Andreas (Bud Tingwell) and Claire (Julia Blake) were lovers in Belgium, soon after the Second World War. More than fifty years later, after the death of Andreas’ wife, they meet again in present-day Adelaide. Although both are over 70, they fall in love all over again. Through their relationship they discover wisdom and the joy of life – despite the anger of Claire’s husband (Terry Norris) and the inevitable shadows of sickness and death.

Innocence.2000.DVDRip.x264.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 35mn
Size:	1.60 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	706x466 ~> 828x466
Aspect ratio:	16:9
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	1 945 kb/s
Audio
English 5.0ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/CEF95C089C12871/Innocence.2000.DVDRip.x264.mkv

https://rapidgator.net/file/37dbebb8818ed061eb0df53da650fa7d/Innocence.2000.DVDRip.x264.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, Spanish, French

The post Paul Cox – Innocence (2000) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Once upon a time there was a spoilt, directionless woman called Georgina Oliphant (Claudia Karvan).

To relieve the boredom associated with being an heiress, Georgina has commissioned a sculpture using her father’s money. Foreseeing a healthy tax deduction and a chance to honour his dead wife with a new wing in the state gallery, her father George (Chris Haywood) indulges her. Georgina’s friend, Lily Carmichael (Victoria Eagger), is engaged to create the work.

Lily is a sculptor of international standing but has been shunned in her own country. This commission offers her the prefect opportunity to create a work that will win her local acclaim.

Karl-Heinz (Nicholas Hope) is thrilled to get the job as the artist’s model. His wife, Cecilia (Gosia Dobrowolska), is heavily involved in a New Age religious organisation represented by Baba Charles (Norman Kaye), and as well as working in the cult’s store, is embracing purity of the mind and body. Karl-Heinz isn’t.

All is going well until the end of the financial year looms and George’s tax problems are bigger than originally thought. A man not afraid to make a decision, he decides to enlarge the solution to a two-figure David and Bathsheba level.

A furious Lily frantically tries to find another model, but George has thought of this as well, and is determined it won’t be his young office squeeze Anna (Ulli Birvé). Unfortunately for Cecilia, she’s it! Georgina drops a drug in her cup of tea, and suddenly Cecilia has the hots for posing nude and for her husband.

However when she finally works out what is going on, she makes a few decisions of her own …shaking down George for enough cash to buy a dream cottage in the Adelaide hills hamlet of Hahndorf, only to discover that Karl-Heinz now prefers being tugged off under the restaurant table by Georgina while dining with the rich.

Furious, Cecilia smashes up the statue, forcing Karl-Heinz and Georgina to pose live for a pretentious art critic (Max Gillies), blathering about Lucian Freud and promising front page treatment…

In this story about art, money, sex and revenge, everybody tries to manipulate somebody and everybody gets screwed!

The cover also boasted of special appearances by Robert Menzies, Bryan Dawe, John Hargreaves, Max Gillies, Wendy Hughes and Pamela Rabe.

Lust And Revenge (Paul Cox 1996).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 29 min
Size: 	1.27 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	722x504 ~> 722x541
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 872 kb/s
BPP: 	0.206
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC

https://nitro.download/view/038B9AE525DB1AA/Lust_And_Revenge_(Paul_Cox_1996).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles.none

The post Paul Cox – Lust and Revenge (1996) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“Paul Cox (“My First Wife”/”A Man of Flowers”/”The Golden Braid “) helms an interesting romantic drama about diverse cultures meeting on equal terms. It’s set in Melbourne, Australia, where the earthy Kostas (Takis Emmanuel), a journalist in the old country but who is now forced to drive a cab to survive. Kostas is depicted as a sensitive man of hot Greek passions, well-educated and of a good upbringing who currently lives in a dumpy boarding-house. The exile lives a peaceful but depressing existence, but things perk up when he picks up one of his fares. Carol (Wendy Hughes) is a native born pretty divorcee of the upper-crust, who despite embarrassed by Kosta’s vulgarity is still attracted to him. How the couple manage to relate to each other makes up the heart of the film and gives the viewer a chance to look at the clash over cultures through their eyes.

Like all Cox films, the background music is well chosen, the acting is superb and the story is intelligently presented.”

