Britney Spears Is Back,UK Concert

US singer Britney Spears is to play two concerts at the O2 arena in London next June – the only European shows on her forthcoming world tour.

Tickets for the dates on 3 and 4 June will go on general sale on 5 December – although fans who register with her website can buy them 24 hours earlier.

“It’s going to be very special,” said Rob Hallett of tour promoter AEG.

The concert, he said, would take its theme from her latest album The Circus, which is released next week.

“We’re creating a musical circus,” he said. “Expect to see jugglers, dancers, tattooed ladies and acrobats.”

According to the promoter, the concerts will be Spears’ only dates in Europe “for the foreseeable future”.

Spears last performed in the UK in 2004 when her Onyx Hotel tour visited Birmingham, Glasgow, Belfast, Manchester and Wembley Arena in London.

‘Radiant’

The 26-year-old will be in the capital this weekend to appear on ITV1 talent show The X Factor.

Before that she will travel to Germany to attend the annual Bambi entertainment awards in Dusseldorf.

The singer will be named best international pop star after achieving what organisers have called a “stunning comeback from an absolute low point”.

“Britney Spears is back,” said host Hubert Burda. “Radiant and better than ever, the erstwhile idol has reclaimed her throne.”

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, the performer admitted she felt “like an old person” now her much-documented troubles are behind her.

“I go to bed at, like, 9.30 every night and I don’t go out or anything,” she is quoted as saying. “I just feel like an old fart.”

Spears’ mother Lynne, meanwhile, has been telling the BBC how happy she is that her daughter has got her life back on track.

“Britney wants to do it right,” she told Radio 5 Live’s Colin Paterson, attributing her recent turnaround to having “good people around her” and “lots and lots of prayer”.

Bush’s Last Days,Barack Obama’s Popularity

We have “only one President at a time,” Barack Obama said in his debut press conference as President-elect. Normally, that would be a safe assumption — but we’re learning not to assume anything as the charcoal-dreary economic winter approaches. By mid-November, with the financial crisis growing worse by the day, it had become obvious that one President was no longer enough (at least not the President we had). So, in the days before Thanksgiving, Obama began to move — if not to take charge outright, then at least to preview what things will be like when he does take over in January. He became a more public presence, taking questions from the press three days in a row. He named his economic team. He promised an enormous stimulus package that would somehow create 2.5 million new jobs, and began to maneuver the new Congress toward having the bill ready for him to sign — in a dramatic ceremony, no doubt — as soon as he assumes office.

That we have slightly more than one President for the moment is mostly a consequence of the extraordinary economic times. Even if George Washington were the incumbent, the markets would want to know what John Adams was planning to do after his Inauguration. And yet this final humiliation seems particularly appropriate for George W. Bush. At the end of a presidency of stupefying ineptitude, he has become the lamest of all possible ducks.

It is in the nature of mainstream journalism to attempt to be kind to Presidents when they are coming and going but to be fiercely skeptical in between. I’ve been feeling sorry for Bush lately, a feeling partly induced by recent fictional depictions of the President as an amiable lunkhead in Oliver Stone’s W. and in Curtis Sittenfeld’s terrific novel American Wife. There was a photo in the New York Times that seemed to sum up his current circumstance: Bush in Peru, dressed in an alpaca poncho, standing alone just after the photo op at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, with various Asian leaders departing the stage, none of them making eye contact with him. Bush has that forlorn what-the-hell-happened? expression on his face, the one that has marked his presidency at difficult times. You never want to see the President of the United States looking like that.

So I’ve been searching for valedictory encomiums. His position on immigration was admirable and courageous; he was right about the Dubai Ports deal and about free trade in general. He spoke well, in the abstract, about the importance of freedom. He is an impeccable classicist when it comes to baseball. And that just about does it for me. I’d add the bracing moment of Bush with the bullhorn in the ruins of the World Trade Center, but that was neutered in my memory by his ridiculous, preening appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the aircraft carrier beneath the “Mission Accomplished” sign. The flight-suit image is one of the two defining moments of the Bush failure. The other is the photo of Bush staring out the window of Air Force One, helplessly viewing the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina. This is a presidency that has wobbled between those two poles — overweening arrogance and paralytic incompetence.

