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Nicole Kidman as Lady Sarah Ashley and Lillian Crombie as Bandy Legs in Australia |
Also on release this week
• Australia.
BAZ Luhrman’s golden touch has been found wanting in this dusty epic of love in a warm climate.
Starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, the tale starts at the end of the 1930s, when a prim English rose ventures to meet her husband in the wilds of northern Australia. She arrives to find he has been killed, and she now owns a herd of cattle. A gentle female in a macho world, she is the victim of some underhand dealings regarding her inherited property.
She teams up with a cowboy (Jackman) and the pair trek through the wilds to Darwin with their animals, while adopting a mixed-race child en route.
As is Luhrman’s trademark, this is all very stylishly done, with wonderful scenery and strong performances... but the sparkle fails essentially to hide the lack of substance. And according to Oz commentators, it’s a rewriting of historical fact, which means it all must be taken with a pinch of salt.
• Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia.
THIS film was panned when it came out in the early 1970s, but it’s super grim stuff from Sam Peckinpah.
When a big-time Mexican land owner demands the head of a bandit who seduced his daughter in return for a fat pay-out, Bennie, a dust bowl bar tender, piano player, former soldier and the lover of a prostitute, heads off on a desert odyssey to find Alfredo.
He finds out his girl had a fling with him, but the baddie has since died. So all Bennie needs to do is slice his bonce from his neck and then swap it for a million dollars. Our hero sets off to excavate the body from its grave and carry this rotting mess across the country in a burlap bag to claim his reward.
But two camp hitmen are on the case too, as are a bevy of other unpleasant characters. It is such a low down rotten world they inhabit – world of crusty old cafés and bars, battered station wagons, seedy motives and poverty. There is violence galore and the film clearly influenced the likes of Quentin Tarantino. |
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