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Genres:
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Adventure /
Drama /
History /
Romance /
War /
Western
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Release:
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Director:
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Baz Luhrmann
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Actors:
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Shea Adams,
Eddie Baroo,
Jamal Bednarz-Metallah,
Damian Bradford,
Nathin Butler,
Tara Carpenter,
Rebecca Chatfield,
Lillian Crombie,
Michelle Dyzla,
Ray Barrett,
Tony Barry,
Bryan Brown,
Max Cullen,
Essie Davis,
Arthur Dignam
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Duration:
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165 min.
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Rating:
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(6.9/10)182
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Plot Summary:
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In 1939, the aristocratic Lady Sarah Ashley travels from Great Britain to Australia to meet her conserve Maitland Ashley in northern Australia. The stillness's drover comes to the city of Darwin to bring Sarah to their smallholding; however, when they reach Faraway Downs Smallholding, they see that Maitland was murdered. Sarah befriends Nullah, who tells her that the administrator Neil Fletcher is stealing her steers; has killed her silence; and is working for the livestock baron King Carney. Sarah fires Fletcher and his men and together with Drover, Nullah and a assortment of reliable employ... ees, they heckle together to memo the cattle to supply the army and earn a tender in times of war. But the ambitious Fletcher has other intentions and uses Nullah to press Sarah.
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Tags:
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A wide sweep of emptiness
I used to think I enjoyed Baz Luhrman's earlier films but on repeated watching I seemed to have tired of the overblown techniques that captured and even enraptured me when these films were first seen in the cinema. 'Australia' is just too expansive and exaggerated, it tries too hard to be the epic it is not, and uses the mysteries of the Aboriginal culture to gloss over some truly obvious and cliched aspects of the plot, such as it is.
Nevertheless I enjoyed it for what is was, and loved the performance from the young Brandon Walters as the 'half-caste' boy at the centre of the story. Hugh Jackman is handsome and rugged as the local cattle drover who refuses, until the Lady (Kidman) turns up, to be attached to anything or anyone, but his performance is limited in...
Much better entertainment than the high-minded critics would have you think
I saw this film in Australia, where it gets a critical panning - extending to a full-page diatribe from the dreadful Germaine Greer. I saw the film regardless, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I was reminded of Titanic, another film I saw despite low expectations, and left the cinema feeling pleasantly surprised. Titanic was a huge critical success, so I obviously wasn't the only person who enjoyed it.
Australia has enough weaknesses for the critics to go at. The one that particularly irks me is the fake 'documentary' element to it - i.e. it portrays its background as being factually accurate. Which it isn't; Germaine Greer gets upset about the portrayal of Aborigines (which I don't know anything about) but even I know that Japanese soldiers did *not* in fac...
Australia
Kenneth TuranAustralia is a double feature all by itself, a film that comes with its own built-in sequel. At 2 hours, 35 minutes, it has room for both a cattle drive movie and a war movie, with a romantic drama thrown into the mix to tie both parts together. With a story this expansive, it's no wonder they named it after a continent.
Yes, this is filmmaking in the old-fashioned epic style but only up to a point. When director and co-writer Baz Luhrmann says, "This film's DNA comes from the same stock as Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia and Giant, but it has its own point of view," he's putting it mildly. For, more than anything, Australia is a postmodern blockbuster filtered through the very particular sensibility of Luhrmann, whose last fil...
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