The latter has held sway these past few months as the economy has crumbled. It is too early to rate the performance of Bush’s economic team, but we have more than enough evidence to say, definitively, that at a moment when there was a vast national need for reassurance, the President himself was a cipher. Yes, he’s a lame duck with an Antarctic approval rating — but can you imagine Bill Clinton going so gently into the night? There are substantive gestures available to a President that do not involve the use of force or photo ops. For example, Bush could have boosted the public spirit — and the auto industry — by announcing that he was scrapping the entire federal automotive fleet, including the presidential limousine, and replacing it with hybrids made in Detroit. He could have jump-started — and he still could — the Obama plan by releasing funds for a green-jobs program to insulate public buildings. He could start funding the transit projects already approved by Congress.

In the end, though, it will not be the creative paralysis that defines Bush. It will be his intellectual laziness, at home and abroad. Bush never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and regulation that was necessary to make markets work. He never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and equity that was necessary to maintain the strong middle class required for both prosperity and democracy. He never considered the complexities of the cultures he was invading. He never understood that faith, unaccompanied by rigorous skepticism, is a recipe for myopia and foolishness. He is less than President now, and that is appropriate. He was never very much of one.

International Airport Shutsdown,Anti-Government Protesters

Flights from Thailand’s international airport have been suspended after hundreds of anti-government protesters stormed the building in Bangkok.

The demonstrators are in full control of Suvarnabhumi airport, leaving at least 3,000 passengers stranded.

A BBC correspondent says it is the most dramatic action so far by the protesters to oust the government.

The government is to hold an emergency cabinet meeting, and the head of the army is due to make a statement.

There is speculation that the army chief may impose emergency rule.

Yellow-shirted protestors from the the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) have taken over strategic areas of the airport, such as the control tower.

They had hoped to intercept Thai Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat as he returned from an Asia-Pacific summit in Peru, but his flight has been diverted elsewhere.

Now the PAD says it will keep the airport closed until Mr Somchai resigns.

A series of small explosions among the PAD protestors on Wednesday morning injured several people, underlining the risk of more violent clashes with pro-government groups, says the BBC’s Jonathan Head in Bangkok.

‘They won’t talk to us’

Hundreds of masked demonstrators, carrying huge Thai flags and makeshift weapons, stormed through police lines around the building on Tuesday.

Airport director Serirat Prasutanon said operations had been “totally shut down” since early on Wednesday, and that 78 outbound and incoming flights had been affected.

“We are trying to negotiate with them to allow outgoing passengers stranded by the protest to fly,” he was quoted by the Associated Press as saying.

“The incident has damaged Thailand’s reputation and its economy beyond repair.”

One stranded tourist told the BBC: “I don’t know what happened to my flight. They won’t talk to us. I’m angry and sad, because I have two small children – they’re sick, so we want to go home.”

Some British holidaymakers are among those stranded in “no-man’s land” at the airport, said a spokesman for the UK Foreign Office.

Having passed through immigration control, they are now stuck without planes to board.

Earlier, demonstrations in central Bangkok turned violent, leaving at least 11 people injured.

Thai TPBS television broadcast pictures of the violence on the main road to the capital’s old airport. The footage showed shots being fired from a truck into crowds after rocks were thrown.

At least two handguns could be seen and people standing with the gunmen raised up a picture of the revered Thai king, whom the PAD claim to be supporting.

A man was also seized by anti-government supporters and what appeared to be a large knife was held to his throat.

TPBS said its cameraman had been threatened at the scene and that PAD personnel attempted to seize his tape.

On Monday, PAD protesters converged on Bangkok’s old Don Muang international airport, from where the cabinet has been operating since its offices were occupied three months ago.

Organisers say the protest is a “final battle” to bring down the government.

Our correspondent says that the government appears to have followed a strategy of allowing the PAD to attack government buildings while avoiding clashes, in the hope that it will wear the protesters down.

