Australia

Just came back from seeing Australia. Now, I heart Hugh Jackman, I heart Baz Luhrmann, am midling-to-cold on Australia itself, and I think Nicole Kidman is super-pretty and I wish I had her clothes, but like, in my size. And I quite liked this movie. Did it hit the epicness that Baz was shooting for? No, unfortunately. But it sure did some nice things on the way to not hitting the mark.

If, like me, you’re a total lighting junkie, huge swathes of the movie are like porn.

If, like me, you have a connoisseurs appreciation of shirtless Hugh Jackman, this movie is not like porn (only shirtless once, though he is shirtless + wet, which kinda counts as 1 and a half).

So you can see how I might be conflicted.

The story is an unlikely one, where, in 1939 a blonde British aristocrat is somehow able to set aside her class-consciousness and her racism in like, twenty minutes and then becomes some kind of race and class heroine. In the process, we learn valuable lessons, like that anyone who isn’t white is magic, everyone in Australia has really white teeth, and that Hugh Jackman only uses moisturizer when he’s in Darwin.

The sets, – hoo golly – lighting, shots and visual effects are mostly created to simulate a really beautiful old film style, though occasionally some of it drops off, which seems a little visually disjointed. The costumes are terriffc. The villains are a sweater-vest wearin’ gang of do-no-goods, the leader of whom is kinda hot in a surly, mustachioed way.

Corniness seeps in through Miss Kidman’s performance, and the constantly-repeated motif of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and The Wizard of Oz – but I’ll tell ya now that the corniness gets compounded the earlier you key in that Oz is what they call Australia these days. Baz, you’re hurting me. Sometimes Hugh pulls a Wolverine pose that cracks me up, and some of the lines ought to have been strangled at birth. The kid narrator shut up about 5 minutes after he ought to have, and that could’ve been a total disaster for the film if they hadn’t reined it in.

I called pretty much every good-guy death, which was telegraphed for miles, and in fact there’s very little about this movie that isn’t completely predictable.

But, as you can probably tell, I enjoyed the fuck out of it, probably because it combines the best of two worlds: a movie with lots of bad stuff to mock, and with lots of good stuff to get excited about.

Like I say, the lighting was (mostly) like porn to me.

I’m going to give it 2 forks, which is pretty good for me. I’m totally finished seeing how a brave, independently-minded white person like, is the great fucking white hope and has absolutely no regrettable opinions. But, overlooking that bit (the soft-focus-history bit), and the cheesy bits, it’s a very entertaining movie that didn’t feel like it was a hundred hours long, despite its length. It’s not Baz Luhrman’s best film – weirdly, I think he’s been getting worse, though Baz Luhrman at his worst is still a hell of a lot better than you or I on a good day. It’s more focused than Moulin Rouge (which was a bit of a mess, though a pretty one), more polished than Strictly Ballroom, and I’m totally not going to compare it to R+J because the writer gave him an edge (and Claire Danes took that edge away, via criminal lameness).

Am I going to say it? Yes, yes I am: It’s no Iron Man.

Ouch, Baz!