This link came in from the Micra Racer.
The list goes in ascending order:
- Soylent Green
- Back To The Future
- Robocop
- Withnail and I
- Stand By Me
- Sunset Boulevard
- Blade Runner (Director's Cut)
- The Silence of the Lambs
- E.T.
- Casablanca
I think this list was compiled by a sentimental 80s kind of guy. It's not a bad list, but Casablanca and Sunset Boulevard are representing everything before Soylent Green. BTF1, Robocop, Blade Runner, Stand By Me and E.T. all hail from the 1980s, and the Silence of the Lambs is barely 1990s. Still, it's not a bad list of closing lines. Too bad it won't last, but then again, what does?
Schadenfreude On Speed And Steroids
Pleiades sent this link in earlier today. It's the New Yorker's review of 'Australia'
He has created an instant cliché: the rise to nowhere. In such moments, you can feel the director’s frustration; he’s like an infant wrestling with a king-size mattress. It’s a shame that Fox entrusted Luhrmann with this project, because audiences were probably ready for a big-boned realistic movie spectacle. We couldn’t rightly expect Lean’s stern pictorial glory, or the vital dramatic imagination of a Fred Zinnemann (“From Here to Eternity”). But, at this point, we would have gladly settled for the routine competence of a George Roy Hill, whose national epic “Hawaii” (1966), put up against “Australia,” is a model of narrative rectitude. Luhrmann is drawn to kitsch as inevitably as a bear to honey. The early scenes of this movie have a ludicrous opéra-bouffe boisterousness. Nicole Kidman is Sarah Ashley, a rich, highborn Englishwoman with clipped diction and jackets that fit as tightly as a toreador’s. It’s 1939, and she arrives in a huff from England to retrieve her husband, who she suspects has been dallying with Aboriginal women on the family-owned cattle station. In Darwin, she looks for her lift to the interior, in the person of a cattle driver known as the Drover (Hugh Jackman), and finds him engaged in a meaningless bar brawl. (As if Australia weren’t raw enough, Luhrmann is given to scenes of roistering and tumult.)
Pretty damning. As with all these things, the opinion is spreading that it's open season on Baz Luhrmann and Nicole Kidman. This link is reporting another poisonous review sent in from Pleiades.
The LA Times' Patrick Goldstein wrote the Hollywood studio behind the $US130 million ($A201.55 million) film, Twentieth Century Fox, had high hopes for Australia as a commercial and critical success, but it made just $US20 million ($A31.01 million) in its first five days in North American theatres.
"Without any bankable stars in the picture (Australia once again proving that Kidman is many things but not a movie star), Fox has been forced to sell it as a Baz Luhrmann film," Goldstein wrote.
"And as all of us Baz fans know well, Luhrmann is many things, most notably a brilliant artist, but he is not a popcorn-chewing, crowd-pleasing filmmaker."
Goldstein also predicted Australia's hopes for a best picture Oscar may have sunk.
"As history shows, it's almost impossible for a film with Australia's mediocre critical response to land a best picture nomination, which robs Fox of an important marketing tool in keeping the film afloat in a crowded marketplace," he wrote.
The Schadenfreude over Nicole Kidman and Baz Luhrmann is pretty poisonous. It's as if the press gallery is out to bury them so they never work in LA again. Having not seen the film still, I can't comment on how accurate these nasty reviews are, but it's certainly killing box office interest.
When I went to the opening for the Japanese Film Festival in Sydney's Greater Union cinemas on george Street, around 400 people turned up to watch a totally unknown Japanese film. There were about 20 people coming out of a session for 'Australia'. The contrast was hard to pick, and the competition wasn't even a Hollywood blockbuster or James Bond.
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