{"id":2813,"date":"2016-07-08T16:24:49","date_gmt":"2016-07-08T16:24:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2016\/07\/08\/last-cab-to-darwin-grim-yet-glorious\/"},"modified":"2016-07-08T16:24:49","modified_gmt":"2016-07-08T16:24:49","slug":"last-cab-to-darwin-grim-yet-glorious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2016\/07\/08\/last-cab-to-darwin-grim-yet-glorious\/","title":{"rendered":"Last Cab to Darwin grim yet glorious"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ken Eisner \/ Georgia Straight<\/em><\/p>\n

The subject of Last Cab to Darwin<\/em> might be pretty downbeat. Still, grimness doesn\u2019t dominate this gloriously shot road trip, which covers 2,000 kilometers of Australian outback and big swathes of the country\u2019s psychic geography, as well.<\/p>\n

For screenwriter Reg Cribb and writer-director Jeremy Sims, Darwin follows their homegrown hit Last Train to Freo<\/em>, from 10 years ago. Darwin<\/em> is adapted from Cribb\u2019s stage play, but it\u2019s mostly a pictorial mood-setter, with blood-red desert sunsets and golden-hour river swims backgrounding a career-high performance from The Castle<\/em>\u2019s Michael Caton.<\/p>\n

He plays taxi-driving Reg, who has never left the dried-up mining town of Broken Hill, in New South Wales, nor has he ever started a family. So there\u2019s no one to consult when his stomach cancer is found too late to save him. Sure, there\u2019s his neighbour Polly (Rabbit-Proof Fence<\/em>\u2019s Ningali Lawford-Wolf), an aboriginal woman he sometimes shares a bed with, although he keeps this a secret from his mates at the local pub\u2014where, shockingly, they still don\u2019t serve \u201cblackfellas\u201d, as Polly puts it.<\/p>\n

When Reg hears about a doctor up north (Animal Kingdom<\/em>\u2019s Jacki Weaver) who\u2019s fighting for the rights of sick people to die with dignity, he cleans up his cab and heads for Darwin. Along the way, he hooks up with a handsome young, mixed-race drifter called Tilley (movie-stealing Mark Coles Smith) who, despite being quite trouble-prone himself, helps Reg navigate the indigenous reaches of central Australia.<\/p>\n

At two hours, the movie feels a bit overstuffed with issues and plot contrivances; how handy to run into a beautiful English nurse (The Tudors<\/em>\u2019 Emma Hamilton) before hitting Darwin! But the actors never let artifice get in the way of the movie\u2019s deep well of human feeling. That acoustic-guitar score is mighty nice, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ken Eisner \/ Georgia Straight The subject of Last Cab to Darwin might be pretty downbeat. Still, grimness doesn\u2019t dominate this gloriously shot road trip, which covers 2,000 kilometers of Australian outback and big swathes of the country\u2019s psychic geography, as well. For screenwriter Reg Cribb and writer-director Jeremy Sims, Darwin follows their homegrown hit … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLast Cab to Darwin grim yet glorious - Thunderbird Entertainment<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2016\/07\/08\/last-cab-to-darwin-grim-yet-glorious\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Last Cab to Darwin grim yet glorious - Thunderbird Entertainment\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ken Eisner \/ Georgia Straight The subject of Last Cab to Darwin might be pretty downbeat. 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