Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 29, 2024, 07:22:18 AM

Login with username, password and session length

101 great and very good Australian films

Started by Johnny Townmouse, December 04, 2013, 02:56:29 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Johnny Townmouse

I don't imagine that this will actually get all the way up to 101, although I could probably get about half that on my own. I've gone the 'nominate a film' route because it gives an opportunity to find out about as many as possible. I thought I had the subject pretty sewn up, but just a cursory glance around offers many treats, many of which I didn't know existed.

So, I have had always had a fascination with Australian film - there is something about the foreign sense of otherness to this place so different to the UK, even though culturally it is really very similar. It is a country that functions as a fish out of water - loads of Europeans living in this incredible heat in a completely forboding, dangerous and utterly beautiful geography. The stories that come out of Australia are as varied as one could imagine - but I would say that there is a curious melancholy to many of the films I have seen, whether it is drama or comedy. To get the thread kicked off I thought I would nominate a quite representative example of a really wonderful Australian film:

101. Wake in Fright (1971)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067541



"New to the Yabba?"

I actually don't want to talk about this film in too much detail because I went into the cinema cold, knowing very little other than it was compared to Walkabout, and featured Donald Pleasance. The benefit of knowing very little meant that I genuinely did not know what to expect - and due to the title almost reckoned this for a horror of the Deliverance kind. This is not true, but also not a million miles away from being accurate for various reasons that become clear upon viewing.

Directed by Canadian Ted Kotcheff, and starring not very well-known British actor Gary Bond, the film manages to capture something about Australia that I have been informed by aussie pals is something many natives would struggle to pull-off. The basic premise of the film is that Gary Bond's character John Grant has finished his teaching assignment in a tiny village in the outback, and is on his way to Sydney to see his fiancee. He has to stay overnight in a town with a small airport to get a connecting flight, and what transpires is that the town becomes impossible for him to leave. Bond is something of a snob, and looks down on many of the activities of the colourful folk in the town, who spend much of their time drinking, hunting and gambling. And drinking. And then drinking some more. When the extreme heat is combined with vast amounts of beer being drunk - and nary a glass of water in sight - you start to feel dry, dehydrated, hot, hungover and rung out in the same way as Grant. It is very evocative, and reminds me of any time I have become foolishly drunk and done very stupid things. Waking in fright is just part of that, as the regret comes thundering in. This also reminds me that the film evokes Under the Volcano.

Pleasance pretty much steals the film, and in the third act there is what I would consider to be the one of the most subtle and understated suggestion of
Spoiler alert
man-on-man action / rape /  drunken homoerotica
[close]
I have ever seen. I won't say much more other than to remark upon how well the film conveys the feeling of unforced entrapment, with growing tension, conspiracy and a sense of impending doom. Two warnings though: This is not high drama, it does not crack along violently like the poster above would suggest. Instead it is a mood piece, more similar to a couple of others aussie films that I may nominate if nobody else does. Secondly, if you don't like the scene of the bull being killed in Apocalypse Now then you are going to fucking hate the hunting scenes in this film.

This is well tl;dr so please feel free to be brief.

#1
What a dumb idea for a thread. There's already been 6 others in the past two weeks about this very subject.

Seriously though, it's been mentioned in a few threads over the years, but Snowtown is an exceptional piece of cinema.



Harrowing, bleak, beautiful.

Brilliantly shot in a really simple minimalist manner, and amazing performances throughout. It's cast almost entirely from non-actors, with the exception of Henshall. The director, Justin Kurzel, went out to South Australia and found real people from the area, and he gets the most naturalistic, understated performances out of them all.
And Henshall himself if a fucking terrifying force in this film. He's incredibly nuanced, and likable, but he's also a serial killer. You slowly start to gather what he's capable of as you go along, and you'll hold your breath in all his scenes because it could go anyway and his motivations become increasingly blurred. He's a mundanely real monster.

He's brilliant. I love this film. 

Based on the real life Snowtown Murders, the film follows Jamie, a 16 year old, as finally gets a bit of a father figure out of this man, called John Bunting.

There's more to this story, obviously, but just watch the film. It's deeply unpleasant, deliberately so, it'll make you want to have a shower afterwards but I wouldn't say it's that graphic to be honest. I remember when it came out, it had a lot of walk outs, but with the exclusion of maybe two shots, it's generally left to your imagination in a far more horrifying way. Don't let critics who decried this as torture porn or anything sway you. It's so far from such a thing. It's inexplicable that people would call it that.

