MentalPolyphonics
Smash monogamy.
I’ve been on a low-key Aussie movie kick the last couple of months, starting with a made-for-TV movie called Scorched.
I can’t really explain why I like that “film”. All the Mick Dundee and Steve Irwin and Nova Scotian cricketers that my mind’s lashed together and labeled “Australian” have made it completely impossible for me to take an action movie full of “g’day” seriously.
“G’day, I’m declaring an emergency situation. Would everyone please take out their color-coordinated emergency vests?”
Hilarious!
Then, for meme refresh, Crocodile Dundee! Stop cringing, Aussie readers. I’m sure you liked Due South.
Dundee is a really neat film until about halfway through. If you switch it off when she leaves the Outback you achieve an almost-pure victory — unless you haven’t seen enough boy-meets-loses-finds girl from the Hollywood hit machine.
The problem with Dundee is the characters. The protagonist isn’t actually Paul Hogan, it’s the woman. Dundee does his outback-ninja bit, wows us, and then, the real story done, we’re back to New York so she can blah blah blah and whatever — typical romance bolt-on side-plot. Except it’s the main plot. She’s the one that needs to change and ends up changing. Mick Dundee is constant, that’s his charm.
But King Kong needs to be paraded around civilized society. Since Mick doesn’t climb any office towers (just lamp posts) the fighter planes are called off and he ends up with Fay Wray. Which, as it turns out, is a far worse ending — imagine if the Big City had killed Dundee!
Okay, off to the other Australia…
The best parts of that film are, as always, Luhrman’s fantastic sense of color and visual design. His take on that post-Deco style in World War Two propaganda films is not to be missed. I just wish there was more of it.
The movie is a mess of genres. It’s a romantic action western with forays into magical realism and musical theater without songs: It abuses leitmotif, and singing is important thematically but not indulged.
The flick breaks down roughly like this: Luhrman’s style works for magic and musicals and doesn’t for action and westerns. The romance plot is a wash because it needs to exist in every. Fucking. Movie. Without. Exception. Mankind has a limitless appetite for both romance and pornography.
Luhrman’s stylization of the propaganda in the action bits though — that tips the scale towards “successful”.
Here’s Ten Canoes:
The performances in that movie blew my mind. The man-animal nature-story connections are made stark.
Narrator: Ridjimiraril’s wives were acting like wives, so Ridjimiraril acted like a husband.
Ridjimiraril: I’m going hunting. Don’t wait up for me, I’ll be back late.
I’ve been trawling the ‘Nets for info on The Dreaming, the Aboriginal Aussie cycle of myth. I like to think this movie is sorta about how The Dreaming works: A man telling a story about a man telling a story about a man telling a story about the stories a man tells himself, at each level the tellers manipulating their tales to manipulate the audience. And here I am telling you about it.
The Dreaming rules.
Okay, post over. Here’s a bonus video because I love English idiom…
PS — Three of these films, the three containing Aboriginal themes, share one aboriginal actor: David Gulpilil. According to that link one of the stories in Ten Canoes is over a thousand years old: so a good bit older than The Canterbury Tales.
There’s hard archeology that shows some stories to be over 10,000 years old, and wild speculation that bits of The Dreaming go back to the earliest occupation of Australia 40,000 years ago. Heady stuff: an ancient oral tradition that remembers extinct animals, dead volcanoes underneath modern forests, alternate ancient riverbeds, and the arrival of the British.
I thought this set a good overview. Also: there is very little...
Don
Just two quick points:
Review: Watchmen | MentalPolyphonics
on March 8, 2009 at 4:22 pm
[...] opening credits are great (shades of the Baz Luhrman bellum-color propaganda effect I liked in Australia). And for those in the know: Hollywood didn’t spoil the ending. [...]