Praise

Praise the movie is a splendidly laid back version of Andrew McGahan's award winning best seller. The movie traces the odd love story between Gordon, the asthmatic heavy drinking under-achiever, and Cynthia, his energetic and demanding lover.

Cynthia, to Gordon's panic, expects sex 'every morning and every night' - "exhausting" is the way Gordon describes her. Set against the seedy boarding house where Gordon lives, the film explores the world of the socially displaced, and the under-motivated. It also looks at the way which relationships can implode despite the best intentions of its players.

McGahan's book Praise was the first of the 'grunge'fiction which swept through Australia (and other parts of the world) in the early 1990s. Despite the somewhat depressing story, the characters are depicted both in print and film with love, honesty and clarity. The performances of the actors in the film help the audience to like them both, and regard them with affection.

This film is a wonderful insight into a life that for many people is baffling - and for that reason alone should be regarded as an important Australian film.

I don't know who reads these things, but if anybody with any power or clout or interest could please note that this is a great film. Without a doubt much better than THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT or GO! or any other film you can name from last year's SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL.

I was one of the lucky audience members that was exposed to Curan's unique vision. Beauty was found in the most disgusting places.

It's been a year since I've seen this film. A number of my friends have had to read the book (which is available in the US) instead of watching miss Sacha Horler's performance --which apparently won her an award in Australia. Great job!

Please bring this film to America. I don't care if I need to order my own copy... this is not to be missed and, sadly, this entire country has missed out on it.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Great, thrilling, scarily intimate. In its first half hour, this astonishing Australian feature gets so close to its characters you feel the director is touching your skin. Gordon (Peter Fenton) is a type well known to people in that age between Bill Clinton and the Backstreet Boys: smart, alert, passive, asexual, easily emotionally manipulated. Cynthia (Sacha Horler) is a big girl with a big appetite for beer and the male organ; she needs sex desperately, helplessly, in the way a love-starved puppy races in circles in need of a touch. The movie records the birth pangs, first steps, clunky adolescence, and quick death of a relationship. Like Wong Kar-wai's HAPPY TOGETHER, most of it takes place in a crappy flophouse apartment. That's it--that's the movie. And every detail in it, from the stigmata-like blood flow of Cynthia's eczemous skin, to the fellatio in a milky bathtub, to the reaction of a horny couple to a violent row, is flawless.

The director, John S. Cullen, is all about getting it right, and so he does--to the point where you can find yourself mouthing aloud the dialogue seconds before it happens. This isn't because the movie is cliched; quite the opposite. It's because the movie gets things about falling in and out of love that no one--nobody, not even those who have made the Big Famous Movies About Sex--has hit. PRAISE seems to have had no luck in the theatres; perhaps it will live on in its IFC afterlife. All praise to Strand Releasing, the best distributors of foreign and independent movies in America. If you want to see a non-studio movie on a subject other than a cute boy and his grandpa, or a wily chef who woos all the ladies, you have Strand to thank for your satisfaction.

"Praise" is a slice-of-misery Aussie flick which looks into the waxing and waning of a relationship between a sexually obsessed woman and her taciturn and less experienced boyfriend while both languish in a life of self indulgence, sex, indolence, sex, drugs, sex and more sex. "Praise" is one of those films which slip between the cracks of public consciousness for want of broad market appeal and entertainment value while garnering critical and industry acclaim for its ability to faithfully portray difficult human issues. A good flick for adult cinema devotees who are as interested in execution as in content.

The term "loser" to an Australian ear has a nasty harsh American stridency to it which seems to absolve the person uttering it from any sympathy for the "loser" in question. Now Gordon and Cynthia are definitely "losers" but at the end of this film we see beauty in an otherwise fairly pathetic pair. Gordon, in his mid-twenties, a country boy who's drifted to the city, works in a bottle store and lives in a once grand but now squalid rooming house occupied by various broken-down old men. He meets Cynthia, a barmaid, at work and for no particular reason they both quit. She moves in with him when her military parents are transferred. Gordon's chief recreation is drinking, and hers is sex, and after a while Gordon is dreading going to bed. Yet something happens between them and affection grows, even though we can see it's hopeless. There is beauty even in a doomed relationship between two misfits.

Quite why their lives have become so aimless is not really explored; both seem to have untraumatic backgrounds and neither is really cut off from their families. Gordon's lost love Rachel appears towards the end but he's lost interest in her, too. Gordon is at home amongst the deros, prematurely old, out of steam, life over before it really got started.

It sounds depressing and it is, but the relationship is tender and warm - a less melodramatic version of "Leaving Las Vegas." The story is set in Brisbane, though apparently not filmed there, and the humid stifling summer atmosphere is well evoked. It doesn't really explain the lack of motivation though.