The government has so far resisted calling in the army. Analysts says it is a thinly disguised aim of the PAD to provoke such a move.

APPLE To Drop IPHONE,Banned

An Apple iPhone advert has been banned by the advertising standards watchdog for exaggerating the phone’s speed.

The advert boasted the new 3G model was “really fast” and showed it loading internet pages in under a second.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld complaints by 17 people who said the TV advert had misled them as to its speed.

Apple UK said it was comparing the 3G model with its 2G predecessor and its claims were “relative not absolute”.

The advert repeatedly stated that the phone was “really fast” and showed news pages and the Google maps service taking just fractions of a second to appear.

Text on the screen said: “Network performance will vary by location.”

After upholding the viewers’ complaints, the ASA said the advert must not appear again in the same form.

It said the advert was likely to lead viewers to believe that the device actually operated at or near to the speeds shown in the advert.

The watchdog concluded: “Because we understood that it did not, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead.”

Apple said its claims were “relative rather than absolute in nature” – implying the 3G iPhone was “really fast” in comparison to the previous generation – and therefore the advert was not misleading.

The company also said the average consumer would realise the phone’s performance would vary – a point they said was made clear by the text stating “network performance will vary by location”.

Best Crime Of The Century:4 Of 25

THE FATTY ARBUCKLE SCANDAL, 1920

When the world first read about the events of Sept. 3, 1920 in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, the plotline appeared to be tabloid-headline loud and clear: during a wild party, an obese Hollywood comedy star takes advantage of a naive young actress, puncturing her bladder during forced sex (with a beer bottle!); she dies a painful death of peritonitis. The star was Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, perhaps the first film actor to be paid an annual salary of $1 million, an amazing sum in the silent film industry. Insisting he had done nothing wrong, Arbuckle nevertheless went through three trials, hounded by newspapers and morality groups each time. His movies were banned in both America and Britain. Some people even called for him to be executed. But the woman who brought the charges — a friend of the dead starlet — never testified in court because of a past record of extortion, racketeering and bigamy. Neither was the woman an eyewitness to the alleged crime. Arbuckle’s first two trials thus ended in hung juries. And the third acquitted him of all crimes. That jury even issued him an apology. But his career was over. The media pall over his reputation was impossible to overcome. The public and much of Hollywood would never forgive him; all his comeback attempts failed. Indeed, as a result of the scandal, the White House established the Hays Office as the movie industry’s moral arbiter and censor. Arbuckle died in 1933, after falling into alcoholism and a lurid obscurity.

Budget Blade Sharpened,Barack Obama’s Federal Budget

President-elect Barack Obama had warned on Monday that he would begin detailing on Tuesday how he would make some of the “meaningful cuts” he is planning for the federal budget. “If we are going to make the investments we need, we also have to be willing to shed the spending that we don’t need,” Obama said. “We can’t sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness or exist solely because of the power of politicians, lobbyists or interest groups.”

Despite the rhetoric, however, the President-elect on Tuesday singled out only a single program for elimination — crop subsidies totaling $49 million that the Agriculture Department paid out to 2,702 millionaires apparently too rich to qualify for them between 2003 and 2006. But Obama also promised significant federal-budget surgery to come. While many incoming Presidents have made such promises, not one in the past two generations has had the crowbar of looming economic calamity available that Obama does to force major changes in the way Washington taxes and spends.

It may have been thin on details, but federal-budget hawks were pleased by Tuesday’s announcement of big cuts to come. “The signals he’s sending out are positive,” says Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a grass-roots group that advocates federal-budget discipline. “I’m as encouraged as you can be in the face of a trillion-dollar deficit.” Bixby says Obama’s tone — and the message that he’s unwilling to pour federal dollars into combating the recession without assessing the merit of that spending — should help curb some appetites on Capitol Hill. “He talked about the need to cut wasteful government spending to make sure that taxpayers dollars are being spent efficiently,” Bixby said. “It sends an important signal to Congress that he’s not willing to yank the lid off and say, ‘Anything goes!’ “

As Obama’s fledgling economic team bolts together a stimulus package that could cost the nation’s taxpayers upwards of half a trillion dollars, the President-elect said the old ways of building a federal budget — often piling additional billions onto hidebound programs of dubious value — are over. He pledged that his Administration would go through the federal budget “page by page, line by line, eliminating those programs we don’t need and insisting that those that we do need operate in a sensible, cost-effective way.” He referred to the “hard-pressed middle class” and declared that “their government is on their side” — a jibe at the Bush Administration’s preoccupation with restoring the fortunes of Wall Street.

