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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.

That's not to say it won't be popular, possibly wildly so. The film has broad appeal, particularly to the chick-flick market, with its sweeping, overlong melodramatic saga about cattle drives, the stolen generations, the bombing of Darwin and Hugh Jackman's abs. The story involves a prissy English woman (Nicole Kidman) who, with the help of a stockman known enigmatically as "The Drover" (Jackman), tries saving her troubled cattle station from a greedy cattleman (Bryan Brown) and his evil relative (David Wenham).

Blended into the tale is the touching story of a little boy of mixed blood, who serves as a symbol for the stolen generations and racism.

The film is fine, and never boring but, boy, is it overlong. At a mammoth 165 minutes it feels too much like a work-in-progress. There is a lot of narrative flab and longueurs in the first two hours and the film often has the pace of a steamroller with engine trouble.

Luhrmann also seems so eager to trowel on the Aussie cliches — obviously to appeal to the tourist markets! — that Australia is often simply irritating. The word "crikey" is spouted so often the film often sounds like a tribute to Steve Irwin.

As for the visuals, the film is pretty — you cannot point a camera at the outback and not get something impressive — but there are only so many wide shots of the Aussie outback that the human mind can stand.

In terms of spectacle, the film boasts one impressive sequence involving a stampede of cattle heading for a cliff. Lovely stuff. On the flipside, however, the much-touted bombing of Darwin by the Japanese is way too brief and resembles off-cuts from the movie Pearl Harbor.

Performances are fine throughout, with Wenham as the bad guy cattle heir putting in the best work. As the quintesential outback Aussie bloke, Jackman is a sort of ocker liberal who stands up for women and the right of blackfellas to drink in pubs. He's good value, as usual.

Australia is a far bigger deal for Kidman, though, in that she finally stars in a film that people might actually be interested in seeing.

Since her well-deserved Oscar win for The Hours Kidman has been box-office poison after such disasters as Bewitched, The Stepford Wives, The Invasion, Fur and Margot at the Wedding. If the film connects, it might signal a badly needed career turnaround for her.

More importantly, local films with black themes or major indigenous characters tend to do poorly, so if Australia succeeds here it could represent a breakthrough. We've always had trouble dealing with racial issues on film, so, in that regard, the film could be a landmark.

If only Baz had made the damn thing shorter by at least half an hour.

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REVIEW: HE SET himself an enormous challenge, but Baz Luhrmann has pulled off an incredible film in Australia.

Shoehorning two complete films into one package, Australia sees Nicole Kidman as Lady Sarah Ashley, a priviilged aristocrat drawn to the outback to sell her late husband's failing cattle station.

But she's soon drawn to the landscape, a little Aboriginal boy called Nullah, played startlingly by newcomer Brandon Walters, and a taciturn drover (Hugh Jackman) who reluctantly helps her save her property.

The film begins with surprising slapstick and trademark Luhrmann over-the-top humour - a scene featuring Jackman giving himself a bath with a bucket is pure beefcake and proud of it - but settles into a compelling and moving tale which traverses war, race relations, class and the Stolen Generation.

It's a movie with a message, but Luhrmann provides the audience with no shortage of thrills, from a cliff hanger cattle stampede to the bombing of Darwin.

Kidman and Jackman are perfect together, Jackman's broad speaking drover a perfect foil to Kidman's snooty English rose.

Australia is full of familiar faces, from David Gulpilil to David Wenham, Bryan Brown to Ben Mendelsohn, but not so familiar places, to many Australians anyway.

Australia features some of the most beautiful photography ever seen in an Australian film, from the Bungle Bungles in the Kimberley to the Northern Territory in the midst of the wet season.

A love letter to the Australian landscape and our history, Australia has international blockbuster written all over it.
REVIEW IN THE HERALD SUN

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Entertainment

Australia almost lives up to the hype
By Katherine Field and Alyssa Braithwaite18th November 2008, 14:51 WST

It was always going to be hard for Australia to live up to the hype and expectation, but Baz Luhrmann's film almost pulls it off. Right from the outset, Australia is every bit the sweeping epic in the tradition of Gone With The Wind and Out Of Africa.
Nicole Kidman says this is the film she has wanted to make all her life, and she looks more natural and at home in this role than any other.

