(no subject)

[rm]

It's fucking ridiculous to me how miserable Australia made me and how much I can still watch/read pretty much anything about Luhrmann's process and be like, "yes, yes, yes, yes."

This is why I make anything no matter how trivial or minor or unsaleable or ultimately useless. It's ridiculous. I have no idea how it happened. It feels good in a way, that it's still true, after everything. Because in a lot of ways it shouldn't be. And it certainly doesn't matter to anyone but me, but there it is. It matters to me a lot.

http://community.livejournal.com/australiamovie/34165.html

(oh, bloody hell, it's locked -- but it's a great video download about Luhrmann's film career with lots of interviews about all four films).

Comments

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

See, I think this is why I can't quite bring myself to hate Baz, no matter how much his movies irritate me. I identify with the way he puts them together, and I get what he's doing. The end result is rarely, if ever, to my liking.

(Wait, he did Simply Ballroom, right? I saw that blind and loved it, but haven't seen it in many a year.)

How do you feel about Guy Maddin? He has some similar denominators with Baz Luhrman, but his stuff resonates with me a lot more.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Strictly Ballroom, yeah. That was his first, came out of a play he and his friends wrote in drama school.

I really love Luhrmann's first three films (although it is almost impossible for me to watch Romeo + Juliet at this point, having watched it about 30 times in one awful two week period of stage managing a production from hell), and I feel slightly better about (not that I like it any more) Australia now that I think I figured out what he was trying to do thematically and use as a through-line. It is really sort of nuttily uncomfortable for me to dislike the film as much as I do -- but it's not a stylistic complaint -- it's that say what you will all of Luhrmann's other films are very tight and know what story they are telling. Australia doesn't, and my thing about Luhrmann is all about how essential story is to the narrative both on and off screen.

Anyway. Blargh. It's ridiculous that I care so much, but I totally do. It makes me miss all the folk I did summer with at NIDA, because I know they would both mock and comfort me over this one in a way that I'm not sure other people can.

Anyway, Maddin. Other than The Saddest Music in the World which I love, I'm largely unfamiliar, so I can't make a broad judgment.

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

See more Maddin. He is very good, and if you liked Saddest Music, odds are you'll like more of his stuff.

It's not that I doubt that Luhrmann knows the story he's telling, but a lot of stuff in his films -- particularly once he started to get larger budgets -- strikes me as really self-indulgent. He treats every film as though it's the last film he'll make, and he puts everything that's crossed his mind within the time it took to make the film into it, even if it means shoehorning things in that don't have much relevance. Or that would make sense in another movie. I like a lot of artists that have a similar sense of the self-indulgent, and I don't understand why Luhrmann doesn't work for me when Guy Maddin (whose work is exaggeratedly autobiographical, to the point of naming characters after himself in his most recent three features) or Sparks (okay, they're a band, but still) or...others do.

This comment is becoming more about me than about Baz, so I will go elsewhere.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Hahahaha, no it's all good.

I agree that Luhrmann is crazily self-indulgent. I'm self-indulgent, just as an artist and a human, so I think part of the appeal to me is this sense of "it's okay" and more than that "it's great". Australia made me so fucking _angry_ because the Luhrmann's self-indulgence was there and as ever largely on topics that have personal resonance for me (oh, lookie, arbitrary plot point about prostituion, yay Baz!), but this time they were not even remotely justifiable as in service to the story. I thought he knew better, and it's like finding out your parents are actually boring and ordinary and faliable -- he just got lucky before. I dunno, it sucks. When I talk about this shit, it's about me too, so yeah, waaaay get it.

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

I keep trying to be more self-indulgent in the art I make, but I tend to see things and say "Wow, that doesn't belong here" and take it out, or I write a lot of drafts in which the things that don't serve the story or illustrate a character get written out. When I watch Baz's stuff, I get the sense that all the weird little things that serve no purpose don't get dropped. There were a few tangents in Moulin Rouge! in particular that really deserved to be in another film, so that he could go into greater depth with them rather than just whip-panning to the next musical number or whatever. The Bollywood scene was cute, though.

(As a side note, I've gotten into a massive argument with someone on MeFi about Alex Proyas and am thinking way too much about technique and editing and Things That Bother Me In Other People's Films, and that thinking is starting to bleed over into other places. So, yeah. Needless to say I think about these things way. too. much.)

[rm.livejournal.com]

And to think of all the things that did get killed from Moulin Rouge! I don't know if you've read the stuff about the early script drafts (Christian gets killed in WWII, Christian and Satine run off and have an affair with some baron and all this other cracktastic stuff) or the BDSM scene (to Slave to the Rhythm) that got killed. The fact that that movie is cogent at all is sort of a miracle.

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

Well, I know how I'm going to procrastinate at work tomorrow!

[rm.livejournal.com]

That should be WWI, not WWII, of course, but yeah, it's funny crap. Funny, funny crap.

[baronalejandro.livejournal.com]

Oh, how I hated that movie. I was so mad at having been dragged to it.