Buz Luhrman's AUSTRALIA opened the weekend I boarded the Queen Mary 2 to go on my anniversary cruise together with Oliver. Despite considering myself a huge "Huge Jackman fan", I didn't manage to watch the movie while it was still running in the theaters. Having read enough negative reviews, my desire to sit through it for 3 hours simply wasn't big enough. So I waited for the DVD release and 2 weeks ago, Netflix sent me the awaited DVD. But I still didn't watch it immediately but waited 2 more weekes to eventually sit down and play the disc.
Yesterday though seemed to be the perfect evening to see AUSTRALIA. We even bought Australian red wine to go with it which would not have been my first choice since I prefer Italian, Spanish or American wines. Not this time. The wine was an excellent choice but the movie was not!
I won't be able to say if there's a turn to the better or if there's anything of interest happening in the movie at all because it lost me, or better yet, never got me, right at its opening credits. 5 minutes in, we stopped the movie and agreed that we can't stand neither the female nor the male lead which both were introduced in an excessive matter that was very hard to believe. Everything seemed like coming straight from a rag. What has beautifully worked in MOULIN ROUGE didn't work at all in AUSTRALIA. Not even Hugh Jackman's build up body, half nacked, could save me from absolutely hating the movie. We gave up! After the "tent scene" we removed the disc, put it back in it's Netflix envelope and still couldn't believe what we were just trying to watch.
What has happened Buz Luhrman? Why?
In for a quiet evening - for a change - we then decided to watch the other DVD that Netflix has sent us. I've decided on a Spanish language movie, to support our Spanish learning experience: Belle Epoque by Fernando Trueba. What a different experience! The movie didn't want to be anything but a romantic romp and it succeeded on every level. There's a reason why in 1993 it won an Oscar as Best Foreign Film. After having seen this joyful movie, I was happy again with the evening's turnout which hasn't started promising at all.
-- Elke
The introductory warning screen was very hard to take, but the movie lost me when Nicole Kidman's character uttered "funny" noises of distress when her underwear was scattered all over the dirt during a bar brawl initiated by Hugh Jackman's character in order to defend his aborigines friends. Characters so predictable don't justify spending 3 hours with this movie.
Posted by: oliver | March 29, 2009 at 12:50 PM