Features

Five Films about Australia better than ‘Australia’

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This is a guest post written by Greg Davies. Greg is known in social media circles as cGt2099, and runs the sites The-TrukstoP.com and WallabyDown.com. We’ve previously featured his inestimable talents on the post: Before the Galaxy Far, Far Away: Influences on ‘Star Wars’ One of the most expected movies of 2008, Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, […]

Acting Against Type

When Not Going ‘Full Retard’ Paid Off: Ten Critically Acclaimed Depictions of Mentally Challenged Characters

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The 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder highlights an inconvenient Hollywood truth: Oscar loves mental disabilities. In the film, Ben Stiller’s action hero character, Tugg Speedman, wishing to expand beyond his stereotype, attempts to court Oscar sympathies by playing a mentally challenged farmhand. It ends up being a critical failure. This is because, as Tugg’s co-star Robert […]

Film Focus

Guilty Pleasures: Xanadu

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In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree : Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man: Down to a sunless sea.” –Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan, or A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.” Perhaps the biggest crime Xanadu, the 1980 Olivia Newton-John/Gene Kelly musical is guilty of is its […]