There is no such thing as an Aboriginal "Shaman", that's a USA Native thing, which culture bears no resemblance to Australian Aborigines.

To answer your Kidman question - because she's a crap actress, waaaay overrated. Like Cruise, she only has one schtick and its long run out.

I'm an Aussie, and geez I wish he'd called it anything except "Australia".

We have what's called the "Tall Poppy Syndrome" here, which obliges us to cut down any Aussie who dares to stick his above the pack... but this Luhrmann guy? He doesn't half have tickets on himself.

The movie itself sounds pretty painful, but I can't wait for the computer game.

I'm Australian too and it's exhausting being iconicised in this fashion - particularly when the director has decided the shortest route to iconography is to get out every cliche in the book and slam them all together: and that's just in the cinema ad.

Best thing I've read about the movie so far: Nicole kept a diary on set that was published in this months 'Australian Womens Weekly". In it she finds herself wondering 'is this movie, perhaps, going to become an icon?'

As if that wasn't the word drummed into everyone involved in the film from the get go.

Like you don't know.

For a long time, I thought I was the only one who was distracted by Kidman's lack of facial movements. She is a good actress (albeit way overhyped), but it is hard to concentrate on her work when all I can think is, "What the hell is with that forehead?!"

From the look of it, this film is shaping up to be a national embarrassment of almost Hoganesque proportions.

Has been seized by Xenu the Science fiction space lord of the Scientologists. It is specifically the curse of Tom Cruise, Sky Marshal of he of the special Cruise Control High Command, and is a curse every bit as irrevocable and eternal, as the curse of The Aztec astronauts.

That was the best movie review I can remember reading,it is hilarious and it hasn't put me of seeing it.By law,Jack Thompson must be cast in any Aussie movie with outdoor scenes.He better be in it Baz...

Given the similarity to Our Nic's earlier role as a reverse Eliza Doolittle made mortal by a dark handsome stranger, perhaps Lady Sarah's ranch should have been named not "Faraway Downs", but "Far and Away Downs".

Baz Luhrmann's over-large, sprawling cinematic signature has been as a wackily anachronistic iconoclast. Within that slender zone of his arguable greatness, his partner and art director, Catherine Martin, has invariably been the actual auteur of the most stunning images and dazzling moments attributed to Luhrmann.

In Australia Luhrmann abandons iconoclasticism, anachronism and, to a telling degree, Catherine Martin's hallucinagenic genius, to grasp unsuccessfully at the merely iconic. In doing so he has created a magnificent mess, a cavalcade of cliche as pompous, bloated and overlong as any would-be blockbuster in living memory. Duller and drier than Waterworld, dumber than more breathtakingly banal than Pearl Harbour, Luhrmann manages to make a film even more simple-minded than its singularly uninspired title. As I aged, discernibly, through its interminable length, out of desperation, I tried to imagine a film nearly as dull called Canada. It would have Mounties & Mohicans, of course, fur-trappers, Calgary cattle-men, unctuous French-ified Quebecois secessionists, sweeping Rocky vistas, Manitoban plains, Athabascan tar-sands, a sound track featuring kd laing, Joni Mitchell and of course Neil Young singing pitchlessly, endearingly "There is a town in north Ontario...leaves us helpless, helpless, helpless..." Before long I'd imagined a far better film than the sprawlingly self-important, bodice-ripping dreck that continued to swoop and swoon before me, and the film still had 2 hours to go.

Yes, of course Australia has many fine actors and most of them are here, fleshing out as best they can the cartoonish roles they've been assigned. Hugh Jackman photographs very well and pretends to be a drover with convincing, tumescent panache. Nicole Kidman has more difficulty, despite her greater gift, acting through the Botoxed paralysis and recently acquired trout-mouth that she hasn't yet learned to drive. The handicap is far greater and considerably less humanoid than the elaborate prosthetic schnozz she wore in The Hours. But behind the Stepford-ish mask that has become her face, something like her craft could still be briefly glimpsed in her frantic, intelligent eyes. While the acting is generally far better than the woeful plot and 'beauty treatments' that impede it, the singular exception is the half-Aboriginal boy who manages, astonishingly, to be an even worse child actor than that fat kid in The Last Action Hero. This photogenic youngster is so thuddingly wooden, so cringingly self-conscious, he makes Keanu Reeves look talented.

Ultimately though the failure is all Luhrmann's. He throws everything at the screen in the hope that something will stick. Everything that is, except for the plot which he's clearly misplaced in his desperate attempt to dazzle. But while the panoramic camera work swoops and swirls as giddily as the portentious score, all that lingers in the end is a vapid caricature, a tacky travelogue of a nation as vast as Luhrmann's own ego and as dangerously barren-hearted as his vision.

I don't get how actresses think they can get Botox and then act. And Nicole Kidman must have had lots of it! She couldn't move her face on Oprah last week or in her last few movies. She is just an ok actress anyway but coupled with the fact that she has ruined her face and the fact that I think this movie will bomb...after being paid a fortune and being listed as the most overpaid actress in Hollywood...this may be the last we see of her for awhile. She is in despercate need of a hit after about eight bombs which she was paid a lot of money to be in. Makes you wonder who is running the studios these days.

I posted this same thing on another site - please, please see "A Town Like Alice" instead, an old BBC production of Nevil Shute's novel. I don't know if it's in DVD form or not (I have the VCR still). It is a beautiful, non-epic love story that is a must-see for all the romantics out there and involves an English woman and an Australian man. So-o-o good.