JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Baz Luhrmann’s Australia is a scream! Anyone can make a competent feature, but it takes talent to make a grand mess. Whatever possessed Baz Luhrmann to attempt an epic? His entire oeuvre is designed to trigger seizures, and an epic requires, um, concentration. Australia is a movie that makes me want to douse myself in sunscreen. Nicole Kidman looks a little pinched as a prissy English aristocrat, but Hugh Jackman is so fabulous, his character doesn’t even need a proper name—everyone just calls him The Drover. Obviously he’s the object of desire, because he gets to bathe with a bucket in the moonlight while she gawks at his sculpted torso.

The scenes are set up so you expect the characters to burst into song every five minutes and are disappointed when they don’t. The narrator and central character is a half-aboriginal, half-white boy named Nullah. His grandfather “King George” is a shaman who literally watches over him—from mountaintops, water tanks, radio towers, etc. There are lots of references to The Wizard of Oz, which I suspect is the movie Baz really wanted make. Epics have to be grounded in reality; Australia is so unreal that when the cattle stampede I thought, “At last! Dance number!”