I Get Asked What I Think Sometimes...

12.8 million For Hugh, Nothing For You

The news this week for film industry types is that Hugh Jackman is going to bring his next Wolverine production back to Sydney. Because the degree of my jadedness - my ad-jade-ment if you will - is at such proportions, I thought I'd just not comment on it until Pleiades brought this little thing to my attention:

You’d have thought that riches to rags story had taught Australian politicians that dumb subsidies don’t work and may have actually damaged the local film industry more than it helped.

Unfortunately not.

Last week the Australian federal government announced $13 million in support for production of Wolverine. The prime minister’s office gushed:

"To attract The Wolverine to Australia, the Gillard government granted the producers a one-off payment of $12.8 million which will result in over $80 million of investment in Australia and create more than 2000 jobs.

"The payment effectively provided The Wolverine a one-off investment package equivalent to an increase in the existing location offset to 30 per cent.

"Without this effective tax offset incentive, the producers of The Wolverine would not have chosen Australia as the location."

"That's just the nature of this government," thundered Pleiades. "It's all about bribing people. It's corruption and bribery that's marked this government."

I'm inclined to believe it's true. What's truly spectacular about this account is that 12.8million can buy you a lot of things in the film industry: development, advertising support, distribution support, publicity. Instead, Julia Gillard's government has chosen to hand this over to a Hollywood production on the grounds that it's going to be shot in Australia. Heck, there are any number of good film scripts out there to be made for a flat 12.8million. When you consider that the annual budget at AFTRS used to be 9million p.a. (I think it might even be less now), you think "wow, they really don't care about the front end of the industry, they only care about the rear end."

They could have done a lot more things with that money that actually helped.

All this is to say that it is incredibly dubious as to what merit there is in throwing this money at Hugh Jackman's production which is already funded out of the Hollywood machine. Now, I'm not taking anything away from Hugh Jackman who is able to do so, but you have to seriously question the ALP government where they really stand with regards to the rest of the Australian film industry. It's nice that some of the crew and special effects houses and post-production houses will get some business coming through, but when it's done, it's going to be the breadline for most of those people again. The ALP government can't be buying temporary jobs like that, they should be trying to re-establish the industry as a industry instead of this public-money-consuming sheltered workshop - assuming they're serious.

Which, they're not. So why am I bothering with this today? Oh yes, I got asked what I thought.

More On The Sheltered Workshop Thing

Here's a more detailed account of what they think they're doing.

Hugh Jackman is returning to Australia to make The Wolverine, his sixth outing as the Marvel character, thanks to a $12.8 million federal government subsidy.

And while billed as a “one-off”, the local film industry has its fingers crossed that the near-doubling of the standard assistance for a big-budget foreign production is a sign of things to come in next month’s budget.

The Wolverine is set in Japan but will be shot at Fox Studios in Sydney between July and December. Hugh Jackman will star and produce. “It’s so great to bring these big movies down there, to keep people working,” Jackman told the Today program from London, where he is filming Les Miserables for Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech). “I just have to say thanks to Prime Minister Gillard, she was instrumental with this.”

Yikes. Sounds awful already. Set in Japan but shot in Sydney sounds a bit like the Last Samurai which was set in Japan but shot in NZ. Nothing wrong with that, just that it looked really weird in many parts. I'm resigned to there being an alternative universe where there is a Japan that is totally on another planet with totally weird things going on. Even so... let that slide for now.

The patent myth - and outright wishful thinking on the part of SPAA - is that this is going to lead to there being more direct input from the Federal government to lure productions to Australia so that they hire Australian crew and talent. The other patent myth is that once this Wolverine Production starts or finishes in Australia that it's going to open the flood gates for more productions to come back through the Fox lot that is mostly sitting dormant right now, thanks to the high Aussie Dollar. When you choose to look at the funding through these two rose tinted glasses, then sure, this $12.8million seems like chump change. But as with the generous amount of government money dropped on Baz Luhrman's 'Australia' , there's nothing that strengthens the industry, nothing that gives it an ongoing mechanism for growth, nothing that allows for the Australian industry itself to grow unless you define the Australian Film Industry as a service industry for Hollywood in which case why are we doing this?

Haven't we been here before with Baz Luhrman's number?

The point is, it's not even good policy to be throwing money at a Hollywood production, just so it comes here to shoot. If they don't come of their own accord, it's proof positive that our service part of the film industry isn't competitive enough. We're either going to be competitive on the world market on our own merits or not. The producers hoping the government's going to make a habit of funding these things are uncompetitive swill, sucking on the government teat wanting more. I'm sorry but years and years of public funding has reduced our film industry to these kinds of producers getting the loudest voices.

On a personal note, I struggled greatly to convince the production for Kamui Gaiden to come here when their main objection was cost - and that was when the Australian Dollar was only 70yen. Had somebody handed even 5million on a platter, it probably would have happened here or NZ instead of Okinawa; but nobody was there to do it because it was during the time the FFC was being rolled into Screen Australia, just before the GFC hit. (And really, it was probably the natural course of things that it didn't happen that way, which was not only my loss but arguably Australia's film industry's lost opportunity.) Still, that was the last straw for me.

It goes back to the problem that the people who want the industry don't know what they're getting; the people in the industry don't know what market they're operating in; and the world really doesn't like in-between-ers, which is exactly what our film industry is.

Scum Dog Paupers

Yes Mr. Sheridan, 'Australia' Sucks

...but Australian Cinema does not!

This article came to me from Pleiades.

After a brilliant rebirth in the 1970s, it has become steadily worse. Our individual performers conquer all in Hollywood and London, and even Bollywood, but Australian films are consistently and predictably bad.

Compare and contrast, as the essay topic-setter would put it, two recent films: the big-budget fiasco Australia, and the exquisite Slumdog Millionaire.

Australia cost at least $130 million, perhaps all up quite a lot more than that. It is one of the worst films I have seen for years. And it has been a commercial mediocrity and critical flop. It is not so much a failed epic as a ludicrous, camp pantomime. It features superb actors: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and the gifted and charming young Aboriginal star, Brandon Walters. But they cannot save it from its ridiculous plot confusion, its constant air of contrived unreality, its pretentious and worthless nods to other films and the fact that at no point does the viewer believe in or care about the characters or the situations.

It grossly defames our nation. The treatment of Aborigines is the most morally troubling aspect of our history and we are rightly exercised about it. But no Australian government ever sent Aboriginal children to a mission island near Darwin so that the Japanese would bomb them. Nor did the Japanese land on and take control of such an island in the 1942 bombing of Darwin.

