Rating: 
Summary: Nothing Groundbreaking, but nothing old either.
Review: Rabbit Proof Fence is about three young Abrogine (the native people of Austrilia) girls living in Austrilia. The goverenment takes them away from their parents to have them raised as "civilied" white people. Unhappy in the camp they are sent to, the girls escape, outsmarting all of the trackers following them. Their road to cross the 1200 miles of Australian Outback was a fence to keep rabbits from destroying farmland. Through all of their adventures, they eventually made it home. This was based on a true story.
The story was okay. The only problem was that the movie dragged out and seemed to go on forever. I was very suprized that it was only 90 minutes long. The director used cool camera angles, but they got kind of annoying after a while. The soundtrack was composed by Peter Gabriel, and it was just plain scary. It was mostly buzzing noises of bugs, and more often than not, drowned out the dialog that was going on.
The best part of the DVD in my opinion was the documentary about the making of the movie. It had the director talking about the movie, along with other actors in it, and I found it much more interesting than the movie itself.
I would reccomend this to anyone trying to learn about history, but anyone else would love to sleep through the movie!
Rating: 
Summary: Certainly Amongst the Best Films Yet from this Decade
Review: I could not agree less with the previous reviewer's opinion of this film... Rabbit-Proof Fence is the certainly the best Australian film I have ever seen and one of the finest films yet from this young decade. Why? It's story is real, poignant, and thoroughly entertaining; I never once looked at the clock. And its heart-tugging without being sappy or overly politically correct; like the Quebecois film "Robe Noir", one sees that neither side is completely in the right (unless you think its OK to sleep in the dirt, eat lizards, and have no formal education). The film is visually stunning with brilliant colors and superb wide screen cinematography. And the acting, in my humble opinion, puts this film over the top. Kenneth Brannaugh redeems his downwardly spiraling career with a performance that will some day be held up just underneath his Henry V as his most compelling role. But even more importantly, Everlyn Sampi's quiet but powerful performance should someday be held up with Maria Falconetti's Jeanne d'Arc as one of the most memorable events in the history of film. She was stunning. David Gulpilil's role as the tracker was also great. It gave that "uuuuuuu" scary feel that I remember from reading Mark Twain novels as a kid. All of this makes for a great family-film introduction to serious topics.I thought the DVD image and the "making of" extra documentary were thoroughly entertaining. I was also fascinated with how beautiful all those young Aboriginal children were. In all my life I have never scene an attractive Aboriginal person on TV or film, and here I see that there are bounds of them. This film was largely ignored by the US market and awards, but that means little. A look at the long list of best-picture winning Oscars shows a long line of mostly forgotten and unimportant films. Time will tell if Rabbit-Proof Fence becomes a great classic, but my overwhelming inclination is that it will indeed.
Rating:
Summary: I'm a more noble person for watching this movie.
Review: I've read a large number of glowing reviews of this film - and I don't necessarily disagree - it's a very good movie - well structured, beautifully shot, etc. But I'm going to be brave here and say the unspeakable - this is a boring flick. No matter how heartfelt and important the content of this film is or how true and fully realized are the protagonist's epic journey, these young girls just _don't say anything_(!). A good subtitle would have been "Mimes Across the Desert" (ha ha ha... heh) These girls never come to life for me - they have no opinions about anything, no distinct personalities, no inner life. The audience can empathize and project themselves into these runaways, so the film does work - but this film could have been so much more if only it had an additional 5-10 minutes of dialogue. The commentary however, is very interesting and informative of the whole process. Mr. Noyce shares with us his irritation with Hollywood and takes a verbal stab at Harrison Ford. Unintentionally funny stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Must See
Review: All should see this movie. The story is shocking, emotional, and inspirational. Freedom and family are priceless.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully Moving!!!!
Review: I think I was equally moved at the story of how these three girls with no acting experience were chosen to do this movie and after I watched it was compelled to watch the movie again! This was a tour de force for the director and, I hope, his best experience making a movie in his homeland. I have seen it 4 times and everyone I have loaned the DVD to has watched it over and over. I have bought movies that are entertaining, but this is one of the best and when I show it for company, just as another reviewer said, they are so drawn into it they never leave their seats and there are discussions long after the movie is over. This is definitely a favorite!!!