It's a quiet waking horror that'll stick with you for a long time. Exceptional filmmaking, exceptional soundtrack, exceptional performances, exceptional editing, exceptional cinematography.

So yeah, it's alright, I guess.

zomgmouse

99. The Proposition



Incredible Western set in Colonial Australia. You'd think it would seem almost natural for a Western to be set there. There's its "new land" vibe, expansive landscapes/underdeveloped towns/horrendous Indigenous relations, and an inimitable preponderance of outlaws - and yet so few have been made using it.

Beautifully shot, great cast (Guy Pearce is brilliant in this, as is Danny Huston, and Ray Winstone and John Hurt), fantastic score (by Nick Cave, who also co-wrote it). It's a tremendous tale - gripping, depressing - and it's a tale told well.

Moribunderast

Snowtown is an interesting one for me. I agree that it's an incredibly well-made and affecting film but, given it's pure bleakness and the fact that it's based on real murders, it did leave me wondering if A) there was a point, and B) whether the point expressed is a justifiable reason to recreate the brutal murders of several real people for entertainment purposes. It's a very dicey issue as I don't know where I'd draw a distinction between what is an acceptable real-life event to recreate and what isn't, but I just found myself watching this movie and putting myself in the shoes of the families of those whose deaths were shown on-screen and I wasn't sure if I could justify it's existence. The "True Story" tag gives the film added weight but did the themes within the story require it to be framed within the actual crimes that occured? This is where I'd defend The Boys, for instance, in that the film is all the preamble to a horrific crime and communicates a lot about masculinity and the mundanity of evil without actually portraying the crime in question.

I'm not saying Snowtown is wrong or shouldn't exist but I did find myself debating that point while viewing and I still don't know how I feel about it. The main performances are brilliant and the atmosphere created is genuinely unsettling, though, so I would say it's a fantastic achievement independent of my worries about it's affect on people close to the film's story.

Johnny Townmouse

I sympathise with this view up to a point, but at the same time so much of this is subjective. How should the cinema treat murders in order to make the dramatisation worthwhile? And how can we gauge how the families would want this to be dramatised? Like Ron Howard would? It's almost impossible for me to comment on this fully, but I do think that if someone I loved was murdered in as squalid a way as the people are in Snowtown, then I would want the film to be disturbing and explicit.

I'm biased though, I think Snowtown is up there as one of the best, if not the best, new film I have seen in the last couple of years.

Props to The Proposition as well. It took a second watch for me to really appreciate it - I went in with all this expectation because of how pedigree the project is (Hillcoat/Cave/Winstone/Pearce/Huston/Hurt/Watson/Ellis) and was somewhat let down. But the second viewing was much more satisfying - in particular I think Huston is great, and the design of that little English house in the middle of that desert is wonderful and pretty much sums up a lot of Aussie cinema.

Quote from: Johnny Townmouse on December 04, 2013, 06:20:53 AM
...and the design of that little English house in the middle of that desert is wonderful and pretty much sums up a lot of Aussie cinema.

It's funny because that house design is always what I think about with the proposition. It's such a small thing in the periphery but it's probably my favourite detail about it. I was a bit the same with my first viewing though, felt a bit too much of a try-hard Apocalypse Now or something. It really does mirror the plot of that quite unashamedly. But the second time I loved it a lot more. Just enjoyed the more symbolic and thematic story it was telling. It's not supposed to be a naturalistic period drama, it's all about the thematics. I really like Ray Winstone in this one actually. That line in his gravelly voice, "Australia. What fresh hell is this?", sums up the film, really.

leighhart

Quote from: Bored of Canada on December 04, 2013, 03:58:49 AM
What a dumb idea for a thread. There's already been 6 others in the past two weeks about this very subject.

Seriously though, it's been mentioned in a few threads over the years, but Snowtown is an exceptional piece of cinema.



Harrowing, bleak, beautiful.

Brilliantly shot in a really simple minimalist manner, and amazing performances throughout. It's cast almost entirely from non-actors, with the exception of Henshall. The director, Justin Kurzel, went out to South Australia and found real people from the area, and he gets the most naturalistic, understated performances out of them all.
And Henshall himself if a fucking terrifying force in this film. He's incredibly nuanced, and likable, but he's also a serial killer. You slowly start to gather what he's capable of as you go along, and you'll hold your breath in all his scenes because it could go anyway and his motivations become increasingly blurred. He's a mundanely real monster.

