Croc A Dyke Dundee -The Legend of Dawn O'Donnell.

Cast your mind back to the 1994’s comedy drama The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. You will remember the opening scene of the movie that takes place in The Imperial Hotel, which is located in Newton a suburb of Sydney's inner west district. The reason director Stephan Elliott chose this location was because the hotel was owned by Dawn O'Donnell a prominent Sydney entrepreneur but far more importantly she was a pioneer of Sydney's LGBT community back in the days when it was illegal in Australia to have same sex feelings or even for an man to wear woman's clothes. O'Donnell has been credited with changing all that nonsense.

 

Dawn O'Donnell and her partner.

Dawn the celebrity. 

Born in in a suburb of Sydney in 1928 she was a convent girl who become a professional ice skater and travelled the world. It was while appearing in an ice show in Paris she had her first intimate romance with another woman. She returned to Australia in the 1950's as a penniless lesbian. But by the time of her death in 2007 she had built a gay empire of bars, clubs, steam rooms, sex shops and drag shows. Croc A Dyke Dundee -The Legend of Dawn O'Donnell (2015) is a fascinating documentary about a larger than life woman who was suspected at various times of being a partner of Abe Saffron a major figure in Australia's organised crime, an arsonist, burning down her properties to raise the insurance money, she was also said to have been implicated in a number of murder’s!  But there's no doubt that she was a shrewd businesswoman and a champion of gay rights in a country that did not respect woman or gays.

Dawn with some of the LGBT community.

Fiona Cunningham-Reid's entertaining documentary is well worth an hour of your time and can be purchased as a double DVD coupled with another of Cunningham-Reid's documentaries Wine Woman and Friends (2012) about two women who set out to produce excellent wine's in an industry that is normally the preserve of France males, building a business and a community within a community. 

Dawn O'Donnell with Elton John.

The Turning.

Fascinating is how I would describe the ten wee vignettes that made up the Australian film The Turning (2013). All ten stories shown in this 110-minute version are based on a collection of short stories by Tim Winton - the full version has 18 stories and extends the movies running time to 180 minutes. Winton is an Australian novelist and short story writer who allegedly draws his inspiration from landscape and places "The place comes first. If the place isn't interesting to me then I can't feel it. I can't feel any people in it. I can't feel what the people are on about or likely to get up to."[1]

First published in 2005, the collection was originally adapted into a play for the 2008 Perth International Arts Festival before becoming an award winning movie that was nominated for nine AACTA awards, one of which Best Actress was awarded to Rose Byrne. Each part of the anthology was directed by a different director including actress Mia Wasikowska on her debut directing gig, and as well as Byrne, the best known of the actors on display would probable be Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving and fellow Australian actress Miranda Otto who you may have seen in I Frankenstein (2014) and the western The Homesman (2014).

The best of the stories are The Turning about a woman (Byrne) who along with her abusive husband and her two wee daughters live in a trailer park. When she befriends Sherry (Otto) she discovers God. In Reunion its Christmas Day and Vic and Gale (Blanchett) invite Vic’s mum Carol to join them. All three are invited to their relatives for lunch but Carol gets the address wrong and they end up in the wrong house and the wrong swimming pool.  I was also impressed with Aquifer a moving story directed by Robert Connolly about a High School music teacher who hears of a tragedy on the TV news broadcast and without a word to his family drives all night back to his hometown to face a secret from his childhood. Each of the individual film’s are linked by a common emotional bond, bound together by recurring themes; the passing of time, regret, addiction and obsession. Well put together and photographed with each of the directors putting their own stamp on they’re own individual piece of work.

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[1] The Sydney Morning Herald April 2008.

The Babadook.

In my recent blog on DigiCult Selected Scottish Shorts 2009-2013 I discussed the reason why short films are made, one of the reasons I suggested was to impress someone enough to provide finance and backing to make a full length feature that had been spring boarded from your basic ideas. Director and writer Jennifer Kent did just that. In 2005 she made a ten minute black and white short called Monster about a doll that appears to come to life and reside in the closet of a young boy (Luke Ikimis-Healey) and his mother  (Susan Prior), we do not obviously have a back-story or time to flesh out the characters. But some nine years later Kent did just that when she produced from that short film, a 94 minute psychological horror film, similarly about a woman and her son who are tormented by an 'imaginary' monster. Kent’s debut feature film is an extremely raw and emotional roller coaster ride about a mother and son relationship, which is retained as the core of her well-written story. 

