Reviews

This is one of those movies that may get into your head. If it does, it will be there for a very long time.

Most of the story is not in the movie: you need to fill it in from your imagination.

An example: Mangannini is the fire-carrier for her people. When Joanna drops the fire-stick into the water, the look of utter devastation on Mangannini's face will stay with you. Because while Mangannini is the fire carrier for her people, she has no way to make a fire. Tasmania in winter is a cold place...

Mangannini's people no longer exist. Neither do any of Mangannini's descendants.

We did that.

This is a very odd movie: we as the audience have to do all the work!

Is there a plot? No. You have to imagine it. Is there a script? No: you have to imagine that, too.

I spent the entire movie waiting for something to happen. Nothing ever did!

OK, it was a very pleasant wait: the scenery is very attractive, and most of it is scantily-clad. So if you like looking at women in a state of undress (I do!) then you will at least have something to do while you imagine a story to go with the visuals.

There is one stand-out: the sound. Many of the scenes are shot with ambient sound, and it is beautifully captured. As a former sound man myself, I know how hard this would have been to do.

Everything else: that's up to your imagination!

Few people in the rest of the world will understand why Australians are intensely annoyed by this film. I'll get to that in a moment.

To begin with, this review is written by someone who has been there. I have lived in the area where this film was made. I grew up on a "farm" (an Australian 'farm' such as the one in the film is bigger than some countries, and bigger than some US States).

"When do we get to 'Faraway Downs'"? "We've been on it for two days: we'll see the homestead tomorrow." If you suspend all disbelief, and discard any knowledge you may have about Australia, you will enjoy this film. I did. I saw it twice, and enjoyed it both times. It's a "Western", with above-average scenery! People living in New York, London -- or even Sydney -- cannot understand what it feels like to be able to see for 100 miles in any direction and know you are the only human being there. Try it, just once, before you die. You may not like it: not everyone does. But if you do like it, it will stay with you forever.

So why does this film annoy us? To understand that, you need to understand that this film is about our religion. It's about our land. Our stories. Our history. Our language. It's about what makes Australia our home, and what makes us Australians. And it gets it wrong. It gets it wrong in the way that urinating on the altar of a church would do.

The central character, Nulla, is speaking in a "Hollywood American Indian" dialect. Aborigines simply don't talk like that: most Aboriginal words end with the mouth open, not closed: so the "belong-um" type of endings is not only wrong, it is cringe-worthy.

Several times the film shows a drover herding horses at a gallop. It would never happen. A professional drover would never let his flock gallop: you can't control them when they do that because the animals are in a panic. And in Australia, they won't live if they burn that much energy: the distances between water are too great. And a drover gets paid only for the number he delivers alive.

The scenes of the Japanese attack on Darwin could have been handled a lot more sensitively. Again, it appears that the Director did not understand the spiritual significance of what he was filming. The attack on Darwin is the only time war has ever come to our homeland; and in it we lost a greater proportion of our population than the USA did at Pearl Harbour.

Enjoy the film. It gets some things very right. The land does look exactly like that. If you go to the Northern Territory, you will meed men exactly like The Drover. If you're lucky. You may even meet Aborigines exactly like the others in the film. If you're lucky. You won't meet an elder like the one in the film (or if you do, you won't know it...) but then you probably won't get a personal audience with the Pope or the Dalai Llama, either.

We hope you will come. We love guests in Australia. But please: understand that our land and our story is the core of our belief!

It's the writing that makes this movie.

The Executive Producer wrote it, and directed it; so I can understand how that happened. The person with the ultimate authority to wreck this script was the man who wrote it: so it didn't get mangled.

Typically, a Hollywood movie has only one idea in it. This one has seven (well, I counted seven, maybe I missed some). It almost seems as if the central premise is "Everything is the opposite of what it seems". Almost.

One needs to pay attention to get the juice out of this movie. I kept finding I needed to go back and replay scenes because my mind wandered (it does that a lot, but in most movies, that doesn't matter because I know the ending shortly after the opening titles fade).

This movie has seven endings, and none of them occur at the end of the film.

Don't sit there reading this, go see for yourself what I am talking about. I don't think you will be sorry. Unless you have a learning disability (it's a line from the film: watch for it...) Enjoy!

I'm a sucker for romance. No, I didn't give Legally Blonde a ten, but I'm pretty tragic: I watched Notting Hill three times.

That's what I thought I was getting this time. I was wrong.

I recorded this, and it was a few months until I got around to watching it.

It helps if you don't know that it's a remake: but by now, you do. Or of what... If you've seen the other movie, you can watch this one too: trust me, you have NOT seen it before! When I watched it, I didn't know it was a re-make; I didn't even know it was Australian. I take the point of the poster who said this is two stories compressed into the one movie: it is. He believes that's over-doing it. I respectfully disagree: in Australia, we often find the "one idea" Hollywood treatment of a story quite unsatisfying.

This movie had me in from the opening scenes. It's one of the few movies I wouldn't pause to take a phone call. That's my highest accolade, and this one earns it.

Notice the high ratings the Australian posters are giving it? That's not entirely because we like our own films. It's also because this has an authenticity that is utterly compelling, if you happen to speak Australian. If you do speak Australian, you will realise that the power of this story is in what is NOT said. Which tends to be the way rural Australians communicate! Outback Australia really is like this: particularly the north of the country.

I SO enjoyed this movie.

I watched this movie without realizing until close to the end that Howard Stern was playing himself.

I was a radio announcer myself, during the period when Stern got going. This movie has the 'feel' of reality to it. I recognized so many of the people I worked with in this movie. Every radio station has some of them. The studios of the period were just like this.

Of course, this movie was severely compressed in time and space. Radio is like warfare: lengthy periods of utter boredom punctuated by periods of pure panic. We don't need to see the slow bits. Each hour of on-air radio presentation requires something like three hours of preparation: we don't see the hard work that goes into such a show.

We do see a very funny and entertaining movie. Don't forget, I was in the industry at the time this all happened: and this one feels 'real' to me.

Many autobiographical pieces by "stars" turn into awful sycophantic schmaltz-fests. This one didn't. It could have been awful. Most of this kind are. This one... is excellent.

And if you've never worked in broadcasting -- it's still very funny!