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Best movie of this year hands down!

Sadly Over-hyped

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

In the backwaters of Australia, sisters naive Dimity Hurley (Miranda Otto) and older obsessive Vicki-Ann Hurley (Rebecca Frith) compete for an older creakily radio station DJ Ken Sherry. He's not pretty but the disconnected poetry spouting thrice divorced man is new in town.The sisters' relationship and their fascination with this man drive this movie. The movie is spiced up with good music. It's strangely compelling and fun. It's an odd little indie from down under.

This movie is a little gem in which all the odd ingredients come together to form a surprisingly spot-on depiction of Australian life for a large percentage of the population. It scores big points for depicting life in the fairly unglamorous and largely forgotten country towns. The two sisters, especially the Rebecca Frith character (why this movie didn't make her a superstar is a shock to me) are spot on. But where this movie makes the leap from good Aussie flick to comic gem is its lack of fear in being strange. I won't spoil the many surprising treats by giving any of them away here but I will say that if you're a fan of Preston Sturges, this movie is his unlikely Aussie bastard child.

"Love Serenade" is a quirky and original film. I'm reminded of Pauline Kael's remark about "Passport to Pimlico" - "comedy with a fine flavour." I'd never heard of this and only rented it because of a recommendation by David Stratton on the cover. And I'm glad I got it out - it's been years since I liked a film this much. It's generally quiet, but its off-kilter humour is really very funny, and its observations about the sexes are poignant and even disturbing. The soundtrack is a key factor; it's a great collection of smooth seventies soul tracks, but they're used ironically, and you feel a little guilty for enjoying them so much. The performances are really fine, too. In all it's a wonderful film and it needs to be seen.

Miranda Otto is, as always, superb as a socially deficient young woman living in a backwater town on the Murray which becomes home to the closest thing she's seen to a real-life celebrity: a disgraced, thrice-divorced former Brisbane DJ - and a sleaze to boot - becomes the town's new radio announcer. Otto and her older sister wage an hilarious war for the affections of the skinny, unnattractive man in his mid-40s, who has more than just a passing resemblance to a fish... Good Aussie film, Stratton gave it 4 stars (he must have seen something in it that I didn't), I'll give it 3 due to the slight lull in the middle. Rating: 7/10.