Australia (2008)

[stuart.uk]

Spoiler Alert

Some might be surprised that I've classed this as a western, but if Robert Mitchum's The Sundowners quailifies then IMO so does this.

It stars Nichole Kidman and I thought at the begining that it was going to resmemble the earlier Kidman western Far And Away in being IMO unintentially funny and not very good, but I was wrong. It's a sort of a cross between Red River and They Were Expendable in the sense there was an epic cattle drive and later on a rescue of children from a part of the country invaded by the Japanese.

As you can tell it's a western, if you can call it that, with a modern setting. Nichole is excellent as a rich and to some extent spoilt English widow, who comes over to Oz to help her husband with his ranch, only to find him murdered when he got their. She had one advange in that she could ride, so it helped when she had learn how to be a cowhand. She also by her own admission wasn't good with children, so her growing relationship with native 9-yr-boy boy was great to watch develop.

Hugh Jackman also looked good and convincing as cattleman. Bryan Brown, from The Thorn Birds was one of the villians. Also intersesting to see elderly Ray Barrett, an Aussie, as an Englishman in a small role. Ray voiced John Tracy in Thunderbirds. He also starred with Bond regular Geoffrey Keen in 60s adventure oil series The Trouble Shooters

[rudyfan]

To cast a dissenting opinion,

I felt it was overlong, overblown and really tested one's suspension of disbelief. I'm finding with so many newer films the incredible overuse of CGI is distracting. I'm not sure how I would have felt in the theater, but on television at home in HD, it was painful, it should have been a cartoon.

Right after I watched this film I rewatched The Wind and the Lion (a western of a different sort) and felt such relief that there was no CGI, effects, yes, but nothing like the modern adventure/action films of today.

I really admire Kidman as a rule, but I'm begining to think all the botox has really harmed her ability to emote. Jackman was fun and cute and sufficiently hunky. But it's not a film I'd revisit soon.

[klondike]

Hey there, Stu & Donna!
Those are two very interesting and very different takes on the same film.
Here's my review that I posted after seeing it at the theatre back in December:

I just got back home from seeing AUSTRALIA, and w o w, am I pumped!
Go see this film as soon as you can, so that next time you hear someone say: "They don't make 'em like that anymore!" - you can reply: "Well, actually, once in a while, they still do!"
This a brand new, absolutely GREAT movie, lovingly crafted, and courageously old-fashioned . . . it's a war movie, a western, an adventure flick, a love story, a coming of age drama, a race conflict, a period piece, and although I would never call it a comedy, there are some wonderfully droll-yet-warm scenes of class-&-gender humor.
It also clocks in at right around 160 minutes, but I defy anybody to claim even one of those minutes dragged or faltered or was in any way boring.
Still not convinced? OK, riddle me this: when was the last time the ol' Sled Dog said anything nice about Nicole Kidman?!
Well, I beseech all of you to forget all my wisecracks about her fishbelly complexion, and her immense forehead, and her former poutish mugging & dialogue dissection . . she & Hugh Jackman are perfectly cast in this sprawling Down Under epic . . and that should be the key word here: e p i c .
'Cause this cinematic Xmas gift is going to redefine & reanimate the parameters of the sort of movie for which widescreen was invented! So I urge you, don't wait to "catch it on DVD"; you deserve to fill your eyes up with this one.
Guaranteed, your heart will be brimming, too!

I have to say, having read Donna's opinions, I begin to think now that this film's major hurdle is that it really was just really, absolutely, entirely intended to be viewed from "down below" a great big theatre screen . . you know - unboxed, so to speak.

[movieman1957]

Donna:

I haven't seen "Australia" but I couldn't agree more about CGI. Whatever benefit there is too them often seems overshadowed by how obvious they are. That to me then takes them to the level of annoying because they are so in front of everything. The best way would be not to notice them at all.

[phil noir]

I went to see Australia last year at the pictures, and I do agree with those of you who didn't care for the CGI effects. They have always looked incredibly phoney to me, and used on a large scale, never fail to take me out of the movie-watching experience.

I admired the ambition and 'epic-ness' of the film, but I thought Nicole Kidman's performance was rather strange. It's not so much that her forehead is 'immense', but that it never moves, and in close-up on a huge cinema screen this looks alarming and robotic. Also her vocal range seems to have shrunk - I don't remember her having such a small, thin, high, husky, expressionless voice in the roles she played a few years ago.