He's brilliant. I love this film. 

Based on the real life Snowtown Murders, the film follows Jamie, a 16 year old, as finally gets a bit of a father figure out of this man, called John Bunting.

There's more to this story, obviously, but just watch the film. It's deeply unpleasant, deliberately so, it'll make you want to have a shower afterwards but I wouldn't say it's that graphic to be honest. I remember when it came out, it had a lot of walk outs, but with the exclusion of maybe two shots, it's generally left to your imagination in a far more horrifying way. Don't let critics who decried this as torture porn or anything sway you. It's so far from such a thing. It's inexplicable that people would call it that.

It's a quiet waking horror that'll stick with you for a long time. Exceptional filmmaking, exceptional soundtrack, exceptional performances, exceptional editing, exceptional cinematography.

So yeah, it's alright, I guess.

fantastic film. Some of the scenes are brutal but its a brutal piece of Australian criminal history

Moribunderast

Quote from: Johnny Townmouse on December 04, 2013, 06:20:53 AM
I sympathise with this view up to a point, but at the same time so much of this is subjective.

I completely agree and, as I say, I'm not definitively stating that I don't think it's existence is justified - it's just that I've found it a moral quandary ever since seeing that film. It's partially due to a conversation I had with a friend who was pals with someone who was a victim of a famous Australian serial killer. Hearing first-hand how sickened he was whenever the case was brought up or dodgy re-enactments were done on television certainly made me think a lot harder about films like Snowtown, The Boys and Animal Kingdom (why are all the best Australian films horrific true-crime stories?) as I completely understand the fascination that comes with the cases they're based on and I'm not necessarily against using these cases to explore various themes - it's just that I think you'd want to be saying something pretty profound or important to justify that hurt that could come from creating visual re-enactments of actual deaths. It's a complex issue and one I'm probably not articulate enough to properly surmise. I'm not dismissive of the true-crime genre altogether, I just find it morally ambiguous.

I'm keen to see what films come up in this thread. As an Australian and a Nick Cave fan, I'm ashamed to say I've not yet seen The Proposition. One day.

Urinal Cake


The kings of mykonos
A nuanced tale of acceptance as an Australian man of Greek heritage goes back to his roots to bury his uncle and comes to terms with his homosexuality while fighting an incestous attraction to his cousin.

Moribunderast


Hank_Kingsley

Alexandra's Project

Some sheila tortures her cheating drongo husband via VIDEO.

It's good, actually. I like Bad Boy Bubby too, but people don't seem to have seen many of blokeys other films. Probably cos they don't have as much mum shagging and cat killing.

Quote from: Urinal Cake on December 04, 2013, 08:32:25 AM

The kings of mykonos
A nuanced tale of acceptance as an Australian man of Greek heritage goes back to his roots to bury his uncle and comes to terms with his homosexuality while fighting an incestous attraction to his cousin.

You always tear things down, Urinal Cake! Do you ever feel joy and enjoy things!?
Though, yeah, that said, I've not seen that film but it looks like flippin' wank.

I've worked with the director of the first Wog Boy actually, who's incredibly talented. Did all those horrific TAC videos that scarred you for life.
I've not seen the first Wog Boy since I was a wee lad though, remember not hugely getting the humour of it, though I was a white kid of Welsh descent in a 'village' of less than 500 out in the country. So it was a lot of playing to a culture that I wasn't hugely familiar with.

I've not seen Alexandra's Project actually. Had it on VHS for ages and my parents always told me to give it a shot but never got around to it. I liked Bad Boy Bubby, but it's definitely not aged well. Feels very, very 80's once he gets out of the Bunker. For those of you who've not seen it, it's a lot like Old Boy or Dogtooth with it's opening, then turns into a Being There type fish out of water farce.

Rolf De Heer's Ten Canoes is probably the one that made the biggest mark, at least around here. I'm ashamed to admit I've not seen that one either, despite having a big interest in films, being from this country, and having a desire to see more stuff focusing on Aboriginal culture and characters reach wider audiences.
Same with Samson and Delilah, hired it out from the video store once but didn't get the time to watch it. I really need to organise a proper list for all the books and films I want to get through.