As Lady Sarah Ashley, an English aristocrat who inherits an outback cattle station, Kidman shows off her comic acting skills to great effect for the first 20 minutes of the movie.
Luhrmann puts his unique stamp on the film in the opening sequences, which recall the wackiness seen in his previous works, such as Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge!
As the movie progresses, lightness gives way to more serious themes of love, loss, the stolen generations and war.
The film opens with an explanation of the stolen generations and closes with a note about the prime minister's apology this year.

The bombing of Darwin in World War II is spectacularly recreated.

But it's not all gloom and doom.

Hugh Jackman's rugged Drover is sure to win over female fans, thanks in part to a scene where he pours water over his naked torso.

While Jackman and Kidman are convincing as the unlikely lovers, the most touching relationship is between Kidman and 13-year-old Brandon Walters who plays Nullah. Walters, in his depiction of the orphaned half-Aboriginal, half-Caucasian Nullah, steals the show.

The breathtaking scenery is beautifully shot, with one standout scene featuring thousands of cattle stampeding towards a cliff.

The film is unreservedly Australian, filled with "crikey" and "bloody" and rough outback blokes, but it descends into Hollywood cheesiness at times in some of the dialogue and scenes.

For Australian and international audiences, there is plenty to enjoy in this film, but whether it is the saviour of the local industry, or the Gone With The Wind of this era, remains to be seen.

Australia opens on November 26 nationally.
AAP

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Review: Jackman to the rescue

BEN LANGFORD

November 19th, 2008


ALL MAN: Hugh Jackman gets it done in the new film Australia.


AUSSIE ROSE: Nicole Kidman dresses up for the ball.

BAZ Luhrmann is the man who made Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom, he lives in a fancy Sydney mansion, his filmmaking style could out-camp a drag queen who's wrapped in a tent, and here he is trying to capture the wild rugged Outback of 1940s Australia.

If he succeeds it's mainly because of Hugh Jackman, and he should be buying the leading man beers for the rest of his life.

If the new James Bond film set the standard for product placement then Australia has introduced us to a new kind of saturation hype.

It comes with a $40 million series of Luhrmann-directed ads to encourage tourists to Australia, and with the tourism economy and the Aussie film industry in trouble, the film has been hailed as the saviour of both.

It's not, but it's not a bad yarn either - if you can handle plenty of cheesy melodrama (e.g. lines like "Let's go home" ... "There's no place like it").

Jackman plays a drover sent to help Nicole Kidman's English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley with a cattle station in the Kimberley.

She meets him when she gets off the boat in Darwin, just as he uses her luggage to bash a man who insulted him.

The film has been written up as the love story between the two leads, but it's really about the relationship between them and a young Aboriginal boy (Brandon Walters) who Kidman's character adopts.

The stolen generation theme is at the centre of the film and Luhrmann doesn't miss a chance to tell us all about it - including a strange reference to Kevin Rudd's apology.

Darwin stars, with Stokes Hill Wharf the centre of the action - at times you can almost feel the humidity in the build-up nightlife.

But it's Jackman's film. Equal parts beefcake, action hero, caring (eventually) father and reconciliation warrior, the superstar drover steals the film from Kidman early and never lets go.

Early on Kidman struggles to be anything other than silly in her harsh new environment.

Later she manages it, but she's is really the support act.

David Gulpilil is comfortable as the elder King George, standing around a lot on the edge of cliffs being spiritual.

Of course it's over-the-top - we would expect nothing else from Luhrmann.

But the audience's intelligence is seriously tested by a scene, where a cattle stampede starts in the middle of the night and 30 seconds later it's broad daylight.

The Bombing of Darwin scene is a highlight, but there's only one raid and it's over quickly.

Meanwhile the constant presence of the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow is just a bit weird.

Australia is a pretty good, simple, story but it should have been better.

With the rich material in the Top End's history, it could have been a classic.

Australia opens in cinemas next Wednesday.

Director: Baz Luhrmann

Starring: Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Brandon Walters, David Wenham, David Ngoombujarra, David Gulpilil

Rating: * * *

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Baz's Australia a shot in the arm, but no lifesaver

Australia, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, is the most expensive film ever made Down Under.

Actors and critics agree: Baz Luhrmann's Australia will be popular, but it won't save the struggling local film industry by itself.

The highly-anticipated epic finally had its world premiere in Sydney last night.

Hundreds of cheering fans braved the rain to see Hollywood heavyweights Luhrmann, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, as well as actors Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown, David Gulpilil and newcomer Brandon Walters walk the red carpet.

Early reviews have been mixed.

