Morning:
8°c
Just as you think you are so bloated with turkey you can shunt it aside for another year, the most succulent and lush of all turkeys has landed before us. I am, of course, talking about Australia, the 10,000-hour epic by Baz Luhrmann that has crash-landed in our cinemas. It aims to create a new national myth for Australia, no less, by dropping Nicole Kidman - playing a frozen-faced English aristocrat - into the Australia outback, where she promptly rescues the aborigines, melts the heart of a calloused Aussie ranch-hand, and becomes one with the land.
The film is appalling, excruciating, offensive - and I loved it. While everyone else in the cinema walked out or lapsed into a coma, I rejoiced when Hugh Jackman tells Kidman - with real pain in his eyes - "I mix with dingoes, not duchesses".
I, dear reader, am always ready to buckle up for a cinematic car-crash. But they must be utterly straight-faced; the film-maker has to believe he has a profound message for humanity. That means many of the films on Great Bad Movies lists have to be dismissed. Goodbye The Swarm, where the bees turn on humanity and Michael Caine howls: "Why the bees? They have always been our friends!" Farewell The Exorcist II, where Richard Burton is acted off the screen by a giant prosthetic locust. Who is surprised you suck?
No, the pleasure must lie in the chasm between the film-maker's expectations and our guffaws. Take The Greatest Story Ever Told, Hollywood's 1965 atrocity-take on Christ. John Wayne is given the last line. Gazing at Jesus' ascending body, he says: "Truly, this man was the son of God." When the director told him to say it with more awe, Wayne said blankly: "Aw, truly this man was the son of God."
Hollywood did not regain this golden slurry until the 1990s, when Kevin Costner decided to stage the Apocalypse - twice. In Waterworld, he is one of the last survivors of a drowned world. It is hard to take his long existentialist speeches seriously when he is wearing flippers. In The Postman, he wanders through a burned landscape, keeping - yes - the postal system running. "You're a godsend, a saviour!" he is told. "No," he says, "I'm a postman." Can we agree now that if there is an apocalypse and we are all dependent on Kevin Costner, our species should just call it a day?
Go to Australia. Go now. Go twice. Aw, truly this film is the work of God.
