The Missing Review

I Wonder Why It Got Pulled...

Fairfax published the following review on the Sunday Herald, and then it promptly went missing. Pleiades looked for it all over the Fairfax media site but couldn't find it. It hadn't been up long enough for Google to cache it, so it's not in Google cache either. In the end, he and Mrs. Pleiades fished through the rubbish bin to recover this review of Baz Luhrmann's 'Australia':

Australia is a big, gloopy mess of a movie; and overlong, overstuffed production and a prime example of egos gone wild.

Obviously no one had the guts to red-flag the problems to director-creator Baz Luhrmann of a 165-minute patchwork of simple-minded romance, generic World War II attacks, Stolen Generation themes, squirmingly kitsch song replays and flagrant ripping off from – oops, we mean, paying homage to – better epics such as ‘Out of Africa’.

Let’s not forget the many, many slow motion-shots, which make many, many scenes look like men’s aftershave ads.
Watching this is like being hit over the head by a giant glitter-coated marshmallow wielded by a director whose concept of epic romance is like a drag queen’s interpretation of what a woman is.

Except for one saving grace, ‘Australia’ feels like the movie equivalent of the Sydney 2000 Olympics opening ceremony: appropriation o Aboriginal culture blended with bush stockman clichés, to sell an image to the rest of the world. Make that unfinished image.

‘Australia’ should not have been released as is; it needs re-editing throughout and the junking of at least 30minutes. The opening is a disaster; fussily scripted, self-indulgently directed and boasting a soundtrack that never shuts up and seemingly includes every tin whistle and wobble board known to man.

This reviewer sat (literally) open-mouthed for the first hour,.

It didn’t help that, as the English aristocrat who travels to the Northern Territory to claim a remote cattle station is forced to replay the lock-jawed prissiness of ‘Moulin Rouge!’, her last film for Luhrmann.

Meanwhile, Jackman, the most natural and likeable of our actors, is reduced to gruff beefcake as the heroic Drover, who says “Crikey” every other reel in apparent image-branding imitation of Steve Irwin.

Add Bryan Brown (as ‘Strine’ as they come), David Wenham (his villain should have had a black cape), Jack Thompson (odd moments of poignancy) and Ben Mendelsohn (the only decent English Accent), bunched together like stampeding brumbies, they are hurled across the screen to establish, well, the Australian-ness of it all.

However, despite the relentless hyped contributions of ‘The Pianist’ scriptwriter Ronald Harwood and Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan, the support cast clearly had nothing to work with.

Midway, ‘Australia’ looked to earn those comparisons with ‘Titanic’ – but with the ship, not the Oscar winner.

And then, amazingly, something real slipped through the mess: incandescent 13-year-old debuting actor Brandon Walters.

He plays Nullah, the child of an Aboriginal mother and white father, and the he makes everyone look good; Kidman delivers her most warmly appealing moments, ever.
They rebuff Luhrmann’s unbearable replaying, in a noxious suck-up to US audiences, of the song ‘Over the Rainbow’ from ‘Wizard of Oz’.

Helped by magnificent ‘The Tracker’ star David Gulpilil, Luhrmann and cinematographer Mandy Walker capture the hallucinatory impact of the Australian landscape and translate (for non-indigenous viewers) a small portion of the rich spirituality of Aboriginal culture.

The rest of the movie might lumber along with fuzzy, computerized Japanese plane attacks and campfire scenes that look shot in the studio.

Only the theme about the Stolen Generations (Aboriginal children taken from their families) produces genuinely tense moments. Luhrmann has been lucky in his timing – and in a new Prime Minster who said “Sorry”.

However, the director deserves kudos for skill and unexpected restraint here.
Walters alone can’t redeem ‘Australia’s flaws. But for viewers who resent being represented by a wastefully expensive, American-pandering production, this one Aboriginal boy’s truthful presence puts soul into the film and justifies the over-reaching title.

And if you thought that was a bit mean, well, so did the editor, we think. Even so, this is a complete shellacking of the film and its pretensions. I'm thinking that I really don't want to see this damn thing at all.

Still, it's a little perplexing to see that it has done a complete and utter disappearance act, so in honor of the article itself, I've duplicated it entirely above. Not nice on my part, but I think it's not nice to smother a bad review, just because it might affect business with 20th Century Fox or Rupert Murdoch. Besides which, if they don't want it I'm entirely happy to present it to the world.

Pleiades also sent in this link:

She’s regarded by critics as one of the great actresses of our time, she’s sought after by the world’s best directors, from Stanley Kubrick to Wong Kar Wai, she commands a king’s ransom each time she steps in front of a camera and glamour mags can’t get enough of her. Yet few people will cross the street to catch one of Kidman’s movies.

Kidman has made big-budget studio pictures (Bewitched, The Stepford Wives, The Golden Compass, The Invasion), high-gloss art-house flicks (Eyes Wide Shut, Birth, The Human Stain), oddball indie comedies and dramas (Birthday Girl, Margot at the Wedding) and head-scratching avant-garde experiments (Dogville). Yet she has a near-perfect record of bombs, even when she gets good notices.

Those persistent failures since her Oscar win for The Hours culminated in Fortune magazine this year putting Kidman on the top of their list of Hollywood’s most overpaid stars.

I wonder which critics it is they're talking about exactly that are regarding her as "one of the greatest actresses of our time"? Isn't it more the case that most critics regard her as a sort of acting non-entity who married into Hollywood royalty and is reaping the alimony from the famous divorce? Sure she's pretty but so are countless other women. The paparazzi obsession simply comes down to the residue of her marriages to Tom 'The-Face-of-Scientology' Cruise and her then subsequent marriage to Keith 'I'm-a-reformed-drug-addict' Urban.

There's even a theory going around that Kubrick hired Tom and Nicole precisely because they were so plastic and inhuman in their pristine Hollywood world. The fact that their marriage broke down subsequent to the film lends some credence to the observation. Certainly if one were to start a 'Hall of The Overrated', she'd top my ballot followed closely by Baz Luhrmann, but what the hey? Simply invidia right?

As if to chime in on the fun, ThatActionGuy sent in this review on slate msn:

It's a mystery to me how Baz Luhrmann continues to be regarded as a director worth following. A long time has passed since I've regarded his lush, loud, defiantly unsubtle output with anything but dread. In Australia, his new romantic-epic-Western-protest-war drama, Luhrmann's dedication to cliché has become so absolute, it starts to verge on a kind of genius. There's not a single music cue that isn't obvious (swelling strings to indicate heartbreak, wailing didgeridoo to signal aboriginal nobility). Nary a line of dialogue is spoken that hasn't been boiled down, like condensed milk, from a huge vat of earlier Hollywood films (Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Out of Africa, and various John Ford cattle-drive pictures being the most obvious referents). But to marvel at the purity of Australia's corniness isn't to imply that the movie functions as so-bad-it's-good camp, or guilty pleasure, or anything else involving aesthetic enjoyment. Audiences without a vast appetite for racial condescension, CGI cattle, and backlit smooches will sit through Australia with all the enthusiasm of the British convicts who were shipped to that continent against their will in the late 18th century.

There's more, but you get the vibe.

I've now decided I'm going to wait out this one until it's on DVD.