Water For Elephants/Australia Robert Pattinson 2012 New DVD Top-quality

Double bill of historical dramas. ‘Water for Elephants’ (2011) follows the adventures of a young vet working in a travelling circus during America’s Great Depression in the 1930s. After his parents are killed in a car accident, promising Ivy League student Jacob Jankowski (Robert Pattinson) suffers an emotional breakdown and runs away before graduating, eventually finding work as a vet with the down-at-heel Benzini Brothers circus. There he meets a host of colourful characters including tyrannical animal trainer August (Christoph Waltz) and his beautiful wife Marlena (Reese Witherspoon). In ‘Australia’ (2008) Nicole Kidman stars as Lady Sarah Ashley, an English aristocrat who inherits a vast cattle ranch in the unforgiving Australian outback. When her land comes under threat from a takeover plot by English cattle barons, Sarah reluctantly teams up with a rough-edged drover (Hugh Jackman) to drive her 2,000 head of cattle hundreds of miles over some of the world’s most desolate landscape. The pair then arrive in Darwin just in time to face the Japanese bombings that come only months after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.