In Her Skin Trailer: Sam Neill and Guy Pearce Finally do a Lifetime Movie
Every now and then a trailer comes along and offers a glimpse of a movie you had no idea you wanted to see, if only because you wouldn't have thought it could exist in a million years. Case in point: the trailer for this Australian thriller In Her Skin. Until now, I had no idea that there was any hope of getting a Lifetime movie starring Guy Pearce and Sam Neill. But here we are!
Just like Lifetime movies, this one is based on a true story - in this case about a beautiful 15 year-old girl who gets kidnapped and murdered by a jealous, disturbed and less-beautiful 15-year-old girl. The beginning of the trailer shows a few shallow glimpses of style and convoluted symbolism with a prolonged shot of the pretty one dancing around in a bright blue cape. By the end, we're looking at the disturbed girl's notebooks, which have phrases like "I hate myself" scrawled all over them in terrible handwriting. If not for the pedigree involved here, I would totally mistake this trailer for a movie-of-the week and not a supposedly-prestigious foreign film that IFC picked up for release.
But let's talk about the pedigree! Guy Pearce and Sam Neill! Those guys are great! I honestly consider watching movies with even one of those actors regardless of how terrible it looks. Put them in a movie together as two dads trying to pick up the pieces of their daughters' involvement in a murder and I'm totally in.
I suppose there's a chance that the trailer is misleading and this movie is actually poignant somehow. If so, bonus! But even if the trailer is dead on, recent experience has taught that we can learn a lot even from Lifetime movies. Surely, the wisdom will only deepen with guys like Pearce and Neill front and center.
Verdict: Sold.
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Your surprise is presumably symptomatic of not having seen many Australian films. They are almost universally terrible and are financed by the government to meet production quotas - not to make money or attract audiences. Occasionally a halfway decent one will miraculously slip through the cracks, which gives the impression internationally that the Australian film market operates like any other where quality is the imperative. This is an illusion. This movie doesn't look like a Lifetime movie. It just looks like an Australian movie.
Hey, thanks for the info! That doesn't really surprise me. In France, I've been seeing the new French movies that don't make it to the U.S. and most of them are rough.
My surprise here stemmed from the fact that it's actually getting a U.S. release and as far as I can tell, the cast is great.
I think this has some some historical truth to it, but the last few years have yielded an unusually strong crop of Australian films, starting with _The Proposition_ and threading through things like _The Square_, _Beautiful Kate_, _Samson and Delilah_, _Animal Kingdom_ or _Last Ride_. It also gave us the execrable _Bran Nue Dae_, which negates maybe a third of those, but still. Arguably it's better now than it's ever been -- no miracles necessary.
You're sorta proving my point S.T. That's six films in close to a decade.
Six!
And two of them (The Square and Animal Kingdon) are from the same group of people. I haven't seen Beauitful Kate but thought it looked like typical Australian crapola, though if you've grown up there you're probably more sensitive to the cliches.
Well, to be fair, that's six films in maybe five years, but I hear you. In any case when you talk to guys like David Michod or Glendyn Ivin, they recognize the terrible history and acknowledge ambitions to improve the film culture from within however they can. They're off to a good start! Of course they'll probably be directing comic-book movies by the end of the year, so... (Ultimately, America exports more crap cinema than anyone, right?)
Kind of. The American film industry makes crap with a capitalistic imperative. Movies don't have to be good, but they are expected to make money. For this reason even the bad American movies tend to succeed on at least some level as disposable entertainment. Such a culture produces it's fair share of mediocrity, but it also lavishes budgets and resources on great filmmakers, with a reasonable expectation that they will make a profit.
Australian films on the other hand (at least those with government funding) are required neither to be good nor profitable, so there is ZERO quality control. Films that qualify for production do so by meeting bureaucratically assigned criteria (like representing a uniquely Australian perspective - thus cliches about living in the bush ad nausea) or as a result of cronyism. All this would be bad enough, but it feeds into a culture where the ambitious, creative people move overseas, leaving the dregs to continue pounding the industry into the ground even further.
It's a devastating, cyclical nightmare. I welcome filmmakers like Michod, but I despair that others like him (and better) will never get the chance to make a movie. The situation will not improve before the funding bureaucracy is entirely dismantled. The industry has to die before it can be reborn.
Roy, you've got no idea what you're talking about. Australian filmmaking is in a great place at the moment, with the number of great - not good but great - films being produced remarkable. Go and watch Transformers.