Some critics have excused this by saying that Australia partakes of no reality and therefore this anachronism, along with all the others, doesn't matter. Australia claims to be dealing with a huge historical issue, the forced removal of mixed race Aboriginal children. It can't expect people to take it seriously if it then depicts eventsthat not only didn't occur, but could not possibly have occurred in the universe we happen to inhabit.

The script is a dog's breakfast. At one point the rough Aussie drover (Jackman) is driving the refined English aristocrat (Kidman) to her new home. Jackman says he's always wanted to crossbreed a wild brumby with an English thoroughbred. Kidman thinks he's propositioning her and reacts with shock.

This banal, pathetic attempt at a joke is important because it illustrates the script's disdain for the audience. Kidman's character is meant to be obsessed with horses in England, and with breeding her champions. It is inconceivable that she could have misunderstood Jackman's remark, so the misunderstanding, which is meant to be comic, has no plausibility. In other words, the actors are not delivering the dialogue of a joke, they are delivering the dialogue of a parody of a joke. The audience is being asked to laugh not at a comic situation but at a director's sly and knowing wink about the banality of comic situations in films. In which case, why make films at all?

Australia exhibits two of the worst characteristics of Australian filmmaking: excessive artiness, which prevents effective story telling and a didactic, dogmatic, unsubtle, hectoring tone of political preaching. It is a tragic waste of a unique opportunity in Australian filmmaking.

Aaaargh. Where do you start?

I think it's pretty damned unfair. The point is, you would be consigning to the dustbin all kinds of films on the basis that:

• 'Australia' is an Australian Film


• 'Australia' sucks as a film


• Therefore all Australian films suck.

That can't be right any more than 'Slumdog Millionaire' would somehow prove the superiority of British Cinema or Bollywood or whoever was invovled with that production by 3 degrees of association.

If all Australian Cinema got judged and hung on the basis of 'Australia' by Baz Luhrman,we should start judging everything by the worst example. What if Wayne Carey and Ben Cousins defined all Australian sportsmanship? What if Vince Sorenti proved why comedy in Australia was crap? What if Tracy Grimshaw (just to pull a name out of a hat, nothing personal here!) proved once and for all why Australian Television journalism was completely and utterly fucked?

Besides which, 'Australia' was more exceptional than a typical example of an Australian film production, what with its enormous backing from 20th Century Fox with a $200million or so budget. I mean, were every Australian film blessed with such Rupert-Murdochian Largesse!

It strikes me that everybody is kicking the dog now that it s down, and maybe in some ways it does deserve the kicks. However a long term outlook of cinema would tell you that there might not be an Australian Cinema in the decades to come if current trends continue.

It's really not a matter of talent or ideas or script or skill any more. It's the reality of the scale of economies involved in film production, distribution and just how many paying eyeballs are out there to be targeted.

In the global market, it may not matter what we produce or how we go about doing it, given what the global audience is looking for, which goes to our general inability to supply that demand.

By the way, this bit brought me a smile:

Some folks believe Australian poets achieve much more than our novelists because the poet mediates nature directly to the reader, whereas the novelist needs a complex society to work with.

But that doesn't explain why our films are so poor today. It may be that the culture of government grants that dominates our arts has deprived them of the drive to connect with an audience. On the other hand, maybe we're just better at cricket. Come to think of it, the Indians are beating us there, too.

Again, the production cost and risks of poetry are much smaller than for film. The relative successes of our poets essentially comes from the freedom they have in their mode of production.

But it's nice to see our poets are doing well in our own cultural estimation.

Squirm-Worthy

At Least Being Dumb Isn't One Of Her Problems

A couple of weeks ago it was suggested that it was the nasty reviews that hounded Nicole Kidman out of town, but it turns out it was actually seeing her own performance.

Nicole Kidman isn't "proud" of her performance in Australia.

The 41-year-old actress has revealed she "squirmed" in her seat throughout the Sydney premiere because she was so uncomfortable watching herself on screen.

She said: "I can't look at this movie and be proud of what I've done. I sat there, and I looked at Keith and went, 'Am I any good in this movie?' But I thought Brandon Walters and Hugh Jackman were wonderful. It's just impossible for me to connect to it emotionally at all."

Nicole was so nervous about her performance she fled Australia as soon as the premiere was over with husband Keith Urban and their five-month-old daughter Sunday Rose.

She told Australian radio station 2dayFM: "We ran because I didn't want to read anything. I didn't want to know. I saw my sister and my family and we saw Keith's family and then we were straight on a plane."

Nicole added she only attended the premiere to please the film's director Baz Luhrmann.

She said: "I don't usually see my films, but because of Baz I had to see it. I saw 'Moulin Rouge'. I've really only seen that and this in my whole career. It gets worse as I get older."

That's it in full (sorry SMH, I can't resist it when it's this juicy in full). At least she knew it was crap the moment she saw it.

Let us now officially dismiss the claims that it was the tall poppy syndrome. The tall poppy syndrome, while it does exist, had nothing to do with this one. Nicole Kidman watched herself on screen and squirmed and decided to hit the road before the crits came in.

There's an old story about how Eric Stoltz was originally cast as Marty McFly. 2 weeks into the shoot, the director and producers realised that as fine an actor as Eric Stoltz was, he didn't have good comic timing. It just wasn't his suite. So they canned Stoltz and brought in Michael J. Fox, and the rest of it is history as we know it.

In other words, if a cast member isn't working out for you, especially in a big budget movie, don't hesitate to replace them. Baz Luhrmann should've known from the rushes it wasn't working, but he persisted with Kidman. Heaven only knows what he was hoping for. It sure hasn't done his films any favors and it's surely dented Nicole Kidman's reputation (and bankability) quite heavily for sure.

It Might Be Hubris

Or It Might Just Be Plain Awfulness

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.

Laws Of Australian Cinematics

David Dale's View

David Dale regales us with his three laws of Cinematics:

The First Law of Cinematics: To predict the success of a big budget movie in Australia, multiply its first week's takings by three. The nation's favourite flick this year, The Dark Knight, made $15.9 million in its first week, and ended up with a total of $45.6 million (putting it close to the all-time chart-toppers Titanic with $58m, Shrek 2 with $50m and Return of the King with $49m). TDK sold more than 4 million tickets because it lived up to its hype, just like Kung Fu Panda, which earned $8.3 million in the first week and went on to total $26 million, or Wall-E (from $5.8m to $17.8m).
There were exceptions to the first law this year. Mamma Mia! went from $8.1m to an amazing $31.5m and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull went from $12.3m to a mere $29.5m. They are covered by ...
The Second Law of Cinematics: To tell if a movie will stay hot, examine the dropoff in its second week's takings. If it falls by more than a third, word of mouth must be bad (and the ultimate total, as with Indy, will be less than three times the first week). If it falls by less than a third, w.o.m. will propel it to glorious heights (as with Mamma Mia!). It's ominous news for the teen vampire flick Twilight that its second weekend box office was down 54 per cent on its first weekend.
Now here's a spooky detail: the takings of Australia fell by 33 per cent from week 1 to week 2, and by 32 per cent from week 2 to week 3.

