Ooh.
Read moreTomorrow, When the War Began
Tomorrow, When the War Began, is an Aussie action flick, as eight high school kids single-handedly face down a foreign invasion. Think “Red Dawn Lite.” It’s beautiful to look at, and the VFX are great, but it always felt like I was watching the feature length pilot for a tv series. A tv series, I’d…
Read moreVan Diemen’s Land
Here’s something I believe fiercely: there is no monopoly on suffering. Show me how your forefathers struggled under the yoke of cruel brutality, and I’ll show you how mine struggled more. But perhaps more importantly, whilst the stuff my ancestors did to yours appalls me, the stuff my ancestors did to each other leaves me…
Read moreRogue
It doesn’t happen quite so much these days, but there was a time when you mentioned living in Africa and people thought there were giraffes in the street. I did live in Zimbabwe for a while and I remember startling a zebra once, when out on a morning run (the run being more unusual than…
Read moreKnowing
I’ve mentioned before how I think Nicholas Cage is the great spawn of Satan, his hairplugs the horsemen of the Apocalypse. He’s as clunky and long-faced as a camel, and no director should ever, ever ask him to run and expect the audience to still take him seriously thereafter. But dammit, he still gets roles…
Read moreAustralia
And so to the other big location pic of 2008/9: Australia. I finally caught it on the very small screen – on the way back from Locations Trade Show 09. And what can I tell you about it? Well, I can see why so many people hated it, why the critics whipped themselves into a…
Read moreThe Ruins
The Ruins starts with the typical premise of standard slasher-horror-fayre; a group of nice, naive, corn-fed American tourists wander off the beaten track and into the arms of particularly gruesome and bloody danger. The difference though is that the predatory threat here is not a mad-eyed axemurderer, but a land-locked island of mobile, talkative, carnivorous plants. It…
Read moreThe Hobbit Effect in Australia
Due for release in November of this Year, Baz Luhrmann’s latest opus Australia is set in north of that country just before World War II. It revolves around an English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) who inherits a cattle station the size of a small European nation. When rival cattle barons plot to annex her land, she…
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