You Can Go Now! (2023) - Movie Review

Much like with when I looked at The Witch Of Kings Cross back in 2021, this is a documentary about an Aussie artist that I didn’t know anything about beforehand. I consider myself an ally of the First Peoples of this country, and have (and will continue to) voice such opinions in my work, but I freely admit that there are sizeable gaps in my knowledge of the history. Specifically, when it comes to Black art. So, when it came time for me to draft up a list of films I wanted to make sure I got to before the end of the year, I knew that I had to include this look at one of Australia’s most prominent Black artists: Richard Bell. And while it gave me a better impression of who Richie is and his place within Australian art history, it also felt spread a bit thin.

The Drover's Wife: The Legend Of Molly Johnson (2022) - Movie Review

Something keeps telling me I shouldn’t be as down on Westerns as I have been in the past. The reason for its cultural and artistic appeal, even to this day, is out of a sense of moral ambiguity. Of a land untamed by man, unchained by law, where the only way to make things right is to right them for one’s self. Sure, its presence in American and even Australian folklore can feed into certain power fantasies that shouldn’t apply in societies that keep insisting that they are bound by rules of law… but as someone who tends to feel less safe, rather than more, whenever law enforcement officers are nearby, even I can understand the draw of that kind of story.

Of course, that runs into the problem of who has been holding the pen when writing those stories. It’s a period in time when men were damn-near encouraged to take the law into their own hands… but only the men, and even then, only some of them get the benefit of doubt in altercations with firearms. As I got into when I reviewed Sweet Country, there’s a thick vein of hypocrisy in our own country’s glorification of the image of the outlaw, as they were (and in many ways still are) willing to denigrate for embodying a different variety of that same image. This is the reason why Revisionist Westerns exist in the first place, and it’s why this particular one managed to grab my attention and keep it.

Top End Wedding (2019) - Movie Review

I’ve ragged on romantic comedies a fair bit in past reviews. Part of that is simply the nature of the beast, since rom-coms tend to make for rather clichéd viewing even at the best of times, but I feel like I haven’t the sub-genre nearly enough credit. I mean, with both critics and general audiences, rom-coms tend to be the most accessible features to get into, and that accessibility can lead to some opportune moments for demographics to get screen time. I looked at this last year with Crazy Rich Asians, a film that was ostensibly just a standard narrative boosted tremendously by its cultural aesthetic. Today’s film very well could have the chance to do the same thing for Tiwi indigenous Australians, but… I can’t lie, I’m not nearly as hyped about this one.