Stupendously awful on an epic scale, Australia shows how many ways a silly spin on a straightforwardly simple story can go fabulously wrong. Director/co-writer Baz Luhrmann may not have been able to figure out whether he was making a romantic comedy, a gritty Western, a treatise on racial tolerance, or a war-drama tearjerker. But he apparently decided that the one element this frustratingly misbegotten concoction desperately needed to hold it together was a whole lotta camp. That approach may have worked for Luhrmann's way OTT Moulin Rouge! (or not, depending on your fondness for frippery), but feels as wrong here as lip gloss on a koala. Australia's out-there tongue-in-cheekiness makes everything about the movie utterly unconvincing. The broad attempts at humor fall flat. The adventure scenes are ridiculously overblown. The heart-tugging moments feel forced and fake. And the halfbreed kid whose outcast plight is supposed to shock our collective conscience is as aggravatingly

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Site: Artist Direct Feed: Reviews () Url: http://www.artistdirect.com/na... Views: 0 Added On: 2008-11-25 20:30:06

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