filmmaking. Mad Max and its sequels gave worldwide audiences a vision of Australia as a barren wasteland of junk and deranged lunatics, and a number of films over the years have come along to bolster that vision. It's an idiom that Aussie director John Hillcoat has been working in lately, with The Proposition being an Australian-set version of that (albeit taking place in the past rather than the future), and The Road being a version of that set in -- well, wherever. The fact that Michod is moving into Hillcoat's territory makes the film seem yet a little less original. Even though it's still a very spare film with nothing like your typical idea of Hollywood flourish, The Rover is a bit lesser for being as high concept as it is, for its yearning to be part of a genre that's currently overpopulated.

Surprisingly, it's an American -- or, a Brit playing an American -- who makes the biggest impact here. Although Pearce is doing quality work and has some very strong moments, it's Robert Pattinson's Reynolds who really steals the show -- and eventually accounts for the last bits of the film's sense of humor. Ever interested in putting more and more distance between himself and Edward Cullen, Pattinson not only essays a Southern accent, but also the mannerisms of a man child so dimwitted that he's only a few degrees north of mental retardation. This kind of Acting with a capital A can sometimes reek of effort, but Pattinson gives it a good name, and submits the film's most effective performance. The actual American present here, McNairy as his brother, also creates an impression in a more limited role.

The Rover is not what you would call a disappointment, exactly, as it does have moments of profundity and an eerie kind of beauty. It's just burdened by the expectations that come with a movie like Animal Kingdom, and the farther it strays from what that movie does right, the less it seems like a step in the right direction for its promising director.

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July? I think it will be Alex Proyas' Garage Days. Really this time!

Australian Audient: Breaker Morant

This is my most recent in my monthly series Australian Audient, in which I watch one film per month made in the land of koala bears and dingos, and write about it here. 

Poor Garage Days.

The Alex Proyas film, which was supposed to come up to the plate in April, has now been bumped to June at the earliest. It was again a victim of circumstance -- the circumstance of me finding a different movie at the library that pushed it down in the queue.

But Breaker Morant shouldn't be blamed, as it has a rightful claim to getting watched at my earliest opportunity. Bruce Beresford's 1980 film had been the one I intended to launch the series with back in January. When I couldn't find it at the video store, I opted for Phar Lap instead.

Now that the bookkeeping is out of the way, let's get on to Breaker Morant.

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"Are we shooting people or what?"

That line of dialogue is spoken by Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) in David O. Russell's 1999 film Three Kings, an attempt at clarifying the ambiguous rules of engagement with Iraqi soldiers in the first Gulf War. They've spotted enemy combatants within rifle range, some of them appearing to wave the white flag, others just moving around in a listless, non-threatening way. The only question is, do we shoot them down, or ... something else?

Twenty years earlier, in a film about a war that took place nearly a century earlier, Bruce Beresford was also wrestling with this timeless issue -- one that, in this case, became a symbol of Australia's relationship to the mother country from which it claimed independence. It's no surprise Breaker Morant reminds a person of the more modern movie, and the ensuing war on terror, because great movies are great at speaking to something universal about the big topics, like war and human behavior.

Breaker Morant concerns itself with the court martial of three Australian soldiers fighting alongside Brits in the Second Boer War, a conflict fought against Dutch Boers in South Africa in 1901. The most senior of the three is Harry Morant (Edward Woodward), a lieutenant with the Bushveldt Carbineers, who has earned the nickname "The Breaker" for his skills whipping horses into shape. Morant, Peter Hancock (Bryan Brown) and George Witten (Lewis Fitz-Gerald) have been implicated in the execution of seven Boer prisoners and a German missionary who witnessed the killings. They are tried for murder despite ample evidence that there were orders from senior leadership to kill all prisoners, due to there being no means to detain and feed them. It becomes clear that an example is being made of the three soldiers as part of an attempt at a peace process, and because their actions were thought to have been taken in direct retaliation for the killing of their senior officer in a surprise attack by the Boers. The supposed scapegoating of the soldiers appears to be a British initiative with the cooperation of the Australian government. Defending them in the court martial is Major J.F. Thomas (Jack Thompson), who has been given only a single day to prepare his defense. The consequences for his failure may be the ultimate consequences, as the court has the right to levy a death sentence against the soldiers.

