strange_complex | Entries tagged with australia

Christmas was very nice, involving a soft new dark purple dressing-gown, this book, a roaring fire and a roast duck. Today we have been out in the melting snow to saw up a wardrobe and take it to the tip, and now I've got a couple of hours of quiet time before a family friend comes round to dinner. So let's get started on those over-due reviews I mentioned. A batch of films first, the first two of which must date back to at least June, because I saw them before I went to Australia at the end of that month.

12. Nothing But The Night (1973), dir. Peter Sasdy

This one I watched with

ladylugosi_1313 because we just fancied a bit 1970s Cushing-Lee action (a fairly permanent state of mind for us). I've seen it before, and my review from last time (LJ / DW) does not exactly brim over with enthusiasm, but we actually found it better than either of us had remembered on a re-watch. Much of my complaint last time was that it suddenly seemed to switch genres in the final 10 minutes or so, whipping out a supernatural explanation for what had until then appeared to be a perfectly ordinary murder-mystery story with little time to process it or understand why a child was suddenly burning her own mother to death. But of course if you know that supernatural explanation from the beginning, it doesn't appear quite so incongruous when it comes, and you can pick up small ways in which it had actually been telegraphed much earlier on in the film.

There's still a problem with the ending, though, even after the supernatural explanation for all the strange goings-on has been revealed. Basically, the story drives itself into a moral corner by putting a bunch of grown adults who have all done terrible things and therefore need to get their come-uppance into the stolen bodies of children. The dilemma is that because they look like children, it would be a hard sell to convince the audience that it would really be OK for the heroic point-of-view characters we have been following throughout the narrative to gun them down, destroy them in a blazing inferno, or deploy any of the other methods typically used to defeat villains in fantasy movies. However much the audience might have been told that they are adult villains, the visuals of horrible deaths being visited on people we instinctively see as innocent just wouldn't be good. So the solution chosen instead was for the children to enact justice on themselves by deciding to jump off a cliff en masse at the first sign that their plans had been rumbled and they might shortly have to face justice. Unfortunately, though, this just doesn’t ring true at all given the lengths they have already gone to to secure immortality, and contributes a lot to the sensation I'd experienced last time of just feeling that the entire film had plunged spectacularly off the rails in the final few minutes.

Oh well, it still has Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in it, and lots of great '70s period detail, so watching it certainly wasn't a waste of time. But I doubt it will ever be terribly high up my list of their best pairings.

13. Son of Frankenstein (1939), dir. Rowland V. Lee

This was another one watched with

ladylugosi_1313, quite possibly on the same night (I can't remember). It features Basil Rathbone as the title character, returning to his father's castle to restore his reputation - except that this includes reviving his Creature, and things start to go horribly wrong when the local Ygor (Bela Lugosi) uses the Creature to wreak revenge on the men who once sentenced him to a hanging (a fuller plot summary is on Wikipedia). Everyone is very good in it - perhaps especially Lugosi as the shaggy, conspiring Ygor - and Basil gets an excellent, athletic swinging-on-a-rope moment at the end to knock the Creature into a sulphur pit and save the day. But the absolute stars of the production really are the wonderful sets, and especially this beautiful pair of matching fire-places in the main living area:

14. Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (1974), dir. Brian Clemens

I watched this one on the plane from the UK to Thailand, mainly because it was available on Google Play Movies, so I could easily get it onto the tablet which I had bought especially for that trip and watch it when offline. I had seen almost all of it before, but never all sequentially or while properly paying attention. It’s a creditable go at a fresh take on the vampire film on Hammer’s part, and it has some good sequences. I like the scene in which Kronos and Grost have to find out how to despatch the semi-vampirised Dr. Marcus by experimentation, with him urging them on all the while. It offers a good note of black humour and a fun tongue-in-cheek dig at the conventions of the vampire genre. Caroline Munro also does a very good job of experiencing a creepy night in front of the fire at Durward Manor (the vampires' strong-hold). But I find Kronos himself a bit characterless, and Caroline Munro isn’t given enough to do beyond looking scared, wenchlike or sexy. Her performances as both Laura in Dracula AD 1972 and Margiana in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad show a capacity to convey a sense of adventure and vitality which wasn’t given enough outlet here.