How about we move away from the harrowing, bleak Australian crop like The Proposition and Wog Boy 2 for a second, and move onto something that's more happy:

The Castle



It's such an obvious choice for Australians, it's a national treasure and the familiarity with it can mean you kinda just shrug it off as shit, but everytime you watch it, you remember how good it actually is. It's a comedy film about Australian values, and it's one of those weird comedies that doesn't have a bad bone it its body, but still remains funny. It's not like it's a kids film or anything. It's suitable for kids, I mean, if they can handle hearing "Fuck" a lot, but shit, they're kids, they hear that a lot anyway.
It's just endlessly charming, lovely, clever and just incredibly funny.

It follows a sweet, down to earth family in Melbourne who are just almost entirely content with their lot in life, who find out their street's going to be torn down so they can extend the airport tarmac, that's literally just about 30 metres away. Don't watch the trailer online because it's a really terribly cut one, but I highly recommend it.





vrailaine

well.. I was gonna say the Castle and Wake in Fright, so I don't really have anything to add here, I guess.

Does Road Warrior count? Does Babe count? Both of them are pretty high up on my favourite films ever list.
Find it kinda baffling that Babe gets mentioned so little these days to be honest, but I'm excessively biased toward it and James Cromwell so maybe that's just me. Six point fucking nine on the IMDb.

...does Babe: Pig in the City count?

Urinal Cake

Quote from: Bored of Canada on December 04, 2013, 10:55:19 AM
You always tear things down, Urinal Cake! Do you ever feel joy and enjoy things!?
I schadenfreude.

Quote from: vrailaine on December 04, 2013, 11:13:35 AM
well.. I was gonna say the Castle and Wake in Fright, so I don't really have anything to add here, I guess.

Does Road Warrior count? Does Babe count? Both of them are pretty high up on my favourite films ever list.
Find it kinda baffling that Babe gets mentioned so little these days to be honest, but I'm excessively biased toward it and James Cromwell so maybe that's just me. Six point fucking nine on the IMDb.

...does Babe: Pig in the City count?

The Babe films are genuinely great. The second one's surprisingly good too if I remember correctly.
Mad Max is great primarily because of the stunts in it, but the second one is considerably better in all other aspects. Gave up on Beyond Thunderdome though. Just couldn't hack it. 

This will be the last film I list, because I want other people to have a chance to suggest some, but it's got to be up there as one of my all-time favourite films to come out of Australia.

Not Quite Hollywood.



A bloody brilliant documentary showing the history of Australian cinema, except not the more artistic crop like Picnic at Hanging Rock, but our insane history of exploitation films. Has interviews with so many people throughout. Tarantino's in almost half the films, lispily geeking out over all this shit. You watch that and you understand why he cast himself as an Australian bushranger in Django Unchained. He's clearly got a weird fascination with the country and our films. Has some amazing stories about Dennis Hopper too on the set of Mad Dog Morgan. It's just got everything. It's got this passion and enthusiasm that's infectious, and it makes you really excited for all these genuinely pretty shitty films. It's fucking genius, and it showed me about this whole history of our nation's cinema that I just wasn't aware of. I'd seen Bazza McKenzie stuff, but I never knew we made a Kung Fu film where there's a fight on top of Ayers Rock, and it ends by them setting George Lazenby on fire.

The stunts in that are fucking amazing too. Some of the most ludicrously dangerous stunts you'll ever see in films ever. 

Give the trailer a watch, Johnny. You'll probably like this film.

Okay. I'm out. I'll let other people suggest stuff now.

billtheburger


Oh let me count the ways you are so great:
1.It has Harold Bishop (ian smith) as a gun weilding mad scientist.
2.Squeaky voice body builders
3.Inbred rednecks eating an adrenalin gland from a kangaroo and then going nuts
4.Loads of gore, including a psychotic embryo that climbs out of the womb and kills its mother
5.Hard core porn on a tv in the background that got past UK censors


neveragain

Saw a film called Look Both Ways recently. Almost hypnotically slow but with interesting characters and some nice drama. Visually beautiful. Sort of a perfect Sunday afternoon escapism film except that the main characters are dealing with testicular cancer and witnessing a train crash, respectively. Interesting use of animation throughout.

Johnny Townmouse

Some new ones there for me to look at, and yes I would have eventually nominated both Not Quite Hollywood and The Castle myself. The former is a glimpse into something I never thought could have existed (indeed, I saw an academic paper a few weeks ago about Taz-ploitation film! Very niche), and the latter is just a full-on unashamed feel-good film with a classic David & Goliath storyline. Some of the dialogue and set-pieces in that film are hilarious.

Are we on 92? Probably not, but anyway.....