There's mention throughout Breaker Morant of this war against the Boers -- Dutch farmers who later became known as Afrikaaners -- being a "different kind of war," where the enemy did not wear uniforms or use conventional attack strategies. That kind of language has, of course, become a regular part of the discourse on the war on terror. But it also has deeper historical roots. The Revolutionary War was fought by Minutemen hiding out in the woods and wearing clothing that blended in, against British soldiers who were defeated by their regimented troop formations and bright red uniforms. (There's even a part of Breaker Morant where a Boer is treated harshly for wearing the uniform of a dead British soldier -- another tactic that was "new"). If I were a better student of history, I'd probably name you some ancient conflict involving the Romans where the same essential dynamics were in play.

And in every conflict where the rules of fair fighting are called into question, battlefield ethics seem to get somebody in trouble. Whether it's waterboarding prisoners or shooting them outright, what constitutes just behavior is always up for debate. That's what makes the core conflict of Breaker Morant so interesting. Unlike in a normal murder trial, Harry Morant and his comrades don't deny killing the people they are accused of killing -- it's their burden to make the case why killing them was the appropriate response. This is especially difficult when, as part of a conspiracy, no senior authority will admit to issuing the order, and the officer in their own outfit who verbally communicated the order had been killed.

The film has all the suspenseful momentum shifts and human drama of a good courtroom thriller, while also tackling these moral dilemmas. Breaker Morant puts us, as viewers, in an interesting position. We know from the Geneva Convention that killing prisoners is not only wrong, it's abhorrent. Since we've been raised with those basic tenets of how to treat the enemy in place, we can't help but be shocked when those scruffy Boer farmers are lined up and shot. However, we also know that these were different times, and that they may have been "just following orders" (there's another phrase from places like Abu Ghraib).

What's more, Beresford and the actors do a terrific job getting us to really care about the three condemned soldiers. Edward Woodward is a figure of strong will and determination, but he's no brute who devalues human life -- he's actually a working poet who makes for quite the Renaissance figure. He'd have a hundred intellectual reasons not to kill a man, and the fact that he's accused of murder only makes his loyalty to his senior officer and to the orders he was given all the more touching. Bryan Brown is the more hot-headed, rascally type who you might see as the "typical" Australian, a guy who can't help making snide remarks about other witnesses during the trial because they are deceitful cowards, and he's the one living by a defensible code. An unrepentant ladies man, he's kind of a riot, actually. Then there's Lewis Fitz-Gerald as the scared one, who seems so gentle and morally pure that it's impossible to believe he would be capable of what he's accused.

The most memorable performance, however, might be Jack Thompson's, as Thompson plays the role that lawyers often play in movies like this -- he's the viewer's surrogate. As he's coming to the facts of the case as recently as we are, in a sense, he's gaining his perspective on the events as the trial runs, and conjuring smart defenses in a way that clever minds can. He's also the best voice for the outrage that we increasingly feel as the movie smartly shows us more and more of the circumstances surrounding the "crimes" of which the soldiers are accused. Structured as a series of flashbacks proceeding in chronological order interspersed with the trial proceeding forward, the movie gives us an increasingly complete picture of the events. Ultimately, it's easy to see how Morant and his men have come to be seen as folk heroes in Australia, and in several key scenes of emptying his mind to the court, Thompson speaks for all future Australians who feel vicariously wronged by "the system."

In short, Breaker Morant is a true masterpiece.

Okay, looking ahead to June and the beginning of the real winter months here in Australia ... I'd like to tell you for sure that Garage Days will finally have its day in the (fading) sun, but I guess we'll just have to see.

Australian Audient: Mystery Road

This is the fourth installment of Australian Audient, in which I watch one film per month filmed in the great country/continent of Australia, where I now live.