[stuart.uk]

I agree the special effects kinda made the film unreal. I wonder if it's cheaper than doing it for real. One of Red River's strengths is how real everything is. I can also understand folk thinking it was over long, because I thought it would end after the cattledrive, but then we had a WW2 war movie o the back of that.

Having said that I still enjoyed it. You could almost compare Nichole Kidman's role to the one she played in Cold Mountain. The difference was in CM Nichole, a very feminine lady with no pratical experience had to learn from scratch how to run a farm. Here she was a wealthy young woman, who had to learn how to become a rancher, but she was already an acclompished horsewoman back in her home Country England

[charliechaplinfan]

I don't like CGI effects either, it's so rare that anything comes to the cinema screen that I want to watch. The only exception is the kids club on a Saturday morning. I don't mind the CGI in kids films because they are mostly fantasy and that to me is the difference. I don't really want fantasy in my movies and if I watch an epic I want to be blown away by the performances, the landscape and the cinematography, not the special effects. The othe winning factor about kids movies is that they usually are around 90 minutes long whereas adult movies seen to be endless these days.

[mrsl]

I haven't seen Australia yet but I am anxious because I adore Hugh Jackman, Nicole is another story but actually I'm writing about CGI. If you go to a movie, expecting to see it, and it is a character in the movie like Jurassic Park, or War of the Worlds, then it's fine. I guess with the loss of the big studios, this is what we're left with, ie. no more "Cast of Thousands". Personally, I think a film with cowboys (or gauchos) out on the open prairie (or Outback), still makes it a Western. We had loads of Westerns with John Wayne and Gene Autry jumping off their horses backs and climbing into an airplane, so mixing the elements of the old and new West is not a new concept. The thing I admire and exclaim over most is how they made those locusts climb up those office buildings, or those giant ants flying through the air in L.A. Those crazy visuals, no matter how phoney, were what made those movies fun and worth revisiting. It seems like CGI is used nowadays just to fill up an elevator scene, ie. instead of hiring ten extras. The sad thing is there are still a lot of ghost towns sprinkled throughout our Western deserts that could be used for backgrounds, or even fixed up a little as facades. Also there are so many people looking for work, I'm sure the difference between scale for 25 people and the charges for all that imitation stuff is close to equal, not to mention writers and camermen, and directors, might do better to use their brains for some scenes instead of letting some computer artist do it all for them, like using the old back lot as Atlanta burning in GWTW, or using an entrance and drawing in the plantation house as has been shown in the making of GWTW. Hollywood seems to be the absolute opposite of imagination gone wild in the last 15-20 years.

Anne

[klondike]

Riddle me this:

If your eyes, and the visual information nerves in your brain, accept the effects in a movie as being authentic, and physically solid, and totally believable, and you are unaware of what ordinary objects and settings are actual and which are virtual, is the trickery any more contrived or synthetic than, say, the traveling matte viewed through the rear window of John Garfield's car in The Postman Always Rings Twice, or the styrofoam boulders on the old "Star Trek" series, or the fake-blood capsules that Randolph Scott's gunfight opponents used to bite open prior to hissing their dying words, or Margaret Hamilton's smoking-trap-door "magic exits" in The Wizard of Oz?
I'd heard that CGI had been used to some extent in Australia, before I decided to go see it; yet, once caught up in the sprawling sweep of the saga, my eyes noted nothing in the progress of action or vista to suggest anything overtly bogus or that threatened the suspension of my disbelief.
I'm no champion of CGI, and I've certainly seen it used to unfortunate extremes . . but I don't feel that Australia deserves such branding (n.p.i).
Isn't the art of making movies, to great measure, the presentation of Illusion?

[knitwit45]

From Webster's Dictionary (online version)

ho·kum
Pronunciation:
\ˈhō-kəm\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
probably blend of hocus-pocus and bunkum
Date:
1908

1 : a device used (as by showmen) to evoke a desired audience response

Isn't this why we go to the movies? to be entertained, amused, provoked, or taken away from our own troubles/thoughts/musings? Hokum is a large part of the movies, a suspension of belief, if only for a little while. We may walk out of the theater, or turn the tv off, and say "Aw, crud, they got me on that one!" but that's part of the fun of "hokum", too.

[phil noir]

I'd heard that CGI had been used to some extent in Australia, before I decided to go see it; yet, once caught up in the sprawling sweep of the saga, my eyes noted nothing in the progress of action or vista to suggest anything overtly bogus or that threatened the suspension of my disbelief.