15. Dracula: The Dark Prince (2013), Pearry Reginald Teo

Another one downloaded onto my tablet before my Australia trip, and watched in a hotel in Brisbane. I straight-up loved it! It belongs to a particular sub-genre of Dracula stories which are sort of about the historical Vlad as a vampire, but which treat 15th-century Wallachia as a generic Game of Thrones-ish medieval fantasy world rather than making any very serious attempt to situate him in a real historical context. Dracula Untold is on the edge of this field, although it makes more effort than most with the historical setting, and the opening scenes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) are of course what really kicked them all off - but most are novels or comic books. Although I haven’t read any of those, I'm aware enough of the genre to recognise it here, and I have a lot of respect for the approach. It basically takes all the fun bits of the various branches of the Dracula mythos, and doesn't let historical or literary purity get in the way of constructing epic Gothic adventures out of them. Quite right too! This particular film it isn’t anything very much to write home about as far as scripting, acting, direction or cinematography are concerned, and nor does it win any prizes for its representation of gender relations, ethnic diversity, disability or anything else. But as Gothic brain candy it is wonderful and uplifting and enchanting, and I definitely want more films like this, please. I might even explore some of those novels or comic books at some point...

That will have to be enough reviews for today, though, as it is time to get in the shower and then help with getting dinner started.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/595148.html

Ah, free weekend! How blessed and rare you are. Time to push on with my Australia posts, then.

After Brisbane, my next stop was Cape Tribulation. My stay here was probably the highlight of my travels, but it was also the least well-represented on Facebook because there is no mobile reception there, and only very slow / limited wifi. So this post will do more than some of the others need to to fill in the gaps.

Cape Trib (as it's called locally) is in Queensland, but a little over 1000 miles north of Brisbane, and I got there by flying to Cairns and then driving another 100 miles north in a hire car. Cape Trib is located in a large region called the Daintree, which bills itself as being 'Where the rainforest meets the reef'. This is the photo I took which best captures that - basically a forested mountain range sloping down to beautiful beaches, and with the reef about 20km off-shore.

I got myself a good dose of both rainforest and reef by staying for two nights in an absolutely beautiful isolated log-cabin looking right into pristine rainforest, and then another two in a slightly-less-magnificent but still totally adequate beach hut which was part of a larger resort. This was the one single FB post which I managed to make while there, from the bar area of the beach hut resort. I didn't put comment under any of the pictures at the time, because I knew my connection could drop at any minute, but I've added a few in square brackets now.

( 14th July: rainforest and beach at Cape Tribulation )

The owners of the log cabin had set up a self-guided walk which you could follow through the rainforest, which I did on my first day, and which is where I took the pictures in the FB post above. It is pretty amazing just clambering through the rainforest all alone, and I took a little selfie video which I think captures how ïnto it I was:

[There is a video here in the LJ version of this post, but DW can't host it. Please click through if you'd like to see it.]

I also went swimming in a freshwater creek, which is what you have to do locally if you want to swim. Sadly, all those beautiful beaches aren't actually safe to swim off, because there are marine crocodiles in the area who can lurk unseen in the water, and will attack people paddling or swimming. I did want to take the opportunity to swim while I was there, though, as it was nice weather, with temperatures usually in the low-to-mid twenties, and the creek was quite idyllic, with trees overhanging the water and a shoal of fish swimming around in the swimming-hole. I chatted to a family from Melbourne having a winter holiday there while we lounged around in the water, and picked up a few tips for the next leg of my travels.

The following day, it was time to meet the reef, which I did by booking myself onto a snorkelling tour with these people. I have never snorkelled before, and it was a pretty choppy day to be heading out into the open ocean in not much more than a large motorised dinghy. We certainly got sprayed in the face a lot, although the guy at the wheel made it fun by playing stuff like Queen's Bo Rhap on the ship's stereo as we crashed through the waves. Then when we got there and I actually plunged into the water, I had a minute or two of thinking I wasn't going to be able to do it because I was trying to gasp for air and didn't like the way the snorkel mask blocked off my nose and restricted the amount of air I could pull in. But the lady who was guiding and instructing us all explained that I just needed to relax and breathe deeply and slowly through the snorkel, and after a few minutes I got the hang of that, put my face in the water, and it was all worth it!

