By Peter Duncan, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47180331
Unfinished Sky - (2007)
A sex slave from Afghanistan escapes her captors in a small Australian town and finds refuge with a man who needs saving in a spiritual sense. The fear and distrust that has to be overcome is epic, and language barriers add a sense that our two characters, John Woldring (William McInnes) and Tahmeena (Monic Hendrickx) can only really express what they're feeling, not thinking - but Hendrickx, a Dutch actress who also starred in the same role in the original version of this (
The Polish Bride), is eminently watchable and the real takeaway from this pretty average but reasonably decent Aussie movie. It's always nice to see something with actors you've never seen before - although David Field, who shows up as the questionable Sergeant Carl Allen, is an Australian staple and favourite of mine. Hendrickx won a very deserved AFI Award for Best Actress, and I'd say she beat her competitors hands down.
6/10
By All Movie Guide [1], Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12485563
Walking on Water - (2002)
I didn't initially take to all of the characters in
Walking on Water - of which there initially seemed to be too many. The film starts with the death of Gavin (David Bonney) from AIDS - promised a dignified death, his family and friends are much aggrieved when multiple overdoses of morphine simply don't do the trick, so his close friend Charlie (Vince Colosimo) puts a bag over his head - a decision that will haunt him during the messy grieving process all of Gavin's friends and family go through. About how different people handle grieving, it's a movie that I felt really pulled itself together during the final stretch after leaving me unimpressed during it's first two-thirds - and that makes me wonder, how much do I rate a movie that had me feeling "Bravo!" at the end but kind of "Oh, I am so bored and fed up with these characters" for a good while before that? I think a significantly higher rating would have been in order if we'd have been able to see a little deeper into what was going on earlier instead of watching people dance and have sex, but perhaps shallow attempts to distract ourselves from the recent death of a loved one is the point. Anyway, this isn't a complete waste of time and anyone with the slightest interest should perhaps give it a chance. You'll get a few renditions of "Under the Milky Way" for your trouble (The Church and Sarah McGregor) which is quite a haunting song, and made for a movie like this - one which won 5 AFI Awards in it's day.
6/10