Sweeping Outback epic leaves city types fuming

Sydney

Impressive'. 'Outstanding'. 'Rousing and passionate'. 'A sunburnt spectacular'. To the list of superlatives being showered on Baz Luhrmann's outback movie epic, Australia, should perhaps be added just one more: shameless.

Never before has so much been written about - and promised by - an Australian film. One wit called the frenetic publicity campaign a 'hurricane of hype'.

In addition to the normal hoopla surrounding the release of a major motion picture, Australia is also spearheading a glossy and nakedly jingoistic marketing campaign designed to lure visitors; nothing of this scale has been attempted since Paul Hogan famously promised to slip 'another shrimp on the barbie' in the 1980s.

The Luhrmann juggernaut swept into Sydney with a red-carpet spectacular that paralysed much of the city and, sadly, had a similar effect on the country's film critics, who happily tore the A$130 million (HK$651 million) movie into tiny shreds. 'Watching this is like being hit over the head by a giant glitter-coated marshmallow,' fumed Rob Lowing in The Sun-Herald. The Sydney Morning Herald's Sandra Hall dismissed the dust and jodhpur melodrama as 'deliriously camp and shamelessly overdone', while Jim Schembri delivered the coup de grace in The Age, calling Luhrmann's 165-minute masterwork an 'oversized, overlong outback weepie'.

Shot on location in Sydney, far north Queensland and the remote Kimberley region, the sweeping tale of an English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) who teams up with rough-hewn cowboy (Hugh Jackman) to take on an evil cattle baron, Australia seems like the perfect antidote to the financial gloom.