Must See Films!!

Again courtesy of the SMH
Our movies your children should see at school
August 4, 2005

Australian story ... Rabbit-Proof Fence is the only local film in the British top 50.
Australian critics and filmmakers offer their list of must-see movies for children. Alexa Moses reports.
Peter Castaldi and his 14-year-old daughter operate under a democratic cinematic regime. On Saturdays or Sundays when they both have time, they go to the movies. One visit, the pair see a commercial blockbuster chosen by Isabelle. The next, Castaldi chooses.
"I see one of her bad films and she sees one of my good ones," is how Castaldi puts it. "To begin with, I dragged her in kicking and screaming. Now it's less and less."
As a film critic and director of the Australian Film Commission's Big Screen touring film festival, Castaldi naturally believes cinema is crucial to children's development. So it was with pleasure that he read a list released by the British Film Institute late last month of 10 films the institute believes children should see by the age of 14. This cinema canon was chosen by filmmakers, teachers and the heads of children's film organisations across Europe.
Behind the list is a belief that adults have become overly restrictive about what children see. Discussion about children's viewing, the institute argues, should focus more on exploration than prohibition and censorship. There's also the task of deciding what age is the right age to see a particular film, and that's without factoring in the individual child's maturity. Castaldi, for instance, has been taking his daughter to see carefully vetted MA15+ films since she was 12.

While the institute's top 10 includes obvious picks such as The Wizard of Oz, ET and Toy Story, some of the offerings are more obscure: the Japanese film Spirited Away, the 1948 Italian classic Bicycle Thieves, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's romantic comedy Show Me Love, and the Charles Laughton classic The Night of the Hunter.
The list has been criticised for being too prescriptive, too fuddy-duddy, and for being heavy with films in which boys are the heroes. From an Australian perspective, it barely reflects our culture. Only one local movie made the top 50: Phillip Noyce's 2002 film Rabbit-Proof Fence.
Such a list, then, could be expanded to include other adventurous films that tell Australian stories - not necessarily made for children - that children under 14 could appreciate.
Castaldi loves the list, but would include more silent films, such as Buster Keaton's The General and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. If more Australian films were to be added, he would plug the 1976 film Storm Boy, adapted from a novel by Colin Thiele. Storm Boy is the only film that has been part of the Big Screen festival for five years.
Other Australian or semi-Australian films he believes would be appropriate for older children are the "quite scary" Picnic at Hanging Rock, and the movie Romeo + Juliet, directed by the Australian Baz Luhrmann, which made the British institute's top 50.
"Because it was financed overseas, Romeo + Juliet doesn't qualify as an Australian film, but it's so irreverent it could only have come from a country like Australia," Castaldi says.
Denny Lawrence, a filmmaker and the chairman of the Australian Film Institute, is also a fan of the British list.
"I think it's terribly important children see powerful adult stories as well as films aimed specifically for children," he says.
He would fight for Walkabout, from the director Nicolas Roeg, Looking for Alibrandi, directed by Kate Woods, and George Miller's Babe to be added, although the second Babe film is not usually considered Australian.
Dr Patricia Edgar, chairwoman of the World Summit on Media for Children, and founding director of the Australian Children's Television Foundation, feels the list has an overly European sensibility.
"But they're all life-affirming legends," Edgar says. "I think it's important for kids to see those sort of films."
She would add the comedy School of Rock, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Jack Black, to the list. "The pity is, you wouldn't be able to come up with a list of Australian films to actually match that," she says. "We don't have the same European tradition for making films for kids."
The Australian film she thinks children would enjoy is the 1957 film The Shiralee, starring Peter Finch, because of the strong child's perspective within the movie.
Peter Tapp, from the Australian Teachers of Media, which produces study guides for students and teachers about films and documentaries, reckons Australian children should take a look at the 1983 classic Careful, He Might Hear You, from the novel by Sumner Locke Elliott. He thinks older children might appreciate John Duigan's coming-of-age flick The Year My Voice Broke, starring Noah Taylor.
And the children? Admittedly, she's exposed to more art-house cinema than most teenagers, but Isabelle Castaldi says she's learning to appreciate her father's "different" films. She last took her father to see Madagascar, and he took her to the Australian film Peaches, which she loved. She adores Disney animation, and her favourite film of all time is Monty Python's Life of Brian, which she first watched when she was four. What she would love to see added to the list is the Australian film Looking for Alibrandi.
"I would use a list like that if people said they were good movies," Isabelle says.
"If it appealed to me, I'd definitely rent it."
THE BFI TOP 10
·Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948, Italy)
·ET The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982, US)
·Kes (Ken Loach, 1969, UK)
·The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955, US)
·Les Quatre Cents Coups (400 Blows) ( Francois Truffaut, 1959, France)
· Show Me Love (Lukas Moodys- son, 1998, Sweden/Denmark)
·Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001, Japan)
·Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995, US)
·Where is My Friend's House? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987, Iran)
·The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939, US)

AN AUSTRALIAN TOP 10
·Babe (George Miller, 1995)
·Careful, He Might Hear You (Carl Schultz, 1983)
·Looking for Alibrandi (Kate Woods, 2000)
·Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)
·Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002)
·Storm Boy (Henri Safran, 1976)
·The Shiralee (Leslie Norman, 1957)
·Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1992)
·Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)
·The Year My Voice Broke (John Duigan, 1987)

What? No Crocodile Dundee 3??????????