Australia, 4/5

Rated PG-13. Click here to view the trailer.

WARNING: Insensitive and inappropriate racial humor ahead.

Unless I decide to go back to the Sleep Study Center and hook myself up to 30 or 40 electrodes, there's no real scientific way to measure how well my CPAP machine is working. At least, there wasn't until tonight. I'm no board-certified sleep pathologist, but tonight I unequivocally proved that I am indeed sleeping better and have more energy. Ladies and gentlemen, I stayed awake and alert through all three hours of Australia.

Australia is Baz Luhrmann's sweeping, over-the-top, 180-minute celluloid love letter to his homeland and it certainly is epic. A little too epic, perhaps.

Set in the days leading up to WWII, Nullah, a 9-year-old "Creamy" (the wince-inducing slang for half whites, half Aborigine children) narrates the story of Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman). She is a proper English housewife who comes to Far Away Downs, a HUGE cattle ranch owned by her philandering husband but just as she arrives, he is killed by the Magic Negro, King George. Lady Ashley hires a cattle drover named - wait for it - Drover (Hugh Jackman) to help herd her cattle and outrace competing ranchers to Darwin in time to meet snag a lucrative Army contract. Those brave Australian soldiers have to have good, Aussie beef if they're going to fight against those murderous Japs, don't they? Boy, I'm just getting all the racial slurs in today, aren't I?. Are there any Jews in the house? Do we have any Guidos in the audience tonight?

Lady Ashley and Drover fall in love and she more or less ends up adopting the orphaned Nullah. Things happen and events occur. A lovable drunk gets tramped by a CGI stampede. Nullah develops an affinity for the movie The Wizard of Oz and learns to play the harmonica and hypnotize cattle. Ninety minutes in, the story ends. Then it picks back up again and barrels on for another 90 minutes as callous missionaries kidnap Nullah and take him to an island to "breed the Black out of him." Drover and Lady Ashley have a tiff, and those murderous Japs attack the Australia's Northern Territory. Throughout both "acts," King George is stealthily shadowing the main characters. It's very White of me to say so, but I wanted to tell him to take a bath. Oh, the hegemony!

If you're exhausted reading all that, trying staying awake through it.

I'm not saying it's a bad movie - it's actually pretty good - but there can be no doubt it suffers from its length. There's a good movie in here. Actually there's two, and that's the problem. I supposed true epics like The Odyssey, The Illiad, The Aeneid or even Gone With the Wind don't exactly fallow the exposition-escalation-climax-denouement pattern, but it's exceptionally hard to make a good movie doing anything but that.

From Lurhmann, the man behind such stylish movies like Moulin Rouge!, Romeo+Juliet and this timeless masterpiece, I wanted something with a little more style and flash. We get some good opening credits and the "animation" tracing Lady Ashley's journey down under is cool, but mostly we get a straight drama. Like I said, it's not bad, but it could have been great.

I did enjoy the bits of Aborigine mysticism and especially the Australia/native jargon used by Nullah. He can make himself "invisible" at times and can do other "magic."I'm generally not a fan of animism, it was at least interesting. Some have criticized the movie as being condescending to Aborigines, but come on, it's a movie.

Brandon Walters, who plays Nullah, is very, every good and Hugh Jackman is pretty darn watchable, even if he does make me feel woefully inadequate. As for Nicole Kidman, well she did OK, but she left me with this one lingering question as I left the theater: Where did she find a botox clinic in the Outback?

Ooh! I almost forgot: There's a Chinese cook named Sing Song. I bet he knows karate and has a severe overbite. They all look alike, you know [sound of a gong].