Item #: 6850DVD Category: AUSTRALIAN Format: DVD MPAA Rating: PG

Woolly Rating: 6/10 (67 votes)

MEMBER COMMENTS ON THIS VIDEO

oldntiredat28

Aug 19, 2004 @ 23:35:44

Truly one of the BEST films EVER
I'll keep this as short as possible. Two words about this DVD: RENT IT!! I read an excerpt of the book this film is based on shortly before I saw it at Baxter Avenue and it piqued my interest and stirred the adoration I have for all things Australian (one Mr. Crowe included hehehe!). The film really brought the story to life for me. As a mom, a film about a child being ripped from the arms of her loving mother and the courage the child found within her to find her way back home was beyond moving. Tear-producing might be a more suitable adjective. The intelligence and determination displayed by the child to "follow the rabbit-proof fence" home from the camp that she had been sent to in order to learn how to "be white," as she was half-aborigine, and to know that this actually happened was riveting! What made it all the more intriguing was that this was no walk around the block for a young girl. It was a thousand or so miles across the continent I think. Followed by aboriginal trackers (who apparently should be employed by every state/federal bureau that tracks fugitives) and others bent on catching her . . . well, why ruin it for you? Granted, this may not be Kenneth Branagh's most theatrical work to date, but it is definitely one of his best!

Ab-original
Director Phillip Noyce has one of the most interesting careers going on in Hollywood and Australia right now. His Hollywood stint in the '90s included a lot of high-profile, moneymaking fluff (check the imdb.com). He now seems to be alternating between Tinseltown and Down Under, where he began his career, making several high-profile Aussie productions as a 20-something wunderkind in the 1970s. Perhaps the best of these was 1977's 'Newsfront,' a vivid, sympathetic re-creation of Australia in the '40s and '50s shown through the eyes of competing newsreel hounds in the waning days of that craft. I finally saw that movie after hunting it down for years, and also was fortunate to luck into a used copy of his 1982 drama, 'Heatwave'--my favorite among Noyce's films. That film dramatically embellished a then-recent Aussie scandal involving the disappearance and presumed murder of a tenacious anti-development activist (played with typical virtuosity by Judy Davis). Fast forwarding: 'Rabbit-Proof Fence' returns Noyce to Aussie social concern; re-enacting a shameful part of the country's history: the policy of stealing 'half-caste' children from aboriginal homes and placing them in virtual slavery to 'teach' them to live in 'civilized' white society. The do-gooders' ideas of 'living' most often meant serving as maids for whites. Apart from the unfathomable racism and personal tragedy, the policy was a tremendous indignity and insult to aborigines: who made the supreme effort to care for children abandoned by whites only to then have them taken and used as slave fodder for white society, "for their own good." Kenneth Branagh plays the central do-gooder here, using junk pseudo-'science' to justify the policies to the public. Interestingly, Branagh's character here reminds me of the 'do-gooder' American character, Alden, in Noyce's next film, a superb and faithful adaptation of Graham Greene's novel 'The Quiet American.' The film and novel, prescient of America's Vietnam and now Iraq quagmires, posited that American well-intentioned realpolitik ('for their own good') tends to get a lot of innocent people killed ('destroying the village to save it;' 'the kid's arms may be blown off, but by god he's free!'). After a fairly long setup showing the children's lives in the internment camp, the film becomes dramatically tense and visually beautiful as the three young siblings take off across the scorching outback--following a vast mini wall of China known as the 'rabbit-proof fence.' There are several close calls as the paths of the pursued and pursuers cross (sometimes within a matter of feet). Every once in awhile, it might have been helpful to have one of those old-film-style animated dotted maps pop up to show where the hunters and the hunted are in relation to each other, but perhaps it's just too outdated a device and detrimental to giving the audience a sense of suspense and realistic disorientation. The finale of the film is incredibly moving. Although a tad conventional, this movie nonetheless stacks up to the best Aussie has to offer, including "Walkabout," "Picnic at Hanging Rock," "The Last Wave," "The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith" and all the wonderful films Bruce Beresford ("The 'Getting of Wisdom', 'Don's Party,' 'Breaker Morant') made in his native land. *** Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) -2005 Kevin Rayburn

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a genius reality check 4 our race we may live in the white mans land & call it hme bt in doing that we deny the truth of our being. All brown skin people nomatta hw light r african rayalty ... (lady swirl)