There is thus no way to tell if it will top the $29 million earned by Baz Luhrmann's last epic, Moulin Rouge. We might seek a clue in ...

The Third Law of Cinematics: Australian films never make more than $3 million (Happy Feet and Australia don't count because they are international movies). To put it another way, there are only 300,000 cinemagoers in this country who regard the term "Australian-made" as an incentive.
The most awarded local flick this year was The Black Balloon. It made $2.1 million. The most awarded local flick last year was Romulus My Father, which made $2.6 million. Some people theorise that Australian movies fail because they lack budgets. There may be another issue. Could it be that they fail because they lack story?

Need we say more?

Baz Mounts Defense of 'Australia'

Because Evidently It's Not Speaking For Itself

Baz Luhrmann is sounding like he's not enjoying the roasting. Here's a Reuters article on the director's perspective on his own film.

"A lot of reviewers like 'Australia.' And we're making people cry; I know because they write to us," he told the Hollywood Reporter during an interview at the Four Seasons Hotel. "But there are those that don't get it. A lot of the film scientists don't get it. And it's not just that that they don't get it, but they hate it and they hate me, and they think I'm the black hole of cinema. They say, 'He shouldn't have made it, and he should die.'"

I think the people are crying because it's more like an onion than a proper tear-jerker. But we'll let that pass.

Asked why he thought the reactions were so passionate, he replied: "I know what it's about."

The movie's detractors, he said, were used to movies that were neatly defined.

"This is not (simply) a romantic comedy for 40-year-old women or action movies for 17-year-old boys, and that's not OK with some people. It's not OK for people to come eat at the same table of cinema. But you look at movies like 'Gone With the Wind' and Old Hollywood classics, and they don't fit in any box.

"Corny Hollywood movies from the '40s freak out (the film scientists)," he added.

It's a real drag that Baz Luhrmann went out and made a very big movie without a target audience, armed with the faith that a retread of a Hollywood movie from the 1940s would transcend the need for defining a genre, all the while he post-Modernistically pilfered cues from the said 1940s film.

While I'm no film scientist, I am at least a student of my craft. When I saw shorts on the Kidman/Letterman interview, I noticed he crossed the line not once but twice in a span of 30seconds. I'm sorry but if you can't get your basics down like that, while working with a professional crew, then should you be entrusted with a $197million budget?

It's not that he's made a very broad, general film with a mixed genre - those things have places in the world, but they tend to have smaller audiences  because it takes a lot more effort from the audience to understand how the genres are getting mixed. It is the fact that Luhrmann can't tell a story without throwing his camera around and trying to invent a new angle to shoot a 2-hander scene. Dare I say it, he's actually not properly schooled in how to direct a scene for camera.

This results in his films being nebulous, unfocused and largely confusing. He is the opposite of David Mamet's tenets where you should simply stick to the story as tightly as you can.

Years ago when he suddenly burst on to the world with 'Strictly Ballroom', I was a student at AFTRS. The 'Strictly Ballroom' promotional tour rolled into the school cinema and got its screen to much adulation from the  teaching staff. I was struck by several things:

- How poorly directed Strictly Ballroom actually was.

- How the teachers and admin staff embraced it anyway because the story was good enough and simple enough.

- How the AFTRS staff embraced the film, even though Luhrman was from NIDA and not the AFTRS. The guy had nothing to do with AFTRS.

Now, the third thing was possibly the weirdest thing, because it relates back to the first. One of the things that film school inevitably does to you is give you a grounding in the basic needs of directing for camera. If it didn't/doesn't, you should burn it down and start again. Certainly, in my time, as wobbly as it was, that culture lived and breathed at AFTRS.

So here was a film that failed to meet the kind of technical standards that second year novices were meeting, getting critical acclaim. Worse still, the AFTRS educators were willing to turn a blind eye to all these faults for which they would have roasted their own students and praise the film to the sky. It was a surreal moment. Yes, I'm talking about you, John O'Hara, Paul Thompson, Helen Carmichael, Marion Ord, Brian Hannant! - Just in case you're googling your own names.

But it got me thinking: If NIDA could produce successful film makers who didn't know anything about the technical things the AFTRS was imparting to its own students, and the AFTRS's job was just to produce the crew who would work on these films, What EXACTLY WAS THE POINT OF HAVING A DIRECTING DEPARTMENT? What was the point of even having AFTRS?  It seemed incredibly self-defeating for AFTRS's teaching body to embrace the success of the film in spite of all its abundantly clear faults. The sort of faults with which it would roast its own students

Understand this: All the students knew (and understood) that it was a deeply flawed film, and yet we all shrugged and furtively caught each other's disbelieving glances as the AFTRS teachers lauded its success. It was one of those. "WHAT THE FUCK?!!!!" moments that make you re-assess everything about what you are doing. What exactly was the point of proper film technique?

What exactly is the point of any technique to do anything? Why bother learning a single-handed backhand? Why bother learning correct finger - position for scales? Why learn how to cast and reel properly? Why learn technique in anything, when the novice world just doesn't notice? Or was it just a case of double standards?

I don't have an answer to this double standard. I have no answer as to how these things happen. But let's face it, there's Baz Luhrmann making his dirty big Hollywood Blockbuster, partly on Australian tax Payers' money - still, clearly ignorant of the basic basics of film making. And the joke is on me (and others), because there is nobody from my year at AFTRS that has directed a Hollywood film. What, exactly, was the point of having AFTRS, if this was going to be the outcome?

Those people should have been quaking in their shoes when Baz Luhrmann emerged, instead of lauding its success; because his very career poses serious questions about Filmmaking in Australia. In my book, the one that I got from AFTRS, it's questionable that Baz Luhrmann should have been allowed to make that film; no, he shouln't have to die except in the box office; and I'm not being mean-spirited when I say that.

Don't Do A Bond Movie, Baz

Done Their Dash

Here's something interesting. 'Ostraya' might have been the last hurrah, rather than the next wave.

