Ticket To Paradise (2022) - Movie Review

Well, after spending the last several reviews neck-deep in the weirder sides of genre cinema, I figure it’s about time to wind things down a bit. Time to get into something a little simpler, a little more straight-forward and, truth be told, a little less intensive when it comes to writing about it. I mean, while I have all the respect for filmmakers that care enough about their audiences to try and challenge them, there is still a place in the world for breezy and cheery rom-coms like this.

Ol Parker, after managing a quite surprising hit with the Mamma Mia sequel, wanted to keep going with bringing back the more fluffy rom-coms of the 2000s which… yeah, I’ve ragged on the formulas that came from those quite a bit on here, but considering how miserable the world has been the last several years, wanting to go back to more pleasant times isn’t that bad an idea. I mean, even with the lamer comedies out there, there’s something to be said about that communal sense of fun that comes out of having a nice giggle together in a crowded cinema. It helps to have a film worth giggling over, of course, which is why I’m very thankful that Ol Parker has delivered another modest winner.

Here Out West (2022) - Movie Review

Even from an early age, prejudice along the lines of race or ethnic background never made much sense to me. Not because I’m any sort of profoundly enlightened individual or any such ponce like that; it’s more the result of what I understand to be the cultural makeup of where I was born and where I have spent the entirety of my life so far: Australia. It is, and I say with all the love I can muster for a geographical location, a mongrel nation. A former prison colony that has since become a hub for all manner of multicultural communities and existences, from the indigenous population that the ‘settlers’ fucked over, to our umbilical cord connection to Europe as a British colony, to our proximity to the rest of Asia. Our national identity (well, the parts of it that aren’t a result of our criminal ancestry) doesn’t make sense if not through the context of being the product of basically everywhere else on the planet, just filtered through the kind of laidback attitude that can take a word that is among the most visceral in the English language (cunt) and find a use for it in pretty much every single conversation.

And for as much as I understand how fraught that history of multiculturalism is, as we don’t have the best history when it comes to white Australians interacting with other cultures, that kind of ethnic melting pot is one of the reasons why, for all its faults, I still fucking love this country. And it’s one of the reasons why this particular film, an anthology co-produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, hits me right where I live. Almost literally, since the title and its setting are in Western Sydney, not that far from where I reside and work.