Down Under Flix

Beth Winters (Judy Morris), a resourceful and ambitious American journalist, travels to Australia to investigate kangaroos being killed for pet food in a small outback town. The perpetrators, Dicko (David Argue) and Benny (Chris Haywood), pursue Beth with intent to harm, but are scared away by a monstrous wild boar who finishes the job. Beth’s boring husband Carl (Gregory Harrison) travels down under to investigate her disappearance, where he encounters Dicko and Benny, the monstrous boar, and the tragic Jake Cullen (Bill Kerr), a vengeful hunter whose infant grandson was killed by the beast (although the film was based on a novel, it’s hard to ignore parallels with Azaria Chamberlain’s disappearance at Uluru a few years earlier).    Razorback was Russell Mulcahy’s second feature and—along with his impressive music videos—Hollywood calling card. It’s also his only Australian feature that’s of a piece with his American genre fare ( Swimming Upstream and In Like Flynn are bot...

  Dark City  opens with John (friend of Australian cinema Rufus Sewell, In a Savage Land ) waking in a bathtub in a dimly lit hotel room in a dimly lit city, with blood on his forehead, a dead woman in the next room, and no memory of who he is or how he got there. He goes on the lam and starts to piece together who he is, guided by the bread-crumbs left by Dr Schreber, a mad scientist type (friend of Australian cinema Kiefer Sutherland, Paradise Found and lovingly photographed by Dean Semler in Young Guns I and II , The Three Musketeers , and The Cowboy Way ). In pursuit of John is a weary (or maybe just sleepy) detective Bumstead (William Hurt) and, separately, a group of pale-faced, black-clad “Strangers” who John witnesses shutting the city down at midnight and “tuning” (that is, altering) the environment and its occupants’ identities.     It’s a terrific setup for one of the very best science-fiction films of the 1990s. Dark City is a film of impeccab...

  Cosi (1996) and Looking for Alibrandi (2000) , though disparate in plot, character, setting, and execution, share several attributes in common. Both are Australian comedy-dramas released within a five-year stretch. Both feature soundtracks of popular music, albeit the popular music of the 1700s in Cosi ’s case. Both feature Greta Scacchi and Kerry Walker, though  The Home Song Stories also featured the latter, which I guess makes this Kerry Walker Month on Down Under Flix. Both were adapted from sources originating in 1992— Cosi a play by Louis Nowra, Alibrandi a novel by Melina Marchetta — and their source authors also served as screenwriters. Finally, both of those source texts were, at least in my school years, part of the Victorian curriculum. I studied Marchetta’s novel prior to the film’s release, so was deprived of the ritual of watching it on a large television wheeled into the classroom. I was afforded that pleasure, however, for Cosi .    Directed by...

  “It’s not a house, it’s a home,” declares patriarch Daryl Kerrigan in The Castle . It’s a memorable line in a film chockfull of memorable lines that's attained the status of national treasure. However, in the broader sweep of Australian cinema, home is more likely to be a site or dysfunction (e.g. The Last Days of Chez Nous , Muriel’s Wedding , The Boys , Crackers , Radiance , Alexandra’s Project ) and/or trauma (e.g. Bad Boy Bubby , Shine , The Goddess of 1967 , Swimming Upstream , Beautiful Kate , The Babadook ). Moreover, in the two films spotlighted this week, home is depicted as temporary and/or circumstantial.    The Home Song Stories (2007) is a somewhat autobiographical work from writer-director Tony Ayres. It unfolds largely from the point of view of Tom (Joel Lok), whose mother Rose (Joan Chen) meets an Australian sailor (Steven Vidler) in Hong Kong, marries him, and brings Tom and older sister May (Irene Chen, no relation) to Australia. Discontent, Rose ha...

  The Last Wave (1977) presents two very surprising firsts for Down Under Flix: it’s the first David Gulpilil film I’ve examined on the site, notwithstanding his cute cameo in Dead Heart , and also the first Peter Weir film I’ve covered. It’s especially surprising I’ve not reviewed a Weir film until now, having covered films by most of his contemporaries—Beresford, Schepisi, Armstrong, Miller—but then again films like Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli are quite well-trodden critical ground, as are his international productions, several of which — Green Card ,  Master and Commander , Witness —I especially adore.    In another first, I’m going to fly the spoiler flag high upfront. I don’t often dabble in spoiler territory, but I don’t think I can provide an authentic assessment of The Last Wave without entering that terrain. If you want the quick version of the review before checking out, I think The Last Wave is perfectly made, impeccably crafted, and maddenin...