A Lonely Place to Die opens by showing you it’s on a real mountain. You see Alison (Melissa George), Ed (Ed Speelers) and Rob (Alec Newman) scaling a face and it looks like it’s really them and it’s really high up. You see Rob winching up his ropes so they’re safe, and an upside down point of view when Ed takes a careless fall. That’s your Cliffhanger opening.

The trio meets up with Alex (Garry Sweeney) and Jenny (Kate Magowan) at a cabin and have some bonding drinking and poker. The defining characteristics are Ed complains a lot and Alex is the group A-hole. The next day, hiking the more foresty terrain, they find a tube sticking out of the ground. It’s a breathing tube for someone buried alive so they dig out a little girl, Anna (Holly Boyd).

The nearest town is 20 miles away, but it’s okay. All they have to do is scale down Devil’s Drop for a shortcut. Only Rob and Alison can make it down the drop so they split up and the other three take the girl. Soon Anna’s kidnappers are after them with sniper rifles.

The mountain climbing is intense. Someone could fall suddenly with no telegraphing or foreshadowing. Falling rocks come really close and you don’t even see where they’re coming from. Alison can’t even shout over the roaring rapids when she’s separated from the group. The sniper rifles are ever present and the shots can come out of nowhere.

The characters talk tech really well. I believe they know what they’re doing. Managing Anna is a dilemma and one tough guy has to climb on a hurt leg at one point. Anyone can go at any time. Well, not Alison because Melissa George is the above the title star, and not Anna obviously, but that’s still four for the picking.

It’s better than Sanctum, because it actually has momentum that someone who’s not an expert mountaineer will be affected by. The character types are just as one dimensional, but at least Alex risks himself for the group when you think he’s just going to be difficult.

Action Film of the year? No, but it’s an impressive hardcore thriller that definitely stands out from the competition at ActionFest.

Source

A suburban carpark has been littered with superstars as the tele-series The Slap continues filming around Melbourne. Spotted around the carpark of Melrose Receptions in Tullamarine were Melissa George, Alex Dimitriades and Jonathan La Paglia.

Source

In a recent interview,Melissa’s Swinging With The Finkels co-star Jonathan Silverman made a brief mention of our lovely lady.

With your career, you grew up with a lot of your comedy’s mainly. Would you say that’s kind of your forte, the comedy?

I suppose. I mean, I don’t want to say it comes easy for me, but I certainly enjoy doing it. Perhaps it comes more difficult for most. So I guess I tend to do more comedies than dramas. I love doing dramas, I, of course love doing stage, but for the most part, one way or another, I get cast in comedies more than anything else. I actually recently worked with the beautiful Aussie named Melissa George. We shot a film in England together playing husband and wife. It’s a picture with Martin Freeman and Mandy Moore which is coming out this summer. It’s called Swinging with the Finkels.

Source

While most people are focused on the catwalk this week, there is one fashion-watcher with eyes only for Melissa George.

The LMFF ambassador’s husband, Claudio Dabed, is in Melbourne and has been watching from the sidelines.

“Proud? I am in love,” he said with a smile at Alex Perry’s show this week. “The more time we spend together, the better it gets. When your partner shines, you appreciate them more.”

The pair were apart while George was in Melbourne filming The Slap for most of February.

Dabed stayed home in Buenos Aires, looking after their beloved pooch, Glee. But he left the dog in safe hands to be in Melbourne.

“My mum is taking good care of her,” he said.

Source: Herald Sun

Melissa George has headed home to Argentina with a suitcase full of our Aussie fashion.

The L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival ambassador was Down Under for a month, snapping up some of the latest looks.

She revealed she managed a few shopping trips between filming on ABC mini-series The Slap.

“I got some Dion Lee pieces, I got a beautiful Collette Dinnigan dress that was a limited edition, summer dress… just gorgeous,” she said.

George, who splits her time between New York and Buenos Aires, said she had fallen in love all over again with Australian fashion.

“They really take risks, a lot of the designers here. They’re more daring. We have got nothing to lose here. There are 20 million of us. We are not having to please 300 million people in the country like America or wherever.”

George is back in Argentina for almost a month, but will return to Melbourne on March 14 for the LMFF and to wrap up filming on The Slap.

Source: Herald Sun

The program launch for L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival

An invitation to Victoria’s Government House is like a gift from Tiffany’s, something not to be refused. That would explain why the grand building’s lawns were crammed with designers, models and the sponsorship suit set for the program launch of the 2011 L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival.

Project Runway presenter Megan Gale chatted with designer Alex Perry, Yeojin Bae quizzed Myer’s Mitch Catlin about her new stablemates sass & bide, while Samantha Harris represented David Jones, still fresh from the store’s launch the night before.

Formal proceedings began inside with a spectacular array of gowns by participating designers and sample-sized opera singer Janet Todd rattling the ballroom’s chandeliers. Then came the speeches, which most people spent looking at the beautiful Melissa George, the festival’s ambassador wearing Toni Maticevski.