I suspect that my problem with Australia was that I never did get caught up in the sweep of it. I suppose I felt irritated at the way it played as an extended homage to many other films, without taking on a life of its own, and so I was never able to suspend my disbelief. Although I admired Baz Luhrman's amazing attention to detail, sometimes a film can be over-designed, and that's how Australia struck me.

I wouldn't mind CGI, if I couldn't tell it was CGI; but too often, it seems to be foregrounded in films as though 'special effects' were a box office draw in themselves (and of course they are to some audiences). It is almost as though CGI is done with a slight and deliberate unconvincingness, just to let us know of the huge (yet to me not quite good enough) technical accomplishments behind the film.

[rudyfan]

I'm all for CGI when it is used well or not overused.

For me Australia was lacking "sweep" in the grand epic scale simply because I did not give a hoot about the characters. It is not like I was watching a film such as Stagecoach, Red River or Shane (granted all much smaller films), so for bigger classic films, GWTW, The Charge of the Light Brigade at least there are characters you give a hoot about. This is just me, I did not connect with the people in the film or the story.

Back to CGI, my basic problem with it, in a realistic setting, most CGI looks terribly fake. When I can sit down and watch a film and mentally recite, live action/cgi/live action/cgi/cgi/cgi it takes me out of the film experience. It works best for me in films such as the Lord of the Rings Trilogy or the Harry Potter films. Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong was technically splendid, but OMG, did that man need an editor? The dinosaur chase? Merian C. Cooper was probably spinning in his grave. I felt that there was much more heart and feeling in the Kong of 1933, I wept when he was shot, the arch of his body, the resignation, the fall, it was heartbreaking. When Jackson's Kong died, I wept for joy as the film was finally over.

Not to derail Stuart's original thread, in looking at snaps from the upcoming Tim Burton film, ALice in Wonderland, now this is CGI that gets me excited. http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/new ... land_N.htm

[klondike]

Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong was technically splendid, but OMG, did that man need an editor? The dinosaur chase? Merian C. Cooper was probably spinning in his grave. I felt that there was much more heart and feeling in the Kong of 1933, I wept when he was shot, the arch of his body, the resignation, the fall, it was heartbreaking. When Jackson's Kong died, I wept for joy as the film was finally over.

OMG, did you not just nail that puppy dead-center-perfect!!
I, too, felt that there was plenty of "touches" & individual scenes in Jackson's King Kong that were noteworthy & sometimes even praiseworthy (like Jack Black's retro-4th-wall in-jokes about Wray & Cooper & RKO), but everything else was almost predictably over-the-top and "hindsight perfect". . . and the freewheeling CGI orgy in the Skull Island hunterlands? Aaaarghhh - for me, it culminated with that overcast, overlong creepy-depressive giant insect battle - I was so irritable & edgy, I was literally pacing my livingroom!
And believe me, I too felt the sudden swell of relief when old Kong started to wobble 'neath the Pearl Harbor size aeroplane assault . . mind you, I would rather have seen him sweep Adrian Brody over the edge along with him when he went . . but that he finally went at all . . aye, that was enough!
Those credits were as balm to my fatigued & bleary eyes!

[charliechaplinfan]

Well I didn't see King Kong off the island, I was terribly bored for a film that promised so much, so I have to agree with the above comments.

[MichiganJ]

Wow, you really have to read all of the threads, don't you? I recently got back from Australia (the country) and was interested in what this was about. CGI and Jackson's King Kong. Who knew?

I actually liked Jackson's Kong a lot, despite all of its problems (and yes, "Sheriff" Brody is chief among them.) Believe it or not, the "expanded DVD edition" (201-minutes vs. 187-minutes) is better than the theatrical cut, (which should have been cut by an hour or so.) If you watch the documentary on the 2-DVD set of the original King Kong (my favorite film) you'll see that Jackson is a huge fan of the original, (he even recreates lost sequences). Because I'm such a fan of the original, Jackson's Kong is like being in a candy store. He filled it with so many references and in-jokes, etc. it's impossible not to love. But like being in a candy store, you eat too much, and the stomach troubles start (I, too hated the insect attack. But to be fair, that was a scene cut from the original, which, even as a kid, I was dying to see. Apparently Jackson was, too. But now we see why it was cut form the original.) While the dinosaur stampede is maybe a "tad" much, I must admit I love it. I could however, live without Kong "ice skating" near the film's end. (Loved Watts, by the way. Always do.)

As much as I like Jackson's film, the original is the one that has heart. That six-inch puppet is a far better performer than any CGI effect, even one based on an actual human's performance.