Walkabout

Outstanding! I've never before seen anything quite so casual about the mystifying totality of nature, and I don't think I'll ever watch another movie quite so deservedly stunned by the beauty of its own subject. Nicolas Roeg earns every inch of wilderness, every implausible wombat, every stolen glance at the Aborigine's bare ass. Even the dated, Easy Rider-ish psychedelia blends comfortably with the broader, calmer strategy of permeable montage and whoa-universe symbology. And Roeg controls the mood so expertly, so flexibly that you don't so much feel about the movie as refract its weird prismatic tone in reverse, absorbing individual emotions and emitting in their place something far more composite and incomprehensible. Anything that begins, as Walkabout does, with inexplicable infanticide and ends with obsolete economy wants a mighty instrument indeed. It has one in the Aboriginal one-legged hunting stick. (See above.)

Also, it may be the only film to explore the unspoken bond between British survivalist schoolgirls and their naked indigenous pathfinders. An astonishing oversight in l'histoire du cinema. Ahem, Jean-Luc?

Slothrop: Holy Porcupine! So Alice takes lots of LSD, falls into a Discovery Channel Hole, wears a ridiculously unfair school-girl outfit, seduces me with blood and sunsets, and quixotically punches every capitalist-weeny in the nose, almost. Might this be one of the most unexpectedly beautiful movies I've ever seen? And Koko, why do we still wear clothes? Slothy thought he had a sartorial conundrum for the first day of school... little did he know he's either never going to school again, or he's showing up flopping. This movie makes me feel embarrassed to use words. 88-95