92. Ghosts... of the Civil Dead (1988)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095217/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1



Once again, if you liked Snowtown and The Boys, and specifically The Proposition, then you are going to like this a lot - a film that I consider to be a forerunner to the contemporary squalid brutality of the Aussie drama. I don't want to say too much about specific events that occur in the film so as not to lessen their impact, but this really is a descent into hell, helmed by your man John Hillcoat and co-written with Nick Cave. I first saw this late-night on Channel 4 when I was about 15, and it was pretty quick after initial release. It was a hot, hot summer (1990?) and I remember being awake at 2am soaked in sweat being subjected to what was up to that point the most disturbing film I had ever seen.

Ghosts..... is set in a high-security prison in the very imminent future, and details how a project to keep dangerous prisoners together goes seriously awry. If you like the prison genre, and I do, then this is a must. It is very much Scum grown up - and in terms of brutality it really does piss over stuff like Bad BoysAnimal Factory and A Prophet. Also, the great HBO TV Series Oz owes huge amounts to this film. The strength of the film lies in its tone, built up through the use of an eerie Cave/Harvey/Bargeld soundtrack featuring Anita Lane's plaintive, haunting sighing/singing that just gets under your skin, plus the judicious use of voice-over that avoids exposition and rather gives us a whispering, focus-shifting insight into the characters' inner-lives.

There is no real main character, although we do follow the main supervisor of the prison whose sweat drenched face is etched with the inevitably of the violence waiting to burst from his charges, and there is also a new, young inmate who appears to be way out of his depth, and who provides the most interesting and disturbing coda of resolution by the end of the film. I really adore the man who has lived most of his life in solitary and who provides the most poetic voice-over, and there is a transvestite character who provides some of the most unpleasantness (the tranny character in Animal Kingdom almost seems like a reference to this guy). But it is Cave who steals the show with a completely unrestrained demonstration of his demonic mania. The moment that one prisoner hears Cave's screaming in the distance upon his arrival, he just looks crestfallen. What follows is Cave tormenting him through the walls of their cell for hours and hours and hours...

Fuck, I adore this film so much. It is one of my favourite films of all time, although probably too dated for some.

holyzombiejesus

Can I just say The Year My Voice Broke or do I have to talk about it?

Johnny Townmouse

Quote from: holyzombiejesus on December 04, 2013, 03:33:47 PM
Can I just say The Year My Voice Broke or do I have to talk about it?

Hey, we all have busy lives so no worries.

I just downloaded a quite horribly low-res copy of that a few weeks ago. It has Noah Taylor in it, who I think has wonderful screen presence. Why do you like it?

Famous Mortimer

91. "Barry McKenzie Holds His Own" (1974)

This was one of the very few films my local VHS shop had , way back when, so we ended up renting it quite a lot and always having a grand old time. Barry McKenzie, his aunt Dame Edna Everage, a drunk Clive James, Donald Pleasance, Roy Kinner and John Le Mesurier...it's been 20 years since I've seen it, and it's almost certainly aged incredibly badly, but so what? This thread can't be all clever dramas, violent horrors and whatever else – there has to be room for stupid, filthy, toilet-humour comedies, and this is where they have room.

In fact, I might watch this again soon.

Dusty Substance

90. Dr. Plonk

Forget The Artist, a much better and funnier example of a modern day B&W silent movie with a scene-stealing dog is the Australian 2007 film Dr. Plonk.

From the writer/director of Bad Boy Bubby, the eponymous Plonk is a scientist from 1907 who concludes that the world will end in 2008 and time travels to 2007 collect evidence to back up his theory. Every time he travels forward he causes all sorts of problems and ends becoming, well, I wouldn't wish to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it.

It's a genuinely laugh out loud comedy film with wonderful performances, but the previously mentioned dog is something to behold - He's outstandingly funny.

Check it out if you can find it, it's quite the rarity, seemingly only released on Australian Region 4 DVD: 




Quote from: Famous Mortimer on December 04, 2013, 03:47:33 PM
91. "Barry McKenzie Holds His Own" (1974)

This was one of the very few films my local VHS shop had , way back when, so we ended up renting it quite a lot and always having a grand old time. Barry McKenzie, his aunt Dame Edna Everage, a drunk Clive James, Donald Pleasance, Roy Kinner and John Le Mesurier...it's been 20 years since I've seen it, and it's almost certainly aged incredibly badly, but so what? This thread can't be all clever dramas, violent horrors and whatever else – there has to be room for stupid, filthy, toilet-humour comedies, and this is where they have room.

