THE week's new releases.
FILM OF THE WEEK
AUSTRALIA (12A) ***
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Running time: 165 minutesBAZ Luhrmann called his new movie Australia and, like the country, it's awfully big and you're not sure you want to stay too long. Visu
ally stunning, it's capable of rousing moments and guileless yearning – but the epic banality of the story arc and the relentless use of ironic filters is like being beaten up by a pair of inverted commas.
Nicole Kidman plays Lady Sarah Ashley, a tightly wound and corseted bit of English posh who travels to a remote territory in Australia just before the Second World War expecting to surprise her philandering husband. She arrives to find her husband has been murdered, and that a competing business interest, led by the voracious old cattleman King Carney (Bryan Brown), is trying to buy her land. All the surviving cattle are wandering the property without any hope of getting to market, unless she can put together an unlikely crew and undertake a drive with 1,500 head of cattle across several hundreds of miles to Darwin.
The key to this is Hugh Jackman's tall, dark and dusty drover sent to help Kidman's lockjawed priss, a job he carries out with virile Ocker boorishness. When they first meet, he uses her luggage to bash a bloke who insults him and throws her lingerie across the street. Every fibre of Kidman's being throbs with pre-erotic vexation, with the exception of her forehead, which remains curiously impervious to all the emotional stresses that this film throws at her. Kidman's cool screen presence will never be hot to the touch, but this could well be her worst performance to date. Jackman, on the other hand, has a lively, sexy fearlessness that almost transcends the clunkiness of his gruff stereotype. "I wouldn't have it on with you if you were the only tart left in Australia!" he tells Kidman. Immediately you know he will, and he does.
Helping bring them together is the third lead in this red earth dramarama: a young half-Aborigine boy with magical powers called Nullah (Brandon Walters). Caught between two cultures, he's also at the apex of Luhrmann's attempt to critique the institutional racism directed at the country's "stolen generations" – the thousands of aboriginal and mixed-race children forcibly removed by the government to live in religious missions to "breed the black out of them".
Also keeping constant watch is Nullah's shaman grandfather, who builds giant bonfires on cliffs that are always around to afford him a grand overview. Grandad is David Gulpilil, who long ago was a wandering boy himself in the 1971 film Walkabout, a movie which has much to teach Luhrmann about portraying indigenous mysticism and ethnic tragedy.
Luhrmann's main hallmark is that he never knowingly says "I think that's enough now", and this excess is Australia's Achilles' heel. It's been reported that he shot three endings, and it looks like he decided to use all three. At times you may shiver pleasurably at his flamboyance, but you also cringe when he tackles aboriginal culture with a superfluity of boomerangs, walkabouts and didgeridoo noodlings.
Part romance, part Western, part action-adventure, Australia is a Hollywood epic directed by a magpie. Gone With The Wind provides half the relationships and set pieces, Nicole Kidman seems to fancy herself Katharine Hepburn's virginal missionary in The African Queen, while Red River, Giant, Lawrence Of Arabia and many more make guest appearances. Australia strains toward classic status by pastiching these standards of cinema – but homage without innovation isn't homage. It's karaoke.
And sometimes it's also rather irritating. Luhrmann's musical taste has always leant toward tin-eared kitsch: 'Love Is In The Air' just about worked for Strictly Ballroom, but his elevation of 'Your Song' seemed risible rather than romantic in Moulin Rouge. In Australia, the constant presence of the song 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow' seems partly a terrible pun on Oz, and partly a reminder that this is a movie desperately in need of a heart and a brain. And yet you can't help but have a sneaking regard for its nerve.
On general release from Friday
ALSO RELEASED THIS WEEK
YES MAN (12A) **
Director: Peyton Reed
Running time: 104 minutesYES MAN wants to be an exuberant comedy about risk-taking and a return to form for the erratic Jim Carrey, who plays Carl, a man broken by divorce who stamps "denied" on the applications that come his way in his dull job as a loan officer, and rejects all kindly overtures from friends and neighbours.
His best friend Peter (Bradley Cooper) has no success in coaxing him into a more positive frame of mind, but a chance meeting with an old acquaintance Nick (John Michael Higgins) leads him to a seminar with cult-like overtones led by Terrence Bundley (Terence Stamp).
Even though Terrence's psychobabble guru has the look of a man who has refused everything, including haircare and career advice, Carl signs up for a life-changing self-help programme where he must answer everything in the affirmative. This includes accepting the desperate invitations of Carl's dismal boss (Flight Of The Conchords' Rhys Darby), who hosts social evenings like a Harry Potter-themed party.