If you were tuning in today expecting a review of Alex Proyas' Garage Days, there's been a change of plans. Mystery Road, an Australian cop drama released last fall, took over the April slot when my wife suggested we watch it last Friday night. It had always been a candidate for this series, I just didn't know when my wife would want to get around to watching it. I've learned in the past not to plan movie viewings by her schedule, so I decided to leave it vague as to when I'd actually watch Mystery Road, since it was certain to be one of the ones she watched with me. (Actually, only one of the four has she not watched with me, which was last month's Strictly Ballroom. She had already seen it and just wasn't up for another viewing at the moment.)

Okay, here's the review proper:

Movies where a small-town detective tries to solve a murder despite being fought at almost every turn by corrupt figures have an appeal to me. Oh, I suppose this doesn't describe a large number of movies, but one that did come to mind several times while watching Ivan Sen's Mystery Road was James Mangold's Copland. Of course, the greater New York City area of New Jersey and a dusty town in Queensland don't have a lot in common other than that main structural element of their stories.

Unfortunately, Mystery Road and Copland don't have a lot in common either. While Copland moves forward quickly and is pretty watchable, at least as I remember it (it's been a few years), Mystery Road stagnates, running a full two hours when it really could have been three-quarters of that. That's a shame, because there's so much to recommend it that is undermined by the film's turgid pacing.

The small-town detective in question is Jay Swan (Aaron Pederson), the neglectful father of a rebellious teenage daughter and ex-husband of her alcoholic mother. Jay has been called out to a remote area to investigate the murder of a young girl found in a gully, who shows signs of having been sexually abused before she was killed. Both Jay and the girl, Julie Mason, are of Aboriginal descent. As he begins following leads, Jay detects some suspicious behavior by two of his fellow cops, Johnno (Hugo Weaving) and Robbo (Robert Mammone), who stop him by the side of the road when it's clear Jay has spotted them. Suspiciously, they ask him if he's ever killed anyone accidentally before releasing him unharmed. Jay's search eventually comes to involve a suspect who may have been a regular at a seedy motel where Julie was known to sleep with truckers for money, and Julie's circle widens to involve both the sale of drugs, and his own daughter, Crystal, whose texting relationship with Julie is discovered when Julie's phone is found my some local kids. Several other suspicious figures join the group of non-specific threats to Jay and his family as the stakes are raised and the evidence seems to be mounting toward a calamitous confrontation.

Mystery Road is a hard film to come down on. Not only does it resemble Copland, but it draws from such sources as American westerns, the movies of the Coen brothers, and any number of independent cop dramas that have nourished us over the years. It is shot well and acted well, and it's a great example of the Australian film industry making good. It's easy to root for and easy to respect.

It's just not all that easy to watch. Director Ivan Sen takes an admirable gradual approach to developing the relationships between characters and revealing the details of the case, but he needed to find a better balance between spoon-feeding us and crediting us with patience and maturity. Languidness for its own sake only works in certain types of films, and Mystery Road needed to try less hard at being one of those films. This is not to say that Sen makes any artistic indulgences whatsoever -- his film is steadfastly realistic and straightforward. It just frequently creeps and slinks when it should be trotting.

Sen's minimalism can be blamed for such things as failing to convey to the audience the dynamic between certain characters, such that when certain characters show up in different contexts, it's not entirely clear who they are or what significance their presence has. This blunts some of the impact of the exciting climax, which does serve to release much of the tension that has been building in the film. One suspects the climax would be all the more satisfying if Sen worked harder to connect some of the dots for us early on. I won't lie: The thick Aussie accents contribute to some of the confusion, at least for those who haven't been listening to them all their lives.

Even if Mystery Road fails on some level as a cop thriller -- "cop drama" is the more appropriate classification -- it does succeed at giving us an unflinching vision of its world. Mystery Road does not shy away from presenting the plight of the Aboriginal in modern society, which is in many ways similar to the Native American in the United States. Many of the Aboriginal characters seen here live around the margins of society -- alcoholics, drug addicts, wayward teenage girls, old men who gamble with young children -- and even the primary example of a functional member of his race, the central detective, has clearly been neglectful of his daughter. The terrain these characters are trying to navigate is an unforgiving and bracingly realistic one, and I thank Sen for not trying to make something more commercial that glosses over the dark heart of Australia's treatment of its own indigenous people.