Rating: 
Summary: eye-opening social drama
Review: "Rabbit-Proof Fence" provides a thrilling adventure tale, a fascinating historical document, and a stirring tribute to the strength and resiliency of the human spirit - all for the price of a single admission ticket (or rental fee). This true-life story is a classic case of racist imperialism run amuck. As late as 1970, the white government in Australia believed it had solved the "problem" of what to do with all the half-caste children populating the country (a half-caste is the product of one parent who is white and the other aborigine). The solution the leaders came up with was to simply take the children away from their parents, move the youngsters into government-run "schools," then "ease" their way into the white population and culture. The hope was that, through education and interbreeding, the aborigines would eventually be subsumed completely by the white race. The most maddening and amazing aspect of this story is the fact that many of the people in charge of this policy genuinely believed that what they were doing was right, that they were actually enlightening the aborigines, improving their lot in life and rescuing them from a life of stone-aged hardship and ignorance - if only the natives could be made to see it for themselves! It didn't seem to matter to these authorities that, in their efforts, they were violating the very foundation upon which civilized society is based: the sacred bond of the family. Yet through the outrage of those characters who refuse to give into this notion, the film taps into that desire common to each and every one of us: to be who we are and not what other people think we should be. The story takes place in 1931 when three young girls are ripped away from their homes and families and placed into a "training camp" run by the government. Molly is the oldest of the three, a sensitive but fiery girl of twelve who decides to break out of their prison and lead her cousin and little sister across 1500 miles of scorching desert back to their native home. Young Everlyn Sampi gives a stunning performance as Molly, a wide-eyed youngster driven by strength and determination to rescue the three of them from this gross miscarriage of justice. Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan do an equally beautiful job as her erstwhile mates who face a task far more daunting than most of us will ever have to confront. Kenneth Branagh, in a relatively small but pivotal role as the government official in charge of all the nation's half-castes, manages to bring a touch of humanity to a character who could easily have slipped over into unmitigated villainy in the wrong actor's hands. In a strange way, Branagh makes us see this character less as an odious creature and more as a misguided product of his culture, upbringing and time. Featuring expert direction by Philip Noyce and haunting music by Peter Gabriel, "Rabbit-Proof Fence" serves the same kind of salutary purpose for the present day Australians that a movie like "One Potato, Two Potato" (also about the problems faced by mixed race children) did for Americans in the 1960's. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" provides Aussies with a chance to confront and repudiate a disreputable chapter in their recent past - something movies have proven very effective at doing in many different parts of the world.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and an engaging story
Review: My husband and I really loved the story and its potrayal.
Very moving, not a single boring scene or monent and a story that ensures that human spirit is undieable.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This movie is a movie that should teach people how to make movies. I can't figure out how to briefly sum it up but here it goes. I sat down to watch this movie and as I do any other but I couldn't move from my seat, all my senses were heightened. I forgot about everything around me I was engulfed in this movie!
