Australia. (15.)
Directed by Baz Luhrman.
Starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Bryan Brown, David Gulpilil, Brandon Walters. 155 mins.
After all the hullabaloo, here it finally is. So what’s it like? Long, mostly. (Though not as long as it used to be; approximately 15 minutes seem to have been trimmed from its running length in recent weeks.) It’s not as bad as the trailer and the poster suggest but given the investment of time and finance involved it represents a pretty slim return. Its chief pleasure is imagining the look on Rupert Murdoch’s face when he first saw what they had spent his money on.
The plot is like an Australian’s erotic fantasy of a Royal visit. An impossibly posh and disdainful English aristocrat (Kidman) comes to visit, they present her with various displays and examples of their indigenous culture – the outback, kangaroos, cattle, mistreating Aborigines - and she ends up falling in love with it and her guide (Hugh Jackman playing a more buffed version of Paul Hogan.)
It is basically two films lumped together – a cattle drive adventure followed by a wartime drama. The first half is Red River with Clark Gable and Katherine Hepburn followed by a final hour that is Pearl Harbour as the Japanese bomb Darwin.
Oz looks like it was put together by the people who came up with the Millennium Experience in the Dome or our Olympic presentation; a committee based creativity that tries to cover all the bases and ends up not really satisfying anyone. It’s supposed to show off the extraordinary landscape of the Northern Territories but there are so many Computer Generated Imagery it doesn’t even do that.
One obvious complaint is that the treatment of the Aborigines is patronising and simplistic – their most famous performer Gulpilil (Walkabout, Crocodile Dundee, Ten Canoes) is asked to spend the whole film standing on one leg, looking wise. But the white characters are just as stereotyped; it’s like a Fosters ad with Stella Artois production values.
Directed by Baz Luhrman.
Starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Bryan Brown, David Gulpilil, Brandon Walters. 155 mins.
After all the hullabaloo, here it finally is. So what’s it like? Long, mostly. (Though not as long as it used to be; approximately 15 minutes seem to have been trimmed from its running length in recent weeks.) It’s not as bad as the trailer and the poster suggest but given the investment of time and finance involved it represents a pretty slim return. Its chief pleasure is imagining the look on Rupert Murdoch’s face when he first saw what they had spent his money on.
The plot is like an Australian’s erotic fantasy of a Royal visit. An impossibly posh and disdainful English aristocrat (Kidman) comes to visit, they present her with various displays and examples of their indigenous culture – the outback, kangaroos, cattle, mistreating Aborigines - and she ends up falling in love with it and her guide (Hugh Jackman playing a more buffed version of Paul Hogan.)
It is basically two films lumped together – a cattle drive adventure followed by a wartime drama. The first half is Red River with Clark Gable and Katherine Hepburn followed by a final hour that is Pearl Harbour as the Japanese bomb Darwin.
Oz looks like it was put together by the people who came up with the Millennium Experience in the Dome or our Olympic presentation; a committee based creativity that tries to cover all the bases and ends up not really satisfying anyone. It’s supposed to show off the extraordinary landscape of the Northern Territories but there are so many Computer Generated Imagery it doesn’t even do that.
One obvious complaint is that the treatment of the Aborigines is patronising and simplistic – their most famous performer Gulpilil (Walkabout, Crocodile Dundee, Ten Canoes) is asked to spend the whole film standing on one leg, looking wise. But the white characters are just as stereotyped; it’s like a Fosters ad with Stella Artois production values.