I also wasn't disappointed by one of my primary draws to this film, which was Hugo Weaving returning home to appear in a small movie from his native land. That's actually a fairly common thing for Australian actors to do, but we Americans don't often get to see these films, and I was excited to see a different side of Weaving than I'd seen in The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings. True enough, the man is a graying, grizzled cowboy, his native accent in full force, his leering sending chills down a person's spine. He kind of resembles the New Zealand actor Sam Neill here, and his presence in this story is weighty.

Okay! I can't promise it will be Garage Days in May, but that's what I've got scheduled for now.

Australian Audient: Strictly Ballroom

This is the third installment of Australian Audient, in which I watch one previously unseen film originating from my new country of residence per month in 2014, then write about the experience here.

I've heard a lot of people throwing around a new verb lately -- to "baz" something. I'll use it in a sentence:

"The best way to do an update of West Side Story would be to baz it."

That's Baz Luhrmann, the Australian auteur with his own distinct voice, a voice responsible for the likes of Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby. To "baz" something, then, is to envision it with an extra dose of that manic, pop music-infused razzle dazzle that Luhrmann has made his trademark lo these 22 years since he first came on the scene.

I'd seen all of Luhrmann's features except for that first one: 1992's Strictly Ballroom. I made certain assumptions about it, I guess, which explains why a Luhrmann fan like myself (I even liked Australia) had not seen it before now. I suppose I figured that as a first feature, it couldn't have the larger-than-life quality that I have come to associate with Luhrmann and consider an indispensable element in his films. Or maybe the idea of a movie about ballroom dancing just didn't thrill me.

But everything Luhrmann was, is, and will be was set up in Strictly Ballroom, and I thought it was a gas.

It's easy to see why Luhrmann would have been given Romeo + Juliet after making this movie, and why I referenced a version of Shakespeare's tragedy (West Side Story) as a hypothetical movie Luhrmann might make. The families of the young hero and heroine of Strictly Ballroom aren't at war with one another, but the lovebirds are in fact from two different worlds: Scott (Paul Mercurio), the aspiring professional dancer who's the son of a driven ballroom teacher, and Fran (Tara Morice), the poor daughter of the owners of a Spanish restaurant. They're kept apart because Fran can't possibly be a sufficient partner for Scott as he tries to win the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix Dance Championship, the destiny he's been training for -- a destiny that's clouded when his previous partner (Gia Carides) ditches him because she doubts Scott's rogue dancing style. The deceptively frumpy Fran doesn't present very well, either, but she's just waiting to blossom into a swan -- and to introduce Scott to her unpolished if impressive authentic Spanish dance moves. With just a short time until the competition, will Scott follow the leanings of his heart, toward Fran, or the more established partners being presented for him, who may be part of a larger scheme to fix the competition?

Some successful directors start in one place and discover something quite different as they hone their skills. Others have a vision from an early age, and just keep on fine-tuning it. Luhrmann fits into the latter category. Even without having a lot of money for his first picture, Luhrmann knew how to make it grandiose. Strictly Ballroom feels painted on a big canvas, one so big and fantastical that its firmly established Australian setting feels almost besides the point. With the exception of Romeo + Juliet, all of Luhrmann's films have a very definite and important setting -- Paris with Moulin Rouge!, Australia with Australia and New York with The Great Gatsby. Yet they all take place inside his mind, a setting wonderfully all its own. Ballroom is no exception.

It's interesting to see how much of the Luhrmann flourishes already exist here. One is what we will call the "frenetic close-up," where Luhrmann swoops his camera in at the unnaturally frenzied face of a character, making them appear almost grotesque. Think Jim Broadbent dancing in Moulin Rouge! Another is his earnest repurposing of pop music, as (cover versions of) both "Love is in the Air" and Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors" are used prominently and to emotionally cathartic effect.