Rating:
Summary: Aboriginal culture as alternative
Review: The book is a straightforward telling of the story of the 3 girls walk, almost 2000 KM in about 9 weeks, eluding the police and obtaining food. Interestingly it starts with the first European's landing on the shores and the ancestors of the girls reactions. The reviews at amazon give a sufficient outline of the movie and i don't feel the need to repeat the details here. What i would like to discuss is the clash of cultures that underlies and animates the movie. The key scene in the policeman holding up the paper and removing the children from their mother's loving arms, to be placed in a heartless, cruel, impersonal, prison. Western culture several hundred years ago became structured, institutionalized, bureaucratic, impersonal. The aboriginal culture, for at least 60thousand years has remained close to the foundations of humanity: hunter-gatherers, minimal technology, minimal possessions. The words of the superintendent: "Just because they use Neolithic tools doesn't mean that they have Neolithic brains." is the key element in this 'clash of cultures'. The conquest of Australia, like the destruction of native cultures in the Pacific and the Americas was done via germs and guns, (to partly quote an excellent book on the topic). It was the difference in the tools, in the things of these two different cultures that doomed the Aboriginals to the destruction of their long held way of life, not the ideas, not the humanity(or lack of it) of either group. And this is, to me, one of the paradoxes of the movie. The motivations of the institutionalizers was clearly not evil as much as wrongly directed. Yet the obvious evil that emerged from it must be explained not only as a result of massive impersonal institutions creating their own inertia, but in the deflection of human personalities, of human feelings in those institutions towards the goals of those institutions. Simply put, our tools shape their own results, despite our personal feelings or conscious intentions. That is even before the observation that people assume the fascade of their organizations, even before we realize that people are shaped and controlled by their institutions and their tools. So it is a story that starkly illustrates the collision of cultures in the type of tools each has purchased with the souls of the people inside. For despite the intentions and outspoken feelings of the white people involved they continued the brutal suppression and destruction of the Aboriginal culture and people through the heart-wrenching tearing away of their next generation. The movie and the book are on a very personal level, just one old lady relating what happened to her so many years ago, to us her audience. Yet even in this personal level the tools intervene, for the way home, the bread crumbs, the yellow brick road was the rabbit proof fence. European culture introduced the rabbits to Australia, to the extraordinary destruction of the native habitat and unique animals that exist there. All to create more rabbits at the destruction of the kangaroos, analogous to the western peoples invasion which substituted white human bodies for black. The rabbit proof fence was a typical western ideological tool to try to fix what never should have happened. More technology chasing the problems of more stupid decisions, round and round until the destructiveness of the whole package is obvious to even the meanest minded colonist. The fence never worked, the rabbits got through, technology failed, again. But the fence became a very specific thing in the minds of the Aboriginals, it was the way to come out of the wilderness where they lived their ancestrial ways and became the hangers-on of the white tool based culture. For the fence was the boundary between white and Aboriginal, between the hunter gatherer and the stationary monthly ration outback ranch way of life. And to the girls it was the way home. The movie, like the destruction of native cultures, is full of paradoxes like these. The powerlessness of young girls arraided against the full brute force of the police and their legal papers, the fact that they are 'half-caste' who grew up hated by the full aboriginal kids, then torn from that by their father's culture who only wanted to turn them into domestic slaves. We cheer for the girls, we distaint the Aboriginal tracker who deserts his own people for the service of the conquerers, we cry with the mothers as they strike their heads with rocks to mourn their children's kidnapping. But we might miss the big picture if we look at them as the only victims of the system, for the huge imposing edifice of Western police, military, courts, governments is just the iceberg-like tip of a culture that imposed tools between people, which dehumanizes and manipulates its inhabitants into believing that theirs is the best of all possible ways of living. This is the big picture, the Aboriginal way of life, the culture as a testimony that humanity has not always lived this way, that it is not necessarily the only way to express our common humanity, that there were alternatives in the recent past. Before the machine destroyed them all.
Rating:
Summary: Superb
Review: The story, set in 1931, is of three young Aboriginal girls in Australia who are "half castes," --the offspring of an aboriginal mother and white father. They are abducted from their mother(s) and sent 1500 km to be raised in a government-run facility in a thoroughly misguided attempt to remove them from the possibility of having offspring with full-blooded aborigines. When they arrive at the facility, they are immersed in all things Anglo, and are even told to "stop talking that jabber" when speaking in their native tongue. The purpose of the facility is to turn out young girls who can work as maids and perform other menial jobs. It is a horrifying -- and TRUE story. The amazing part of the tale comes shortly after they arrive at the facility. They escape into the outback, and over the course of a couple of months, walk back to their village of Jingaloo and their families, using the 'rabbit-proof fence' as a guide. The filmmakers used three aboriginal girls who had never performed before, and who were familiar with many of the ways of the aboriginal people in order to provide an air of authenticity. It was superb, and the accompanying music was haunting and beautiful.
|