Obama said his key challenge is finding a way to pump funds into the economy on a short-term basis in a manner that spurs long-term economic growth. He suggested that such twofers might include middle-class tax cuts, changes in the tax code and investments in health care. When pressed by an Illinois reporter on what he would say to his cash-strapped former colleagues and friends in Springfield, where Obama served as a state senator, the President-elect said the question reflected old thinking. “I want to be clear: friendship doesn’t [enter] into this,” he said. “That’s part of the old way of doing business.”

Obama also announced that he is tapping Peter Orszag, currently head of the Congressional Budget Office, to head the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, which coordinates federal spending.

The crashing economy has prompted Obama to begin acting presidential even before Inauguration Day. He has declared his intention to develop an economic stimulus package aimed at saving or creating 2.5 million jobs and promoting infrastructure improvements, environmentally friendly investments and health-care efforts, and he wants that package on his Oval Office desk for signing into law soon after he arrives at the White House. “We don’t intend to stumble into the next Administration,” Obama told reporters on Tuesday in Chicago. “We are going to hit the ground running.” But unlike on Monday, when Obama’s naming of his economic team accompanied a nearly 400-point boost in the Dow Jones industrial average, during Tuesday’s conversation with reporters, major market indicators slumped but later began to rise again. Investors, no doubt, will be paying close attention when Obama holds a third press conference in as many days on Wednesday.

Obama’s Plan,Defense Department Updated

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama has decided to keep Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in his post, a show of bipartisan continuity in a time of war that will be the first time a Pentagon chief has been carried over from a president of a different party, Democrats close to the transition said Tuesday.

Mr. Obama’s advisers were nearing a formal agreement with Mr. Gates to stay on for perhaps a year, the Democrats said, and they expected to announce the decision as early as next week, along with other choices for the national security team. The two sides have been working out details on how Mr. Gates would wield authority in a new administration.

The move will give the new president a defense secretary with support on both sides of the aisle in Congress, as well as experience with foreign leaders around the world and respect among the senior military officer corps. But two years after President Bush picked him to lead the armed forces, Mr. Gates will now have to pivot from serving the commander in chief who started the Iraq war to serving one who has promised to end it.

In deciding to ask Mr. Gates to stay, Mr. Obama put aside concerns that he would send a jarring signal after a political campaign in which he made opposition to the war his signature issue in the early days. Some Democrats who have advised his campaign quietly complained that he was undercutting his own message and risked alienating war critics who formed his initial base of support, especially after tapping his primary rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, for secretary of state.

But advisers argued that Mr. Gates was a practical public servant who was also interested in drawing down troops in Iraq when conditions allow.

“From our point of view, it looks pretty damn good because of continuity and stability,” said an Obama adviser, who insisted on anonymity to discuss confidential deliberations. “And I don’t think there are any ideological problems.”

Associates said Mr. Gates was torn between a desire to retire to a home in Washington State and a sense of duty as the military faces the daunting challenges of reducing forces in Iraq and increasing them in Afghanistan.

As Mr. Obama moved closer to assembling his national security team Tuesday, he lost a top candidate for director of the Central Intelligence Agency. John O. Brennan, an agency veteran who was widely seen as the front-runner, withdrew from consideration amid concerns that he was linked to controversial intelligence programs authorized by Mr. Bush.

In a letter to Mr. Obama, Mr. Brennan said he did not want those concerns to be a “distraction” for the incoming administration. At the same time, he vigorously defended his record and called himself a “strong opponent” of the harsh interrogation methods the agency used in recent years, including waterboarding, the practice of making a suspect experience the sensation of drowning.

