Down Under Flix

  Director: John Stainton Starring: Steve Irwin, Terri Irwin, Magda Szubanski, David Wenham, Lachy Hulme, Aden Young, Steve Bastoni, Kate Beahan, Kenneth Ransom The phenomenon of Steve Irwin’s Crocodile Hunter largely bypassed me during his lifetime. I was in my twenties, considered myself too cool (so wrong) for Steve Irwin’s shenanigans, and was uninterested, like Tommy Lee Jones, in sanctioning buffoonery . As I potter towards middle age, I find myself increasingly in awe of people at the very apex of their profession, be it Fred Astaire dancing like a boss , Jacqueline du Pre commanding a cello , or Elvis bringing the house down . If your profession is wrestling deadly reptiles into submission with extraordinary zeal and strength, then you have my attention and at least a modicum of my admiration. In The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course , an important high-tech MacGuffin falls from outer space and lands in the Australian outback, where it is promptly snapped up by a crocodile...

  Director: Gillian Armstrong Starring: Guy Pearce, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Saoirse Ronan, Timothy Spall Since launching Down Under Flix in 2016, I’ve reviewed much of Gillian Armstrong’s wholly Australian output, covering Starstruck , High Tide , and The Last Days of Chez Nous  on Down Under Flix, and revisiting Starstruck   as well as an early documentary, Fourteen’s Good, Eighteen’s Better , for Senses of Cinema . The contemporaneity of this line-up is striking given our popular conception of Armstrong as a period film director. Certainly her feature debut, My Brilliant Career , was a period film, as were her subsequent Hollywood films ( Mrs Soffel , Little Women ) and Australian-international co-productions ( Oscar and Lucinda , Charlotte Gray ), but she was not beholden to this mould for her wholly home-grown features. This suggests Hollywood and international film financiers have been beholden to a view of Armstrong’s work that emerged largely from My Brilliant Caree...