Trailer Trash: Australia

Trailer Trash gives us a closer look at hot movie previews from a fresh, spoiler-free perspective, mining it for nuggets of joy the rest of us may have missed.

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By Chris Rachael Oseland, Fancast Movies

Australia: Opening November 26

Oh, look! It’s Nicole Kidman! That means this movie must be ART. Uh, oh. Those flashes of fake newspapers confirm it. Settle in, kids. It’s time to Learn Something Significant.

Unfortunately, while your teacher is wafer thin and ethereally beautiful, all those missed meals have taken their toll in the form of early onset dementia. She can’t remember the words for “plane” or “Australia,” but still retains full knowledge of complicated hair styling. After that unfortunate incident where she blinded a servant with a hair comb, her wealthy family had no choice but to abandon her in the desert to die. Alas, she finds a hapless native child who, because this is cinema, will no doubt rescue her lily white ass instead of telling her to bugger off.

In flashbacks, we see poor Nicole once hired Wolverine to tend her family’s horses. Then they caught fire. But wait! He also rustles cattle! Oh. They caught fire, too.

That’s okay, because the impromptu barbeque gives Nicole Kidman an excuse to wear Indiana Jones’s Fedora. Huzzah! We’re all action heroes! Why, there’s Wolverine rescuing kids from a mine, just like in The Temple of Doom. There’s a journey to a mysterious and neigh unreachable cliff face, just like in The Last Crusade. There’s a group of painted natives waving ominous sticks at people holding guns, just like in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Australia is everything we loved about Indiana Jones without any of that pesky endearing humor.

Hmm…gorgeous people with no sense of humor in heart wrenching scenes of tragedy. I betcha all that BBQ gets smothered in Oscar sauce.

What can we learn from this preview?

1. Japan has always been frightening
2. Even bad cowboys are awesome.
3. Australia is secretly populated by the Discworld’s Wee Free Men
4. Wolverine cleans up purty in a tux.