Elvis (2022) - Movie Review

Baz Luhrmann. The Aussie king of camp. The Man from Showy River.

I don’t like Baz Luhrmann’s films.

His woeful adaptation of The Great Gatsby marks the first time I ever left a cinema actually angry at having wasted my time and money on a particular film. Romeo + Juliet was the first time a specific adaptation choice (the whole ‘Sword-branded guns’ thing) actively annoyed me. Australia was the first time I discovered how much test screenings can interfere with the creative process in rather peculiar ways (i.e. The Drover was originally meant to die, but test audiences didn’t want to see that happen to Hugh Jackman, so… that changed).

Yeah, he’s responsible for a lot of personal milestones, and none of them positive. The man’s insistence on absolute bombast constantly gets between him and whatever the hell point he thinks he’s making in his films, and even as someone who enjoys the patently ridiculous, Baz keeps testing my patience in just how loud he plays every aspect of his films.

But even with all of that in mind, one thing I have always maintained, alongside my utter contempt for the bulk of the man’s filmography (Australia and The Great Gatsby are easily on the shortlist for worst films I’ve ever seen, period), is that he is talented. He knows how to put a film together, he’s a properly unique voice in Australian cinema, and for as much as I personally can’t stand his work, I can at least understand why others would. Hell, I’ll even give him credit for Strictly Ballroom, which is a genuinely good film and something of a mission statement for Baz’s entire career to follow: Play to the crowds, don’t worry about the committees. It’s just that, with everything since Strictly Ballroom, that talent has been squandered on increasingly misguided and frequently exasperating storytelling decisions.

Suffice to say, I wasn’t really looking forward to his latest release. I may be growing more and more comfortable with lengthier films, but considering how much I just can’t with this guy to begin with, sitting down for a near-three hour presentation is one of those moments when this job of mine actually feels like work. Or, at least, that’s what I was expecting. In what is raring to be the biggest surprise of 2022 (pleasant ones, at least), this is the first Baz Luhrmann film I’ve genuinely enjoyed since Strictly Ballroom.

The Furnace (2020) - Movie Review

Shitty things about a nation’s history are like ants on the sidewalk: You rarely find just one of them when you start looking, and before long, you find another, and another, and then holy shit, it’s crawling with the fuckers. And over the last few years’ worth of Australian films, we’ve certainly been making a point of unearthing our own past to basically throw a spear right through the collective nostalgia. Sweet Country, The Nightingale, and True History Of The Kelly Gang looked at the colonial side of things, Ride Like A Girl wound up unintentionally exposing its own duplicity within our horse-racing industry, even Below from earlier this year took a speculative look at our recent activity with off-shore detention centres. Today’s film follows in that tradition, managing to find a whole new avenue to convey how much the British put the ‘colon’ in ‘colonialism’, with a look at Afghan cameleers.