The developments came as Mr. Obama prepared to begin unveiling his national security team after the long Thanksgiving weekend. Besides formally announcing his nomination of Mrs. Clinton as secretary of state, Mr. Obama was expected to appoint Gen. James L. Jones, a retired Marine commandant and NATO supreme commander, as his national security adviser.

Other front-runners have emerged in recent days, including Adm. Dennis Blair, retired from the Navy, for director of national intelligence; Susan E. Rice, a former assistant secretary of state, for ambassador to the United Nations; James B. Steinberg, a former deputy national security adviser, for deputy secretary of state; and Thomas E. Donilon, a former chief of staff at the State Department, for deputy national security adviser.

The team is shaping up as one of experience more than change, figures with long résumés but at times conflicting backgrounds. Nothing reflects that more than keeping a Republican-appointed defense secretary. Although Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Gerald R. Ford made no change at the top of the Pentagon when they took office, no president has kept a defense secretary from a predecessor in another party, Donald Ritchie, a Senate historian, said.

Mr. Gates, who served as C.I.A. director under the first President Bush, would not have to be reconfirmed by the Senate. The prospect of retaining him generated praise from the military establishment and Capitol Hill, where he is viewed as a pragmatist who turned the Pentagon around after the tumultuous tenure of Donald H. Rumsfeld.

But it also stirred a debate inside Mr. Obama’s circles, where some advisers worried that the decision to turn to a Republican appointee — something President Bill Clinton did in naming William S. Cohen to the defense post in 1997 — would reinforce the notion that Democrats could not manage the military. “It makes them look like they’re too wimpy to be trusted to run the building,” said one adviser who asked not to be named.

Keeping Mr. Gates after a polarizing campaign on the war also seemed incongruous to some. “I really can’t begin to understand from a political point of view how Barack Obama, a person who got the nomination because he ran against the Iraq war, can keep around the guy who’s been in charge of it for the last two years,” said Loren B. Thompson, head of the Lexington Institute, a research organization.

Mr. Gates talked with Mr. Obama’s team about how to make the arrangement work. One adviser familiar with the discussions said the final issue was the choice of senior Pentagon personnel and whether a small circle of Gates advisers would remain.

Obama advisers have talked about Richard J. Danzig, a former Navy secretary, as a possible deputy and heir apparent to Mr. Gates, but some acknowledged that the prospect could raise concerns. If Mr. Danzig is sitting down the hall from the secretary’s office and seen as Mr. Obama’s real choice, some said, then his presence could undercut Mr. Gates’s authority.

But Mr. Gates has shown an ability to manage the Pentagon even with a small inner circle. When he took over from Mr. Rumsfeld after the 2006 midterm elections, Mr. Gates did not bring a single new aide. And the senior military officer corps will remain unchanged at the start of the administration, including Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Admiral Mullen made an unannounced trip to Chicago on Friday for a 45-minute meeting with Mr. Obama on a wide range of national security issues, Pentagon officials said. Before going, Admiral Mullen received approval from both Mr. Gates and Mr. Bush, the officials said.

The decision by Mr. Brennan to pull out of consideration for a senior intelligence job surprised specialists and lawmakers, some of whom questioned whether he had been forced by Mr. Obama’s team to withdraw. Mr. Obama’s office denied pushing Mr. Brennan aside.

The episode underscored how the C.I.A.’s secret detention program remained an incendiary issue. Mr. Brennan, who will continue to work on Mr. Obama’s transition team, was a senior adviser during the campaign and said an Obama administration would ban coercive interrogation.

Yet a group of psychologists posted a letter on the Internet last weekend calling for Mr. Obama to pass over Mr. Brennan, quoting a 2006 interview in which he seemed to defend C.I.A. operations after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Stephanie Cutter, an Obama spokeswoman, said, “John Brennan has served our nation with honor and is a man of talent and integrity,” adding that Mr. Obama “is grateful for John’s continuing assistance as a valuable member of our transition team.”

