Category: Entertainment (Page 5 of 9)

I finally got around to seeing Baz Lurhmann’s Australia. I cannot remember ever having seen a film so offensively bad.

It is three hours of unmitigated drivel.

My mother-in-law said about half way through ‘This thing just goes on and on. It must be six hours already!’

My brother-in-law Bruce, at whose insistence we were watching it, replied ‘It’s almost over, just another half hour.’

‘Half an hour!’ shouted Bonnie, ‘I can’t sit here another minute!

We stopped for twenty minutes to let everyone catch their breath. I grabbed a very large scotch, and kept the bottle.

The movie started again. OK. I was pretty confident I could get through the next half hour without slashing my wrists.

An hour and a half later it finally dribbled to an end.

By this time Bonnie was comatose, and even Kathy, who had wanted to see it, was looking less than gruntled.

Australia is an abject collection of every movie cliche imaginable.

The overall effect is like Flying High or Scary Movie – ‘Oh, that’s from How The West Was Won’ or ‘That’s from Sixth Sense.’

But because Australia takes itself so seriously – and that is a key difference from Lurhmann’s earlier films – it doesn’t offer even the minimal amusement afforded by those other rip-off movies.

Australia is also a collection of every offensive half truth about about Australia’s history, and every offensive libel about official attitudes and policies relating to Australia’s indigenous people.

Some of the scenery is interesting, but apart from that, it is difficult to think of anything good about the movie at all.

Nicole Kidman is a competent if not brilliant actress (to be fair, she was brilliant in The Hours, a substantially less depressing film than Australia), and Hugh Jackman makes a good Wolverine or Peter Allen.

But in Australia, the limit of their expressive power is Jackman stalking about looking manly, while Kidman struts about looking concerned.

The boy who plays Nullah (Brandon Walters) is a nice looking kid, but he has only three expressions: happy, sad, and confused.

He looked confused quite frequently. He wasn’t the only one.

I am sure I looked confused almost as often as I looked bored or annoyed, depending on whether what was on screen at the  time was another gaping hole in the plot, another cattle stampede to the edge of the cliff cliche, or another malicious misrepresentation of Australia’s history.

Baz Lurhmann has produced three entertaining and original movies. How did he go so far wrong with this?

From Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter:

You don’t have to take an IQ test to become a reporter. Even so, I always hope for just the smallest glimmer. And I’m always disappointed. Perhaps I saw too many blacka nd white movies as a child. I still thought the cynical world-weary drunk from the large metropolitan daily was supposed to ask an awkward question and force the investigators to re-examine the evidence.

Sadly, as Dexter notes, the the awkward questions seem only to extend to ‘How did that make you feel?’ or ‘What was she wearing at the time?’ or ‘How high, Mr Gore?’

This afternoon Kathy and I went to see the movie of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. We were the only adults in the cinema who were not accompanied by children. 

I wrote in April: if the director and producers have been able to resist the Hollywood temptation to tamper too much with the story, especially either by making the wild things ‘cute’ or by making Max (the hero) into some sort of spoilt adolescent with problems at home, it should be a magical movie.

There are three things to say.

1. Where the Wild Things Are is not a children’s movie.
2. It will not be a commercial success.
3. It is a very good film.

It is a little scary in places, but that is not the reason it is not a children’s film.

The book is intended for young children. The film is too long and too slowly paced to hold the interest of anyone under forty. Well, that may be a slight exaggeration, though one family did leave about an hour in.

Jonze and Sendak collaborated on the script and have produced a remarkable palimpsest of Sendak’s book.

The book was funny, scary, and engaging. The film is all of these things and more. It is the ‘more’ which makes this such a good movie, and also not a children’s movie.

Essentially, the film is a parable about what the world means to a boy, any boy (but definitely a boy), and about how a boy can or should relate to that world.

The wild things seem to represent different aspects of Max’s personality. The goat, the chicken, the bull, the scary unidentifiable things.

This is just asking for a book – Which Wild Thing are You? – How to Release Your Inner Power.

The answer is that Max, and all of us, are all of the wild things. We are cowards, we are destructive, we are angry, we are hungry, we are brave, we are creative, we are kind.

In the course of his adventure, Max learns how his words and actions impact on other people. He learns about love, and that actions have consequences, and that some things cannot be undone.

That should give you a hint that the lefties, I suspect, will not like this film. Their dislike will intensified by the fact that there is not a hint of  greenie bovine manure in the movie.

Trees are knocked over with glee, violence sometimes solves problems (and causes them), throwing dirt at people’s heads is the best way to have fun together, and if you happen to have a small animal in your hand instead of a lump of dirt, well, chuck it anyway.

Despite the life lessons, and Max learns many valuable things, Where the Wild Things Are is never preachy.

I laughed out loud, and had tears in my eyes at the end. The kids around me just looked bored.

It is a great film. Go and see it. Just don’t expect your children to enjoy it. Not till they get to forty, anyway.

Two songs by Jewel. Thoughtful lyrics, and what a rich, pure voice.

Angel Standing By

Hands – If I could tell the world just one thing, it would be that we’re all OK – not to worry in times like these… only kindness matters…

Absolutely tasteless, but beautifully done and hilarious, the real Australia:

Well, no more tasteless than that other Australian tourism promotion.

 From the Epic Fail blog (link below) via Mark Shea (link on the right), just because it’s funny. 

see more Epic Fails

Dudley Moore:

Victor Borge:

Read this column by Jeremy Clarkson for the fun of it. It’s just a silly story about not realising how hot a bottle of hot sauce was going to be.

But in passing, it makes a point I have thought about a few times – that the result of the proliferation of product warnings on every imaginable product is that the few we need to take note of get lost in the blur.

A few examples of amusing, silly or pointless product warnings.

I know, it sounds like an oxymoron. But it might just be true.

I haven’t seen Paul Hogan’s new film Charlie and Boots yet. Philppa Martyr has, and has written an intelligent and amusing review, full of praise for what she says is an intelligent and well made film. Two of the things she enjoyed about it were its good-naturedness, and its lack of self-consciousness and preaching. Yet the film does have some worthwhile things to say.

Astonishingly, Margaret Pomeranz and David thingy both enjoyed it too. I just hope that doesn’t put too many people off.