I sympathize with the Australians...

[onager]

What a disaster, to have your beautiful and fascinating country represented by one of the worst movies ever made.

Yes, I just recently saw Australia. I'm in Egypt, so I knew very little about the movie until I settled down to watch it. And it's a good thing I did settle down, since this Magum Dopus lasted about as long as the Thirty Years War and featured no less than 5 or 6 false endings. I lost count.

I should have heeded that warning in the opening credits: Written and Directed by Baz(tard) Luhrmann. I understand much of Luhrmann's financing came from the Australian government. Which makes me wonder why the streets of Canberra, right now, are not copiously decorated with severed heads on spikes. But I'm an American, with no right to criticize anybody's government after the last 8 years...

This is, thankfully, only Luhrmann's fourth movie. Since Australia bombed financially, we can hope he's never allowed to direct much of anything again.

A quick review of this idiot's career:

1. Strictly Ballroom: strictly a rip-off of Footloose and 1000 other movies. Youth rebels against authority figures! Damn, that's original! Lots of people like this one for its "OTT style." I am not one of those people.

2. Romeo + Juliet: proving once again that even the most ham-handed hack can't screw up Shakespeare too much. I bet Luhrmann was kicking himself that he didn't have more money for the music. If he had, imagine Elton John and Kylie Minogue doing the entire soundtrack of West Side Story in the background. To a watered-down techno beat.

3. Moulin Rouge: Baz(tard) happily trashed both French and pop culture. An homage to fin de siecle Paris, where the only French phrase we ever hear is voulez-vous couche avec moi. No, that's not from an Edith Piaf song. I hope Jim Broadbent got a nice paycheck out of it. Otherwise, it was the biggest waste of good music until Across The Universe came along and massacred the Beatles catalog.

And now Australia. Part Gone With The Wind, part Pearl Harbor, all crap. And Baz(tard) managed to drag The Wizard of Oz onto his personal dung-heap as well. WTF? Yeah, Baz(tard), even us stupid Yanks know Australia is often called "Oz." You don't have to beat us over the head with the concept.

Yep, this is one schizophrenic flick. The pretentious opening screen tells us we're about to see a story dealing with Australia's "Lost Generations" of Aboriginal children. But we already saw that story in a much better movie, Rabbit-Proof Fence.

Which, unlike Oztralia, treated its characters as real human beings and not cardboard cutouts to be manipulated for the sake of making Big Phony Moral Points.

The patronizing in this movie was unbelievable. Why, here come Miz Scarlett...er, Nicole to stand up for the po' oppressed Unwhite folk!

Give me a break. Kidman was playing an upper-class British woman in 1939. The idea that she would even acknowledge her servants...let alone hang out with them...is just hilarious.

A woman of that class, in that time, would have plenty of experience back in Old Blighty dealing with her own aboriginal servants--the Irish.

End of rant...unless I think of something else.

[MrModerate]

1. Whoa . . . the movie is certainly a clunker, but not *that* bad . . .

It's better than "Plan 9 from Outer Space," f'rinstance.

And yes, all of Lurhman's movies do stink, but this one stinks less than "Moulin Rouge." At least they blow stuff up.

(And "Across the Universe" was kinda cute, in a frosted-flakes, old peanut butter sort of way.)

[onager]

3. But if Ed Wood had $130 million...

No, what am I thinking. "Plan 9" would look just as bad.

Thanks for the comments, though we will have to agree to disagree about Australia. But you're right about them blowing stuff up, and I was glad because it helped keep me awake. Which is more than I can say for the plot(s).

OK, I'll say something NICE about the damn thing: it earned paychecks for many great Australian actors and it was a pleasure to see them. Though even that was a pleasure tinged with horror, since I kept having the awful feeling that Paul Hogan or Yahoo Serious might pop up any minute.

[vaberella]

2. Huh...The Irish....Meh, I"m just lost in the rant.

I wasn't going to see Australia, since I think Australia's history with the inception of the British was macabre and is still heavily Macabre when I think of the aboriginal. And when I saw in the commercial the female lead was playing with an Aboriginal child as though she was going to adopt him and it was a period film...all I could think was their time of ethnic cleansing. And their ethnic cleansing was out of control. Well they all were....I mean this was going World wide, but the idea of wiping out a race by marrying them into the White race was nonsensical.

I never saw Strictly Ballroom. So I don't know what you're talking about there.

I saw Romeo + Juliet, which I thought was crap and borderline racist. Not to mention I thought Claire Danes is frightfully unattractive. Nothing like Maggie Gyllenhaal (The face of a live Mumra...) but close enough.

Moulin Rouge never seemed interesting to say the least I'm not a fan of Nicole Kidman. As a note I've never seen Rabbit-Proof Fence considering I've done the reading which is heart wrenching.

As a note though. In 1939 and if we're looking at the same period. They would have mistreated the Irish, yes but nothing in the realm of what they did 50 years before that. There were actually decent people then considering they were looking down at the issues of racism within England during that period. A woman of standing would not be known to publicly have associated with the "servants" however a woman of standing would have been raised by the "servants" and would in a lot of cases have good relationships with her servants considering they raised her or she was in their company. So it's not a full butchering of the story. As for Aboriginal...they were mainly taken out by those of Australian descent, ie several generations of European descent versus up and coming British; although I'm not too sure what her background was by your statements.

In any event, I don't really waste my time with a lot of films and that was one I wasn't even going to give the time of day.

[onager]

4. I don't know what I'm talking about either...

But thanks for the perceptive comments about the servants. I sorta knew I was off in the timeline--i.e., too late. But I just threw it in for gratuitous snark.

One other weird thing, long as I'm here: after starting out with that bit about the movie being dedicated to "aboriginal children," the first part of Australia is sort of a madcap comedy with tight-ass Brit Kidman arriving, and walking into a cliched Australian bar-brawl. Then we get into Serious Moments with the indigenous people. Then we're into a cattle drive straight out of an American western.

Like I said, "schizophrenic." About 6 different movies crammed into one. But we don't care because all those movies have been done before, and a lot better.

Not giving it the time of day was a wise choice.

[vaberella]

5. Hmmm..I see, contrived drama.

However, when looking at some of the "stations" within Australia, it's found to be synonymous with the Wild West Cattle ranches so that's not off. Actually a station is Australian for a ranch, all in all. So that's not too far off. I think for a lot of people they seem to think the US was wholly unique, but they're not so much. Sure some of the circumstances are unique, like the African movement into the Americas that never really happened in Australia. However the mistreatment, abuse, and genocide of Natives was similar and as such much of the colonial population evolved similarly.