Pleiades sent in this article here with more feedback about Baz Luhrmann's 'Australia'.
So why hasn't it happened for Australia? What's the problem?
Here are two reasons, neither of which is necessarily Baz Luhrmann's fault.
At one level, Australia was too commercially ambitious, too boastful. The decision to call it Australia instead of its working title, Faraway Downs, was a mistake. It yielded the inevitable result: domestic audiences rolled their eyes at the hubris, while foreigners wondered why the hell anyone would make a movie about that crazy little country in the Alps where Hitler was born.
And Australia's marketing presentation to the public lacked any reference to the one quality deeply connected in our minds with Baz Luhrmann's work: originality.
Luhrmann's previous successes - Romeo and Juliet, Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom -\- were all startlingly different. They surprised audiences. We'd never seen the ludicrous spangleworld on screen before Strictly Ballroom - and Moulin Rouge was nothing more than an embarrassing Paris tourist-bus cliche until Baz's movie.
I'm not feeling easy with such easy analysis. For a start, you can't be risk averse, and yet be so pretentious as to call your film 'Australia'. I'm pretty sure it wasn't so much the title as the suggested content as shown in the trailers that turned off a wide cross-section of cinema-goers. Bottom line, people just weren't interested in the world of 1940s Drovers and English Aristocrats going to the antipodes. .
My take on it is that it also had many other negatives attached to it - some of it Luhrmann, a lot of it Kidman - that it overwhelmed any chance it had of being accepted readily by the people who still pay to go see a movie. I don't kno if that is hubris so much as a total lack of judgment.
This Is The Aftermath Of Hubris
In this, the last days of GWB, we can finally see that even America has had enough of this lame duck, shameful fuck of a President.
The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush's presidency found that 79 per cent of Americans will not miss him. He is being forgotten already, even if he's not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is, stretching from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship.
The one indisputable ability of his White House was to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press. Now that bag of tricks is also empty. In what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq's improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.
Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn't grasp the finality of their defection.
Bush is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery. Almost poignantly, he keeps trying to hawk his goods in these final days. Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews than either Clinton or Reagan. Along with old cronies like Karl Rove, he has embarked on a Bush "legacy project", as Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard described it on CNN.
To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as high-falutin' as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short as the President is "not a big reader".
Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin is on the White House website: a booklet recounting "highlights" of the administration's "accomplishments and results". With big type, much white space and child-like trivia boxes titled "Did You Know?", its 52 pages are the literary correlative to "Mission Accomplished".
I often thought that the sheer awfulness of Jimmy Carter's term brought about Ronald Reagan and 'Reagan Republicans'. The pay off for that were the 2 Reagan terms, the 1 term of George Bush senior, and the 2 terms o GWB. It's a pretty good continuity of power for the Republicans.
But it may just be possible that the the GWB Presidency was so awful that it might end up ushering in 5-6 terms of Democratic Presidencies starting with the in-coming Barack Obama. Let's not beat about the err... bush (well, why not, here's my bat)... GWB was that bad.
It's pretty tragic that the USA has had to endure not just 1, but 2 terms of this President. I think he must be the worst President in my lifetime. Yet, his old man, who was in some ways better, but also just as out of touch with Main Street thinks GWB's brother Jeb might one day make a fine candidate as US President.
On "Fox News Sunday," former President George H. W. Bush said he's ready for another Bush in the White House. He hopes his son Jeb runs for Senate in Florida and one day for president.
"I think he'd be an outstanding senator ... I'd like to see him be president some day," Bush said. "Right now is probably a bad time because maybe we've had enough Bushes in there."
Good God, spare me, and spare us all. After the fiasco that saw GWB come to power thanks to the electoral shenanigans in Florida, which happened (and most probably engineered) on Jeb Bush's watch as governor, I think Jeb should be disqualified before he even runs. Or could the God-and-Anti-Abortion Right Wing of the Republicans so stupid that they think Jeb is a viable candidate? You can never tell with that crowd.
The other point to be made about yet another Bush Presidency is that it's really hard to see what exactly the Bush family stand for that is such a powerful symbol of Republicanism - except being rich and spoilt and largely for the big end of town to a fault. Why would the USA need another dose of this kind of Presidency in the wake of 3 totally uninspiring Bush family terms? Who are they trying to kid?
If that's not hubris deserving of calamity, I don't know what is.
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