Mood:
lazy"Australia is yours until Saturday," the Blockbuster cashier told me as she rang up my rental.
Whee doggies!!! You hear that, Australia??? You're MINE now. For one week. All twenty million of you.
Oh, what to do with my newfound powers? I've never owned a whole country for a week before.
Let's start with a few cosmetic changes. First of all, David Wenham's face will be going on all your coinage, with the motto RES CALIDA! ("Hot Stuff"). The stars on your flag will be replaced by small mullets.
Secondly, it is hereby decreed that "Waltzing Matilda" shall be translated into proper English. All those verses about boiling billies and tucker bags? Think of the young, impressionable minds you've warped over the years. For example, at our school we learned this song in first grade, when the music teacher went on a brief Australian kick. After we sang it, one kid raised her hand and asked what a "billabong" was. The teacher said it was a kind of coffee can, and that a "coolibah tree" was, obviously, some type of tree, probably made out of cork, and please not to ask any more questions about the "swagman" or the "jumbuck". I'd be willing to bet no one ever explained this song to you either.
Thirdly, in order to bring your nation into conformity with the Kookaburra song and stop confusing six-year-olds who interpret the lyrics literally and grow up thinking Australia is a magical land where the trees blossom with candy and sticks of Juicy Fruit...
Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Eating all the gumdrops he can see
...it is hereby decreed that throughout Australia, from this moment forward, gumdrops will actually grow on trees. (If they don't grow there naturally, it is OK to wire them onto branches individually.).
Okay, okay, enough clowning around. Yes, I was renting Australia the movie, not Australia the country. (But you have to admit that would be a cool idea, for a shop to rent out countries for people to do with as they like for one week. I'd like to rent Norway and transform it into an emirate. And make it into the rollercoaster capital of the world. And invite everyone over for lutefisk kabobs.)
So here are some random thoughts upon a second viewing of Australia....
* David's performance was really stubble. Neil Fletcher is so cowboy hat. Every time he's on screen, you can't help but blue eyes. Tuxedo. I just...tuxedo. Nose.
* Funny, when I saw Australia in the theater I didn't notice the crocodile-skin boot splashing into the water next to Maitland Ashley's speared body. Perhaps that was because the film hadn't yet formally introduced us to Neil Fletcher's footwear. (Audience, we'd like you to meet tacky reptile clodhopper. Tacky reptile clodhopper....Audience.) The film does have quite a fetish for those boots. Neil's presence is often signalled by a closeup of one boot descending with a chill authoritarian stomp. What a nassssty dude. You just know he wishes Lady Ashley's prim English neck was underneath.
* Things I got a chuckle out of: The Expository Artwork hanging on the wall of King Carney's office, in the form of a map of Australia with CARNEY CATTLE possessively stencilled across the entire Northern Territory. (Sorry, King Carney, you can't have Australia till I return it.) I bet if you looked, the outer door would have a nameplate reading VILLAIN'S LAIR.
*Things I got a chuckle out of, part 2: The newsreel breathlessly updating Darwin filmgoers on the status of the crucial Australian Military Beef Contract. You'd think the outcome of the entire war depended on whose cheeky bulls got loaded into the bloody big ship first. Of course, if I were a soldier I think I'd prefer flank steak from Faraway Downs. Lord only knows what King Carney feeds his cattle.
*If you are patient enough to sit through the credits, you'll hear the Drover's Song, a twangy number about freedom and outcasts and making the southern skies your blanket. Why no Fletcher song?
You're missing your best calves
Your floor's full of fly halves
Your bum he'll be grabbin',
'fore he burns your cabin...
It's Fletcher, it's Fletcher,
Is he bad? You betcher!
* The DVD includes a wonderful deleted scene between the Drover, Fletcher, and Lady Ashley. Fletcher is keen to get Lady Ashley on the road back to Darwin so he can continue stealing cattle. He's bustling around, getting her suitcases in the car, acting all fake-solicitous. The Drover is trying to convince Sarah to stay, because otherwise he's out of a job. Guess who wins? (Well, duh...if Lady Sarah had listened to Neil and gone back to Darwin, there would be no movie.)
* If I understand this correctly, Neil deliberately contrived to have Lord Ashley send the Drover to pick up Lady Sarah, knowing that the Drover would get drunk and fight and be all flyblown and sweaty and rough-mannered on the drive home, thereby shocking the prim Lady Sarah into wilting like an English rose and going home. Fletcher was apparently not acquainted with the Law of Unintended Consequences. That's what you get for outsourcing your dirty work, Neil. You should have driven her yourself and...I don't know, belched or told rude jokes or something. She would have been on the next airboat to Singapore.
* I was afraid my Hugh Jackman Persistent Afterimage Disorder might flare up again, but the campfire scene passed without incident. It helps that my TV screen is the size of a washcloth.
* Brandon Walters does a knockout job as Nullah. What an outstanding performance. I must admit, his narration reminded me a little of the kid from "Pass the Dutchie" ("Dis generation! Rules de nation!"). Which in turn reminded me of Doug's rant from Cosi ("Too long have white motherfuckers ruled this nation!"). Sometimes my mind wanders a little. I need to get it one of those invisible electronic dog fences.
* Why do Hollywood sex-scene bedrooms ALWAYS have billowing white sheets tacked to the wall? Who decorates their bedroom like that? And then leaves the windows open for all the mosquitoes to come in? During the wet season?
* I think I mentioned this before, but one of the fundamental problems with the film is that Australia isn't made exotic enough, except briefly when we enter Nullah's dream-song sequences (which are totally cool and they should have done the whole movie from that viewpoint). The narrative structure is taken straight out of old Westerns and epic romances of the '30s, plus it borrows from "The Wizard of Oz", one of the most well-known films of all time. There isn't a lot of strangeness, or a feeling that we've strayed far from generic Hollywood back lots. Bill Bryson remarks in "In A Sunburned Country" that Australia feels very culturally familiar to Americans, which is an unsettling feeling when you have to travel such a very long way to get there. After that fifteen-hour plane ride, at the very least, you should step out and see dromedaries, or the surface of Venus. Instead you see the same busy streets, glass office buildings, and Starbucks that you just left back home. It's Canada in a thong. Same with this film: Baz is too busy replicating the movies he loved as a kid to transport us to undiscovered realms of the imagination. Nothing wrong with paying homage, but it keeps the movie from ever really lifting off and achieving flight. Still, it's very well-crafted.
* At one point during the movie, I scribbled down a note on a receipt: "Whyn crack. Be sure to mention in Grove." Your guess is as good as mine.