Samuel dreams and obsesses about monsters something that his mother Amelia is told ‘is quite normal for a six-year-old boy’. It’s pretty obvious that Samuel behavioural problems steam from a lot more than a vivid imagination. In fact we learn that his father Oscar was killed in a car crash, which happened while Oscar was taking his pregnant wife to hospital to give birth to Samuel. The lonely Amelia and her son do not seem to have developed a normal relationship with any one else other than an elderly neighbour. Mother’s only relief from working full time in a care home and looking after her son is to pleasure herself in bed at night. Samuels’s metal state gets worse when he finds a book called Mister Babadook that he insists his mother must read to him at bedtime. It’s not very long before they both realise that you can't get rid of Babadook! 

This is a very good horror film, which has a depth and does not rely on the normal cliché’s found in this type of genre that are generally made outside of Europe. We sense that far more is going on in the psyche of our two protagonists but especially with the mother. She has never got over the death of her late husband and its obvious that she has never grieved properly and that she must come to terms with her lose and grief before she can move on. She lives in a vacuum of her own making and this has affected her young son who has been excluded from school, with other children outside of school not allowed to play with him  'this strange child' has descended into his own imagination triggered by his mothers psychosis.  

Exceptionally well put together and filmed, this virtual two hander is totally convincing. With the big-eyed six-year-old Noah Wiseman playing Samuel, from a very ambitious script incidentally, and the Australian award-winning actress Essie Davis playing mother the casting is first rate. Davis especially, watching her deterioration was not a pretty sight and how she begins to treat her son and the household pet will not please all viewers. But if I have learnt one thing from watching this movie it's that people who have mental problem should not watch horror films late at night - even if you do suffer from insomnia!  Filmed in South Australia this Kickstart funded project is well worth seeing, I believe its out now on DVD.

The Rover.

The film opens by informing us that it has been ten years since the collapse, we surmise that it was an economic collapse! Its scarily how it reflects a very believable future and one can imagine that the world could easily be heading into a dystopian community - so expertly demonstrated in this Australian movie.  If most of the austerity-obsessed governments of today do not change course from their illegal wars and there willingness to line the pockets of the rich then god help us all - we could all be hanging from telegraph poles!

 

Hope thats not my car?

You will recognise writer, director and producer David Michod from his previous award-winning debut feature film Animal Kingdom (2010) a brilliant study of Melbourne’s criminal underbelly that was inspired by a real life family. Similar to this previous movie, The Rover (2014) has some well-defined characters that all live on the edge of society and are portrayed with great panache, right down to even the smallest parts.   

 

Eric wants his motor back - at all costs!

Rey owes his brother - big time.

The main character is Eric, a man more than capable of killing in cold blood with little remorse; he is a man with anger problems who seems to find the situation of surviving in an apocalyptic landscape, where life appears to be worthless, quite normal. Even a goods train has armed mercenaries to guard it! During the course of the film we find out that Eric is an ex soldier and farmer whose wife is dead and his only possession is his car. A trio of criminals steals the vehicle and Eric sets out to get it back at all costs. During a road trip through thinly populated dirt towns and across the desolate barren landscape’s to catch the perpetrators he meets up with Rey, whose brother is one of the crooks and who left him for dead following a botched robbery. It’s the dynamics between Eric and the dim witted Rey that forms the basic narrative of this movie. 

 

Thats what all the fuss is about, the saloon car on the right. 

A very hard-faced film that’s full of subtext, tone and tension, made even more atmospheric by the female DOP Natasha Braier who manages to make the landscape a character in its own right, along with a great soundtrack from Antony Partos, but at certain points it can be a very emotional movie in a quite unique way. The films success owes a lot to it’s casting and as I’ve said its full of strange characters but the two main leads are superb. Guy Pearce, who Michod admits he wrote the part for, plays Eric, a difficult part for any actor that’s made to look easy by the versatile Pearce. The biggest surprise is Robert Pattinson, best known for his role in the Twilight Trilogy, who is extraordinary good as Rey and bears no resemblance to his normal heartthrob persona instead giving what I would think is his best role to date. Add this movie to your ‘must see list’ and I can guarantee you will not regret it.