26 November 2008 10:39 AM, PST | From Studio Briefing - Film News | See recent Studio Briefing - Film News news
Like his previous film, Moulin Rouge, Baz Luhrmann's Australia is receiving wildly mixed reviews. The $130-million epic has had some writers describing it as Australia's Gone With the Wind, and that film is being used as the benchmark critics are using to assess it. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times says that Luhrman has been able to recreate much of GWTW's "lush epic beauty and some of the same awkwardness with a national legacy of racism. ... What a gorgeous film, what strong performances, what exhilarating images and -- yes, what sweeping romantic melodrama. The kind of movie that is a movie, with all that the word promises and implies." But Claudia Puig in USA Today twists similar words around, writing that the movie "tries to be a sprawling, romantic epic. Instead, it's a melodramatic exercise in tedium. Rather than being old-fashioned or classic, it's old-school and conventional. Instead of believable romance, it offers schmaltz and cliché." Manohla Dargis in the New York Times takes a position firmly in the middle, calling it: "A pastiche of genres and references wrapped up _ though, more often than not, whipped up _ into one demented and generally diverting horse-galloping, cattle-stampeding, camera-swooping, music-swelling, mood-altering widescreen package, this creation story about modern Australia is a testament to movie love at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitsch as an act of aesthetic communion." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post puts it more succinctly: "Australia," he writes, "has it all -- unfortunately."
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