But what really surprised me were some of the little details, moments that Luhrmann loves that he has revisited throughout his career. There's a lovely scene here where the camera pans up from the ground to a building rooftop, where Scott's pushover father (the delightful and ultimately triumphant Barry Otto) is indulging in a private moment of joyous dance. It's that upward movement of the camera that Luhrmann has continued to do with great style, notably as he explores the Parisian rooftops in Moulin Rouge!, and again in last year's Great Gatsby, where one particular urban bacchanal pulls upward to reveal, many floors above, men in hard hats soldering steel girders a hundred stories above a New York City they are building into what it is today.

Luhrmann can also give us a great hissable villain. He's got one in nearly every movie, and here that role is played by Bill Hunter as the conniving president of the Australian Dance Federation. Hunter may be the primary recipient of the "frenetic close-up" described earlier, and he gives a performance to match, without ever going over the top.

Ballroom is simply a joyous celebration, but perhaps my favorite element was its lead actress, Tara Morice. Morice is not a traditional beauty, something that made her very right for this role, but probably prevented her from having a particularly fruitful career (though she did appear in a half-dozen more movies). What she has beyond her non-traditional beauty, though, is a surplus of pluck and likability. A rush of sympathy courses through the viewer whenever she appears on screen. The extent to which you want her character to succeed is also what helps make this movie feel so romantic, even when her romantic on-screen partner is a novice actor who was selected for his renowned dance abilities more than his ability to read lines. Because Luhrmann has an innate talent for this kind of thing -- Moulin Rouge! may be one of the most romantic movies I've ever seen -- he gets everything he's looking for out of the pairing of Mercurio and Morice.

So when do we get Luhrmann's version of West Side Story, on the nose though it may be? Having really liked -- and possibly even loved -- Strictly Ballroom, I'm more ready for it than ever.

Okay, on to April. In April I'm going with a film by another Australian crossover director, Alex Proyas, who directed The Crow and Dark City. The movie I've chosen actually comes after he made those two Hollywood movies, 2002's Garage Days.

Australian Audient: BMX Bandits

 
This is the second in my series Australian Audient, in which I am watching one Australian-made film per month and then writing about it here.

Normally a bad 1980s Australian movie about kids on BMX bikes would have been quickly forgotten, even by Australians. But BMX Bandits has a special claim to enduring fame: It's the movie in which we first saw Nicole Kidman, then just 16 years old, on screen.

Here's my review:

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About halfway through BMX Bandits, after I'd just observed that the bad guys would be a lot better off if they were just carrying guns, my wife turned to me and said "You do realize this is a kids movie, don't you?"

Ah, that makes sense.

Even when shifting one's critical faculties to acknowledge the intended audience for this movie, BMX Bandits is still pretty silly. It involves a trio of teenage bike riders in Sydney's Manley neighborhood who stumble across a criminal conspiracy -- but not before first stumbling over each other. P.J. (Angelo D'Angelo) and Goose (James Lugton) are riding their bikes through a supermarket parking lot when an employee, Judy (Nicole Kidman, in her first screen performance), pushes a line of shopping carts in their path, causing hundreds of dollars of damage to both bikes. For some reason this accident gets her fired, and the three team up to find the money to repair their bikes. (Coincidentally, Judy is also a BMX rider at their same skill level.)

While attempting to steal lobsters out of traps as a way to scare up some extra money, they come across a submerged box of special walkie-talkies, which have been stashed there by a local criminal element looking to pull off a major bank heist. These special devices -- straight from the U.S. of A., according to the crime boss played by Bryan Marshall -- will allow them to talk to each other and hear what the police are saying, without the police hearing them. This is the key element in pulling off the heist. The bikers, of course, know nothing about this, and grab the walkie-talkies in order to sell them.

You'd think these walkie-talkies would just be the way the kids get ensnared in this criminal plot, but the whole movie becomes about the criminals -- led by the hapless duo of Whitey (David Argue) and Moustache (John Ley) -- trying to get these walkie-talkies back from them.