Luhrmann admits that executives at 20th Century Fox, the Hollywood studio behind the film, were having problems marketing it to audiences because of its mix of slapstick comedy and intense drama.

"Fox are having trouble selling it," he said.

"They're having trouble making a trailer that can sell tickets.

"I'm scared and fearful of this. Will everyone get it? No. But I've been amazed by the variety of audiences who are intensely emotional in reacting to it."

Luhrmann said while he had no definite projects in the pipeline at the moment, one day he planned to "take that James Bond film".

"That'll be fun," he said.

Kidman also reiterated her desire to reduce her acting workload in favour of focusing on being mum to her baby Sunday Rose.

"I have to say I'm not that interested in making films any more," she told the newspaper.

"I know I'm not meant to say that, but that's where it is for me now.

"I'm 41 years old and very happy being in Tennessee with my baby and with my husband.

"I obviously have creative blood in me and it needs to come out in some way but I just don't have that burning desire any more.

"I'm not saying I'm never going to work again, but I'm at peace with whatever happens, which is a nice place to be at this stage of my life."

I swear it reads like Baz is blaming ALL the failure of 'Ostraya' on Nicole Kidman - which he probably isn't, but how exactly are we to interpret all this?

I don't know about Kidman's semi-retirement. She is in a position to do whatever she likes.It's also the case that she's hit that age where she can't easily be the romantic/sexual interest of the story, which means she'll be paid less.

As for Luhrmann's claim that he would "take that Bond movie", you'd have to say, "Don't".

Let's face it, the Bond Movie this time around spanked Baz's movie into oblivion at the Box Office. I hardly think Luhrmann is in a position to be dismissive about Bond Movies in general. If your auteur work wasn't good enough to take on a Bond Movie when given the marketing support of a major studio, then how good could you possibly be working for another franchise project? It's pretty galling to think that having made a bunch of largely cruddy films, Luhrmann thinks he's up to doing a Bond Movie.

Narnia In Ostraya

Pleiades gave me the heads-up on this as usual. The first Narnia flick was shot in NZ in the wake of the Rings trilogy. Now there's a rumour that the third might come to Australia.

A surge of Hollywood interest in Australia as a filming location could lead to another coup: the next Chronicles Of Narnia film.

Following The Lion, The Witch And The Wardobe and Prince Caspian, filming for The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader was to begin in Mexico next month, much of it at the Baja Studios water tank that was used for Titanic and Master And Commander.

But difficult conditions, including a rise in violence associated with a drug war, are believed to have led Disney and Walden Media to hunt for a new location to shoot the reputed $US100 million ($150 million) movie.

SiT hears that film industry officials in NSW and Queensland are chasing the movie and the Sunshine State is favoured to win because of the water tank at Warner Roadshow Studios on the Gold Coast. The Dawn Treader needs studios, beaches, jungles and other locations for a five-month shoot.

Well why not? We haven't had much Hollywood fare for the crews since the heyday of Star Wars 2&3 and the Matrix series. What really shits me in all of this is that when these things get made, these Film Offices strut about as if they've accomplished something truly great, when all they've done is set themselves up as the lowest bidder.

A Win For Barbie

Mattel has won its case against the company that poached one of its designers, who took his designs of a certain Bratz range of dolls to Mattel's competitor. It's all a bit weird, but here's the link thanks to Pleiades.

The ruling sent shockwaves through toyland as the industry gears up for its busiest time of the year. In June, sales of Bratz in the US reached $3.1bn (£2.1bn) since their launch in 2001. Sales of Barbie, still America's most popular toy, fell by 15% in 2007.

The ruling comes three months after Mattel, the makers of Barbie, won a copyright case in which it argued that the Bratz concept had been developed by one of its designers. A jury agreed that Carter Bryant had come up with the original designs while at Mattel and had taken them to MGA, which launched the Bratz line in 2001. The jury awarded Mattel $10m for copyright infringement and $90m for breach of contract.

Judge Stephen Larson's ruling effectively places the Bratz brand under the control of Mattel.

Judging from the brief description, it's actually interesting that it took so long! You'd think the horse had bolted a long time before and won a couple of trophies by now.

Mailbox Funnies

This one from Pleiades is pretty cute.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2- 6 years. It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of morons promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.

It's a little ideological. If you thought that was funny, try this. Dick Cheney thinks he and his boss did a good job while in office.

Cheney displayed no regrets and gave no ground to his many critics within America and around the world. He summed up his record by saying: "I think, given the circumstances we've had to deal with, we've done pretty well."

He told ABC News he stood by the most controversial policies of the Bush administration, and urged president-elect Barack Obama to think hard before undoing them. Asked about the use of torture on terror suspects, he replied: "We don't do torture. We never have. It's not something this administration subscribes to."

Later in the same interview, Cheney was asked whether the use of waterboarding in the interrogation of the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, had been appropriate. He replied: "I do."

Waterboarding is a technique that induces the sensation of drowning, and is widely regarded as a form of torture. It was used on three high-level al-Qaida suspects, including Mohammed, but has since been banned by the US.

Dick, I think I'd like to know what you mean by 'pretty' because I'm not sure I can stand by your definition of 'pretty well'.

Like A Film School Movie

Ideologically Straitjacketed

Years ago, the Dude from Audio Darnok and I went through our own little hell at AFTRS. It was just one of those things where we wanted to make a science fiction action movie and the School Administration at the top level just didn't want us to make such a film. Flat out hated it. Wanted it buried - and they did just that.

I caught up with the Dude from Audio Darnok by phone tonight and had a long chat. He was particularly interested in pointing out the gap between Heath Ledger's performance in 'The Dark Knight' and the genral market malaise surrounding 'Australia' by Baz Luhrmann, which hasn't received much critical support for the Golden Globes.

The Dude pointedly said he hadn't gone to see 'Australia' exactly because, just looking at the shorts brought back bad memories of AFTRS.

He said, "It just looks like the sort of film that institution would back. It has an Aboriginal kid and a bucket loads of landscape shots and it's got Nicole Kidman playing a strong-willed woman and it would be exactly the kind of film the Film School powers that be would back, and give money to so that it would get shot on 35mm, and look glossy. You know the films I'm talking about - worthy on the surface, but dead boring to the masses."

Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about, I told him.

"So these people got what? 40million dollars from Tourism Australia to do a tie-up and then Baz Luhrmann's production company is going to get a 40% rebate? But it's going to lose at the box office. It's the same old story. They keep making decisions on projects from a very parochial, narrow basis that has nothing to do with whether it s a good story or not or the sort of movie that would be thrilling or exciting or moving. None of that."