Family Tour,Four Christmases (2008)-Movie Review,Story Line

Every holiday season, either out of respect for tradition or sheer spite, at least one Hollywood studio is sure to release a drippily sentimental, gratingly cheerful “comedy,” indigestible as a fruitcake and disposable as wrapping paper. All appearances to the contrary, “Four Christmases” is not this year’s version. Yes, it follows a charming, mismatched couple on a sentimental journey involving presents, family and the sharing of food and feelings, but the picture, briskly directed by Seth Gordon from a snappy, many-authored script, is refreshingly tart and lean, forgoing the usual schmaltz and syrup.

Don’t get the wrong idea. “Four Christmases” isn’t anything astonishing, but at 86 minutes, divided into four farcical set pieces, plus necessary exposition, denouement and interstitial drive time, it’s an efficient and stress-free entertainment package. For the audience, that is. The main characters seem pretty miserable most of the time, which is as it should be.

To an unusual and welcome degree, “Four Christmases” makes merry with an impressive range of modern American social awfulness. In its view of the discomfort that persists between parents and their grown-up children, it flirts with the misanthropy encapsulated in Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse,” which begins with an unprintable axiom and concludes with the advice to “get out as early as you can/and don’t have any kids yourself.”

This is the counsel Kate (Reese Witherspoon) and Brad (Vince Vaughn) seem to have followed. An unmarried, fun-loving San Francisco couple, they have tactfully estranged themselves from parents, stepparents and siblings. Each Christmas Kate and Brad invent an exotic charity project as cover for a hedonistic jaunt that takes them far from the claims of kin. This year, though, their planned escape is foiled, and they must run a grueling (and surprisingly brutal) gantlet through the homes of four divorced parents, enduring awkwardness, humiliation and sexual ickiness.

“I swear I never had sexual feelings for your mom until I was 30,” Brad’s childhood best friend tells him. It’s much funnier, as well as more appalling, in context.

Mr. Vaughn is supposed to be the offspring of Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek, a curious casting choice unless the editors left out a flashback in which the infant Brad fell into a vat of human growth hormone. Kate’s parents are played by Mary Steenburgen and, all too briefly, Jon Voight, and her undermining, aggressively fertile sister by Kristin Chenoweth.

Brad’s feral brothers, a pair of semi-professional extreme cage fighters, are Tim McGraw and Jon Favreau, and the generally high caliber of the supporting performances — Dwight Yoakam as Pastor Phil, Kate’s mom’s latest boyfriend, also deserves mention — goes a long way toward making “Four Christmases” palatable.

And Ms. Witherspoon serves as a game comic sidekick to the irrepressible Mr. Vaughn, who basically does what he always does, which is to stammer, bluster and wheedle his way through a performance that scrambles the distinction between brute and wimp. He has a tendency, slyly mocked in a church pageant scene, to upstage whomever he’s paired with, and Ms. Witherspoon, though a fine comedian in her own right, is perhaps a bit too decorous and obliging.

The difference in size between them presents an interesting visual challenge, as they fit into the frame like Gandalf and Frodo, or Marmaduke and a Hummel figurine. There are other reasons not to believe them as a couple, one being that no sane woman could endure more than 90 minutes of Brad’s company. But since you don’t even have to endure that much, it really isn’t your problem.

“Four Christmases” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has profanity and sexual situations and references.

FOUR CHRISTMASES

Directed by Seth Gordon; written by Matt R. Allen, Caleb Wilson, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, based on a story by Mr. Allen and Mr. Wilson; director of photography, Jeffrey L. Kimball; edited by Mark Helfrich and Melissa Kent; music by Alex Wurman; production designer, Shepherd Frankel; produced by Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber and Jonathan Glickman; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes.

WITH: Vince Vaughn (Brad), Reese Witherspoon (Kate), Robert Duvall (Howard), Jon Favreau (Denver), Mary Steenburgen (Marilyn), Dwight Yoakam (Pastor Phil), Tim McGraw (Dallas), Kristin Chenoweth (Courtney), Jon Voight (Creighton) and Sissy Spacek (Paula).

