Wake in Fright (1971)

To be perfectly honest, I found "Wake in Fright," the chronicle of a man's financial and spiritual ruin in the outback of Australia, to be dull, uninvolving, and rather obvious. Maybe the reason it didn't engross me as much as I expected it to was that I expected an entirely different movie. Looking forward to an exciting, entertaining, and well-made rural thriller, I was instead subjected to a VERY slow-paced and uneventful movie with lots of animal killings that shocked and sickened me.

There's no one saner than me, Mate! Right!?

   Now, I often love slow-paced movies, so I wonder if I simply watched it at the wrong time. But to enjoy a slow movie I have to have have characters that hold my interest, that I like and relate to in some way. The characters in "Wake in Fright" were fairly well-defined, but not likable nor particularly involving. While many of the Australians are loutish thugs, the rather conceited English schoolteacher is an uppity snob who personifies the kind of person I hate.

   John Grant (Gary Bond) is the stereotypical proper Englishman who reeks of pretension and who you
would want to show your light reading picks to (his choice of light reading would probably be 'Ulysses' followed by a few chapters of "Anna Karenina.") He is stuck on the Australian Outback teaching a small school of students varying greatly in age, and arrives in Bundanyabba, a remote mining town, on his way to meet his girlfriend over in London, England.

   The rough-hewn men of the town want his to drink, brawl, and be merry, and John looks down on the men and their customs. But when he gambles away all his money on a coin game, he is forced to live with Doc (Donald Pleasence,) an alcoholic is both rough and highly educated. Thus begins his emotional and mental disintegration, as he lured into the world of boozing, fighting, kangaroo killing, and homosexual sex (ya better look out for those hom'sexuals, ya hear?)

Den of Sin

 I think reading 'Lord of the Flies' again would be preferable to watching this dreary descent into depravity. Peter Brooks' film adaptation is no good, but William Golding's book remains a masterpiece. I simply didn't get into the characters or events portrayed in this film. Donald Pleasence is a gifted actor and I find him strangely attractive, even as an old man in "Halloween," but his character's motivations are inexplicable.

   Furthermore, I found the killing of the little fox and the kangaroo hunt spiritually sickening on several levels. The disclaimer at the end states that the kangaroos were took down by actual hunters and would have been killed anyway, but that doesn't account for the fox, and I was horrified by the maimed kangaroos staring at the camera with a mixture of sadness and terror. Maybe I'm personifying them too much, but that's not something I'm ashamed of. I know the scenes were meant to show the men's disconnect from the natural world, but it still made me sick.

   I feel a little guilty for not liking "Wake in Fright", which got %100 'fresh' on Rotten Tomatoes.com, but there you are. Truthfully, I kept checking the time left on this film and getting distracted, not the mark of a masterpiece. The actors perform commendably, and the movie is fairly well shot, but basically it was just not for me.
                                                                         Rating-
                                                          5.5/10

Crazy Eyes!

   

Film Review: Oranges and Sunshine

Year Released: 2010

Written by: Rona Munro, based on Empty Cradles, a nonfictional book by Margaret Humphreys

Directed by: Jim Loach


My Rating: 4/5 Stars

Film Review: The Year My Voice Broke

Year Released:1987

Written & Directed By: John Duigan

Rating: (4/5 Stars)





Set in 1962 in New South Wales, Australia, this film opens on a light-hearted note and -- as one might expect -- turns a shade darker and more serious. On the cusp of puberty, Danny Embling (Noah Taylor of Shine and Red, White & Blue) falls for his childhood friend Freya (Leone Carmen). Meanwhile he struggles with raging hormones, bullies, and the tedium of small-town life.

Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger

    Bespectacled, Australian/Jewish and peculiarly named Esther Blueburger (Danielle Catanzriti)'s coming-of-age is the subject of this balanced comedy-drama, which starts out strong and sinks into a pile of saccharine sweetness and bewildering contrivance. The theme, that in the pursuit of popularity, a young person can become the thing they've always hated -- a bully -- is a little didactic, but the movie initially deals with it in a light way.