"Deliriously camp and shamelessly overdone," wrote Sandra Hall for the Sydney Morning Herald.

David Stratton, writing in The Australian, was more measured.

"An uneven romantic melodrama which looks magnificent," he wrote.

The two-hour, 40-minute movie is a World War II drama set in the Australian outback.

Oscar winner Kidman plays English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley who inherits a remote cattle station. When barons threaten to take her land, she reluctantly joins forces with a enigmatic drover, played by Jackman, and an Aboriginal child (Walters) to drive her herd thousands of kilometres to Darwin.

With a budget that reportedly exceeded $150 million, it is the most expensive film ever made Down Under. Many hope it will beat Crocodile Dundee at the worldwide box office.

To say expectations are high would be an understatement, especially as $40 million of taxpayers' money was used in a tourism advertising tie-in. The film also received tax breaks from the Federal Government.

"You know, this is a tremendously important film for Australia. Every man woman and child has an investment in this film," said Margaret Pomeranz, critic on ABC TV's At The Movies.

"So it's important that it works on a number of levels, and I am sure it's going to work here in Australia."

Immense, or just too long?
Federal Arts Minister Peter Garrett is confident Australia will have success at the box office.

"We've got a film which is very large in ambition, large in scope and large in visuals, with a really strong story," Mr Garrett said.

Actor John Jarrett agrees.

"It is the biggest thing since Clark Gable died," he said.

"It is going to be immense, yeah. I think it's going to be huge."

But The Age's Jim Schembri isn't so sure.

"Well I thought the film was good, but not great," he said.

"The problem with the film is that it's just too long."

As for prospects Australia could save our struggling local film industry, Schembri says no single film can do that.

"All this stuff about this film sort of heralding a new age for Australian cinema - no," he said.

"We need about four or five good years of good films. Not just one good film around Christmas time."

Schembri's thoughts were echoed by veteran Australian actor Brown on the red carpet last night.

"It won't do anything for the industry in Australia beyond get people to see this movie," he said.

Yesterday Kidman defended Luhrmann and the film, saying the director never intended it to be "the second coming".

"It is meant to be, 'let's have some fun and enjoy it'," she told a Sydney press conference.

Australia opens nationally on November 26.

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AUSTRALIA

* * * ½

Directed by Baz Luhrmann

Written by Baz Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan

Story by Baz Luhrmann

Rated M, 165 minutes

Cinemas everywhere

Reviewed by Sandra Hall

NOTHING succeeds like excess. Oscar Wilde coined the phrase and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Baz Luhrmann has it embroidered on scatter cushions all over the house.

Not that he needs reminding. It is a mantra stamped on everything he does and Australia is the apotheosis. It has become the movie as superhero, charged with the job of rescuing the Australian film industry and giving us a new and shiny view of ourselves. And shiny it certainly is.

It's also much too long at almost three hours, deliriously camp and shamelessly overdone - an outback adventure seen through the eyes of a filmmaker steeped in the theatrical rituals and hectic colours of old-fashioned showbiz. To quote Oklahoma, one of the few Hollywood classics not to lend its influence to Luhrmann's style, or rather medley of styles, the corn is as high as an elephant's eye.

And so strong is his urge to celebrate the exoticism of old Australia that you half-expect to see the elephant, as well, lumbering across one of those majestic stretches of the Kimberley. Yet the film's vigour and yes, its passion - that overused word - do engage you.

As you watch, memories of other movie moments flicker into view. The film's orange skies conjure up Gone With The Wind. Yet Nicole Kidman's transplanted English aristocrat, Lady Sarah Ashley, looks to be claiming kinship with Meryl Streep's Karen Blixen in Out Of Africa.

Then the pitch changes again and she and Hugh Jackman as her rough-and-ready lover, the Drover, are embarking on unreliable imitations of a bickering Hepburn and Bogart in The African Queen.

But underpinning everything here is the ethos of the musical. David Hirschfelder's score is so integral to the action that everybody seems perpetually on the brink of bursting into song. When Sarah, the Drover and their rag-tag band of riders decide to brave the odds to take 1500 cattle across the desert to Darwin, I was reminded of every Hollywood musical in which somebody has leapt up and said brightly: "Let's put on a show and take it on the road."

The film's rapid changes of tone often make for a bumpy ride. Luhrmann has always had a taste for the cartoon and the opening scenes with their quick cuts, screen-filling close-ups and liberal use of slapstick, hark all the way back to Strictly Ballroom.

