» THE Black Balloon, debut feature film of Australian director Elissa Down, has won six of the prestigious Australian Film Institute Awards, including those for best film and best direction.
The best actor and best actress awards in film went to William McInnes and Monic Hendrickx for their roles in Unfinished Sky.
Unfinished Sky: William McInnes and Monic Hendrickx
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The awards were held in Melbourne at the Princess Theatre on the night of December 6.
The Black Balloon is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story of a family dealing with an autistic child.
Earlier in the year, The Black Balloon had received the Crystal Bear Generation 14plus best feature film award at the Berlin International Film Festival, among other Australian and international honors.
The Black Balloon: Toni Collette
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Elissa Down both wrote (with Jimmy Jack) and directed the movie which starred young adolescents.
The film also won for Toni Collette the best supporting actress award for her role as the mother Maggie and Luke Ford best supporting actor for his role as the autistic teenager Charlie.
The International Award for Best Actor went posthumously to Heath Ledger for his role as The Joker in The Dark Knight.
Men's Group
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» THREE of this year's top Inside Film (IF) Awards have gone to a little-known film, Men's Group, at ceremonies held in mid-November on the Gold Coast.
Men's Group, directed by Michael Joy, was named best feature film.
It also won for Michael Joy and John L Simpson the best script award and for Grant Dodwell the accolade of best actor.
Winning four IF Awards was the Peter Duncan film Unfinished Sky which took out the best director (Duncan) and best actress (Monic Hendrickx) awards.
Nominated for 10 awards, The Black Balloon managed only one win, for box office achievement.
Winner of the Living Legend Award was Hugo Weaving.
Other award winners include The Burning Season, best documentary; Son of a Lion, best music and Independent Spirit Award; September, best cinematography; The Square, best sound; and Just a Boy, best music video.
» AUSTRALIA the movie is now screening nationally and in the US, giving cinemagoers a first taste of the Baz Luhrmann epic wholly filmed in Australia.
Its world premiere took place on November 18 in Sydney, Darwin, Bowen in Queensland and Kununurra in Western Australia, all film locations for the great, grand adventure romance that is Luhrmann's fourth film.
Australia is an Outback saga set in the years leading to the Japanese bombing raid on Darwin in the early months of World War II's Pacific War.
It tells the story of English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley (played by Nicole Kidman) who inherits an Australian Outback cattle property.
To save the animals from local cattle barons, Lady Ashley joins forces with a rugged cattle drover (Hugh Jackman) to drive 2000 cattle through Australia's Top End, only to be caught in the events surrounding the bombing of Darwin... (more)
Guy Pearce in Traitor
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» IN the 1997 film LA Confidential Australian actors Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce shot to international prominence with their cop roles in that movie.
They have since gone their separate ways with Crowe getting greater exposure and prominence, particularly with his acting Oscar for Gladiator.
It is interesting to note that in two current but separate films Crowe and Pearce are deep into tracking and unraveling international conspiracies.
Crowe is in Body of Lies where he plays Leonardo DiCaprio's handler while Pearce is on the trail of mystery man Don Cheadle.
Pearce plays straight arrow FBI agent Roy Clayton who heads an investigation into a dangerous conspiracy where clues seem to lead back to a former US Special Operations officer, Samir Horn (Cheadle).
The plot twists and turns through FBI, CIA and terrorist trails in a fast-paced action film where things are not always what they seem.
Body of Lies |
» RUSSELL Crowe has again teamed up with director Ridley Scott (Gladiator, A Good Year) in the new movie Body of Lies with Leonardo DiCaprio.
Body of Lies is based on Washington Post columnist David Ignatius' 2007 novel about a CIA operative, Roger Ferris (DiCaprio), who uncovers a lead on a major terrorist leader suspected to be operating out of Jordan.
When Ferris devises a plan to infiltrate his network, he must first win the backing of cunning CIA veteran Ed Hoffman (Crowe) and the collegial, but perhaps suspect, head of Jordanian intelligence.
Although ostensibly his allies, Ferris questions how far he can really trust these men without putting his entire operation - and his life — on the line.
Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight |
» ONE of Heath Ledger's last film roles — that of The Joker in The Dark Knight — exhibits a tour de force performance in a role also filled by Jack Nicholson in an earlier Batman movie.
With Ledger's untimely death in New York in January this year, a posthumous Academy Award is being bruited about.
The actor was nominated in 2006 for his role in the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain but lost out to Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote.
Ledger last performed in a film role in The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. He died before the film ws completed and it is said Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell would portray physically changed transformations of Ledger's character.
His film roles in Brokeback Mountain and The Dark Knight — and perhaps in The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus — may turn out to be fitting tributes to a young man of great talent who was lost to the world far too early in his life.
Vale Heath Ledger.
Unfinished Sky
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» QUEENSLAND sheep country is the place where the Peter Duncan film Unfinished Sky takes place.
In this film, Duncan transposess the Dutch box office hit The Polish Bride to the Queensland location where a sheepfarmer, John Waldring, played by William McInnes, discovers the arrival of a bruised and battered woman, Tahmeena (Monic Hendrickx), who can't speak English.
Hendrickx was in the original Dutch film and she reprises her role here as the hunted woman, subject of a police search. In self-imposed isolation on the sheep farm, Waldring is gradually drawn out of his shell by the woman who has sought refuge in his farm.
This is thriller and love story set against the rural Queensland landscape.
» ACTUALLY it's the story of the new Cate Blanchett film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, that is not only curious but, well, impossible to believe.
It's a love story about Blanchett's movie character and co-star Brad Pitt's title character.
The film is directed by David Fincher (Panic Room and the more recent Zodiac) and begins in New Orleans from the end of World War I in 1918, into the 21st century, following Button's journey that is as unusual as any man's life can be.
The film is adapted from a 1920s story by F Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) about a man, Benjamin Button, who is born in his 80s and begins to age backwards.
At age 50, he falls in love with a 30-year-old woman, Blanchett. And then must come to terms with the relationship as they literally grow in opposite directions.
thesydneyscene is published weekly except in the last two weeks in December and the first two weeks in January.
Copyright 2008 Larry Rivera
