"What do you do when you don't have a choice."16 March 1996Drama85 mins
Marty Fine is a small-time man with a big-time dream. One night, the ex-middleweight fighter sees something he shouldn't have - a mob hit. An old gangster offers a deal: Marty can save his own skin by committing a murder, or be killed himself. When push comes to shove, Marty can't kill the mark, a scamming club owner. Now the clock is ticking and Marty is on the ropes, with one last chance to prove he is still a man with a choice.
Teenager, Clare Steves, is kidnapped by an old boyfriend, Eddie Spencer, who demands $250,000. The ransom is paid and Clare is released, but when the kidnapers are caught, they claim that the whole scheme was Clare's idea as a way to punish her father.
BEAUTIFUL FUNERALS is a hand-painted double-step-printed film composed of 1) dense blackness variously punctuated by brilliantly colored jewel/flower-like shapes AND 2) interruptive white sections which are fuzzily dotted with blurred whites and criss-crossed by black "brushstrokes" and hard-edge straight black and white lines.
A jaded Lower East Side couple have become bored of straight sex, in a bid to spice things up, they decide to imitate some rough sex scenes as seen on TV.
Set on May 18, 1993—the day on which Denmark voted to join the European Union, just a few months after they'd voted not to do so—the film follows eight or so disparate Danes (an escaped mental patient, a newly-famous singer, a business executive, and their assorted families and cohorts) as they unwittingly alter one another's lives, for better and for worse.
Australian-born filmmaker George Miller offers a personal view of Australian films. He suggests that they can be regarded as visual music, public dreaming, mythology, and song-lines.
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