Little Fish

I have long been a fan of Aussie cinema, well, Aussie TV too if I'm crashingly honest. 'Neighbours' probably saved me from post natal depression 20 years ago and more recently, 'Kath and Kim' captured my attention. I wish it would come back.

Last night we watched an Aussie film called 'Little Fish'. I had rented it simply on the cast, I'd watch anything with Cate Blanchett in it - which should keep me busy, she has four films due out in 2006 and two more already filming for 2007. But alongside fellow Aussie Hugo Weaving and part-time Brit, part-time Antipodean Sam Neill,that movie was definitely coming home with me.

As an aside, I found out something interesting about Hugo Weaving, he was born in Nigeria the year we left.

It didn't let me down either. I am awed that actors of their calibre are happy to just go home and make a movie where they all look like shit and are just...well, totally Australian. I find Australian films incredibly unpretentious and with a dry sense of humour. Real Canadian films are like this too. Hollywood - eh, not so much, depends on the director.

Yet another American film that was shot here in Canada was 'An Unfinished Life'. I have become very wary of films involving Robert Redford in case he has had too much input into the creative development of them. 'The Legend of Bagger Vance' was one such and possibly the dullest film I have ever seen, although I was on an aircraft otherwise I'd have walked out. On SNL last night someone joked with Tom Hanks that 'Terminal' was such a boring movie that people watching it on an aircraft were walking out.

But Unfinished Life was directed by Swedish great Lasse Hallström, he of 'Chocolat' and 'The Shipping News' amongst others and this film was lovely, even La Lopez was good in it. I don't find Jennifer Lopez to be an awful actor, just one who has made some horrible choices.

Getting away from the cinema, some little fish have powerful minds. I wonder if people the world over know the name of Baroness Mary Warnock. I'd be interested to find out. Mary Warnock has been a teacher, philosopher and writer for donkey's years. I would say she is one of the world's leading minds in the arena of Ethics. The Warnock committee was set up to debate the ethical problem of IVF and embryo research. How incredible, and this from a Tory government at the time, to have this issue debated not by politicians, but by people actually qualified to do so, by philosophers.

Today in the Observer, Baroness Warnock has written a superb piece about assisted suicide . She is such an objective thinker. My greatest fear is that she is now 79 and her mind will be lost to us at some point. But then, she has taught many other great minds in her time at Oxford, perhaps some student of hers will lead us even further. All teachers hope that their students will be greater than them. Yep, sweeping generalisation, but I stick by it.

Lastly, in Friday's Guardian, the story of a true old-fashioned British heroine. Karen Darke, a paraplegic since an accident in 1993, is going to be crossing Greenland's icecap. I quote,
"Though it is not Darke's first major expedition since her climbing accident - she has kayaked Alaska's inner passage, and hand-cycled both the length of Japan and across the Karakoram mountain range in Pakistan - it is set to be her toughest."
Courage and tenacity. That's what we were brought up on in Britain, tales of derring-do, fed to us to stop us whining, 'whingeing POMS' as the Aussies were wont to call us. Well Karen Darke's newest adventure, set to start tomorrow, will certainly stop me squinnying. If she can cross Greenland without the use of anything from the chest down, I can cross metaphorical wastes with everything intact.