It is an effect that sits strangely with the lyricism of the film's red and ochre expanses.

It is also tinged with condescension - as if were going to be looking down on the past as a place peopled exclusively by hams and buffoons. But it does make for some brisk passages of exposition.

Having come to the Northern Territory in search of her wayward husband, Lord Ashley, Sarah discovers first that she's a widow. Then she rashly decides to take over her husband's cattle station, Faraway Downs - a move that puts her up against Bryan Brown's ruthless cattle baron, and his accomplice, played by David Wenham, laying on the deadpan menace with a lavish hand.

More important, she also forms a bond with Brandon Walters, doing an endearing job as Nullah, a mixed-blood Aboriginal boy, in danger of being forced into state care.

Anachronisms abound. Kidman and Jackman speak quaintly of doing a drove. There's an action sequence that pushes the concept of the cliffhanger much further than it was ever meant to go, and Sarah's romance with the Drover is rife with Mills & Boon moments.

There is even a role-reversal version of that much-loved romantic convention, the Makeover. This one has the Drover getting in touch with his inner-glamour boy by shaving off his beard and donning a white tuxedo to join his princess at the ball.

After the long, long lead-up, the big set-piece - the bombing of Darwin - seems oddly perfunctory, maybe because so much energy has been expended on the orgasmic task of bringing all plot strands to a simultaneous climax. But the agile camerawork bestows a dizzying sense of scale and distance. And once Kidman stops playing the easily shockable Victorian heroine, she and Jackman do start generating some heat, largely because they evoke a relationship which seems based on genuine affection.

As to whether the film is going to enjoy a success big enough to shed its radiance over the whole industry, who can say? I suspect the hype, and the budget, impose too heavy a load. A big-hearted melodrama, it takes a series of fascinating risks, some of which come off. But it's no super-movie.

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November 18, 2008
Review: Australia, the movie

Anne Barrowlcough, Sydney
****

It has every Australian cliché you could hope for, from kangaroos and Nicole Kidman to aborigines going walkabout and, yep, Waltzing Matilda. There is even, within moments of the opening scenes, Rolf Harris's wobble board.

But Baz Luhrmann's long-awaited, and over-budget epic Australia manages, against the odds, to avoid turning into one big sunburnt stereotype about Godzone country. Instead, in what turns out to be a multi-layered story it describes an Australia of the 1940s that is at once compellingly, beautiful and breathtakingly cruel.

Described as a cross between Gone with the Wind and Out of Africa it bears, in fact, little resemblance to either movie – apart from a similarly spectacular landscape as Out of Africa and a plot line that loosely resembles that of Gone with the Wind.

In this case, Lady Sarah Ashley, a passionless English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman), inherits a vast cattle station in the Northern Territories only to find that the station is the target of a dastardly takeover plot.

Much against her will, she is forced to enlist the help of a local stockman known only as Drover (Hugh Jackman), to save the station by driving her huge herd of cattle hundreds of miles across the Kuraman desert to Darwin. Which is then bombed by the Japanese.

In the worst Mills and Boon tradition, Lady Sarah – whose emotions are as frozen as Kidman's forehead – and the rough neck Drover loathe each other on sight but, as they endure the harsh and rather dusty travails of the cattle drive they quite quickly fall in love. She even teaches him to dance. Under a boab tree.

But if it sounds shallow and predictable, Australia is, in fact, anything but.

The cliches are saved by little jokes and asides, as if Luhrmann is saying 'Yes, I know, but what can you do?' In an early scene, as the newly-arrived Sarah drives toward her station, Faraway Downs, with Drover, a herd of kangaroo lopes alongside their vehicle.

As Sarah “oohs” and “aahs” with melodramatic wonder, a shot rings out and one of the kangaroos falls, killed by an Aboriginal stockman riding, literally, shot gun on the roof of the car. The horrified aristocrat spends the rest of the trip staring at the hind leg of the kangaroo hanging disconsolately over the windscreen, and the trails of blood that trek through the dust on the glass.

Later that evening she pops her head out of her tent door to behold the kangaroo being roasted for dinner plus (more importantly) the sight of a half naked Drover soaping himself down; a scene that will only do for Jackman what James Bond's swimming briefs did for Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, and will ensure Jackman as Craig's only viable cinematic rival as the heart throb du jour.