Yep, I said. It's pretty bad.

"Seriously, I'm not going to see that film. I'll wait until it's free to air on TV, and I'd still find a reason to miss it."

People hate 'Australia' the movie, not just  for what it is, but what it represents, and who it represents.

The Knives Out

You Win Some, You Lose Some

The Sydney Morning Herald is playfully writing that Nicole Kidman is under siege by the critics.

Nick Curtis from London's Evening Standard fired the first salvo, condemning her English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley as "a showcase for her worst acting tics, all her prissy pouts and expressions of 'Botoxed' startlement". Kidman's "Barbie-perfect bosom, bottom and ironing-board hips" did nothing for Curtis's libido. The actor has a"curiously sexless screen presence", he fumed.

This, remember, is the same woman who gave London a dose of "pure theatrical Viagra" when she appeared in the buff in The Blue Room in 1998.

Curtis's bitter ad hominem attack is almost benign compared to a frothing column by Melanie Reid from The Times. She wrote that Kidman is "exquisitely accomplished at being awful" and that women - all women, apparently - do not like her because she cannot act and looks "frozen, brittle and vapid".

As a thesis it's a bit thin. Kidman has won an Oscar. And if women hate her because she isn't a brilliant actor why don't they chuck eggs at Sandra Bullock and Andie MacDowell?

For a start Jennifer Anniston and Sandra Bullock are much more charming than 'Our Nic'. I think it very unsuprising that a lot of people are expressing a great deal of Kidman-Hate. The defense that she won an Oscar would only serve to irritate those whodislike her more - most likely because they probably thought the Oscar was largely undeserved.

I myself think an Oscar is not a barometer of talent, but a prize for navigating the jungle of Hollywood successfully, and Nicole Kidman sure has done that very well. Did Kidman deserve that Oscar as an indication of talent? Not in my opinion. But I'd be the first to say that anybody with such scant acting talent who could rise to the top of the Hollywood system deserves much recognition. Why not give her a golden statue?

Occasionally I get asked why I think so many people hate Nicole Kidman, and I have to say it is because she comes across as cold and charmless. There's no saving grace because there's no saving charm. All I see is somebody who is earnestly acting, but never ceasing to be 'Nicole Kidman, Movie Star'. It's an unfortunate function of her hailing from the Sydney North Shore.

Yes, We Are All Paying For It

Suddenly the SMH noticed that Baz Luhrmann's company is going to get the 40% rebate on the $197m movie.

AUSTRALIAN taxpayers will end up paying for close to 25 per cent of the production costs for the movie Australia, thanks to a tax deal between director Baz Luhrmann and the Federal Government.

Arts Minister Peter Garrett has defended the Producer Offset scheme, which allows Luhrmann to claim back 40 per cent of his production expenses at the end of this tax year. The rebate was 12.5 per cent before Australia was made.

"It's not only Australia but a range of other motion pictures that will qualify," Mr Garrett said. "That's a really good thing because it means we're seeing significant investment in the Australian film industry, but also in the ancillary services such as transport, technicians, the staging, hotels - all of the expenses that can happen in and around a film.

"It's providing significant investment and economic boosting into our economy."

While Australian taxpayers have been unaware about how much public money will go towards the making of Australia, US publication The Hollywood Reporter has hailed Luhrmann's ingenuity in raising funds from the Australian Government.

"Luhrmann also had another miracle up his sleeve. This time, instead of making the sun come out, he made it rain - dollars," said American film critic Shannon L. Bowen.

"Before Australia went into production, the Australian Government had already planned to increase its film production rebate from 12.5 per cent to 15 per cent," the report said.

But Australia producer G. Mac Brown told the influential industry magazine: "Baz was able to convince the Government that Australian-based productions would get a higher incentive of a 40 per cent rebate, which is a huge difference."

A flop, and yet so rewarding for Baz Luhrmann, is what they're saying between the lines. This 40% rebatething just got a lot harder to sell to the people.

Bill Bennett And His Auteurs-Are-Bad Theory

Describing Symptoms Does Not Make A Diagnosis

That's the best bit of life-experience I got in my brief time as Medical student. It's so true when you come up against a real suffering person, after spending time behind books and in the lecture theatre getting talked at by professors. If there ever was a chronically struggling patient, it's the Australian Film Industry. Today, in the aftermath of the abysmal opening of 'Australia' in the US market, Bill Bennett has piped up with his own analysis of what is wrong with the Australian Film Industry and it is remarkably self-defeating:

The only way we're going to have an Australian film industry is if we get rid of the auteurs. Baz Luhrmann is an auteur, George Miller is an auteur, Peter Weir is an auteur, Jane Campion is an auteur - by that, I mean that these film-makers speak with their own unique voice through cinema. And largely, they keep making the same films. But this does not an industry make.

We need a "modular" system, like Hollywood, if we're ever to break out of the cottage industry mould that we've got ourselves into. By "modular", I mean the antithesis of the auteur system which we largely have in place now - where a film is typically developed by a writer-director, or by a director working with a writer to put down his vision into script form. And then a producer comes on board and then the actors. In this system you cannot separate the script from the director, or sometimes the producer from the director. We have too much respect for the creative process. Big mistake.

Get that? Bill Bennett says what's wrong with the business are the auteurs, and then he lines up Baz Luhrmann with George Miller, Peter Weir, Jane Campion and tries to run them all down. Let's face it, these people are our success stories - they're not part of the problem as I keep saying. If anything, it's Bill Bennett and the system that keeps funding him over, say, me, that is the problem!

Let's be clear about this. About a decade ago, Bill was boasting that he gave advice to funding bodies so that their criteria for selection would favor him the most. Subsequent to that boast he made 'Spider and Rose', which must be the quintessential Australian film people stayed away from in droves.

Let's be even clearer about this. 20th Century Fox bankrolled 'Australia'. It's an American film. Its wins and losses are already part of the Hollywood system, and not really part of the Australian system. Even though it flopped and will shrivel away in the market place, it's actually not our industry's big loss. It's Rupert and Fox's problem, for having bet on Baz Luhrmann this time. It won't be the last time.

So Bill's got a gall trying to call out George Miller, Peter Weir and Jane Campion on the back of Baz's one commercial failure.

Bill Bennett goes on to describe the Hollywood system as he sees it and then hits a point where he realises that he, as a director would not be served by it too well.

