Reviews: Australia (3/5); Bedtime Stories (2/5)

Australia
(Baz Luhrman):
Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman,
Brandon Walters.
Running time: 165 minutes. (12A)

Baz Luhrman’s Australia is a huge gamble – a jaunty pub-brawling soap-operatic camp epic. It’s got wobbly Rolf Harris music and a blast of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. It’s also got Nicole Kidman as Lady Sarah Ashley, a shrill British aristocrat who comes over to Oz to run a cattle ranch. And there’s Hugh Jackman’s Drover, a beefy local who reluctantly agrees to help her fight the local cattle baron. They drive 10,000 cattle through the territories, drive each other nuts, and run into a bit of trouble with the Japanese during the second World War. And then there’s Nullah (Brandon Walters), a charming half-caste Aboriginal who narrates the story and earns their protection from the Australian authorities.
Drover is lewd. Lady Ashley a prude. Jackman is half Popeye, half Bluto. There is an audible gasp among women in the audience when he rips his shirt off. Jackman looks like he wants to pick Kidman up and twist her into a balloon dog. Instead, he presses her with his lips up against a tree. Their kiss would melt concrete. Kidman mines Katharine Hepburn’s pernickety prig in The Philadelphia Story and she’s terrific. She’s mercurial and game for anything, winning many laughs by allowing us to laugh at her.
Luhrman singlehandedly wants to make amends for Australia’s treatment of the Aboriginals. The story is full of wonder and respect for their ways. He’s also full of respect for the epic movies of old. He finds a way to work in ‘Over The Rainbow’, with a cheesy emphasis on Oz. There is a cattle drive straight from Red River. The romantic banter is To Have and Have Not. Australia is the film Howard Hawks never made in the 1950s. Indeed, Australia wants to be a 1950s epic, by way of Gone With The Wind. Luhurman and his movie are nostalgic for the uninhibited artifice of old Hollywood. It’s meant to be old-fashioned: there are glaring studio sets, a plot with more peaks and troughs than a cardiogram, murderous villains whose sneers get zooming close-ups, and charitable supporting characters who get sacrificed for good causes. The pace is a gallop and it hasn’t a clue when to end. Yet it’s shot with such verve and such panache, it’s hard not to go along with it. Australia is pure camp, a celebration of unoriginality. It plays on a sensibility that might not exist in the younger cinema viewer, who prizes dearly an ever-increasing realism. Viewers over a certain age, who grew up with these kinds of movies, will get it instantly. It’s utterly daft, but it’s also a loving homage to the way we used to watch movies.

Bedtime Stories
(Adam Shankman):
Adam Sandler, Keri Russell, Courteney Cox, Russell Brand, Richard Griffiths.
Running time: 100 minutes. (PG)

Adam Sandler is the Christmas pudding of movie stars. You either like the fruitcake or you don’t. Sandler is at his least irritating in this cheap children’s comedy served with a slice of fantasy. Perhaps he’s toned down the manic man-child act so as not to scare the kids. Bedtime Stories is another addition to Sandler’s cynical obsession with the American dream. Skeeter Bronson (Sandler) is a put-upon hotel handyman who has to look after his niece and nephew for a week. Each day, the outlandish bedtime stories he makes up start to come true. He quickly releases the benefits of this: he dreams of running the hotel, owning a Ferrari and winning the boss’s Paris Hilton-esque daughter. Only fate has other plans for him, in the form of nice teacher Keri Russell, if he can save her school from demolition.
Sandler eats a toothpaste sandwich, but otherwise plays it gently. Even Russell Brand, normally out to shock your grandmother, and here playing Skeeter’s best friend, seems cowed by the presence of children. Director Adam (Hairspray) Shankman uses some cheap CGI sequences for each story – trips into the Wild West, a space station, a mediaeval castle and a gladiatorial ring. But the story conjures little magic.
It’s lazy hokum and instantly forgettable, thrown together for the easy tastes of young kids.