morrison-dylan-fan Talking to a family friend about having greatly enjoyed the 2014 Aussie Neo-Noir film The Reckoning,I started to get told about an Aussie Noir title which he had been meaning to pick up for ages.Taking a look at Amazon Uk,I was happy to see a DVD of the movie being sold at a very cheap price,which led to me getting ready to wear the monkey's mask.The plot:Retiring from the police force, Jill Fitzpatrick decides to become a private detective. Receiving a call from out of the blue,Fitzpatrick is asked by the parents of Mickey Norris if she can track down their daughter,due to Norris having been missing for 2 weeks.Visiting the last place that Mickey was seen,Fitzpatrick discovers that Norris was involved in underground poetry groups.Getting hold of Noirris poems,Fitzpatrick is disturbed to find that most of the poems involve violent sexual imagery.Tracking down Norris poet teacher Professor Diana Maitland,Fitzpatrick sets her sights on uncovering the meaning behind Norris poems,but soon finds herself writing sonnets for femme fatale Maitland,who seems to have her eyes set on writing the final verse.View on the film:Adapting Dorothy Porter's "poems novel" (!),the screenplay by Anne Kennedy gives the title a distinctive,quirky vibe,thanks to Kennedy playing around with the traditional amateur male investigator role of Film Noirs,and also offering a number of tantalising genre crashes,which leads to the movie switching from gritty Neo-Noir,to sharp lesbian Drama.Whilst Kennedy does well at offering a unique take on Film Noir,the dialogue sadly takes the sheen off the movie,due to it having a blunt feel which infects the movie with an atmosphere of Kennedy being desperate to make the dialogue as harsh as possible,which leads to it being at odds with the intelligent outline that Kennedy has given Fitzpatrick.Being one of the few women to have directed a Neo-Noir, Samantha Lang shows Fitzpatrick's (played by a very good Susie Porter,who also appears naked in the movie)growing attraction towards Professor Diana Maitland (played by a terrifically brittle Kelly McGillis) in an eye-catching manner,by making the striking sex scenes lose clarity,as Fitzpatrick finds herself getting steamy for Maitland.Making glass a prominent feature of the film,Lang shows an impressively subtle skill in using the glass to reflect clues towards Fitzpatrick,which leads to Lang slowly pushing the glass to the front of the screen,and smashing it in a deeply stylised manner,as Fitzpatrick's realises that she has uncovered missing Norris lost verse.

co co The Monkey's Mask is not a great film. The plot is not originally made and the thriller last only half an hour. Anyway it is interesting for some reasons. The lesbian love between Jill and Diana is very well interpreted by both Susie Porter and Kelly McGillis (a bit over-aged for nude scenes). Even though the only remarkable detail which worth the vision of the movie is the superb erected penis showed by Marton Csokas at the end (almost) of the film. Csokas is pretty handsome: his realistic interpretation offers a spectacular "out of program" to the - till now - exhausted and annoyed watcher. This is why director Samantha Lang must be considered an innovative sex-showed-maker. Italian director Tinto Brass has been fighting for years to demolish any censorship and censure in movies for total realistic interpretations. It is important not to fall in vulgar images. Samantha Lang's style is very elegant. She has directed sex scenes with authentic good taste. Marton Csokas, here, is the husband of Poetry professor Diana/McGillis. He is a very pleased partner to his wife and try to seduce Jill also. Marton Cksokas seems to be accustomed to play strong roles (Rain and Asylum for example). To see Csokas' sex excited is an occasion not to lose. It would be grateful to see a sequel, possibly more involving than this, but starring Csokas and Porter again.

tfduckman Pretending to be open-minded is easy nowadays - see a lousy movie with some unhetero-sexual scenes in and You're in with the IN-crowd ... One day they'll probably let necrophiliacs marry too ! ("Married with Bundy" !) This is one of a bunch of movies trying to "normalize" homosexuality and in this lesbian case show how sickening and dangerous men are. The only problem with these obvious intentions are that the movie itself becomes sickening with prejudices and dangerous for true movies whether made by or about lesbians ... I haven't seen many, but even the slightly naive "Better Than Chocolate" (1999) is far better than this and the strangle-orgasm + a detective with close companion is twisted & copied - it can be found 7 years earlier om "Rising Sun" with Snipes/Connery !!!A terrible mistake not to have seen the plot mainly stolen from Michael Crichtons "Rising Sun", but nowadays anything which seems very woman-centralized gets hailed as a "brave new girl" ...No, I felt the acting was artificially "correct" and the story tried to be light and funny at times, but it collapsed mostly and a heavy rotten biased smell remained ... But the women seemed more potent than the men and refreshingly bed-active ! :-)LOLJay Thomson680 wrote : *******************************************************************And what was the point of Jill's closing line: "Forget the bitch"? Porter didn't mention that. Was its inclusion to comfort the (conservative, hetero, etc) viewer that the dangerous dyke relationship is over, and we can all sleep nice and easy. Worrying stuff, indeed.******************************************************************* *******************No, it's not a conspiracy to comfort non-homosexual or other strange people ... It's very simple - Jill says to herself (like a true private dick, erh, I mean dyke) that she should find another woman and forget the love for Diana that still lingered on after she broke up ... but "Worrying stuff" ? Only for people who watches "little doctor on the prairie" !

matthew Let me state first of all that I liked this film. It revolves around a female PI who is investigating the disappearance of young student poet who is later found murdered. She becomes involved in an affair with the student's teacher who may or may not be involved in the murder. It flows quite well maybe abit slowly for some but to me this is the right pace. The movie is delineated into sections much like a poem and in some ways the lead (admirably played by Susie Porter) seems to float through this world of poetry readings, steamy love trysts and threatening phone calls a player yet somehow disassociated from it all.There were however some things that annoyed me a little about the whole film and while they didnt spoil it for me they nevertheless grated on me. Susie Porters character though solidly played nevertheless did not ring true to me. She is meant to be a working class ex-cop familar with the mean streets of Western Sydney now navigating her way through this bunch of artsy intellectual types. She didnt quite ring true to me - she almost seemed part of that crowd herself - her outsider status wasnt obvious to this viewer.I found the some of the use of nudity and sexual profanity abit try hard. What I mean by this is that it was almost abit forced.To me It looked as though it was saying look how comfortable we are in showing nudity etc,I suspect it was almost there to spice things up rather than being integral to the plot (to be fair a pretty hard line to draw on many occasions).I also found the whole characterisation of the murdered girl and her parents abit annoying. The parents are cardboard carictures of what inner city intellectuals view the suburbanites (with money) as -dull boring and clueless , & the murdered girl is portrayed as some spoilt little brat from the leafy suburbs on a parent subsidised rebellion - another cliche. I find this more than a little ironic as the subject matter of this film is likely to draw an audience (in Australia anyway) that is largely the arthouse end of the market (ie monied and educated) Anyway these points though somewhat annoying to this viewer really are only minor distractions.Overall the film is worth seeing.