The Hollywood system has its own pitfalls and to an extent they treat a director as merely part of the manufacturing process - but hell, what's wrong with that? That's what we're doing. We're manufacturing entertainment and playing with budgets of millions of dollars. And even within this artless box-office driven factory, filmmakers can still keep their own voice. Look at how Peter Weir has continued to make his own unique films within the Hollywood studio system. Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show and Master And Commander could only have been made by Weir. And George Miller has continued to keep control of his movies while getting the Hollywood studios to pick up the tab. Happy Feet broke the Pixar mould and got an Oscar for best animated movie in the process. And then there's Australia - which both supports and denies my "kill the auteurs" theory. Baz Luhrmann has taken too damn long to make that movie. He should be working more. We should be seeing more Baz Luhrmann movies. He has to stop being a writer/director and take on some Hollywood crap. Turn it into gold. Like the fabled directors of the 1940s and '50s: William Wyler, George Stevens, even Alfred Hitchcock. As Picasso once said, if you go to work and you're an artist, then what you'll do is art. If you're not, then at least you did a day's work.

That's really weak. He starts off arguing that it's the auteur's fault and then gets to the last bit and comes to the point that it's the fact that there's not enough stuff being made. Yeah, well, I've been saying that or about a decade, while you've been pulling down chump change from the funding bodies to make your cruddy films, Bill - I don't have the box office returns of 'Kiss or Kill' and 'A Savage Land' and 'The Nugget' on my conscience.

Bottom line for me is that the Australian Film Industry lets Bill Bennett make loser films, while I would've made a bunch of genre movies in its place that might have had a real chance of making money; but the funding bodies backed him instead of me.

Auteur or not, the real problem with the industry is that it can't make quantity for various reasons, and when it does, that small quantity it does make is largely crap in the eyes of the domestic market.

If Bill Bennett wants a clearer picture of what's wrong, here are my 5 pointers:

1) Government should stop trying to make development decisions. They keep making movies that bomb in the market place. We know this. They should get out of that pretension and business altogether.

2) The ATO has got to play ball properly. The Tax office has to play by the rules the government has set with the tax break legislation. Without it, the investors won't return.

3) There has to be a domestic market created through artificial means. Australian films should be cheaper at the box office, and exhibitors should be made to screen them. Distributors who handle Australian films have to be protected. This is a must.

4) Make lots of genre pictures. That is to say, more Australian Horror, more Australian Action, More Australian Crime, more Australian Science Fiction and so on. You know, the kinds of pictures people actually watch as their movie staple.

5) Make More. We just don't make enough to know how good we really can be.

If these changes are made, it won't matter if Baz Luhrmann is an auteur or not, or for that matter if, that one picture succeeds or fails.

(Appropriately,) The Cultural Cringe Sets In

It's Now Official
'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.

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.

Stars In Their Eyes

The Good News First

Baz Luhrman's Australia made it's debut in the last 24 hrs and nobody has condemned it to death... yet. It's good because so much is riding on the success of this film. Here's the funny thing. If 20th Century Fox made a film set in England using English actors, nobody really bats an eye-lid. If they do so with Australian actors in a film about some portion of Australia's landscape, it turns into a media circus.

The most expensive Australian film ever made is rousing and passionate. Despite some cringe-making Harlequin Romance moments between homegrown Hollywood stars Kidman and Jackman, the 1940s-set Australia defies all but the most cynical not to get carried away by the force of its grandiose imagery and storytelling.

The Reporter noted the film was much less earnest than the trailer suggested.

Even if it does run a butt-numbing two hours and 45 minutes, the film has broad appeal for international audiences with plenty of stirring action sequences to make the blokes more comfortable with a particularly blatant shot of bare-chested Jackman lathering up under the shower.

But other reviews have been considerably more measured. The Age in Melbourne damned the film with faint praise, saying: "In what has to be the most hyped and self-consciously local film since 1984's The Man From Snowy River, the anxiously anticipated Australia is not a bad film. But it's far from a great one, and certainly not one destined to be a classic."

In a review tagged with 3½ stars out of five, The Sydney Morning Herald's Sandra Hall described Australia as much too long at almost three hours, shamelessly overdone an outback adventure seen through the eyes of a filmmaker steeped in the theatrical rituals and hectic colours of old-fashioned showbiz.

In The Australian, David Stratton went for the same rating. He mixed enthusiasm for the film with disappointment. While he praised the sweep, scope and acting, he noted the cliches and familiar elements.

The obvious conclusion to draw from that is that Australia as a country is under-exposed to the world, and perhaps even to itself. At this point in history, the movie-watching audience of Australia (Let's call them MWAA for short) are ready to consume anything if there are Australian stars in it, together in a film about Australia. Perhaps the scale of production that is 'Australia' *should* be the norm, but alas, it's a once in a decade event.

It's a little sad that after all the hoopla, the film ends up with a 3.5/5 star rating, but in many ways, that is exactly what all competent films earn these days. They're the most boring kind of movie! In any case, the fact that the critics have not dumped all over it means that it probably won't be orphaned straight to a DVD release or be available for $7.99 on supermarket shelves too soon. It may even make its money back worldwide - I certainly hope it does.

The Bad News

The bad news is that there's really nothing from Australia to follow it up. If 'Australia' is successful, then you hope that there is a plethora of product so follow in its steps, but there won't be. So for better or for worse, the success or possible lack thereof) will become the de facto litmus test on our ability to make films.

The really bad news is that Australian stars generally don't want to come back and make movies here, so Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman deserve some praise for that fact alone. It kind of makes it even more stark that there are so few films made with our bankable international stars, back home in Australia.

Unfortunately, even after 2 Star Wars movies, 3 Matrix movies and a raft of other Hollywood fare was shot in Australia, none of those films catalysed an equivalent rise in Australian production. Instead, what we've seen is a steady flow of Australian acting talent moving abroad on the back of those films. Production back here by our producers ad writers and directors, has tanked completely. Even 'Australia' is actually an American film which just happens to use our talent.

What is doubly unfortunate for an Australian producer is that to get a film up with any scope of real international success, that is to say, the point is to make a film that will find an audience as readily as an American or English film, the producer needs to get commitments out of A-List actors. Even if they are Aussies, you have to know they are very ill-disposed towards coming back to do something here. Even getting a rejection from these people is very tricky, because usually they throw an agent in the way, who then asks for pre-sales on the project before even showing the project to his/her client.

Here's the catch: Most Australian productions can't get a pre-sale exactly because it doesn't have an international star attached. And there's the agent there saying, "if you don't have some kind of pre-sale arrangement..."

