I owe you guys a blog post on at least two other topics (police in house and college football news, not to mention Twilight), but alas neither of those things has my blogging juices flowing tonight.
Instead, I want to talk briefly about the movie Australia. Some of you may remember that I had been looking forward to seeing this movie. Today I put all the other things I needed and wanted to do on hold, drove an hour each way to Virginia, and sat in the movie theatre for almost 3 hours to watch this movie. I knew the reviews and earnings were not very good, and I feared it would leave theatres before I got to see it on the big screen. And well, since the very reason I wanted to see it was the vistas of my long-lost continent love, I needed to see it on the big screen.
***SPOILER ALERT: DON'T READ FURTHER IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE MOVIE AND HAVEN'T YET***
Most of the stuff you will read in the bad reviews is true. The movie can't pick a tone. It starts in something of a campy Moulin Rouge fashion, but then switches and never picks it up again. It is at least two movies in one, with a definite ending point to the first and no real reason to continue along for the next. It is intensely melodramatic, trying to be an epic rather than just being an epic.
Yet, despite all these flaws, I found myself really enjoying it. For one, yes, it was great to revisit some places I'd seen two years ago on my trip from Darwin to Adelaide. There was one shot in particular that I could have sworn was taken with my camera - I have the exact same picture. The mise-en-scene was also gorgeous, despite some of its obviousness. You just can't deny the beauty of a dark figure dancing in front of the setting sun or the vast landscape of the Northern Territory.
But it wasn't just the cinematography that won me over. The little boy that plays Nullah is astounding, and if he doesn't steal your heart, then you simply don't have one. Although the story is over-simplified, it is important that Luhrmann focused on the plight of the Aborigines during these times, even if he admittedly does go too far in placing them at godlike status (as another reviewer aptly noted).
Some have derided Nicole Kidman's performance, but frankly I just didn't see it being awful. In the beginning she was playing up the camp and toward the end I thought she hit the mark pretty well. As for Jackman, all he has to do is look hot and speak with an accent, and I'm good to go, so I'm not the best judge of his performance. My two cents: the characers are pretty one-dimensional and even the actor portraying the villianous Fletcher, who many critics have skewered, did the best he could with what he had - all of them likely following a stylistic choice made by Luhrmann.
It's hard to say whether or not I would have liked this movie if it had taken place anywhere else, particularly say, America. I very likely would have rolled my eyes at every mention of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and gagged at the Kidman-Jackman romance. Australia, though, possesses a certain je ne sais quoi absent in other melodramatic epics in the vein of Pearl Harbor, and the fact of the matter is that it really is good entertainment and spectacular eye candy.
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