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steveb1888
Reviews
Kokoda (2006)
Good, gritty film
Saw this today and I was quite impressed. It wasn't perfect, but I'm sure they had a very limited budget so it's hard to nit pick too much. It's good to see such an important part of Australian history as the mammoth effort to stop the Japanese advance through Papua New Guinea put on film. At the time the bulk of the Australian forces were in North Africa fighting the Germans and Italians, and the desperate defence of PNG was first handled by the very in-experienced militia troops, as featured in the film.
I think the majority of it was filmed near Canungra, which is still used as the Australian army's jungle warfare centre. The makers obviously wanted to showcase the terrible jungle conditions that the soldiers fought in. It was good also to see the famous "fuzzy wuzzy angels" as the soldiers called the native stretcher-bearers prominently featured.
A History of Violence (2005)
Poor
Saw it today and didn't like it. The interaction between people didn't seem realistic at all. Spoiler - for instance, when he raced home to save his family, having first warned his wife the bad guys may be on the way, she is in a frenzy running about with a shotgun (no-one thinks to call Mr friendly policeman from earlier), nearly shoots him as he comes home, and the son is sitting there calmly eating his cereal, Huh!! That's just one example, the whole thing didn't seem right to me, and in fact I walked out after the sex on the stairs scene which seemed out of place and wrong as well. A friend who stayed filled me in on the end, but he found the whole movie painful as well.