Australia
Crit
Years ago, at the Assembly Hall in Champaign, Illinois, a talented but wildly erratic Illini guard followed, as he so often did, a slick pass with an egregious turnover. "Oh, Brooks," cried a frustrated fan near me, "you do something good, and then you go and do something bad." The poignant artlessness of that complaint came to mind today. Oh, Baz. Is there a filmmaker today who works so hard with the apparent goal of making us not take him or his creations seriously? The comic-book silliness of the first 15 minutes or so had me squirming in my seat, convinced that I'd let mixed reviews trick me into a time-waster. And then he goes and does something good. I have no recollection what, exactly--the remaining 2½ hours were such a constant whiplash of pleasure and dismay that it's hard to itemize (though the first 2 [of 4!] end-credits songs represent a take-with-you-from-the-theater nadir: a simpy but blessedly short piece of sentimentality presumably written by the director [couldn't catch it in the credits] and sung, I think, by the female lead] seems like the lowest we can go, until a tell-the-story ballad by Luhrman and Elton John, among others, digs a deeper sewer).
In sum, it's a glorious mess, all over the antipodal map. The Wizard of Oz is its explicit touchpoint, but the 1939 film it leans on far more heavily is the one about a stormy romance that begins on the eve of war and then takes us into the inferno in the capital. That one, you'll recall, shares an imperative of repatriation, not because there's no place like home but because land is the only thing that lasts.
It also seems to share an ambition with the upcoming Che to be a double feature, not just in length but in coming to one perfectly plausible conclusion only to take off again on a related but distinctly different story.
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