I'm a little surprised at just how much vitriol is out there for the Baz Luhrmann film. I keep getting sent links by people that basically talk about how much they hate the damn thing.
Here's a link sent in by Pleiades:
It is not unusual for film reviewer Mark Naglazas and me to disagree about movies, sometimes in these pages. As a fan of Baz Luhrmann’s work — in particular Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge — I was disheartened to read Mark’s scathing review of the talented director’s highly-promoted offering, Australia, the day after its release.
Unfortunately, I’m going to have to disagree with Mark again. Australia, the movie, is far, far worse than anything he wrote. It would be a mistake to be seen to praise through faint damnation.
I’ll leave it to the experts to critique the movie’s fairly obvious failings as a piece of cinema. Save to say that Baz’s slightly campy, almost burlesque treatment that made the two films I liked quirky and interesting, just doesn’t translate to the sprawling epic he has attempted here. It jars.
Some of the stereotypes are cringe-making and there are enough repetitive cattle stampedes to make you call in the RSPCA.
And I just wish Baz would get over those movies of his youth and attempt something less derivative. The intrusion throughout Australia, the film, of Judy Garland and Somewhere Over The Rainbow, for instance, is quite peculiar.
Listening in around the traps, one is hearing that there was enormous pressure put upon many a reviewer so that they would not put out a negative review. Which explains the Rob Dowling review that went missing (and was salvaged here) .
People I know to be good film reviewers have either been muted in their response or quite opaque as to what they really thought. 3.5 Stars out of 5 has got to be one of the worst outcomes for this film. It's going to be up nobody's alley. Notably, both Margaret and David were handing it out, so it must have stunk big time. for those two.
The Deposed Treasurer of the Howard Fiasco years, Peter Costello, has his take here in the SMH.
The Japanese aircraft fly over the island on their way to bomb Darwin, while a priest frantically tries to give a radio warning. It is obvious the island is meant to be Bathurst Island, where Father John McGrath of the Catholic mission saw the aircraft which attacked Darwin on February 19, 1942. He radioed Darwin, but was ignored. Although most women and children had been evacuated, the attack killed about 250 people and created widespread panic.
In the movie, Japanese troops invade the mission island and come looking to kill the half-caste children. In reality, no Japanese troops landed anywhere near the Tiwi Islands or Darwin. If the Imperial Japanese Army had invaded, they wouldn't have worried too much about indigenous (or indeed any other) children. But they didn't land. It just didn't happen - not in Australia, the history.
It is OK to invent things in movie fiction. But this movie wants to look historical. It ends by telling us that the policy of assimilation ended in 1973. (Nobody ever explained what that policy was.) It tells us the Government apologised to the stolen generations in 2008 (which solves the indigenous problem).
Not that I'm a big fan of Mr. Costello, he does make the point that the Japanese invasion angle is totally mangled.
ThatActionGuy sent in this one from USA Today:
The film tries to address the racial prejudice of the time, which is laudable, but the portrayal of aboriginal people as uniformly kind and mystical beings seems counter-effective.
Most of the characters, major or minor, seem one-note and cartoonish, particularly the villainous cattle baron played by Bryan Brown, who does everything short of twirl his mustache.
The tone of the movie shifts inconsistently from humor to romance to pathos to social commentary. The dialogue is derivative at best. Characters utter such lines as, "You got no love in your heart, you got nothing. No dreams, no story. Nothing."
Luhrmann co-wrote the script with Stuart Beattie, who wrote the three Pirates of Caribbean movies, which might explain why Australia feels so superficial and lacking in dimension. Like the last two Pirates movies, Australia is ambitious more than awe-inspiring, grandiose rather than grand, full of spectacle but not spectacular.
Talk about damning. The upshot of all this is that the at is out of the bag and it's a mangey moggie at that. It's box office a flop as well as being hailed as an artistic failure and an utterly crap piece of movie-making. Surprise, surprise!
While I'm At It...
This article in the SMH pissed me off.
All up, the FSU estimates there have been almost 5000 jobs lost in the finance industry since the start of the year, most of them in Sydney. Surprisingly, it appears even this may be an understatement. The chief economist at JPMorgan, Stephen Walters, puts the losses at closer to 19,000, based on company briefings to analysts and media reports.
As the CBD vacates, there is a lingering sense of unreality about it all. Job losses are like the elephant in the room that everyone is gossiping about but no one wants to talk about publicly. Those still ironing shirts are keen to avoid the spotlight, while the newly unemployed, instead of protesting on the street, are quietly going about the business of putting the Mosman home on the market, auctioning the Audi and offloading the holiday house at Palm Beach. Tail between legs, they're retreating homewards to start living the simple life, or start writing that novel they always knew they had in them.
It's the silent recession, which, unlike other recent recessions, is coming from the top down, rather than the bottom up. But it in the end it will catch up with everyone.
Well, it's nice that it's happening "Top Down" for a change, having lived through a couple at the bottom end myself. I've learnt to be a little cynical about how these things go. I mean let's face it, just this once it's punching the very people who caused such a finacial meltdown, right in the face. It's not like they didn't have it coming.
Meanwhile, Australia has lost some of its biggest spenders. Fewer corporate luncheons mean fewer waiters and chefs. Fewer people catching taxis in the CBD means fewer taxi drivers. Fewer luxury purchases means fewer retail assistants and so on.
These former high-flyers also played an important role in inflating and maintaining property prices in well-located inner-city areas. It is not clear how much longer house prices in these areas can hold up against the tide of new properties coming on to the market. There are 312 properties currently listed for sale in Mosman, complete with their own "French Provincial-inspired terrace" and "breathtaking Middle Harbour views". One three-bedroom villa is advertised ominously as "for definite sale".
Enter the Government's hastily constructed "economic security strategy", consisting mostly of pre-Christmas cash bonuses for families and pensioners. It is a multibillion-dollar attempt to prime the economy's pump. Problem is, it works best if the money is spent.
Pensioners, with their relatively low levels of debt and higher proportionate spending on food, are likely to spend most of it but a large amount of the goodies for families are likely to go straight into paying off credit card or mortgage debt.
Wait just one minute there Ms Irvine! That reads like it's some kind of great tragedy that a pack of financial wannabes and fake-it-till-you-make-it animals who have been pulling down way too much more money than they deserved for years, are being turfed out of their ill-gotten houses. I'm not much of a class warrior but this just sucks. They're only getting what's coming to them.
As if that's not insulting enough, the paragraph about pensioners spending most of the government hand out while families pay credit card debts just floored me. It's like Ms Irvine thinks that the only way to run the economy is to have the rich living it high on the hog and the rest of the peasants scrambling for scraps in one big trickle-down effect.
Well, fuck you Ms Irvine, and fuck your faux-capitalist cronies with a cricket bat. A real capitalist does not fear the downturn, the bear market, or the possibility that they might lose their shirt, tyring to get a good product out there. Your friends losing houses in Mosman are nothing but pretenders - better that they're dispatched by the 'GFC'.
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