Where the Cowboys and Kangaroos,Australia(2008)-Movie Review,Story Line

Baz Luhrmann’s continent-size epic, “Australia,” isn’t the greatest story ever — it’s several dozen of the greatest stories ever told, “The African Queen,” “Gone With the Wind” and “Once Upon a Time in the West” included. A pastiche of genres and references wrapped up — though, more often than not, whipped up — into one demented and generally diverting horse-galloping, cattle-stampeding, camera-swooping, music-swelling, mood-altering widescreen package, this creation story about modern Australia is a testament to movie love at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitsch as an act of aesthetic communion.

Mr. Luhrmann’s use of culturally degraded forms both here and in earlier films like “Moulin Rouge” doesn’t register as either a conceptual strategy or a cynical commercial ploy or some combination of the two, as it can with art world jesters like Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, who have appropriated kitsch as a (more or less) legitimate postmodern strategy. Instead it feels — feeling being paramount in all of Mr. Luhrmann’s films — like a sincere cry from the swelling, throbbing heart, a true expression of self. And while that self and its gaudy work may be stitched together from the bits and pieces of pop culture — the son of a movie-theater owner, Mr. Luhrmann grew up worshiping at the altar of Hollywood — they are also wholly sincere.

Sincere, if also sometimes confused and confusing: though there is no denying the scope and towering ambition of “Australia,” which was largely shot on location in the outback, it can be difficult to gauge Mr. Luhrmann’s intentions, or rather his level of self-awareness. The film begins with some text that scrolls importantly across the screen, immediately setting the uncertain tone with some (serious?) twaddle about Australia as a land of “adventure and romance.” Before you have a chance to harrumph indignantly about the oppression of the Aborigines (or sneer at the country’s early imported criminal population), the text has skipped to the topic of “the stolen generations,” the children of indigenous peoples who, from the 19th century well into the 20th, were forcibly separated from their cultures by white Australians in the name of God and civilization.

But no worries! Though “Australia” is narrated by a young boy of mixed race, Nullah (the newcomer Brandon Walters), the illegitimate son of an Aboriginal mother and a white father, who is trying to escape the authorities, and while it opens in 1939, shortly before World War II blasted Australian shores, the film isn’t a bummer. Like every other weighty or would-be weighty moment that passes through Mr. Luhrmann’s soft-filtering lens — a man being trampled to death by rampaging cattle or a city being annihilated by bombing Japanese warplanes — the calamities of history are merely colorful grist for his main interest, the romance between a wilted English rose, Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), and an itinerant Australian cattleman, the Drover (Hugh Jackman).

The lady and the tramp meet soon after she lands in Australia to track down her cattleman husband, whose early murder sets all the narrative pieces in place. Initially intent on selling her property, including 1,500 head of cattle, Sarah soon transforms into a frontierswoman, seduced by Nullah’s smile and the majestic valleys and peaks of both the land and of the Drover’s musculature. Although Ms. Kidman and Mr. Jackman are initially riffing on Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart’s prickly courtship in “The African Queen” — later, as they heat up, they slip into a sexier Scarlett-and-Rhett dynamic — only Ms. Kidman really embraces the more comic and potentially embarrassing aspects of her role, giving herself over to Mr. Luhrmann and his occasionally cruel camera with a pronounced lack of vanity.

Though looking bad (or at least less than perfect) on camera is a particular form of vanity for actors, Ms. Kidman has in recent years generally erred on the side of physical perfection, sometimes to the detriment of her performances. But she’s wonderfully and fully expressive here, from wince-worthy start to heartbreaking finish, whether she’s wrinkling her nose in mock disgust or rushing across a dusty field, her arms pumping so wildly that it’s a wonder well water doesn’t spring from her mouth. It’s a ludicrous role — not long after priming her pump, the barren widow turns into a veritable fertility goddess — but she rides Sarah’s and the story’s ups and downs with ease. Mr. Jackman gives the movie oomph; Ms. Kidman gives it a performance.

