ENTRIES:
1. A caper for a new generation? (David)
2. Sorry, watch more old movies. (Alisa)
3. But I cried. A lot, in fact. (David)
4. How Nullah held it all together. (Alisa)

Alisa,

So for the lonely souls lazing at their computers on Thanksgiving Day, we’re discussing Baz Luhrmann’s retro-ish Down Under “epic” (its nearly three hour running time, if nothing else, earns it that designation) Australia. Before we get going, I’ll sum it up quickly for everyone who hasn’t seen it yet.

Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman), a high-strung British aristocrat, goes to Australia to seize her adventuring husband’s business (a cattle station, the last one in the area not owned by the Big Bad Corporate Family). She finds out he’s been killed, fires his dishonest employees, and taps a “drover”—a cattle transportation specialist—to help her “drove” her cattle to a buyer. Along the way, she stops being a stuffy bitch, starts doing some “wrong-sided business” with the drover (Hugh Jackman), and forms a motherly attachment to Nullah, an orphaned aboriginal boy. That’s the first half. In the second, all sorts of horrid things happen—the happy family gets split up, World War II hits Australia, and the bad cattle guy wins. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say the ending isn’t sad … at all.

So. I’m hugely divided. My critical self noticed every detail that’s wrong with this thing, and there were lots of them. I noticed above all that it was too long—there were several places it could have ended more satisfactorily than the way it did (as we know, it had to reach its studio-mandated happy ending.) I noticed how obnoxious and unnecessary Nullah’s over-narrating is (also his laughable fake broken English), and how one-dimensional the movie is on everything from its racial tension to its love story. I noticed how some of the “aww” tropes—Nullah thinking his songs would bring people back to him, his enchantedness with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and especially the spiritual overlord presence of King George—were repeated so often that we tired of them well before the end of their incessant appearances.

But I also rather enjoyed it as a whole. I found Nullah extremely sympathetic, and the dogged determination of all three lead characters inspiring in a maudlin, happy holidays sort of way. Critics have called Australia a failure even on “so-bad-it’s-good” terms, as it seems to be unaware of its own over-the-top self-parodying clichédness. But the (very much alive) 12-year old in me loved the sweeping scenes, “faraway land,” and wild implausibility, just like I liked the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and, even though I saw them way late, the Indiana Jones movies. Australia is clearly aiming for that class, down to the typeface in the opening titles. I think it lands somewhere near the bottom of that well, but maybe I haven’t seen enough Audrey Hepburn, John Wayne, or Out of Africa to know what I’m seeing. So while I can’t give a free pass in general, could we say Australia is a campy outland caper for a new generation?

Wishing I were as hot as Hugh Jackman,

David