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Showing posts from January, 2024

JanViewAry: Ride Like a Girl (2020), The Patriot (1998), Red Planet (2000), The Invasion (2007)

  Ride Like a Girl (2020) – Rachel Griffith’s film about the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup is an earnest  crowd-pleaser . Like most Hollywood takes on inspirational, incredible true stories, Ride Like a Girl hammers said inspirational, incredible true story into a somewhat familiar shape, but I appreciated its earnest and unjaded portrait of a Christian family and the nicely shaded performances of Teresa Palmer and Sam Neill.   The Patriot (1998) – An addendum to DeSemler , and probably the only Steven Seagal film I’ll ever cover on Down Under Flix. DP Dean Semler’s sophomore and swansong directorial feature after Firestorm , again with Stephen F. Windon lensing (adequately), the film stars Seagal as a former superstar immunologist turned regional GP and cattleman who faces off against a virus-spreading militia. Falling in the transitional period of Seagal’s stardom – no longer the star of lean & mean genre films or expensive Hollywood blockbusters, ...