The Last Wave

A Sydney lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) is drawn to an Aborigine tribal murder of which he gets no assistance, not only from his colleagues but also from the tight-lipped men he is defending. Meanwhile, apocalyptic visions draw him closer and closer to the ancient people. Early Peter Weir effort is eerie and completely unique but perhaps too cryptic and underplotted. Chamberlain is effective and entirely believable in his feverish performance.

*** out of ****

Gallipoli

Two young Aussie runners (Mark Lee and Mel Gibson) befriend each other at a race, enlist in Her Majesty's Army as the Great War rages, and carouse in Cairo before being sent to the deadly eponymous Turkish battle where so many of their countrymen needlessly lost their lives due to arrogance and shortsightedness. It is surprising how little of Peter Weir's Gallipoli is dedicated to battle and just how non urgent it feels for a war movie and is closer to a slice of life picture with wonderful period detail and made with the director's sure hand and his usual muted color palette. The final shot is enduring and an excellent touch.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

To defend the realm from Napoleon's growing forces, Captain Jack Aubrey (Russel Crowe) leads his modest vessel the HMS Surprise on patrol of the high seas while often consulting with his trusted friend, the ship's physician and naturalist (Paul Bettany). After catching a rogue and superior French craft on their trail, the brazen but principled commander decides to change course and take the enemy head on. Condensed from a series of Patrick O'Brian novel's, Peter Weir's Master and Commander is a rousing naval saga, brilliantly directed, plotted, and with painterly cinematography, that still maintains a touching, beautiful human sentiment. Crowe, in a career performance that was unfortunately overlooked, leads an impressive cast with Bettany as a Darwin inspired doctor, quite brilliant as well.

**** out of ****

The Mosquito Coast

A brilliant, principled, irascible and uncompromising inventor relocates his browbeaten family from their New England home to the coastal swamps of Honduras where he plans to lead his own empire which will be based primarily on a gargantuan ice generator of his own creation. Peter Weir's The Mosquito Coast is tremendously, almost slavishly faithful to Paul Theroux's book (which was adapted by Paul Schrader) but tries to cram in way too much in under two hours (glossing over much in the process), loses momentum, and really drags its heals following the Act 2 climax. Ford is excellent in one of his finest roles, fully embodying his complex, larger than life character, and Helen Mirren and River Phoenix are great per usual.

** 1/2 out of ****

Witness

A recently widowed Amish woman travels with her young son to visit her sister in Baltimore. During a layover in Philadelphia, the boy wanders around in amazement of the foreign surroundings and enters the men's room where he witnesses a murder. A dedicated homicide detective detains the boy and their mother, and it quickly becomes clear the crime was part of a police cover-up and the detective, the woman, and her son must lam it at her home in Amish country. Peter Weir's "Witness" weaves its two stories on an incredibly beautiful palette, showing the gritty side of the Philadelphia scenes and painting the scenes in the countryside with plush elegant colors. Harrison Ford is remarkable here and gets to show his range first as the tough action hero we are familiar with and later and predominantly as a light romantic lead (while still maintaining his toughness). Kelly McGillis is pretty good here as the Amish woman who grows to love Ford but can never leave her community, and I really liked the work of Lukas Haas as the young boy. I'm really hesitant to criticize the film, because its honestly one of the best looking I've seen, but I felt the murder story loses some of its urgency during the scenes on the farm, which are still very fine in and of themselves. So we have a great looking film, and very fine Harrison Ford performance, a fish out of water movie, a treatise on the Amish, and a story of a love that could never be, but we also have a crime picture that acts as an antidote to the countless mind numbing pictures in the genre.

Picnic at Hanging Rock

On Valentine's Day in the year 1900, girls from a boarding school go on an all day retreat to an area made of up of volcanic rock. After reciting poetry and laying about, four of the girls decide to climb the rock, seemingly drawn by an unspoken possession. One girl runs back, and the other three, along with a teacher whose disappearance is never explained, are never seen from again. The disappearances cause a media stir and have a devastating affect not only on the girl's college, its students, and cruel headmaster, but also on two young men who were present that unfortunate and mysterious day. Picnic at Hanging Rock was master Aussie director Peter Weir's first film to reach an international audience, and it is a lyrical and haunting film. Like fellow countryman and director Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, it deals with teenagers dealing with their sexual longings while alone in the wilderness. Weir's film is successful because of its atmospheric tone and beautiful visuals, but also because it never provides answers, only suggestions as to what happened to the girls. Benefiting from the same strategy that aided Fargo, the movie presents itself as a true story, when it was really based on a book by Joan Lindsay which was only inspired by true events. Picnic at Hanging Rock is an eerie film made by a true director who knows that not all horror films must deal with blood, guts, and cheap scares.

The Year of Living Dangerously

Amidst the 1965 communist rebellion in Indonesia, an Australian reporter (Mel Gibson) arrives in Jakarta to cover the uprising and finds himself being shut out by the government until he meets a well connected photographer (Linda Hunt), who introduces him to important people including a member of the British Embassy (Sigourney Weaver). The journalist starts an affair with the attache which not only draws the ire of the jilted photographer but also endangers the girl when he decides to write a story which will blow her cover. From a novel by C.J. Koch, The Year of Living Dangerously was directed by the great Australian director Peter Weir who makes a nice use of color, location (particularly during a scene where Gibson journeys to the country), and score by Maurice Jarre, as well as two fine early performances from Gibson and Weaver. Although it is clear that Weir is a great director, I find that he often keeps a distance between his films and the audience, not fully engaging them in the story, and I think it applies here. Also the idea of casting Hunt, who won an Academy Award for this performance by the way, to play a male half Chinese dwarf is ludicrous and extremely distracting. I don't understand why someone who fit the bill wasn't cast, which would have made more sense and been more effective. The Year of Living Dangerously has many fine elements but its languid pacing, Weir keeping the audience at arm's length, and the disastrous casting of Hunt make this a near miss.

The Way Back

In 1941, seven men escaped from a Siberian gulag and made the arduous trek across 4,000 miles of varying, unforgiving terrain. From the treacherous freezing cold of Russia, into Mongolia and the Gobi Desert, and through Tibet, while not only battling the elements but also themselves, three of the men eventually crossed over the Himalayas into India and freedom. The Way Back is the incredible and likely exaggerated story of perseverance brought to the screen by the great Australian director Peter Weir. Weir has a knack for envisioning expansive movies and translating them to the screen, and he succeeds here again crafting a beautifully shot film made on many different locations. Some critics panned this film for being boring, showing only a long arduous journey, but I found it to be intriguing. The story alone holds an inherent fascination and Weir does a wonderful job of evoking that. The film stars Jim Sturgess as one of the wrongly persecuted escapees, and he is another in a line of bland young actors who shouldn't be in films. He's not terrible, but he's just not interesting. Thankfully he's surrounding by the always surehanded Ed Harris who plays an American prisoner, Colin Farrell who plays a cutthroat loyalist prisoner, and Saoirse Ronan who plays a young girl who joins the gang along the way. The Way Back is a great example of how to translate a large expansive potentially boring story into a successful entertaining movie.