I don't understand the reviewers who said "The film wouldn't be worth comment", "confused ... turkey (apart from one actor's performance)", "just plain terrible". For me the praise for the actors in the brother & sister roles is about the reviewers' obsessions rather than the movie. There's no confusion in the story, which is also quite eventful (if bizarre, and with a real dark twist, at the end); it's quite funny once you stop caring too much about the corruption first of a family and then of a whole town by a newcomer.
For me, Sandra Bernhard was at first a little bit too far from drop-dead gorgeous to be the obvious casting in the title role, but then I decided this was deliberate because it was her character's sheer brass neck and outrageous behaviour that won over all those small town Australians, not physiognomic perfection.
I reckon Ann Turner's story and the way she tells it are, overall, just right. It feels a little slow to start with but if you pay attention what is happening is quite quick: Dallas takes over a family and their home, persuades them to sell up and move to a farm, then takes over the town. From an outsider who arrives out of the blue on a plane from America, one by one she gets the family, then the townspeople to depend on her, dote on everything she says, and do whatever she decides she'd like them to. At one moment she remarks to someone that the town mayor, who has held the office for years and is likely to go on a lot longer, is an obstacle to her. The next thing we see is that she's putting him in a position where he doesn't want to be mayor any more and promptly resigns; the clever -- and entertaining -- part is how she does this, and the fact that he feels she has done him an enormous favour getting rid of him, rather than the reverse. Not only that, but she ends up as the most powerful person in the town herself. That episode takes a few minutes. The story is full of quirky little sub-plots, well observed in their execution.
This story is part sex farce, part morality tale, part comedy fantasy -- and part black comedy, in a way. There are some slow bits, and some of those interludes without dialogue where the action soundtrack is replaced by what is presumably one of the director's favourite popular music soundtracks. Despite these it's an entertaining story well worth viewing, certainly more so than a lot of the rubbish that fills TV schedules these days.
For me, Sandra Bernhard was at first a little bit too far from drop-dead gorgeous to be the obvious casting in the title role, but then I decided this was deliberate because it was her character's sheer brass neck and outrageous behaviour that won over all those small town Australians, not physiognomic perfection.
I reckon Ann Turner's story and the way she tells it are, overall, just right. It feels a little slow to start with but if you pay attention what is happening is quite quick: Dallas takes over a family and their home, persuades them to sell up and move to a farm, then takes over the town. From an outsider who arrives out of the blue on a plane from America, one by one she gets the family, then the townspeople to depend on her, dote on everything she says, and do whatever she decides she'd like them to. At one moment she remarks to someone that the town mayor, who has held the office for years and is likely to go on a lot longer, is an obstacle to her. The next thing we see is that she's putting him in a position where he doesn't want to be mayor any more and promptly resigns; the clever -- and entertaining -- part is how she does this, and the fact that he feels she has done him an enormous favour getting rid of him, rather than the reverse. Not only that, but she ends up as the most powerful person in the town herself. That episode takes a few minutes. The story is full of quirky little sub-plots, well observed in their execution.
This story is part sex farce, part morality tale, part comedy fantasy -- and part black comedy, in a way. There are some slow bits, and some of those interludes without dialogue where the action soundtrack is replaced by what is presumably one of the director's favourite popular music soundtracks. Despite these it's an entertaining story well worth viewing, certainly more so than a lot of the rubbish that fills TV schedules these days.