The point being made here is that Carl needs to open himself up to life's possibilities, although I think we can all conjure some quite dour ways in which this could all end very badly. Not all offers from the internet, for instance, are as innocuous as Carl's PersianWifeFinder.com.
Consequently the film does generate a mild surprise when Carl's first night of positive action goes rather well. Giving away a walletful of cash to a homeless man brings him into contact with an effervescent goof called Allison (Zooey Deschanel), who sings in an avant-rock band called Munchausen By Proxy and fills her days with a jogging-photography class.
Carrey can be an agile and restrained actor when the mood strikes him, but Yes Man doesn't demand much discipline from him, or its plotting. Over 90 minutes this film fails to develop the potential of its premise, preferring to wander off into a hectic proliferation of skits aimed at showcasing Carrey's gifts for pratfalls, clowning and riffing. Carrey's aesthetic impudence is that anything goes, and goes fast, including a morning after the night before 'Red Bull' speech, and the result is a bit hit and miss. I enjoyed Carl's non-exclusive dates with Persian bride Farouche, but liked rather less the suicidal ledge jumper who's coaxed into rethinking his life and death priorities by joining Carl in a duet while pavement onlookers do backing vocals.
At best, it has to be said that Carrey follows the credo of his character by gamely performing all that is required of him in Yes Man – including doing his own bungee jump. He even accedes to one of this year's most overfamiliar jokes, where an elderly neighbour (Fionnula Flanagan) offers Carrey sex, knowing he can't turn her down. Even Adam Sandler might have said no to that. Besides, you can't help noticing that the age gap between Carrey and his love interest Deschanel is almost 20 years. Apparently older yes men can be romantic, but older women are simply ridiculous.
On general release from Friday
BEDTIME STORIES (PG) **Adam Sandler is the unlikely star of a Disney family picture about a hotel janitor whose bedtime stories to his nephew and niece come to life in unexpected ways. It's a nice idea, with a rather smart cast of comedy actors that includes Richard Griffiths, Guy Pearce and Courtney Cox-Arquette. Russell Brand also offers support as Sandler's rambling, shambling best friend. Yet despite building a career out of a man-child persona, Sandler and his gang seem to have no idea how to make a movie for kids. Their best efforts amount to some juvenile snickering about bogies and bottoms that could bore more sophisticated children, plus a slightly tiresome running joke about a bug-eyed guinea pig. Sandler's bedtime fantasies of outer space, Roman chariot races and western shootouts certainly look great, but this is a film that falls short of real enchantment or storytelling verve.
On general release from Friday
FAR NORTH ****Asif Kapadia's second feature, right, after The Warrior is a dark drama set against the pristine purity of the Tundra, starring Michelle Yeoh, Sean Bean, Michelle Krusiec. Yeoh and Krusiec are surrogate mother and pretty daughter who have forged a harsh hand-to-mouth existence away from the rest of the world. Their closeness is disrupted by the arrival of a runaway soldier (Bean). Nursed back to health from the brink of death, the stranger's presence tests the women's familial bonds when he flirts with both. Yeoh is particularly compelling here as the thawing reindeer herder who recalls a lost love, while Krusiec experiences first love, but new passions are stirred right up to a jolting climax.
On release from Friday
MUM & DAD (18) ***A fitfully gruelling British horror picture from new director Steven Sheil. Made on a microbudget, there's a certain morbid ingenuity to the film's sadistic 'family', led by Perry Benson. Mum & Dad is probably a hoot if you're in the mood, and it gets points for trying to stuff in some satirical points about dysfunctional family units, but the ideas run out of steam long before the end of the film's short running time. There's kidnapping and gruesome torture, which may please fans of the genre, but they will also have to excuse plot holes the characters could escape through. More bothersome is that it's tough to care what happens to anyone.
On release from Friday
GARDENS IN AUTUMN (JARDINS EN AUTOMNE) (PG) ***French government minister Vincent (Severin Blanchet) resigns from office when a widespread scandal and public protest leads to a change in the political winds in this wry comedy. Vincent's comfortable office and lavish living expenses are upended. Even his high-maintenance wife stays behind with his hard-man successor while her redundant husband is forced to return to his shuttered family home and a far less stylish life. However, he finds refuge in the company of old, bohemian and often inebriated friends. Gently paced, it's not without its amiable pleasures, such as grizzled French movie veteran Michel Piccoli managing a late-career first by dragging up to play Vincent's fretful, coddling mother.
On release from Friday
