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Posts tagged ‘Australia’

Sep 16

Sleeping Beauty (2011)

Directed by: Julia Leigh

4 star

Student Lucy (Emily Browning) supports herself with a series of regular and ad-hoc jobs.  Some (endless photocopying, cleaning tables in a café) use her manual labour – others (serving as a medical experimentee, opportunistic prostitution) use her body and/or looks.  Her relationships with other people, flatmates, former lovers, and most notably with a reclusive alcoholic whom she both supports and aids on his path to self-destructive, are highly enigmatic.

One day she answers a newspaper advertisement, and soon she is being interviewed and prepared for what is described as a silver-service job – a description that manages to be both accurate and disingenuous at the same time.  Renamed as Sarah, she is required to serve and to sleep (drugged) while wealthy men lie with her. Read more

Sep 15

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Snowtown (2011)

Directed by: Justin Kurzel

4 star

1998, Snowtown, South Australia.  Divorced working-class mum Elizabeth Harvey (Louise Harris) asks her neighbour (and potential befriend) to look after her boys one evening, and he rewards her trust by sexually abusing them.  His continued presence across the road serves as a threatening taunt to her clan, so when John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) arrives on this scene, riding a motorbike, he looks to the family like a knight in shining armour.  Soon he’s harassing the paedophile from the neighbourhood and organising kitchen meetings of wannabe vigilantes to plan campaigns against local abusers, real and supposed. Read more

Aug 15

Animal Kingdom (2010)

Directed by: David Michôd

3 stars

In 1980s Melbourne, seventeen year-old J moves in with his grandmother and her brood of bank-robbing and homicidal sons, when his mother overdoses on heroin (J continues to watch a TV game show as the medics try to revive her). Read more