From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!CAD:tektronix!tekid!jm
Newsgroups: net.movies
Title: Australian Director Peter Wier...
Article-I.D.: tekid.987
Posted: Mon Mar  7 09:43:13 1983
Received: Wed Mar  9 03:00:37 1983


	I had the pleasure of seeing 3 movies by Peter Wier this
	week: The Year of Living Dangerously, Gallipoli and
	Picnic at Hanging Rock.  All three were FANTASTIC films,
	and get my absolutely unqualified recomendation (gush, gush).

	The most recent of the three is The Year... .  It is set in
	Indonesia in the early sixties and is the story of an
	Australian Journalist and a British Diplomat (played
	by Sigourney Weaver).  It is being billed as a romance
	and it is, sort of.  It is much more, however.  It is not
	particularly violent or bloody, but the action takes place
	during a period of extreme political/social upheaval and
	it is not a pretty sight.

	The Australians seem to celebrate their defeats and
	tragedies (usually as cannon fodder for the British Empire)
	and this tells one such story.  During WWI, the British
	used the Australian Light Horse Cavalry as a diversion
	so they could make an amphibious landing at Gallipoli
	(in Turkey).  The Light Horse was ordered to charge with
	bayonets into the face of machine guns.  The result was
	disasterous.  A very powerful film.  (For another film
	about Britain vs Australia, see Breaker Morant 
	directed by Bruce Beresford.)

	In 1900 a group of girls from a girls college in Australia
	went on a picnic to Hanging Rock Park.  2 girls and
	one of the chaperons disappeared without a trace.
	They have never been found.  No answers are given,
	but this film will send shivers down your spine like no
	other.  You get the feeling that these people are
	teetering on the raw edge of insanity to begin with.


	All these films are wonderful in their texture:
	You can feel the heat of Jakarta, the grit in the
	trenches and the thinly concealed tension in the
	lives of the girls...  This guy's good.

They don't make movies like that over here...


	Jeff Mizener
	Tektronix, ADG
	Beaverton, OR

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