Another review

This movie is sort of "Blair Witch Project" meets "Crocodile Dundee" - kids in Australia vanish mysteriously, never found, fictitious story that many people believed was real (I do not, however, believe there was a www.picnicathangingrock.com.) On Valentine's Day, 1900, a bunch of girls from a finishing school in Australia traipse off into the outback for a picnic, and a bunch of 'em disappear, along with one of the teachers, and all hell breaks loose.

I would survive probably about ten minutes as a woman in 1900. I'd take one look at that corset and say "Please transport me to 1999 right now, thank you very much." Daintiness is not my strong point. Plus the fact that you have to traipse around in delicate white dresses. I refuse to wear white below my waist anymore. I won't go into the gory details, but it involves monthly womanly functions arriving two weeks early while wearing white sweatpants.

So all the finishing school girls get hauled off into the middle of nowhere for a picnic. After they're allowed to take off their gloves to combat the warm weather (remember, it's 1900), they toast St. Valentine and eat their cake which is later shown swarming with ants. (Ants! Ants! Where's Kyle MacLachlan when you need him?)

No offense to all you Southern Hemisphere folk, but it'd be really weird to live in a place where Christmas is in the middle of summer and it can be really, really warm on Valentine's Day (and I don't mean like in Rochester, where it can be 70 on 2/14, but rather that it's a given that February will be warm). I remember when I saw Muriel's Wedding that the wedding shop lady asked when Muriel's wedding was, she said "November" and the lady's response was "Oh, a spring wedding" and I thought " No, wait! November's fall and it's crappy weather and there's usually snow and...oh, Australia." Of course, people in the Southern Hemisphere probably think it's really weird to live in a place where you wish for snow on Christmas. (And everyone in the world probably thinks it's really weird to live in Rochester, NY, where "Winter" means "October-May".

There are two guys who are held in suspicion of the girls' disappearance, Dorky English Guy and Cool Australian Guy (Even if He Does Have Hat Hair). Dorky English Guy is really a big weenie - he goes racing through the outback to find the oh-so-fair Miranda but ends up with a big cut on his head. Cool Australian Guy, however, finds one of the girls and is a hero (at least to me). After I thought about this movie for a while, I realized it's just another movie where the Beautiful People are held to God-like status whereas the average people are forgotten. Miranda is considered a Botticelli angel. Articles in the newspaper we see about the four missing girls are headed up with her picture. When Irma miraculously returns, the other girls' only concern is "Where's Miranda?" I don't even remember the name of the other chick, the girl with glasses who is also missing. Apparently because she's not a Botticelli angel, no one else cares.


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