Kostas (Paul Cox).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 30 min
Size: 	1.33 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	692x576 ~> 983x576
Aspect ratio:  	1.708
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 910 kb/s
BPP: 	0.192
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/735321557DD2189/Kostas_(Paul_Cox).mkv

Language(s):English, Greek
Subtitles:English hard subs where needed

The post Paul Cox – Kostas (1979) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Two woman, the elder in her early forties. the younger in her twenties. They are good friends. The older woman. Sarah, is an artist, a painter, who has first and foremost found solace and sexual fulfillment in her work. The young woman, Christine who often models for Sarah’s art classes. is heartbroken about her lover: the man does not understand her.
We watch the close rapport between the two women as Christine patiently poses for Sarah’s rather whacky group of students. After classes, Christine talks about her relationship with Roderick. ” I used to really like him. Sometimes I still do”. He’s even jealous of her posing for art classes. Says she doesn’t have the body.
We see Christine at home with her boyfriend. It is hardly a scene of passion and love. Their lovemaking is routine… As complete contrast, we see Sarah’s illicit rendevous with her married lover, Stewart. Abandoned and carefree passion. Sarah persuades Christine to join her for a weekend in her country house in the hills outside Melbourne. For the first time, Christine smiles. She discovers a trampoline in the middle of a meadow filled with yellow flowers. She chases wild horses through the fields and the two of them scream with delight as they rush back to the house In the evening, they relax in front of the fire. Sarah gently massages Christine. Their weekend is over, Christine returns to the city totally self-contained in her newly found sensuality and freedom.

350MB | 25m 59s | 688×416 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/15BF1BE4A633696/Paul_Cox-Touch_Me_(1993).avi

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Paul Cox – Touch Me (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
“The old woman has just come from attending a funeral and knows her own is not far in the future. She is speaking with the young nurse who visits her daily. The actress, Sheila Florance, could be describing herself. She is bone thin, her arms like sticks, her face deeply lined. She was once a great beauty, but now what she has left is character.

Paul Cox’s “A Woman’s Tale” (1991) tells the honest, brave and profoundly touching story of the last days of a 78-year-old woman named Martha (Florance), who lives with her memories and treasured possessions in a few rooms in a Melbourne rental complex and defiantly guards her independence. She knows she is dying and has shrugged off the last course of cancer treatment. She is in pain, but doesn’t complain, and spends her days taking care of others: Billy, her senile neighbor, surrounded by his memories of the war; Miss Inchley, a sweet old lady as innocent as Martha is knowing; and even, in a way, her nurse Anna (Gosia Dobrowolska).

The movie looks calmly and with love at the fact that life ends. It provides not one of those sentimental Hollywood deaths, poetic and composed, but a portrait of a woman who faces her decline with fierce pride. Florance herself was dying when the movie was made, knew it and died a few days after winning an Australian Academy Award as best actress in 1991.

She was a grande dame of the Australian theater, a friend of Paul Cox’s since the 1970s, and the film plays like her final testament — not least since some of Martha’s memories are actually her own. She describes an aerial dogfight during the Battle of Britain, and it becomes immediate for us: The lumbering German bombers, the little Spitfires appearing out of nowhere, the noise! the noise! of the roaring engines and the guns and the explosions, and the shreds of airplane and body parts raining down on those below.

Martha is very ill, but gets around. She helps poor Billy (Norman Kaye), who is forever locking himself out of his room or wetting his pajamas. She is a good companion for Miss Inchley, who is 90, taking her for walks in the park, where they chat with Martha’s friend, the local prostitute. (“Do you know what a whore is, Miss Inchley?” “Isn’t that a rude word?” “Yes, it is.”) Martha’s nights are sleepless, and she passes them with her cigarettes and her cat, Sam, listening to talk radio. When a suicidal 16-year-old girl phones in, Martha calls to speak with her, to tell her how much there is to live for.

Martha’s son, Jonathan (Chris Haywood), cares for her, but is very busy and has a wife who has long since fallen out with Martha. Jonathan thinks his mother would be better off in a nursing home. “Do you know how hard we work to keep these people out of homes?” asks the nurse Anna. She fights for Martha’s independence because she respects it; she loves the old woman and has become like her daughter. Martha, in turn, lets Anna use her bedroom for an affair the nurse is having with a married man. “I’m going to die in this bed,” she says, “and I want you to love in it.”