In fact, I might watch this again soon.

I've not actually seen that one. The first one was really good, though I remember being a lot younger. Had some great British cameos. Peter Cook and that.

Speaking of Noah Taylor, He Died with a Falafel in his Hand.
It's an odd film. Dark comedy follow this guy and his different share houses. Think it kind of helps if you've lived in shit sharehouses but it's just about that kind of culture. It begins with one of most polarizing reconstructions of Reservoir Dogs and has an absolutely decided soundtrack..

Has a special place in my heart because it was one of the first DVDs my family ever bought. Think the first two were Bowfinger and Thirteenth Warrior.

billtheburger


NoSleep

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on December 04, 2013, 03:47:33 PM
91. "Barry McKenzie Holds His Own" (1974)

This was one of the very few films my local VHS shop had , way back when, so we ended up renting it quite a lot and always having a grand old time. Barry McKenzie, his aunt Dame Edna Everage, a drunk Clive James, Donald Pleasance, Roy Kinner and John Le Mesurier...it's been 20 years since I've seen it, and it's almost certainly aged incredibly badly, but so what? This thread can't be all clever dramas, violent horrors and whatever else – there has to be room for stupid, filthy, toilet-humour comedies, and this is where they have room.

In fact, I might watch this again soon.

It also features the then-Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, bizarrely. As did the original film "The Adventures Of Barry McKenzie". Based, as you probably know, on Barry Humphries' comic strip in Private Eye.

Johnny Townmouse

Great suggestions that have me downloading and sourcing DVDs - as a side-note, I have the Region 1 copy of Ghosts.... which has extras, interviews and all sorts of niceness, although it deserves a new, digitally restored release, especially given the success of Hillcoat and Cave.

88. Sweetie (1989)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098725/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1



This was another film that I recorded off TV when I was still at school, and which affected me deeply. This is Jane Campion's break-out film that secured her a place as a credible and forceful director - although it was An Angel at My Table which really brought her fame just a year after Sweetie. For me this film is a really wonderful example of what has become quite normalised in modern film, to an annoying and boring level these days. The quirky, low-budget indie that is both surreal and funny, whilst packing an emotional punch at the end. Miranda July owes a lot to this film I would say, as does most of the films coming out of Sundance during the late 90s - early 00s.

The basic story concerns two sisters, Kay who wants to find love, and who becomes infatuated with a man because of some prediction that comes true; and Sweetie (Dawn) her older sister who comes back to the house Kay lives in with her Father. The problem is that Sweetie is severely mentally disabled, a situation not helped by the fact that her Father dotes on her and only sees the good (hence, the irony of why this rather angry and erratic woman is called Sweetie). As the image above shows, the cinematography is unusual, with interesting choices that pre-date people like Lynne Ramsay. And I really do think that everything about this film is prescient and seminal - so much of what we are used to in Indie cinema is being done here at a time when film was not this mannered.

For those that have seen the film, you might remember a suggestion of
Spoiler alert
incest
[close]
which casts a long shadow over the film without ever tipping it into gratuitous back-story invented motivation. The final 10mins are gut-wrenching, in particular the moment when Sweetie sees herself as a young girl singing a song, before she became a sick, sad monster. I'm welling up just thinking about it.

zomgmouse

87. Romper Stomper



Whirlwind energy. Russell Crowe is pretty damn fantastic in this mid-90s Neo Nazi tale. Threw up a shitload of controversy for reasons that would never had come up if people saw the film properly..

I saw this and American History X in very close succession, and I have to say that while they're both different films, the raw guts of this film elevate it above the Kaye drama for me. It bloody well kicks your teeth in, and you'll thank it for that.

Johnny Townmouse

I just saw this news story posted up on the BBC news, which made me think of Romper Stomper:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25142557

Not so much the gay stuff, more the secret lives, as one of the plot points concerns the Jewish nazi.

Yeah, it really is a powerful film, very much in the Alan Clarke mould I thought, whilst being quintessentially Australian. It was neat device to have the rich girl become part of the crew. The ending is extremely full-on.


zomgmouse

Quote from: That article"He was the British extreme right's most feared streetfighter. But almost right up to his death 20 years ago, Nicky Crane led a precarious dual existence - until it fell dramatically apart."

I like how they imply that the violent bigoted thug is the normal existence.


Also, Romper Stomper was shot in Melbourne, which makes it closer to me (in at least two ways).