It would seem that the movie should center on something more intrinsically valuable than walkie-talkies, but it's clear that BMX Bandits has a different idea of what's intrinsically valuable to its audience. The flimsy plot exists primarily as a showcase for stunts on BMX bikes, and that in itself is no crime, especially when the stunts are shot with as much panache as DP John Seale brings to the proceedings. Seale's a future four-time Oscar nominee who would win a statue for nothing less than The English Patient, so it's no surprise this is the best part of the film. Seale sets up his camera in all sorts of low angles attached to all kinds of moving vehicles (both bikes and cars), and he allows the BMX stunts to shine.

Stunts alone won't get you through this movie without checking your watch repeatedly. Director Brian Trenchard-Smith has no grasp on pacing, as a ridiculously drawn-out chase scene in the second act goes on for something like 20 minutes, including an absurd scene where the bikers take their bikes down a water slide. The fact that they aren't riding the bikes, but rather corralling them at their sides, makes the scene simultaneously both less and more absurd. The other ludicrous aspect of this chase is that the bikers easily maneuver their way through various obstacles, while the villains -- on foot, mind you -- hit each obstacle in goofy ways, yet still remain only a couple paces behind the escaping bikes.

The bumbling of the two primary villains is the dead giveaway that this is, of course, a movie intended for children. Some of the silliness must be forgiven on those grounds. Still, BMX Bandits is surprisingly slow for a 90-minute film full of bicycle stunts. It has its share of kitschy moments, but not nearly enough to take a place in the hallowed So Bad It's Good hall of fame.

Of course, what most people seeking out BMX Bandits will want to know is how Kidman fares. Sadly, the results here are also of relatively little interest. Neither is she bad, nor does she register as someone with the charisma to one day become a major movie star and Oscar winner. You're liable to chuckle when she comes on screen for the first time, just because these ruddy cheeks and this frizzy hair is not how you're accustomed to seeing the former Ms. Tom Cruise. There's something a little piggish, though not in a bad way, about her teenage appearance. Other than that, though, there's nothing remarkable about her performance.

Those watching this movie for a laugh should definitely stick it out to the finale, which involves no fewer than 4,000 Sydney teenagers on bikes, descending on the villains in a pack of such density that it's hard to imagine how they aren't all knocking each other over. Sorry, I should have said: Spoiler alert.

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Nineteen eighty-three must have been a really good, or at least prolific, year in Australian cinema, as both of the movies I've watched so far in this series (the other being Phar Lap in January) came out that year. In March, we'll jump forward nine years to 1992, to see how Baz Luhrmann got his start with Strictly Ballroom. 

Australian Audient: Phar Lap

 
This is the first in a series in which I target one viewing per month of a movie from Australian cinema.

Happy Australia Day!

What better day to start my new 2014 series, Australian Audient?

To start out, I was planning on watching one movie my mom taped off cable back in the early 1980s, and ended up watching another.

Between the years 1983 to, I want to say, 1986, the technological planets aligned for my mom. She both knew how to record things on our VCR and had a subscription to The Movie Channel. I seem to remember my dad -- far less of a movie fan -- eventually overruling the Movie Channel subscription, and I can understand why: My mom had boxes and boxes of movies she had taped off The Movie Channel, and never watched any of them. Now that I'm a parent, I get it -- you're busy during the day, and when the kids finally go to sleep, you want to spend time with your spouse. If he/she doesn't want to watch Paris, Texas or Fitzcarraldo (two titles I remember from her collection), then you're out of luck.

Two other titles I remember from her collection were Breaker Morant and Phar Lap. I wanted to watch Breaker Morant as my first movie in this series, but instead I watched Phar Lap. The Australia section of the local video store had the latter but not the former. 

I could just go on chatting about Phar Lap, as I am wont to do in blog posts like this, but I'm going to hold myself to something I promised about a week ago: I am going to write a review of all movies I watch between now and the end of my so-called Movie Diet on April 27th (read more about that here).

So, here goes - the first review proper I have written in quite some time. Let's see if I can still do it.

