GONE WITH THE WIND - MOVIE REVIEWS AUSTRALIA

MOVIE REVIEWS AUSTRALIA

Like his previous film, Moulin Rouge , Baz Luhrann's Australia is receiving wildly mixed reviews. The $130-million epic has had somewriters describing it as Australia's Gone With the Wind , and thatfilm is being used as the benchmark critics are using to assess it. RogerEbert in the Chicago Sun-Times says that Luhrman has been able torecreate much of GWTW 's "lush epic beauty and some of the sameawkwardness with a national legacy of racism. ... What a gorgeous film, whatstrong performances, what exhilarating images and -- yes, what sweepingromantic melodrama. The kind of movie that is a movie, with all that theword promises and implies." But Claudia Puig in USA Today twistssimilar words around, writing that the movie "tries to be a sprawling,romantic epic. Instead, it's a melodramatic exercise in tedium. Rather thanbeing old-fashioned or classic, it's old-school and conventional. Instead ofbelievable romance, it offers schmaltz and cliché." Manohla Dargis inthe New York Times takes a position firmly in the middle, calling it "A pastiche of genres and references wrapped up _ though, more often thannot, whipped up _ into one demented and generally diverting horse-galloping,cattle-stampeding, camera-swooping, music-swelling, mood-altering widescreenpackage, this creation story about modern Australia is a testament to movielove at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitschas an act of aesthetic communion." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post puts it more succinctly " Australia ," he writes, "has it all --unfortunately."

26/11/2008