But what gives the film its heart is something else entirely. This is also the story of Nullah (Brandon Walters), a mixed race Aboriginal boy left orphaned by the inhumanity of Australian law. The 1940s was the time of the Stolen Generation, when mixed race children were banned from living either with their Aboriginal families or within the white community, but were taken from their homes to be brought up in church missions.

Nullah's increasingly frantic attempts to escape from the 'coppers' and his symbiotic relationship with his grandfather, the mystical King George, played with awesome power by the renowned Aboriginal dancer and musician David Gulpilil, is treated with a stark honesty and is what actually makes this film truly Australian in both its best and its worst sense.

Brandon, 13, was discovered by Lurhmann in his local swimming pool in the West Australian town of Broome and he plays Nullah with a combination of mischief and tragedy that may turn him into the real star of the film, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that he has never acted before.

Australia is reported to have gone $US30million over its $US100 million budget and right to the last minute there was speculation that it would not be finished in time for its Australian premiere.

Australian audiences – who are already in love with the film – are guaranteed to flock to the box office but Luhrmann needs the American market if he is to break even. If all else fails there is always Jackman, stripped to the waist, under the shower. That if nothing else should pull them in.

Australia opens in the UK on December 26

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Film Review: Australia

Bottom Line: In epic style, Baz Luhrmann weaves his wizardry on Oz.
By Megan Lehmann
Nov 18, 2008

SYDNEY -- With his audaciously titled epic "Australia," Baz Luhrmann has delivered a shamelessly melodramatic, often eccentric spectacle with true-blue blockbuster potential. The most expensive Australian film ever made is rousing and passionate. Despite some cringe-making Harlequin Romance moments between homegrown Hollywood stars Nicole Kidman and Hugh 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.

And, yes, there are kangaroos.

Tourism Australia may have politely requested their inclusion, with hopes for a tourist revival riding on this $130 million Outback tale, along with what seems like the future of the entire local film industry. If Luhrmann felt the weight of that responsibility, it doesn't show. His "Australia" is much less earnest than the trailer suggests, layered with a thin veneer of camp and a nod and a wink to accompany the requisite Aussie cliches.

Having shunned the recent grinding run of bleak suburban micro-dramas, Australians are primed to embrace his monumental magic-realist vision, which honors the country's heritage and celebrates the invigorating majesty of its landscape.

Even if it does run a butt-numbing 2 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.

Fashioned in the style of classics such as "Gone With the Wind" and "Lawrence of Arabia," "Australia" follows the fortunes of persnickety Englishwoman Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman), who inherits a sprawling cattle property in northwestern Australia.

Under threat of a takeover, she reluctantly enlists the help of a Marlboro Man-style stockman known only as the Drover (Jackman) to help drive 1,500 head of cattle across the Top End of Australia to the port of Darwin, ahead of its bombing by the Japanese.

Unlike "Gone With the Wind," which skirted the political context of the Civil War, the controversial issue of the so-called Stolen Generation is more than a mere backdrop for the emotional upheavals experienced by the film's leads. Luhrmann, who makes a habit of upending convention, has plonked the attempted assimilation of mixed-race Aboriginal children into Western culture front and center, making this as much a story of reconciliation between black and white Australia as it is between the untamed local and the aristocratic import.

Enter the film's breakout star: 13-year-old Brandon Walters, playing young mixed-race boy Nullah. By turns cheeky and heartrending, the limpid-eyed newcomer knits the disparate threads of this sweeping epic together, single-handedly lending this showcase of amplified emotions its true heart.

Pin thin and ramrod straight, Kidman gives one of her most engaging performances, occasionally harking back to the comic highs of "To Die For." Meanwhile, Jackman looks good in his Akubra bush hat.

Performances are strong throughout, particularly from David Wenham as Lady Ashley's malevolent rival and David Gulpilil as Nullah's mystical grandfather, King George.

While the "Wizard of Oz" motif is labored and the narrative hits a few speed bumps, all is forgiven when Luhrmann brings out one of his stunning set pieces, like a thrilling cattle stampede along a cliff edge.

Cinematographer Mandy Walker, who collaborated with Luhrmann on his award-winning Chanel No. 5 commercial, creates a sumptuous, painterly look, complemented by impeccable costume and production design from Luhrmann's Oscar-winning wife, Catherine Martin.

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Originally posted by Seersha:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/19/2423828.htm?section=australia

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Baz's Australia a shot in the arm, but no lifesaver

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Originally posted by foxie:
Remember Hugh is on GMA this AM!