Australia

Australia

Australia - Directed by Bazz Luhrmann, starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, and David Wenham. Rated PG-13

Australia has been called a beautiful mess by some critics and a trainwreck by others. They complained about the narrative structure of the film, but it all worked for me. It starts off with Sarah Ashley (Kidman) tavelling to her husband's cattle ranch in Australia. She shows up to find her husband murdered and a shady cattle baron and his trusted second in command (Wenham) trying to buy her land. She is convinced that she should take over the cattle ranch herself and drove the cattle to be sold for the army during WWII. She enlists the help of the Drover (Jackman), who doesn't like her at first, but guess what happens there. On top of that, she becomes protective Nullah, a boy of mixed Aboriginal and white descent. That is the subplot of the film. Children like Nullah were known as the Stolen Generations. The film explains what that is near the beginning, so I won't go any further into that. Just know that that is what makes for some of the suspenseful moments of the film.


So the drove is on and this is where the so-called narrative issues start. The drove plot is resolved about halfway through and the film continues with the war and the treatment of the children as the focus. Some claimed that it made this feel like two films. I liked it because it added variety to the film. I didn't want to see nearly three hours of cattle droving, that would be pretty boring. Also, this lets Luhrmann create many different visuals for the film. You have the beautiful Outback scenes on the drove and the interesting camera angles and movement, then you have an impressive bombing sequence, and the rain scene after the ball. It kept the movie interesting and kept things moving. Add a bit of goofiness to balance out the melodrama and you get a great film that is epic in length and scale alike. It may not be very original; in fact, it's downright predictable, but it's fun.


The acting is pretty good as well. Kidman and Jackman have good chemistry, but Jackman shows her up in this. You get a sense that he's having fun in this movie, with his exaggerated accent and the slightly comical fight scenes. The child actor who played Nullah is great, which is extremely important since child actor's usually take a lot of criticism. Nullah is never annoying and his narration adds a bit of humor and heart to the film. David Wenham, as the villain, appears to be enjoying himself as well. He gets to ham it up in a few scenes and while you hate him, you also enjoy the scenes he is in.


Australia came out on DVD Tuesday with only a couple of forgettable deleted scenes for a special feature. I would've liked a making-of doc or something, but the film is enough for me. If you're into westerns, war movies, romance, melodrama, comedy, amazing visuals, culture, and a bit of history then you'll love it. That list of genres might sound like a mess to some, but it sounds like entertainment to me.

Eric Harris - www.canneltoncritic.com

Last updated: 2010-05-11 00:22:21 by user06

Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008)

*
Australia/USA

Hollow, when not offensive – and most of it is offensive. You can’t have an epic sweep without a narrative sweep, and you can’t mount narrative sweep around characters that are a half-assed mangle of a hundred vague stereotypes.

Baz Luhrmann reaches for a depth he previously never attempted and, if there is mercy in the world, never will again. He has no interest in people beyond costumes and hairstyles. So Nicole Kidman squeaks and glowers away any respect for her career choices you may have had (though, you may have heard, her forehead is hypnotically still); while Hugh Jackman’s brooding-Crocodile-Dundee act gets very tedious very quickly, but when he tries out some earnest emoting, you can’t wait for him to shift back to the tedious brooding. The Aboriginals in the cast pop up whenever the plot needs them to summon the kind of magical powers which the movies have taught us are inborn to all exotic natives, and at least one of them has to die purely to clear the way for a woman with nicer hair and an alabaster forehead to adopt her child. And we mustn’t forget to mention the Chinaman named Sing Song whose entire plot function is to talk funny and struggle to ride a horse (cause, you know, Chinamen don’t really know how).

The film doesn’t work as a spectacle either. The Outback has been colour-graded to shit, and since he can’t stage a coherent setpiece, Luhrmann hopes to distract you with excessive CGI and misguided jump cuts.

And the dialogue! Oh, boy, the dialogue! Beyond the various ‘Crikey!’s and ‘Yaay Drover!’s and ‘Yaay, Missus Boss!’s, beyond the bastardised Aussie brogues and gratuitous billabong references, Luhrmann and his crew decide to cap off the film’s emotional peak with a true pearl: A priest asks a random larrikin to give a brood of mixed-blood orphans a ride to civilisation; with beguiling cheer, the larrikin replies, “Ho ho, I’m not Jesus Christ, but I’ll give it my best shot!” You have to marvel at a line like that surviving countless drafts and alternate endings to stay in the final cut.

