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Reviews
Falls Around Her (2018)
Lovely and Atmospheric
Was lucky enough to catch this at Melbourne's Birrarangga Film Festival on its closing night. I also attended the Q+A with the director and main actor. There are so many wonderful layers to this film. It honestly contains so many beautiful multitudes. The world/safe space the main actor creates for herself to heal and process, the reserve/community she returns to, the "big city" she found her musical success and celebrity within. The land is its own character, and she rekindles her relationship with it, witnesses it coming under attack by miners who wrongfully claim ownership of the land while denying accountability for their harm to the land and its inhabitants.
What I loved best is that this film deals with what is clearly a snapshot in the life of this particular indigenous woman, lovingly told by an indigenous woman director. In this film we see her dealing with multiple intersecting conflicts and discoveries, and though some conflicts are left unresolved and some questions remain vague and unanswered, you can appreciate how she overcomes and navigates the movie's main conflict. Her victory over that destructive force in her life, while other destructive forces still loom in the past and future, is realistic and worth celebrating. I didn't need to see every issue tied up neatly in a bow by the conclusion of the film. Life is rarely that neat, and that's what makes the protagonist so human. In life we only have so much time and so much power and so much control, and she executes what healing and help she can bring others, the land and herself with balance and dignity.
That this film was helmed by an indigenous woman, telling indigenous stories, definitely shows. I can't wait to see more, more, more.
A Discovery of Witches (2018)
Pretty Well Done
But let's be real. This is Twilight fan fiction and the problem with this is that Twilight was written and filmed long enough ago that we should be able to navigate around the same tropes and pitfalls, especially since these characters are fully grown adults and the characters of Twilight are horny teenagers. Was the cinematography all done in the VSCO app? Does the protagonist's spell-binding curse limit her to an exclusively blue wardrobe (but like only the exact same shade as her eyes because heaven forbid we rock indigo out here)? I think there was so much potential as far as the lore and magical fantasy go. The cast is pretty great, too. But somewhere along the line the writers sort of said, "Eff it. Let's pretend Anastasia Steele went to Oxford and had magical powers, run it through an Instagram filter and make the sex even less interesting."