'Australia' is a flop. With a budget of $197million, the picture has taken in a paltry $3.4million in its first weekend at the US Box office.
Figures quoted from US entertainment newspaper Variety said the movie made a paltry $3.4 million on its Thursday opening in the key market.
That worked out at a per screen average of $1318, compared to the $35,055 per screen earned by teen movie and box office leader, Twilight.
Talkshow queen Oprah Winfrey has promoted the movie on her show.
Thanksgiving weekend is a traditionally tough weekend in the US, and Australia is also competing with the Reese Witherspoon comedy Four Christmases (renamed Four Holidays in Australia) and Transporter 3.
Australia is the most expensive movie ever made in this country, with a price tag of $197 million.
On its opening day in Australia on Wednesday, it made the respectable figure of $1.3 million.
The new James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace, made $2 million on its opening day the week before.
That's just no good at all. It's not like it was a story that had an underlying international audience that was interested in it as a subject matter or content. It's not as if it was 'Lord of the Rings' where 2 generations of kids grew up acquainted with the story. It's not like it's a marvel comic either. Instead, the damn film is called 'Australia', and its title on the posters has a typeface that is so obscure and parochial that it wouldn't evoke a rat's fart overseas. It's no wonder it got soundly beaten by a James Bond movie, even on its home turf of Ostraya. It's as if they went into a casino, found the longest odds and plonked down their $197million on that one bet.
David Dale has this article.
While her debonair Australia co-star Hugh Jackman has the media wrapped around his little finger, the same cannot be said for Nicole Kidman.
Her appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman is doing the rounds on YouTube and the results ain't pretty.
Call it baby brain, but Kidman appeared unable to string a sentence together. Things went from bad to worse when the veteran talk-show host insisted on talking about anything but Australia, repeatedly questioning Kidman about husband Keith Urban and New Zealand.
Kidman was forced to respond "I made a film called Australia - not New Zealand". Letterman quipped: "Right, are they making a film called New Zealand?"
The bumbled interview pales in comparison to the attacks from the overseas press on Our Nic. Leading the charge was Melanie Reid, a columnist with The Times in Britain.
"Australia the movie … has one huge problem: it stars Nicole Kidman," Reid wrote. "She's one of the most overrated actors in the world, a woman who has been the kiss of death in practically every movie she has starred in."
In a review, New York magazine savaged Kidman's performance. "In one scene, she haltingly sings Somewhere Over The Rainbow to an orphaned half-caste; but watching that big immovable forehead, I thought of another bit from The Wizard Of Oz: 'Oiiil caaan.' "
I've only seen the trailers, so I won't judge the film, but I did get the feeling she was miscast. She's looking too old and not sounding English enough. The time she might have gotten away with it was 10 years ago. The film actually needed a fresh face, but instead they cast Kidman who is young and fresh in surname alone these days. In this day and age of globalisation, you have to go find the right actor with the right background to get past the bullshit detectors in the savvy audience.
I mean, even in the same age group, wouldn't Kate Beckinsale or a Kate Winslet been a better choice? Apart from the fact that they're actually English and can act. When you think of the vast number of actresses out there who could have played this role, you start to think, maybe this was the single worst decision Baz Luhrmann made with this film.
Okay, time for a baseball metaphor: Casting Kidman for this role is a bit like, you're rebuilding a pitching rotation from scratch and you sign a league average pitcher who once fluked a Cy Young season to be your ace. It's a wing on prayer that that pitcher's going to turn into an ace but you're betting on hope (and track record). If she was like any of this year's free agent crop of pitchers, I'd say she was Bartolo Colon 2008. Sure he's won the Cy Young once, probably about the same time Kidman won her Oscar - which goes to show the voting members collectively know squat about what they see in either baseball or movies.
Bottom line, this picture needed somebody much better than Kidman.
To Cringe Or Not To Cringe
The brazen Australiana-on-parade approach of the film's trailer kind of had me sinking in my seat as I waited for the Bond Movie last week. It's not like the Bond movie was selling itself on how British it was - it was selling itself on Bond-being-Bond. The parts where it is Bond's charm that he's British, well that got established a long time ago that it's simply not an issue. People from all over the world like Bond because he's Bond - not because he's British. The thing with the trailer for Australia is that the Australia being portrayed on screen doesn't exactly include a lot of contemporary Australians today. Contrary to it being an inclusive film because it tries to deal with the Stolen Generations, the bottom line is, "my people" were the guys dropping bombs and blowing up navy ships. I didn't feel particularly included by that, I can assure you.
The point about Bond is that Bond is only a fragment of what constitutes the National Branding of the UK. There are the various Rock acts, the theatre, the films, the comedy, the TV shows all of which go to define a broader sense of the Gross National Cool and therefore the National Branding of the UK. Just how cool is this Gross National Cool of the UK? It's so cool German car makers have appropriated it to make their own version - the current best-seller Mini Cooper.
The problem with the National Branding that is being launched by Tourism Australia in tandem with the current 'Australia' movie is that it is inherently retrogressive, and hardly the stuff to send out to the world. Nicole Kidman (she who draws scathing reviews), together with Hugh Jackman (who was only ever really cool when he played the Canadian ex-pat Wolverine) present an Australia that harks back to the Utopian days of... the White Australia Policy and the Stolen Generations. The fact is, we don't have much of a National Branding because we don't make enough stuff that travels out to the world. Our history is too short, and we haven't put anywhere enough effort into our cultural projects to have a proper National Branding. Basically, our Gross National Cool is so low, it's probably in deficit - and we've been living on the credit of Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee for way too long.
Not that those two should define our masculinity or cultural epicentre, but they wouldn't be asked to be if there were more and others. Bond isn't the only British spy character. There's a whole genre of them, and they exist because of genre fiction. And collectively, they make up the spy part of the British Gross National Cool. What have we got? Nothing. Why? because we just haven't done genre fiction in spades. Instead we have 'Home and Away' and 'Neighbours' and 'Water Rats' defining our Gross National Cool, with this latest fiasco of a film to add to the catalogue. It's not that cool.
The point of all this, is that there isn't enough cultural cringe, simply because we don't have a culture industry. And in this light, perhaps it is a little too much to hoist onto Baz Luhrmann, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman... hey, have you noticed they're all -men? ... to shoulder the responsibility of raising our Gross National Cool and National Branding.
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