“This is wonderful because I’m currently filming The Slap,” George said. “That role is about as far from fashion as you can get so this lets me explore another side.”

For creative director Grant Pearce the evening’s real triumph was the presence of designers such as Adele Palmer, from Melbourne’s past who will be celebrated at the festival’s opening event in March.

Source: Vogue Australia

Cast and crew were left in tears after filming the key incident on The Slap, Melissa George has revealed.

The L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival ambassador said making the ABC mini-series was proving an emotional experience.

George said the actual slap scene — shot last week in the northern suburbs — was intense.

“We were shocked,” she said. “We just went for it.

“It’s my little boy that gets slapped and I just forgot where I was, I think.

“I was just so devastated by what I didn’t really see but then I hear… and we’re all in the back yard and it’s all very messy and it’s all very… it’s just amazing.

“It was surprisingly emotional. The director was crying, the cameramen were wiping away tears. It was just really good, really good stuff.”

George stars alongside Sophie Okonedo, Jonathan LaPaglia, Sophie Lowe and Alex Dimitriades in the eight-part adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’s award-winning novel.

George said she would return to her home in Argentina next week and spend a month with her husband, Claudio Dabed.

She will return to Melbourne on March 14 for her duties with LMFF and to wrap filming on the mini-series.

Source: Herald Sun

First up, comedian Hannah Gadsby joins Adam to sort through the array of “setwarming” gifts from the audience. American stand-up comedian Arj Barker — who set the record for the most tickets ever sold at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival — headlines the guest list, while Australian of the Year, Simon McKeon, reveals how his childhood and an early diagnosis of multiple sclerosis directed his philanthropic life. Australian actress and Golden Globe nominee, Melissa George, whose career spans roles in Grey’s Anatomy, Mulholland Dr. and In Treatment, joins us straight from the set of the new ABC TV series The Slap, and gets into some trouble with a “dancing cat”.

Over the years ABC TV’s Gordon St Studios have seen musical performances from some of the best Australian bands on shows like Countdown and Recovery. Each week, these classic numbers will be revived by invited musicians. This week Countdown legend himself, James Reyne performs the Dragon hit, April Sun in Cuba, while 2010 ARIA Award-winner Dan Sultan closes the show with his hit single Letter. And there’s plenty of unexpected fun and games with the studio audience.

Source: ABC TV

Melissa George is a Golden Globe nominee and has a thriving Hollywood career, but there’s nowhere she’d rather be right now than Australia.

Yesterday the actress, who launched her career in Home And Away, was back home shooting the much-anticipated ABC drama series The Slap.

“I’m feeling good but missing my husband terribly and my dog Glee because usually when I shoot they come with me,” George said. “It’s hard, personally. In the last 12 months I’ve moved to New York, and shot one film in Scotland and one in London, and have been traveling a lot but to come home and work in Australia is great.”

The Slap, which also stars Sophie Okonedo, Essie Davis, Jonathan LaPaglia and Alex Dimitriades, is adapted from the novel by Christos Tsiolkas which traces the repercussions after a man slaps a child who is not his son at a barbecue.

Source: Herald Sun

The lively discussions sparked by Christos Tsiolkas’s divisive novel “The Slap” are set to continue. An eight-part mini-series based on the 2008 bestseller began filming this week.

At a barbecue in Melbourne’s inner-north, an obnoxious three-year-old is slapped by a man who is not his father.

As the novel drills down into the lives, backgrounds and relationships of eight friends and family who witnessed the event, The Slap turns into a searing dissection of today’s middle classes, multiculturalism, generational change, parenting and the fragile threads that link the characters to one another.

“It speaks to something that hasn’t been spoken to before,” says Tony Ayres, the AFI-winning writer-director of The Home Song Stories, whose company Matchbox Pictures is producing the mini-series.

”It holds a mirror up to Australia which we haven’t seen, which is ethnically diverse but which doesn’t actually take that diversity as a central issue.”

It’s a story about middle-class issues and values that’s unafraid of pushing buttons.

”The book doesn’t apologize for what people think and one of the real strengths for me in the novel is that it gives you access to people’s inner thoughts and is not in any way apologetic for those thoughts.

“I think that’s one of the things that makes it difficult for some readers and thrilling for others.”

At the center of the novel and mini-series are Hector and Aisha, at whose house the barbecue takes place, Hector’s Greek father, Manolis, Rosie and Gary, the parents of the slapped child Hugo, and Hector’s cousin, Harry, who delivers the contentious slap.

The mini-series has attracted a high-caliber cast, including Adelaide-born, US-based Jonathan LaPaglia (younger brother of actor Anthony) in his first local role as the narcissistic Hector, British actress Sophie Okonedo as the sensible but compromised Aisha, Melissa George as the flaky Rosie, Anthony Hayes as the surly Gary, Alex Dimitriades as Harry and Lex Marinos as Manolis.

Read full article.