ridiculous rating

Fresh and Exciting

Crappy film

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

A wonderful, black farce. The idea of an industrial chemist whose wife is killed by a refigerator accidentally dropped from an air cargo liner, learning to laugh about it under a starlight Australian outback sky with a woman on the run from a psycho is...well...perfect. If you don't like the opening premise -- his loving marriage is terminated by a dropped fridge from the sky -- you're not going to like this. But if you can stay with it, you'll find a perfectly constructed, slaptstick noir with wonderful views and extremely concise, clever dialogue. The bonus is a number of wacky twists and turns, including a very poisonous serpent and a sagging electric ceiling fan. And the very last picture is a beautiful technical tour de force which you'll love. Linus Roache underplays nicely, and the female lead is as sexily Australian as we always dreamed of. The seemingly cliched B-parts actually come to life. This is 'The Castle' with a star cast and a few extra million for effects. You miss it and you're a drongo.

Yesterday, in a Haymarket cinema in London, I watched "Siam Sunset", an australian movie starring Danielle Cormack (Ephiny in Xena) and Linus Roache. It's about this English guy (Linus Roache) who loses his beloved wife in a very stupid way (a refrigerator fell off a cargo plane and landed on top of her). From that moment, very weird things (mostly dangerous accidents) start to happen around him. He works creating color squemes for a paint company, but he suffers an acute depression following his wife's death and is given a long holiday to work through his pain. His personal quest for a very particular color, "Siam sunset", sets him off to a cheap tour of Australia with a bunch of wacky holidaymakers, from Adelaide to nowhere (they never get to Darwin, as planned), while he rediscovers love with a runaway australian girl, Grace, whose not very nice ex-boyfriend wants to find her at all costs (to inflict, we fear, as much pain as possible). You can see it coming: Grace and the Englishman fall in love, of course, and decide to live together happily ever after, and the Englishman finally find his Siam Sunset color. It's, after all, a small romantic comedy and shouldn't you have harboured bigger expectations, you'll like this movie. I did, it put a smile on my face.

I was a bit perplexed by the first half of Siam Sunset. It was trying to be a comedy, tradgedy and a serious piece all at the same time.The poor wife gets flattened by a fridge, people fall down stairs for no apparent reason, and in the meantime our hero is moaning about loss and strange things that happen, quite straight faced...

I enjoyed this movie. It isn't a classic, but its quirky black comedy should ensure a big following (how many films are about people killed by a fridge falling from the sky?!). As an Englishman living in Australia, I suppose it appealed, as that is the core of the film, and English chemical engineer winning a trip to Australia. The film shows great contrast between the two countries and duly ridicules both. Maybe you have to have been to Australia to appreciate the caricatures of the characters on Bill's bus trip, I'm not sure, but they're done superbly - but maybe act as a bit of a distraction in some ways. There's some excellent black humour, and the lead character's search for the perfect shade of paint is a harmless but involving aspect. I'm not sure the message director John Polson was trying to portray, but that didn't matter to me. If you know Australia and Australians, pay a visit to this film - you'll love it.