Gone with the Long-Winded
Baz Luhrmann's epic, Australia, is, as everyone has said, the Australian "Gone with the Wind," with the WWII bombing of Darwin by the Japanese standing in for the American Civil War. It's got it all: love-match misunderstandings, race relations, scenic backdrops in place of on-location shoots, set-piece chapter breaks - plus digital effects George Lucas would be ashamed of. Oh, o.k., the story's not bad, and for a tear-jerker, it's effective enough, but Nicole Kidman, for all that she makes a go of it, struggles throughout, and Hugh Jackman basically alternates between trying to be an Aussie Rhett Butler and otherwise Snowy-Rivering his way through all the other scenes he's in. The Aboriginal kid is good, but doesn't get to do much, and everybody is pretty much left to caricature instead of character. Jack Thompson gets killed off so fast there's pretty much no need for him to even have been in the movie. David Wenham, an actor I've really enjoyed in many other roles, is given little more to do than sneer through his nose in sound bites, more like John Lovitz's pathological liar than anything else ("Yeah, that's the ticket, yeah"). It's pretty, it's loud, it's got a story, but it has no substance. The narration is repetitive, and so's the plot, finally.

One of the standard tropes is that at 165 minutes (plus twenty minutes or more of advertisements and trailers), the movie's about an hour too long. I reckon I'd really only ask for about twenty minutes of my life back, discounting the ads, which I'd get even for a 90-minute flick, and basically just because that's about how much time in total is spent lingeringly on cliches.

Oh, and the songs over the closing credits are terrible. Really, get out while you can.