Word: zealanders
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Jacob and fellow researches will use a DC 8 aircraft to study the atmosphere of the region between Easter Island, Fiji, Tahiti, and New Zealand...
Pauline and Juliet, two love-struck teenagers in 1950s New Zealand, created a voluptuous fantasy world and moved into it. Director Peter Jackson moves in with them; his fevered camera style communicates the rapture and peril of adolescent hysteria. This hurtling, upsetting film, based on a true murder case, has a thrillingly nervy performance by Melanie Lynskey as the darker, needier Pauline...
Peter Jackson's black comedy, "Heavenly Creatures," is a dizzying pastel debacle of school-girl passion, wild imagination and murderous ambition. The film version of the true story is set in mid-1950s Christchurch, New Zealand. Is it coincidental that "Picnic at Hanging Rock," another tale of school-girl mayhem, is set in nearby Australia? In any case, historical fact is wrapped up in Jackson's fictional version like grotesque reality in frilly paper--this film is a deliciously unpleasant surprise package...
...this plot inhabits. The viewer is bombarded by a succession of distorted scenarios--a grainy old film-strip of Christchurch, the Claymation-type animation of Pauline and Juliet's invented alter egos, the "Fourth World" they imagine as their private paradise and the dubious authenticity of mid-century New Zealand. Which world are we supposed to believe in? The extremely exaggerated reaction of Pauline and Juliet to any situation seems to fit the various levels of fantasy existence better than it fits the cramped confines of their mundane homes. And yet, it is when real life begins to demand...
...original murder case, the sexual element of the friendship was played up, and the girls became infamous as lesbian killers. Jackson certainly doesn't tone down the sexual angle in his film version. As shocking as the relationship may have seemed in 1954 New Zealand, it could seem hackneyed in this post-Kinsey day and age. However, in spite of modern omniscience and in spite (or because) of the overwrought treatment it receives in the film, the relationship convinces. Pauline writes in her diary that now she understands "the joy of this thing called sin," and after the bathtub scenes...