So the International A-list actor gets to say 'no, piss-off' without actually saying no, or taking the negative hit for having said no. It's kind of pathetic how for the sake of their PR, they would want to have 'plausible deniability of their rejection', but that is exactly where we stand with our own talent. I can write a long list of Australian actors who have use this ploy to stiff projects I've been on but I won't; however, I will report that Hugh Jackman and his office is one of them who has played this game.

Thus many Australian projects die waiting to hear from their own stars ho have made it, as do the projects that get hobble, nobbled, crippled and fucked by the various funding bodies. That's still the bad news.

Why don't we make commercial films here? Because the stars of the private sector refuse to, which results in the public sector marketing a line of far, far inferior products. That's it in a nutshell.

Looking At It From Their Point Of View

Imagine you're one of these guys or gals. You grow up in Australia, and you decide to become an actor. You do some crappy films with Australian crews and miraculously something breaks internationally. So you hike it out to London or LA, and you beat out rest of the fame-hungry crowd and make it to the top eventually. You're a bankable leading star, with a limited shelf-life.

You sure as hell don't feel like coming back to where you started to make some crappy under-developed film with crews from Australia when you could be working with world-renown writers, producers, directors and sitting in comfortable, air-conditioned trailers filled with your whimiscal riders, in between changing set-ups as you have some gorgeous assistant satisfy your every sexual impulse and desire?

Why would you give that up?

Or, if you want the baseball-metaphor version, why the hell would a Major-Leaguer come back and play Rookie Ball?

What The Australian Government Must Do

Each time I write an entry about why and how the Australian Film Industry is... err, ...for want of a better word, FUCKED, I am asked to write how it could be different. It could be different in several ways.

1) The Government should get out of development.

2) The Government should create a domestic market for domestic films instead.

3) The Government should facilitate producers, not vet or veto.

The logical extension of this is that they should shut down all government funding agencies.They should all shut up shop. It ain't working, and it never will, and it's high tide they stopped spending money on them.

Instead, the Government should come up with a fund to spend money strictly on advertising and marketing Australian films. They MUST get right out of production and development. It should come up with laws making it mandatory that a certain percentage of Australian screens have to screen works by Australian creatives. This will put an artificial demand on the likes of Greater Union to invest in product that they think will sell in those mandatory blocks, because writing off those empty cinemas will send them to the wall. Right now, it's too easy for them to make a living off showing American films with impunity.

There should be an agency, preferably the Commonwealth Bank of Australia that looks after producers that acts as a 'funding Kiosk'. The producer should turn up with a script and a budget. The Government lends a sum up to a certain dollar for that producer to take and get that film made. The Producer then takes that dollar sum, script, budget and perhaps whatever package, and then goes to an Australian distributor - who by law must get screen product to fit the screen quota - a deal. The Producer then takes that deal overseas and sews up the rest of the deals. When the deal is set up, the producer has to return the loan or have his production shut down. Pretty simple.

Needless to say there should be no assessment criteria for the CONTENT of the script. Just the budget and genre, in terms of feasibility. The CBA must determine if they think the film might be commercially viable.

If the Producer fails to get the picture up, they have to return the money at CPI interest rates.  That means a producer has to be pretty certain his or her movie is going to be internationally profitable before he develops it. In other words, let the market decide what a good Australian film might be - not some funding body run by film bureaucrats who miss far more than they hit, and seem totally unaccountable for their failures.

Will this ever happen? I doubt it. There's just too much convention and tradition and bad habits and acceptance of these terrible choices, all wrapped up in the model of government funding that has existed in Australia for so long. However it needs to happen if politicians really think they want to stop hemorrhaging government money on Australian films that Australians don't want to see.

UPDATE:
This came in from Pleiades who is a fully paid up member of the Australian Writers Guild. The text in full reads:

MEDIA RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SCREEN AUSTRALIA ABANDONS AUSTRALIA’S SCREENWRITERS

OSCAR NOMINATED WRITERS SAYS PROPOSED GUIDELINES SPELL DISASTER FOR INDUSTRY

Wednesday 19 November: The Australian Writers’ Guild has expressed alarm at Screen Australia’s draft guidelines and the impact they will have on the future of Australia’s film industry.

One of Australia’s most successful screenwriters, Oscar nominated Jan Sardi (Shine, The Notebook, Mao’s Last Dancer) says “Far from taking the Australian film industry in a new direction, Screen Australia's proposed guidelines spell disaster for an industry already on its knees.”

If the proposed draft guidelines of Screen Australia are put into practice, future funding eligibility requirements for screenwriters will be so high they will exclude all but a handful of professional writers and force others into potentially unproductive partnerships before the first draft is even written.

Funding for first-time and emerging screenwriters will also be completely abandoned and a total disregard is shown for the basic rights of writers through the proposed early transfer of copyright without any mandated protections.

In initial consultations Screen Australia acknowledged the importance of quality scripts in the creation of outstanding films and television programs, and expressed a commitment to supporting writers with the time and money necessary to write them. Their proposed guidelines however show an abject failure to fulfill these commitments.

“Abandoning emerging screenwriters and inflicting shotgun weddings on experienced writers, directors and producers reeks of a government bureaucracy all too eager to divest itself of responsibility and accountability for where Australian taxpayers money goes - it is not the way forward,” says Sardi.

Australian Writers’ Guild Executive Director, Jacqueline Woodman, says “In their eagerness to establish sustainable businesses and let the marketplace develop and promote projects, Screen Australia appears to have forgotten that before there can be a project to be developed, a script must first be written.”

The Australian Writers’ Guild demands that Screen Australia respond publicly to the proposals outlined in their recent submission and intends to actively campaign against the adoption of the federal agency’s proposed guidelines that attack the status and rights of Australian screenwriters.

The Australian Writers’ Guild full submission to Screen Australia is available from www.awg.com.au.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION OR TO REQUEST AN INTERVIEW, PLEASE CONTACT: DEBBIE McINNES, DEBBIE MCINNES PUBLIC RELATIONS Tel: 02 9550 9207 Mob: 0412 818 071 e: debbie@dmcpr.com.au

Take that, Dr. Ruth Harley, wherever you are! The bit in bold is pretty important - I did that.

This is the sort of government ham-fisted non-help that I'm talking about! Get out of development if you're going to impose dumb rules on who gets to write!

If the Screen Australia policy is to only back experienced writers, then it is a sign that they are looking at the industry top-down. It's understandable in that they think it would reduce their risks; however it flies in the face of the reality where films are developed bottom up by people who want to make something out of ideas, and develop them into stories and then scripts and finally films. That's the bottom-up reality of film-making. If the Screen Australia policy is to exclude those people, then there is going to be no future as they will keep making fewer and fewer films as the pool of 'experienced writers' grows older, smaller, and die; and nobody new gets to replace them.