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There's a reason films about great racehorses tend to be limited to biopics, and not stories about fictitious thoroughbreds. Inspirational sports stories about underdogs becoming champions are hard enough to believe even if they're true. If they're made up, they just seem like some screenwriter's flight of fancy. It's an advantage real sports have over fictional sports. You have to believe the real sports because they actually happened.

Phar Lap, the racehorse born in New Zealand and trained to run in Australia, is a particular example of one of those underdogs whose exploits really had to happen to be believed. He wasn't just bad to start out -- "lazy," according to trainer Harold Telford (Martin Vaughan) -- he went beyond bad and finished last in most, if not all, of his races. Miraculously, Telford kept working him, and today his body is preserved and on display in the Melbourne Museum. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

When first arriving on Australian shores in 1927, the wart-ridden young colt is described by his American owner (Ron Leibman) as somewhere between a sheep dog and a kangaroo. Nonetheless, Telford believes in his pedigree, and a good cop-bad cop relationship begins to get the horse into shape: Telford working the "laziness" out of him through sheer force, and Telford's strapper Tommy (Tom Burlinson) relating to him more gently in a way we would now consider "horse whispering." Telford initially fires Tommy when Tommy questions the vigor of Telford's training methods, but reluctantly has to ask him back when the horse quits eating as a protest to Tommy's sacking.

Well, the horse starts winning. And winning. And winning.

And here's where the underdog story develops in a way that's more interesting than just "bad horse makes good." Phar Lap's story becomes about business as much as about sport (that's how they say it in Australia, without the S), and it takes a turn for the unethical. How to bet effectively on the dominant athlete is a subject that ensnares not only his already venal owner, but the previously uncorruptible Telford, who has overstretched his commitment on a number of thus-far unproductive yearlings and is facing bankruptcy. A fascinating passage involves the methods used to protect Phar Lap in the run-up to his first Melbourne Cup, Australia's greatest race, when a betting fix could require the horse not to win -- or better yet, not to be alive.

Unfortunately, the structure of the film removes some of the suspense from this particular sequence, while also giving it a bit of extra gravitas. We find out in the opening minutes of the film that Phar Lap does indeed die under unusual circumstances -- in Menlo Park, California. The rest of the film is told in flashback. So we know the horse survives any attempts on his life prior to the Melbourne Cup -- but we also know that he ultimately does succumb to forces intent on destroying him. Being the best at something is, alas, not always the best for your health.

Phar Lap relies a tad too heavily on its inspirational score, and a mode of expression that we would call "cheesy" if the film were made today. In 1983, a little more of that stuff got a pass. Overall it's a pretty sturdy horse picture that gives a good flavor of the country that considered him one of its heroes.

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Okay. Well. It's a start. In my own defense, I wrote this while my son was trying to get me to play pirates. I might have liked to give it more thought and tweak it some, but if I set out to publish on Australia Day, I've really got to publish on Australia Day, don't I?

Next month: A movie that can't help but take itself a bit less seriously, or so I assume. BMX Bandits is Nicole Kidman's infamous feature debut, and it's available for streaming on Netflix for those of you who want to play along at home. 

Australian Audient: The Series

I just realized -- I almost forgot to tell you about my new blog series for 2014!

I'm in Australia now, so might as well soak in the Aussie culture, right? More importantly, might as well see the Aussie cinema I haven't seen, so that if I do one day get work writing about films in Australia, I will be that much of a better candidate for the job.

So I'm going to watch one movie made in Australia, by Australians, or about Australians per month, and write about it here. The series will be called Australian Audient.

Unfortunately, there are consequences to having been together with an Australian for nine years. I've actually seen many if not most of the prominent Australian films.

However, most is not all, and this could be a good opportunity to find some deep cuts ... one of which I've already got lined up for next month.

But first, January -- the week of it that remains.

I'll be watching Phar Lap, about some kind of heroic Australian horse. It wasn't my first choice, but the video store didn't have my first choice, so that's that. How's that for selling the first installment of the series??

I hope you'll join along, as much as your interest and the availability of the videos to you dictates. Look for my write-up sometime next week.