Word: sydney
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...girl?an instant family that her friends cite as the ultimate in efficiency. Mark went to Harrow and is now the representative of an Australia-based freight company. His sister Carol studied law at London University and has been working in Australia as a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald. She returned to London in time for the last weeks of the campaign...
...books recently: Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, Larry Heinemann's Close Quarters and Frederick Downs' The Killing Zone. Josiah Bunting, a novelist (The Lionheads) and former Army officer who served in Viet Nam and is now president of Virginia's Hampden-Sydney College, points out an anomaly of Viet Nam. "The Norman Mailers and William Styrons and all those guys stayed at Harvard for this war. The real literary genius never went." Nonetheless, Bunting expects that "within the next three or five years, there will be a major, successful Catch-22-stylG novel...
...well-weathered figures of the Aborigines, who bring a note of intensity to the screen, a doomed majesty from another time. When the Aborigines arrive at Chamberlain's house for dinner, they are beautifully out of place. Dressed in ill-fitting suits, they seem to be a part of Sydney's white world, but as they quietly eye the Steuban Glass, the Merimekko prints and the ancient carved stones--which are now nothing more than sophisticated living-room knick-knacks--one can see the gulf between Australia's past and the clean fragile work of the men who settled...
...making the characters anything more than symbols, points on the line between evil white and primitive good. A few scenes of the ghetto in which the Aborigines live are lifeless, the city has no character, and the film disintegrates into stock effects. Chamberlain discovers a secret Aborigine city beneath Sydney, and learns that an ancient white civilization was destroyed by a giant tidal wave, and that another one is due very soon. Some sort of eternal justice will destroy the white man's injustice. At the very end of the film, Chamberlain escapes from the underground city only to look...
WEIR SEEMS TO THINK that this quick view of the apocalypse is enough to have an impact. But aside from the fact that one never sees the wave hit Sydney, the reasons given for its appearance aren't too terribly plausible. There is a magnificent scene which sets up the wave, the highpoint of the film: Chamberlain is in his car and daydreams that the wave has hit and as he looks outside he sees well-dressed pedestrians floating beneath the blue-gray water, groceries floating slowly upwards. But this scene occurs three-quarters of the way through the movie...