The News That's Fit To Punt

Happy Ending Or Bust!

For some days there's been this media press about Baz Luhrman having to recut his film 'Australia' to have a happy ending. He's come out and denied it saying he wrote 6 endings, shot 3 and decided on the happy one.

Luhrmann is flying back to Sydney from New York with a day to spare to complete the film he has spent four years working on.

"I'm going back to the mixing desk to finish it in 24 hours," the director said.

"It's right on the edge, we're right up against it. I literally have to - on Friday night - push that button.

"This is really dangerous, I hope there's no problem with the plane going back."

I don't know how you feel about the media spin on this.

He scoffed at recent media reports that Twentieth Century Fox had forced him to change the ending of the movie so Hugh Jackman's character didn't die because audiences didn't like it.

"You really think that on my films people tell me what to do? I don't think so," he said.

"On my films I decide.

"I wrote six endings and I shot three," said Luhrmann, adding that he decided not to use the ending where Jackman's character dies.

"There is a death at the end of this film, but it's a surprise how that works."

Luhrmann said a rough cut of the film, also starring Nicole Kidman, had so far only been shown to US talk show host Oprah Winfrey and her audience, and Good Morning America host Diane Sawyer.

Kidman and Jackman appeared on an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show on Monday that was dedicated to the film, where Winfrey said: "I have not been this excited about a movie since I don't know when."

Umm, that's just great Baz. I think Shakespeare wrote only one ending for each of his plays and he's still great after 400years. What are you afraid of? :)

It's probably true in as much as so much is riding on it that he just can't allow something like an ending not to be perfectly nuanced.

My bet is that there is not a single moment of black comedy in the whole thing, and we're supposed to just gobble up a tedious story that fetishes the landscape of Northern Australia, turning it into the next frontier of fiction - except Crocodile Dundee already hailed from there. I don't know why but I just can't get my hopes up that it will not be a waste of my time.

The notion of happy endings being lesser art and better business, actually is founded in the public's real behaviour. Nobody wants to leave the cinema on a down note unless they're getting something even better in exchange. That's the problem - not enough writers, directors, producers and studio execs have anything better to give than a happy ending. So happy endings it is for a Saturday night out for all of us, where we get confection instead of something better.

You don't have to be courageous to go with a sad ending, you just have to be good.

We're Crappier Than We Thought

The bad news according to Merrill Lynch - yes, they who got bought out a little while back thanks to the credit crunch - think Australia is the riskiest nation while Nigeria is the safest, thanks to foreign debt.

Australia was ranked riskiest on a table of rankings deduced from seven indicators. These were the current account financing gap, foreign exchange reserves/short-term external debt ratio, exports to-GDP ratio, private credit-to-GDP ratio, private credit growth, loans-to deposits ratio and banks capital-to-assets ratio.

As this country has zero national debt, a stable government and an apparently well-capitalised banking system we can take the Merrill report lightly. In any case, the nature of these things is a complete stab in the dark.

As one blogger put it: "Nigeria is clearly the least risky country in the world. Many Nigerians email me that they have $7.2 million that they wish to share with me on a 50/50 basis. They must be rolling in money!''

Still, it's worth looking at why Australia is at risk. The current account is coming home to roost and the economy is vulnerable to a flight of capital - not from institutional funds into banks but from foreign investors straight out of the country.

Though the Reserve Bank has taken the long-handle to the cash rate with aplomb, the boffins at the bank's headquarters in Martin Place will be quietly panicking.

We are now more susceptible than ever to our large private foreign debt. It is becoming expensive to service, even expensive for the banks to roll in the short term as the $A has fallen.

Offshore investors venture Down Under for two key reasons: to play in commodities and to enjoy the high yields. Commodities prices are getting smashed along with the unequivocally horrible economic and corporate data coming out of the US and Europe.

And as rates fall the attraction of Australia as a stable place to park some money is also diminished.

But there's a more pressing issue - the flip-side of the boom if you like - and that is the penalty for relying on overseas debt.

Despite a relieving thaw in interbank markets offshore, the RBA is not done with its liquidity campaign by a long-shot. And there may yet have to be draconian measures adopted to defend the $A.

Oh the agony. To think that our economy is a house of cards. I keep waiting for whole institutions to fall as the credit crunch works its way through the economy, but no, the same old fat cats are still driving around in their expensive Euro-cars, living on the waterfront, holding vast parties - which is why my workplace is berserk at the moment as we plan for all these fat cats to have their annual dos.

Yep, it's just been non-stop this year. Explain that to me!

Today's New Link

Today's Link Is Bambino's Bloggerama. I've added it to the sidebar so go check it out.

It's a blog that covers aspects of virtual culture as it emerges in blogland - or so I am assuming form the 7 artices on the front page plus alpha it also seems to b about Barbie Dolls. Go have a look. Here's a sample of the wit:

In Barbie Girls, the emphasis seems to be on dressing up your avatar (the power of the 'makeover'), buying stuff (clothing, etc). Here is an article about it in The Second Life Herald (unconnected with Linden Lab's SL). Players use Barbie Bucks instead of Linden Dollars. You can buy virtual furniture or 'furni' as they term it, or virtual pets. I suppose on the positive side, it is reducing actual clothing bought (and as quickly thrown away as last week's fashion) and unwanted real animal pets.

And yet, it is not THAT far away from a game that Mattel put out 40 years ago, in 1967, called "The Barbie World of Fashion game by Mattel". There was still that emphasis on fashion, cute guys, but it wasn't so insidious and was probably aimed at an older market. And the fashions actually looked like fashion - you know, related to art and design, not some sort of ghastly pink cyberchic masquerading as 'fashion'. Cheap disposable fashion, as in the real world, now represented virtually. How utterly pointless! Mattel also release Barbie's "Keys To Fame" game in 1963 but at least the premise of that was "your dream career comes true!". Gosh, a career! There's something that young girls today don't seem to aspire to. They just want fame, money and to be very attractive (and don't forget sexy, even if you are only a tween or younger).

What a shame that all that effort has been put into a game which adds to the already gargantuan effort by companies to further squander and possibly destroy the potential of young girls in the Western world. When I was pre-pubescent, I dreamed of being a ground-breaking scientist or an inventor or an investigator par excellence. I don't think I ever thought of being famous for its own sake or being a popstar/rockstar/fashion model. Now that seems to be all these girls want to be. What an awful waste!

You tell'em lady. :)