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Tag Archives: Australia

Bait 3D

25 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2012, Film

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Australia, Bait, Charmed, Julian McMahon, Lincoln Lewis, Queensland, Shark, supermarket

A devastating tsunami – filled with sharks – hits coastal Queensland just as an escalating armed-robbery is taking place at a beachfront supermarket. The water hits, drowning, maiming and trapping the surviving shoppers and staff in two separate fish tanks. A downtrodden shelf-stacker, his ex-fiancé, her new flame, a cop, his daughter, her boyfriend, his boss, a masked assailant, Julian McMahon, two yuppies and a Pomeranian would seem a great collective for a murder mystery – but, no, Hercule – the shark did it, in aisle 3… with its teeth.

Australia has championed the crocodile film on both an indie (Rogue) and commercial (Crocodile Dundee) level but it is surprising that we haven’t attempted a shark horror that takes itself seriously. Swimmers and surfers all over the world are still recovering from Jaws 40 years on and the thrill of good horror is always a great incentive to spend the night at the movies. Bait 3D, however, is a “popcorn movie” and so we are to accept that its likeness to the abominable Snakes On A Plane or Piranha 3D is intentional.

Saving Dan Wyllie’s deranged criminal – whose speech has a laconic dereliction that is so unashamedly Australian, everything he says is hilarious – the cast are a bit too ordinary, grappling with strange attempts at American accents. Unlike this week’s other Australian release, Lore, in which nationality is a powerful component of each character’s being, Bait’s Oz-American confusion seems less a parody of B-grade American films and more a reluctance to parody itself. Perhaps the cast of Housos should have been the armed robbers? Or perhaps it was the shark’s fault? Considering it is the embodiment of the danger and suspense in the film, it could not be a less interesting rendering of a truly frightful fish, bumping around and rarely eating anyone – the shark has no arc.

Plunging the entire supermarket under water decrees it a useless a setting for this proudly B-grade film. Similarly, the 3D aspect is not employed with any flair, and is another superfluous distraction from the absent story and the vacuous personalities of its TV stars. The end product seems full of producer’s apprehensions about rating (6 years and up), formatting (3D films cost more to attend), casting (may attract fans of Charmed) and confrontation with its only plausible element: a tsunami. The only thing it seems to get right is the title.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

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Lore

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2012, Film

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Adam Arkapaw, Australia, Cate Shortland, Germany, Holocaust, Lore, Max Richter, Nazi, Saskia Rosendahl

Director Cate Shortland won much appreciation for her superb first feature Somersault. Finally, her long-awaited follow-up, Lore, is a German-language Australian co-production, adapted by Shortland and Robin Mukhurjee from Rachel Seiffert’s British novel The Dark Room.

It is May 1945. Peter, an SS officer, is taken into allied custody followed by his wife, Asta, leaving Lore, their eldest daughter, to take her younger brothers and sister to their grandmother in Hamburg. There are no trains running, so they set out on foot across a divided and desolate post-war Germany. The children are soon joined by Thomas, a Jewish survivor, and in him they find a protector and provider whom Lore is both repelled and attracted by.

Lore and her siblings, at first full of music and playfulness, become subdued by temporal dislocation, faced with the aftermath of war, dead bodies, homes in disrepair, citizens in humiliating refuge. Shortland has channeled Elem Klimov’s 1985 war masterpiece Come And See, as the violence and disruption of innocence unfolds as new danger meets them in the mystic spring-fresh green forestry, wet with new beginning. 

The title suggests the picture’s folkloric quality, its distance from its own harsh reality and the intense bond between myth and morality. Name and identity are the most significant and therefore vulnerable agitators of the beliefs instilled in Lore and Thomas’ and how it effects what becomes a burgeoning, inharmonious affair, is an ambiguous and challenging experience.

Kai Peter Malina, as Thomas, is difficult to connect with – all horror is written on his face, his dark eyes a reflection in which Lore is faced with the human manifest of all her hate, guilt and confusion. Saskia Rosendahl exquisitely captures Lore’s bewilderment with budding sexuality, the truth of her parent’s crimes, the burden of adoptive parenthood and her lonely repression of all these concerns in the interests of survival. Her incredible beauty is used to signify her enduring spirit but behind her poster-child visage, is felt the falseness and cruelty of such superficial worship.

Max Richter’s remarkable, German-inspired original score, which is both harrowing and virtuous, is ornately complimented by Adam Arkapaw’s mix of dream-like framing and documentary-style coverage of ruin. Both music and film played a large part in holocaust history, from a propaganda perspective, to documentation, to all film’s made about it since – it has a history of its own and Lore manages to evoke all of it, which is a testament to Shortland’s knowledge of her subject matter.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

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