Sadly, of course, there aren't any pictures, because I don't have a water-proof camera, so I can ony do my best to convey in words how amazing it was. Where we went, the coral was so close to the surface that you had to be very careful in a lot of places not to accidentally bash it, practically sucking your stomach in as you floated over. So it was an incredibly close-up view of huge amounts of marine life. And it really was teeming. I'd always assumed that documentaries etc about the reef were highly selective, focusing in on isolated highlights, but where we went the whole area was alive with brightly-coloured fish, coral, anemones, sea-cucumbers, starfish etc. It really didn't matter much which direction you looked in - everything was utterly amazing.

My most exciting moment was watching a blue spotted ray glide along the ocean floor and then disappear under a coral over-hang, but I also saw iridescent fish, brightly-coloured stripey fish, royal blue star-fish, fish cleaning each other's gills, plants undulating to trap tiny life-forms, spiky blue-tipped coral and giant clams. I didn't even think giant clams were real - I thought they were a joke from Doctor Who - but nope, they are absolutely real, and live ones have beautiful blue or purple tissues lining their shells. I'm not by nature an active sports person, and suspect I am unlikely ever to snorkel again - but I'm very glad I made the effort to do it, and will definitely remember it all my life.

The day after that I had booked another tour, this time in a small group with a local guy who has a four-wheel drive. The sealed roads up the Queensland coast end at Cape Trib, so if you want to go any further north you need something which can handle rough surface and plunge through creeks. He took us about another 20 miles north to Wujal Wujal, a community belonging to the local Kuku Yalanji people, where one of their number, who told us to call her Kathleen, walked us up to a beautiful waterfall. She explained all about how it is a sacred place for her people, and that there is another waterfall further up the same river which is reserved for women only, and is where previous generations of Aboriginal women went to give birth. (Some still do now, but most opt for the local hospital.) She also told us about how the coming of the seasons has changed over her lifetime due to climate change, including bringing crocodiles up to the waterfall part of the river when they didn't used to be a danger in her childhood. Apparently, her people are able to smell the crocodiles even when they can't see them - they smell of mud and fish, she said.

Later, we drove along the river which the waterfall feeds, called Bloomfield River, looking for crocs out basking on the banks. It didn't take long for our efforts to be rewarded, although my camera was far from adequate at capturing the results. The first picture is my own, zoomed in as far as it would go; you can just about make out the crocodile about one-third of the way along the bank from the left. The second was taken by the guy doing the driving and emailed to us afterwards. This whole trip really made me realise that while my camera is excellent for taking photographs of buildings, often allowing me to get the whole thing in while people around me are stepping backwards and backwards and cursing that they can't get far enough back to do so, it is dreadful for capturing smaller things like wildlife for the same reasons.

Anyway, I was very glad after having seen the zoomed-in photo to have been on the other side of the bank from that!

Finally it was time to drive back down to Cairns, but I stopped off half-way down for a couple of hours at the Mossman Gorge Centre. This was still within the Daintree rainforest, in land belonging to the same Kuku Yalanji people as live at Wujal Wujal, and one of the things you can do there is to book a guided walking tour through the forest led by one of them. This time our guide told us the name he goes by amongst his own people, and I tried so hard to remember it, and succeeded for most of the afternoon, but unfortunately it wasn't familiar to me so I have forgotten it again now, and can only record the alternative white-people name he gave us that I already knew: Skip.

I won't forget what I learned from him about his people and their relationship with the rainforest, though. This included things like how he learnt as a child which 40 or so out of the c. 150 fruits in the rainforest were OK to eat; how his people recognise six different seasons of the year, defined by things like hot, cold, wind, rain, dry etc., each with their own different plants and fruits; how in the past they lived in huts in the forest, but would only ever stay in one place for a maximum of three years to allow the ground around them to recover; how they interacted with the plains people and picked up the use of boomerangs from them, but of course couldn't throw them in the middle of the rainforest so just used them to bang for music instead; how they make body-paints from ochre and clay and what the various patterns and symbols mean (e.g. rain-drops, family groupings); and how they collected sasparilla from the forest edge and scrunched it up in water to get a form of natural soap.

The whole picture of a people living in symbiosis with the land until (implicitly - he didn't say this, but didn't need to) white settlers came along and ruined it all was incredibly humbling, particularly coming on top of having gaped in awe at the teeming life of the reef in full awareness of how much of it has already been destroyed by pollution and climate change. Australia is certainly a stark lesson in the impact of British colonialism if you're willing to take it. Anyway, I didn't take a photo of Skip himself, but these are his paints. I just hope there will even be anyone around with the cultural knowledge he has another generation from now.