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Last updated: 2010-03-14 23:28:57 by user06

Australia

A long long time ago, me see movie about land where people shoot kangaroos and say "Raaa!" at cows. We name many names for this place. But the white people who keep saying "Crikey!" throughout the whole goddamn movie call it Australia. And it is fucking awesome!



So Australia is about an English aristocrat played by Nicole Kidman who moves from London to Australia to manage cows. Not sure why anyone would do that but still. So she goes to this place that was managed by her husband and meets the Drover played by Wolverine.



Now before you guys go watch this I gotta warn you. This film is long. Like Lord of the Rings long. But if you have some patience, an eye for stunning nature scenery, an empty bladder and a very thick sweater, you'll do just fine.



The cinematography in Australia is absolutely spectacular. The sweeping landscapes of the Australian outback is really breathtaking. And the art direction added to it was excellent too. Really nice for the eyes if you ask me.



The actors in this were great. The chemistry between Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman was awesome. I like David Wenham as the bad guy. But I loved Brandon Walters the best. He's just so cute!! I actually went through half the movie until I realize he was a boy. Hey don't blame me okay. He had long hair and was named Nullah.



However, some parts of Australia weren't that great, like the whole love story between Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. It had nothing to do with the two actors, I just felt that it wasn't developed enough. Again I didn't see no Titanic shit. The romance side of the movie was brief at best. Most of the love scenes between the two were sex scenes and thanks to our great government, I didn't see any of it.



I felt that the whole bombing of Darwin scene was unnecessary and too Perl Harbor like. Yeah I know it really did happen in history but couldn't the director make it more original? And last was that stupid Somewhere Over The Rainbow song. They kept playing it again and again!



But overall Australia was great. Not for everyone because of it's length but still a very solid epic. I'd recommend you guys to buy it on DVD or download it instead of going to the cinema, simply cause it's more comfortable. At least that way you can take the piss breaks and grab a bite in between.

I predict maybe Oscar noms for Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction.

RATING: 7/10

NicholasC

Australia

Are all epic movies camp? Or is it just that we’re daunted by scale these days? I don’t imagine Cecil B. DeMille worried if his movies were camp. And I can’t see camp accusations giving Joe Mankiewicz any sleepless nights. But these days – when we’re practically born knowing what the “snails and oysters” scene in Spartacus is about – any movie reaching for something big seems camp to us. Australian director Baz Luhrmannn has based his entire career on camp; whether it be ballroom dancing or Shakespeare – he always winks. In Australia, he’s created a camp national epic. But knowingness is dangerous if you want to raise more than a smirk.

The movie is divided into two halves, plus on-screen intermission. You know it’s the intermission because Hugh Jackman shaves his beard off. If the beard is on: so’s the action. This is not a contemplative movie. This is the tale of Nicole Kidman, playing an archetypal English aristocrat. She travels from England to Australia to visit a cattle ranch –her cattle ranch – where her husband lies dead. Nicole’s husband has been killed with a glass-tipped spear. But screw him. He’s only a plot point. What matters is that Hugh Jackman is here, and it’s the eve of World War II, and there are cattle to be driven. The British Army needs meat, and with this much ham-acting they’re liable to choke themselves. There’s also a photogenic Aboriginal boy who needs a mother. And a goddamn nation to be unified! And Nicole has to do it all – thanks to Botox – with just two facial expressions!

How broad is this movie played? I’ll give you two hints: 1) there’s a Chinese character called Mr. Sing-Song. 2) There’s a Russian character called Ivan. Baz Luhrmann is not aiming for social realism here.Australia is no more about the reality of the past than Pearl Harbourwas. Like Pearl Harbour, Australia wants to re-write history to show racism being over-come thirty years early, with war promoting egalitarianism among the Allies. And we, the audience, know this is nothing to do with what happened, but hell, it’s a nice sentiment – and nothing like as hard to believe as Nicole’s lips.

I like Nicole Kidman, but I wish she would stop tinkering with her face. The sad truth is: you can’t act without your forehead. And she really could act once upon a time. Look at To Die For. Look at The Others. Look at Birth. Ok, that’s three out of a hundred (and that’s only a mild exaggeration), but she has talent. Australia doesn’t require much more of her than Far and Away did seventeen years ago (mock consternation on a bullet-train to sex), but she’s game and her eyes are still acting. Hugh Jackman, as ever, offers dependable support. And since this is a “women’s picture” at heart, it’s Jackman who takes his shirt off. Aside from The Fountain, Jackman has made nothing but crap, so Nicole isn’t threatened by him. They’ve no chemistry, but they act well together. It’s as if you can sense these two Australians’ relief at not having an American co-star. They’re from the land of Priscilla, Queen of the Desertand Muriel’s Wedding, so they don’t mind the camp.

