Twentieth Century Fox presents Nicole Kidman in Australia
Posted on January 2, 2009
Filed Under East meets West | Leave a Comment
In northern Australia at the beginning of World War II, an English aristocrat inherits a cattle station the size of Maryland. When English cattle barons plot to take her land, she reluctantly joins forces with a rough-hewn stock-man to drive 2,000 head of cattle across hundreds of miles of the country’s most unforgiving land, only to still face the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by the Japanese forces that had attacked Pearl Harbor only months earlier.
Twentieth Century Fox appears to have given up on director Baz Luhrmann’s latest period epic in North America, and is hoping that foreign sales will rescue the costly picture.Released as the big Boxing Day sales special, it is little short of an embarrassing collection of clichés and pretty pictures, completely devoid of believable plot made worse by wooden acting. Every white Australian character in the movie – other than Drover (Hugh Jackman) – is portrayed as a nasty white racist or, if not that, then a drunkard. The one seemingly intelligent woman, Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), is English. Aborigines are all spiritual beings.
The movie has sold just $44.3 million worth of tickets at the U.S. and Canadian box office after five weekends, and is shaping up to be the latest in a line of disappointments for its star, Nicole Kidman.”Australia” failed to get any nomination for the Golden Globe, Critics Choice and Screen Actors Guild awards. Fox had counted on the recognition to boost its Oscar hopes and to expand the movie beyond its core audience of older women.
This past Christmas holiday weekend, one of the busiest of the year, “Australia” tumbled 10 places to No. 19 with four-day sales of $1.3 million, according to tracking firm Media By Numbers. It played in 711 theaters, down from 2,212 the weekend before. The top film was Fox’s canine comedy “Marley & Me,” which opened to $50.7 million.
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