   Esther is a twin, which would be hard enough in itself, but in this case especially so, as her brother is both manipulative and highly intelligent. She lives with the said twin (Christian Byars) and her inattentive parents (Essie Davis and Russell Dykstra) and goes to a private school which, day in and day out, is a parade of stifling conformity.

   The school uniforms are heinous. The halls are populated by school bullies, including a chick-clique that resembles an Aussie "The Plastics," and nerds. Esther is a nerd, hopelessly out of step with her peers. Lonely, she finds comfort in a flock of ducklings found caged in a classroom, who subsequently end up being the class science experiment.

   Esther's folks want her to invite friends to her upcoming Bat Mitzvah. Esther doesn't have any friends, at least, not until she meets popular Sunni (Keisha Castle-Hughes, an attractive and talented actress you might know for her astonishing performance in Whale Rider.) Sunni introduces her to her unpleasant, b**chy friends. But, surprisingly, Sunni isn't like the others. She takes her under her wing and, in her own slightly condescending way, introduces her to the clique experience.

   Unknown to her parents, Esther borrows a school uniform of Sunni's and goes to her school secretly, where she struggles to reinvent herself. Along the way, she learns the ins and outs of school politics, meets Sunni's eccentric mom, Mary (Toni Collette), who moonlights as a pole dancer, and begins to become a bully, much to the chagrin of Sunni, who had expected more of her.

    Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger starts out as a nice little movie, which saves it from being a complete failure in the end. Newcomer Danielle Catanzriti tends to overact with her mouth, but overall she's a good little actress, but it is Christian Byars who really stands out as her troubled brother. Keisha Castle-Hughes doesn't get as much of a juicy role as she did in Whale Rider, but she holds her own as likable but imperfect Sunni, who is more complicated  than her name suggests.

   The main problem here is the sentimental, overcooked ending and the air of predictability. There are some uncomfortable moments, such as Esther making out with a much-older boy who asks to "feel her boobs" (a watered-down version of a scene in This Is England), or when Esther laments that she "doesn't want to be a virgin at fourteen" (sad, but all too realistic). This is nothing compared to a deleted sequence, which I have only heard described, that was cut from the Region 1 release. The sexual content makes it a movie for kids twelve and up and adults who can look past that the fact that the ending approaches ridiculousness and nearly ruins the movie.

Note- In my humble opinion, the tagline ("Sometimes you have to fit in to stand out") doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Mary & Max

   Mary & Max, which, as you might have guessed from the trailer, is not for kids, is a grim, bleakly animated affair, and is allowed by the director the smallest rays of sunshine. It is the story of 352-pound Jewish New Yorker Max Jerry Horowitz and a lonely eight-year-old named Mary Daisy Dinkle, who lives with her alcoholic shoplifting mother and taxidermist father (whose middle name, "Norman," and hobby of stuffing birds may be an oblique reference to Psycho) in 1976 Australia.

   A male chicken named Ethel is young Mary's only friend, while Max lives with his pets, including an ever-dying line of fish, in a cheap apartment. Max doesn't know it, but he has Asperger's, a neurological, autism-like condition which impairs social interaction. It is quite a coincidence that Max and Mary meet.

    She picks his name from a phone book and decides to ask him where babies come from in America. She has been informed by her deceased granddad that Australians find them in beer glasses. Another name, and she could have picked a pedophile, who would have been very glad to hear from her, but for different reasons. (No, this is not a story about pedophilia.)

    Max answers, in his own eccentric and slightly unrealistic way, and an unusual friendship begins, despite interference from Mary's mother, who, frankly, has a reasonable motive to be suspicious of her child's strange new pen pal. This all leads to a conclusion that made me shed a tear for the first time in an animated movie since some of Pixar's new releases.

    Mary & Max's world is populated by strange claymation characters -- a Greek stutterer, an agoraphobic amputee, and a blind widow -- who are even stranger than they sound. The animation is detailed, gratuitously weird, and frankly, a little hard to take, but the story makes up for it.

   . The bitter-sweetness of the film makes it hard not to cry a little, think a little, and lament for the loneliness that hounds some people throughout their lives. Philip Seymour Hoffman does not sound like Philip Seymour Hoffman as Max and Toni Collette is good as the adult Mary. Mary & Max is not without humor and definitely worth a watch.