Does the movie work? Well, sorta. It carries you away and lives only to please you, and it stars two stars who like a good close-up. The Aboriginal boy is cute and he brings out the human being in Kidman.
Though nothing seems real, nothing in a Baz Luhrmann movie is supposed to be real (it’s why “camp” is his natural milieu). Australia is better than Pearl Harbour because it’s made by someone who’s sincere even when he’s faking. I could have lived without the Elton John song over the closing credits (camp is camp, but “The Drover’s Ballad” is ridiculous). Still, this is an epic that recalls the heady days of the 1950s, when epics were epic, camp be damned.

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AUSTRALIA (2008)

BOTTOM LINE: There’s a lot of noble filmmaking intention underpinning this sweeping epic but unfortunately director Baz Luhrmann does not show enough directorial control of the material, leaving a film that is corny, sometimes silly, stunningly beautiful, but mostly lacking a cohesive narrative and theme.

THE GOOD: The concept of this film in a Hollywood sense is highly unusual. Director Baz Luhrmann deserves credit for twisting the arm off of some studio executive in Tinseltown for allowing him to spend well over $100 million on a film that probably will not resonate with the American audience. Given that he was given the green light, it is understandable that Luhrmann wanted to put as much as he could in to the film and in this respect, the film does not disappoint. The images are bold and magnificent, the characters are colourful and larger than life, and the story is epic, covering much Australian thematic ground such as life in the Outback on a cattle station in the late 1930’s, the treatment of Aboriginal children by the authorities (ie the Stolen Generations), the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese, culminating with a massive, sweeping love story between the lead characters Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) and the Drover (Hugh Jackman). There are moments in this film that are magical, that capture the frontier spirit and the larger than life scenarios depicted. The bombing of Darwin is of course the major epic sequence in the film, but scenes of Lady Ashley, the Drover and the team moving fifteen hundred cattle across the Outback and the dangers that they face from their competitors is likewise spectacular, which is an unexpected surprise given one might not automatically think that moving cows around across a desert would be cinematically interesting. Hugh Jackman is perfect as the Drover; it’s hard to believe that Russell Crowe was the original choice for this role because he would not have suited it all. The astonishing discovery of this film is young child actor Brandon Walters who plays young Aboriginal boy Nullah; not only does he have a strong gravity on screen that holds your interest but he is a born actor, conveying a wide range of emotions that you cannot help but feel sympathy for. However, the best thing about this film is the fact that it got made at all; a huge sweeping epic telling an otherwise little-known, but dramatic part of Australian history is something to be celebrated, and Baz Luhrmann deserves all the kudos for getting this film made.

THE BAD: Unfortunately, director Baz Luhrmann never quite has control of the grandness of what he is trying to achieve, leaving a film that is in cohesive in terms of structure, plot and theme. In terms of individual scenes, the film works well; as a whole, it does not come close to a knockout punch because it can never decide what that punch is. Is it the epic love story? The treatment of Aboriginal children as part of the Stolen Generations? The bombing of Darwin and World War II? The harsh reality of life in the Outback (or likewise the grandeur and beauty of it)? The dark underbelly of humanity and those things we are capable of? All of these themes on their own are big and strong, but because they are not dealt with the right amount of gravity, the whole enterprise becomes two-dimensional. It does not help either that Nicole Kidman puts in a fairly average performance as Lady Ashley. It’s true she gets better as the film goes along, but the opening sequences with her character border on stupidity and silliness. Ironically, the aspect of the film designed to entice the American audience is also its most cringeworthy; the blatant use of Aussie accents. Hugh Jackman is okay, but he still gets to say “crickey” about ten times. Poor Bryan Brown and David Wenham have to really belt that accent out. It’s sad that the only way Australians sell themselves to the world is through that damn accent and it definitely works against the film. Overall, Baz Luhrmann could not tame this epic beast; “Australia” is noble, but deeply flawed and the Australian Tourism Board and Film Industry were probably not wise to hope that it would revive their respective interests. 

RATING: 6.5/10

Todd Murphy <br />
http://www.allaboutmovies.net