Billy has a daughter, who never visits him. “We saw him at Christmas,” the daughter tells Martha. “That was the one day we didn’t see him,” Martha replies tartly. She is a woman of power and confidence, a woman who insists on her dignity when the world wants her to give up and admit she is sick and go off somewhere convenient to die.

What a feisty defense she makes of her cigarettes in a no-smoking restaurant! She hides the worst of her pain from everyone, but we see her wracked with agonizing spells of coughing. In a scene of extraordinary courage, Cox and Florance show us Martha naked in her bath, her body pitifully gaunt, her mouth that must once have been so sensuous, now without lipstick, an anguished slash in a wrinkled face.

Her memories are of the war, when she was in Britain. “In Bristol,” she tells Anna, “my 10-month-old baby was killed. A German dropped a bomb, and her lungs exploded.” There is a nightmare in which she wanders in a wood, and restless dreams of falling water. She visits a waterfall with Miss Inchley and observes how the water seems to pause for a moment at the precipice, before disintegrating into exploding, falling drops, only to reassemble at the bottom as if nothing had happened. Is that what happens when we die? “A Woman’s Tale” is too realistic and tactful to make such a greeting card statement; it allows us to conclude what we will about Martha and her story.

The performance by Dobrowolska is essential to the film’s impact. We see that she is efficient, a good visiting nurse, but that isn’t the point. The point is that she loves and admires Martha and will fight for her, and Dobrowolska brings a natural, unforced sweetness and tenderness to the role. “How I envy your youth!” Martha says, and Anna smiles and says, “I’m not that young.” Ah, but she is, and Martha tells her, “Life is so beautiful. Keep love alive.”

Anna visits old Billy every day, and one day Billy’s hand touches her cheek and then falls slowly toward her breast. Anna removes it, and tells Martha, “Billy tried to touch my breast.” “Oh, dear, why didn’t you let him?” Martha says. “What difference does it make?” This conversation results in a later scene that is sweet, sad and quietly moving.

When I say that Florance’s performance is courageous, I do not mean simply that she made the movie even though she was dying. That took strength and resolve, but what takes courage is to reveal her character as she does, to let us see Martha stripped of vanity. All women, actresses especially, want to look their best; Florance shares her frail body with us like a sacrament.

The character’s vanity, we realize, is expressed not through her appearance, but through her independence, through her determination to fight through every day without giving up and going off to an institution to die. That she cares for Billy and Anna and Miss Inchley and the girl on the talk radio is her reason for holding on: She can still be of use, and that’s worth living for.

Paul Cox is one of the heroes of modern cinema, a Dutch-born Australian who makes his way independently of the mainstream production and distribution channels. In a world of fiercely marketed product and manufactured cinematic artifacts, his films embrace all the wonder and complexity of everyday human life. Consider his “Man of Flowers” (1983), also starring Norman Kaye (who is in most of his films), as a particular and eccentric man who lives alone, and pays for sex in a way that, once we understand it, becomes touching (to know all helps us to forgive). Or his “Vincent” (1987), one of the best documentaries ever made about an artist, and his “Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky” (2001), an almost surreal effort to penetrate the mind of the great dancer. Or his wonderful “Innocence” (2000), with its evocation of a romance that begins between two teenagers and continues when they meet again in old age.

His new film, “The Human Touch,” played at Cannes 2004. It deals with a love affair, but a very particular one, between an uneasily married woman and a brilliant older man who is impotent, but whose caresses excite her as never before. All well and good, but who but Cox would think to transport his characters from Australia to France, and send them into a cave that is 110 million years old, where they are awed by the distance between their brief lives and lusts and the overwhelming span of time that humbles them? Directors like Cox validate the cinema in an age of commercialism; his struggle to carry on making his films his way shows the same kind of courage that Martha has in “A Woman’s Tale.” He knows he can be of use.”
– Roger Ebert

739MB | 1h 32m | 640×464 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/4977171F0C2D83C/A_Woman’s_Tale.avi

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Paul Cox – A Woman’s Tale (1991) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The wealthy Edward (Haywood) sparks to Anna (Mckenzie), the lead voice in a choir that’s raising money for an upcoming trip to China. He donates money to her choir, and she agrees to sit for him for a series of still-life drawings. As Anna is drawn more into Edward’s life, their relationship — quite platonic — nevertheless causes problems at home for Anna, who lives with David (Blabey), a frustrated artist.

