Change Your Image
puckstopper
Reviews
We Can Be Heroes (2005)
I wrote youse a poem
W wicked comedy!
E excellent!
C cracked me up!
A masterpiece!
N not like all the other crap on telly!
B bloody good!
E even better than Kath & Kim!
H hilarious!
E excruciating!
R really, really funny!
O oughta win lots of awards!
E ended too soon!
S sublime!
Run, don't walk to the video store and get your hands on this remarkable comedy! Chris Lilley's "mockumentary" about five people who have been nominated for the award of Australian of the Year, is one of the best comedy shows ever written... and not just in Australia either. Lilley creates characters and situations that are extreme and then underplays them wonderfully. The five nominees are fictional and larger than life... but only just. We all know people like them and some of their actions hit very close to home. We Can Be Heroes is side-splittingly funny but has some wonderful moments of pathos....... such as Pat's fight with cancer, Nathan's poem to his brother and Ricky's relationship with his dad. Don't miss this one!
The Island (2005)
Let's Rehash Some Old Movies!
If you mixed Logan's Run, Freejack and Bad Boys II together... you would probably end up with a movie like The Island. My experience of watching what was actually a pretty decent film was spoiled slightly by the nagging feeling that I had seen all of it before.
Even the end sequence helicopter shots of the people in white on the hillside seemed to be stolen from the "I Still Call Australia Home" Qantas commercials.
But if you can get over the rehash of old movies (or if you haven't seen any of them), The Island is a well made, thought provoking film due to a good script and cast and a surprisingly restrained Michael Bay.
The L Word (2004)
L's Belles!
I love this show! It has fantastic scripts, innovative directing and its themes are universal. It's not about lesbians. It's about the lives of a group of women in LA who happen to be lesbian/bi-sexual/not-sure. Yes, it is true that none of these women look like any lesbians I know... but this is television people! If I wanted to see real lesbians I would go down the street to the local gay bar. When I watch telly I want to see hot women. And these women are!
Here's an interesting bit of trivia for you: The L Word caused a real ruckus when it was shown in Australia. It premiered without any real fanfare and no-one paid much attention to it at first... until a Christian organisation in Melbourne called Saltshakers realised what the show was about. They sent a letter to all the companies who were advertising during the show asking them if they realised what the content of the show was, and that it promoted lesbian motherhood, threesomes and one night stands. The letter said (quote)"I would hope that you value your 'normal' customer base enough not to continue to be associated with such a program" (end quote).
Several of the companies who received this letter (DaimlerChrysler, Just Jeans, Allianz Australia and Roche and Centrum to name a few) immediately withdrew their adds from The L Word, saying that it had been an error made by their advertising agencies and that they had not realised what the show was about.
Naturally, Melbourne's gay rights organisations were furious and the mainstream media picked up the story. It made the front page of the national newspapers the next day under the headline "L's belles prove to be too hot for sponsors."
Paradise Road (1997)
Lest We Forget
Paradise Road is based on the true story of women POWs in Sumatra during WWII. The film, for the most part, follows what really happened... with one glaring exception!
The incident that is prominently missing from Paradise Road is the Bangka Island massacre, which was one of the worst atrocities committed against women POWs during WWII and is an integral part of this story.
After their ship, The SS Vyner Brooke, was sunk, the survivors made for the nearest land which was Bangka Island. They came to shore in different places but a group of more than a hundred people ended up on Radji beach. The group consisted of 22 Australian Army nurses, some civilian men, women and children, and 30 British soldiers from another ship which had been sunk. The island was fully occupied by the Japanese and the group unanimously decided to give themselves up. The group leader set off to find someone to surrender to. The civilian women and children began walking towards the main town on the island. The 22 nurses remained behind with the men and the soldiers (many of whom were badly wounded), an elderly British woman also remained with her wounded husband.
When the group leader returned with a group of 20 Japanese, they ignored all requests for surrender. The Japanese shot and bayoneted the men, then ordered the 23 women to walk into the ocean. When they reached waist depth, the Japanese open fired with a machine gun and mowed the women down.
There was one survivor. One of the nurses, Vivian Bullwinkel, was shot through the side and survived by pretending to be dead. She hid in the jungle for 12 days, caring for a British soldier who had been bayoneted and left for dead (he later died). Eventually, she gave herself up and was re-united with the rest of the women in the prison camp in Muntok. When she told them what had happened on the beach and they quickly realised that they would all be killed if the Japanese learned there was a witness to the massacre. So they made a pact not to speak of it again until they were free.
Paradise Road is a fictional film based loosely on fact, not a documentary. Sometimes it is necessary to make changes to the real sequence of events in order for the film's structure and pacing to work. I do accept this and I would prefer to see a good film rather than a accurate one.
But in leaving out the massacre on the beach, the film does a disservice to these women. These women were aware, from the start of their internment, that the Japanese were capable of atrocities on a massive scale and that there was no safety in numbers. They lived in a constant state of fear that the Japanese would repeat such an act or learn that Vivian Bullwinkel had survived the massacre and kill them all.
Paradise Road tries to portray Japanese atrocities with a fictitious incident where a woman is set on fire (which did not really happen) but this does not compare to the scale of the 80 people massacred on Radji beach and the effect it had on the women in the camp. There were 32 Australian Army nurses in the camp and the women who died on the beach were their friends and colleagues. They were from the same unit and had nursed together for the first two years of the war. All their interactions with the Japanese guards were coloured by the knowledge that they had murdered 22 of their friends in cold blood.
Paradise Road is a very good movie and I suspect it will become the definitive film about female POWs during WWII. Which sadly means that the 22 women who were murdered on Radji beach will be lost from memory... and they deserve better than that.
If you want to learn more about the women POWs of Sumatra, I suggest you read "White Coolies: Australian Nurses Behind Enemy Lines," the diary kept by camp survivor Betty Jeffrey, or read the biography "Bullwinkel" by Norman G. Manners. There is also an excellent 1985 documentary called "Song of Survival", and a really tacky episode of "Willesee's Australians" that dramatises the story of Vivian Bullwinkel.