822MB | 1h 37m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/7EB200879E9C11F/Human_Touch_(Paul_Cox,_2004).mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Paul Cox – Human Touch (2004) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Though art is not my specialty, I do love to wander around a museum. It’s not something I do often, but I get that itch to surround myself with works that have stood the test of time. Gazing at such beautiful art stirs pangs of jealousy that I’m not able to do such things myself. But I know my limitations, and I will simply allow myself an occasional stroll through the controlled environment of my local museums. Shamefully, while I lived just outside of Washington D.C., I spent just one afternoon in its superb Smithsonian Museum of Art; and, on a recent trip to New York City, I nearly ran through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Ohio, where I have spent most of my life, the museums in Cleveland, Dayton, and Cincinnati don’t have the works we’d all like to see. I am actually quite selective in what I like, and that tends toward realism, impressionism, and a touch of surrealism. Contemporary art, cubism, and other abstract forms irritate me and implore me to return to the rooms that showcase works created before the twentieth century.
“The Starry Night” is by far Van Gogh’s best-known work, and the self-removal of his left ear is by far his best-known personal undertaking, but what else do you know about this master artist who created 1,800 pieces in just a decade? This wonderful documentary by Paul Cox, Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh, is a superbly yet simply crafted film that will give you exquisite insight into the passion of an artist. Eschewing the tried and true—and boring—fashion of focusing on the artist’s works while detailing his biography, this documentary takes a different approach. Instead, John Hurt reads excerpts from the hundreds of letter Van Gogh wrote to his younger brother, Theo. Through these letters, you truly begin to understand the drive and passion of Van Gogh. You feel his sadness, his happiness, his joy, his fascination with color, and his appetite for art. From his own words, you begin to understand what motivates this man. Why did he become an artist? Why did he paint as he did? Why did he commit suicide? This documentary is rife with details on Van Gogh’s life, yet it doesn’t dwell on the morbid aspects—the lopping off of his ear and his suicide.
The simplicity of the narrative of this film belies the complexity of its tale. Only because we’re fortunate enough to have so many communiqués from the artist could Cox create such a film. And we are all the more fortunate because of this rare first-person glimpse into the mind of the artist. Even though it is leisurely paced, Vincent will instantly captivate you and hold your attention. But what are you actually looking at while Hurt reads these letters? Most often it’s the scenery of Van Gogh’s homeland, which mirrors and elaborates on the words of the letter. There’s an occasional re-creation of what Van Gogh is writing, and these are a touch on the trite side. Of course, also included are plenty of Van Gogh’s works, from his earliest sketches to his most famous of works.
I found myself disappointed by one thing, and that is the quality of the DVD. The full-frame video is ill suited to the rare beauty of Van Gogh’s art. You’ll find colors washed out, muted, pale, and mostly inaccurate—with a skew toward blues. The picture is also dark, hazy, dirty, murky, and marred by shimmering and flicker. It’s a shame that such a sublime work is ruined in this way. The audio track is acceptable—compared to the video—as Hurt’s voice is rich and deep, yet you can hear a slight hollowness throughout.
This troubled film is described in detail in “A Journey with Paul Cox” (55 minutes). In this piece you get a solid overview of the director’s life and insight into how it influenced his work. You’ll also see where all his films come into play, including the quandary he faced upon Vincent’s release. I wish this featurette had been pared down to focus more on Vincent, as I don’t care to learn all that much about Paul Cox. Also included are a filmmaker bio, a bio for Van Gogh, and a catalog of other discs from Docurama.
There is no bang. There is no oomph. This is a simple story with a rich tale. If you have any interest in the art world or quality documentaries, then you will delight in this movie. Despite its vulgar transfer, I’m still giving it a recommendation.

from the extras, “A Journey with Paul Cox” (55min):

1.79GB | 1h 35m | 700×525 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/A43EF4535F85A4B/Vincent_(1987)_-_DVD.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/5CD52CC5AEDD542/A_Journey_with_Paul_Cox.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Paul Cox – Vincent [+Extras] (1987) first appeared on Cinema of the World.