More than anything else in the film, Nullah included, Ms. Kidman tethers “Australia” to the world of human feeling and brings Mr. Luhrmann’s outrageous flights of fancy down to earth. That may not be where he prefers to make movies, but it’s a necessary place for even a fantasist to visit. Although many of his Western contemporaries like to root around in down-and-dirty realism, Mr. Luhrmann maintains a full-throttle commitment to cinematic illusion and what he characterizes as the “heightened artifice” of his so-called Red Curtain trilogy, “Strictly Ballroom,” “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge.” You may not always see the people for the production design in these, but when you do — as in “Romeo + Juliet” and sometimes here — they spring forth from their fantastical milieus like fists.

A maximalist, Mr. Luhrmann doesn’t simply want to rouse your laughter and tears: he wants to rouse you out of a sensory-overloaded stupor with jolts of passion and fabulous visions. That may make him sound a wee bit Brechtian, but he’s really just an old-fashioned movie man, the kind who never lets good taste get in the way of rip-roaring entertainment. The usual line about kitsch is that it’s an affront, a cheapening of the culture, a danger. “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession,” Milan Kundera wrote. “The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

True, but it doesn’t make the second tear any less wet.

“Australia” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some bloody violence, many stampeding hooves.

AUSTRALIA

Directed by Baz Luhrmann; written by Mr. Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan; director of photography, Mandy Walker; edited by Dody Dorn and Michael McCusker; music by David Hirschfelder; production designer, Catherine Martin; produced by Mr. Luhrmann, G. Mac Brown and Catherine Knapman; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes.

WITH: Nicole Kidman (Lady Sarah Ashley), Hugh Jackman (the Drover), David Wenham (Neil Fletcher), Bryan Brown (King Carney), Jack Thompson (Kipling Flynn), David Gulpilil (King George) and Brandon Walters (Nullah).

Potent Symbol In Death,Milk(2008)-Movie Review,Story Line

One of the first scenes in “Milk” is of a pick-up in a New York subway station. It’s 1970, and an insurance executive in a suit and tie catches sight of a beautiful, scruffy younger man — the phrase “angel-headed hipster” comes to mind — and banters with him on the stairs. The mood of the moment, which ends up with the two men eating birthday cake in bed, is casual and sexy, and its flirtatious playfulness is somewhat disarming, given our expectation of a serious and important movie grounded in historical events. “Milk,” directed by Gus Van Sant from a script by Dustin Lance Black, is certainly such a film, but it manages to evade many of the traps and compromises of the period biopic with a grace and tenacity worthy of its title character.

That would be Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn), a neighborhood activist elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 and murdered, along with the city’s mayor, George Moscone (Victor Garber), by a former supervisor named Dan White (Josh Brolin) the next year. Notwithstanding the modesty of his office and the tragic foreshortening of his tenure, Milk, among the first openly gay elected officials in the country, had a profound impact on national politics, and his rich afterlife in American culture has affirmed his status as pioneer and martyr. His brief career has inspired an opera by Stewart Wallace, an excellent documentary film (“The Times of Harvey Milk,” by Rob Epstein, from 1984) and now “Milk,” which is the best live-action mainstream American movie that I have seen this year. This is not faint praise, by the way, even though 2008 has been a middling year for Hollywood. “Milk” is accessible and instructive, an astute chronicle of big-city politics and the portrait of a warrior whose passion was equaled by his generosity and good humor. Mr. Penn, an actor of unmatched emotional intensity and physical discipline, outdoes himself here, playing a character different from any he has portrayed before.

This is less a matter of sexuality — there is no longer much novelty in a straight actor’s “playing gay” — than of temperament. Unlike, say, Jimmy Markum, Mr. Penn’s brooding ex-convict in Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” Harvey Milk is an extrovert and an ironist, a man whose expansive, sometimes sloppy self-presentation camouflages an incisive mind and a ferociously stubborn will. All of this Mr. Penn captures effortlessly through voice and gesture, but what is most arresting is the sense he conveys of Milk’s fundamental kindness, a personal virtue that also functions as a political principle.

Which is not to say that “Milk” is an easy, sunny, feel-good movie, or that its hero is a shiny liberal saint. There is righteous anger in this movie, and also an arresting, moody lyricism. Mr. Van Sant has frequently practiced a kind of detached romanticism, letting his stories unfold matter-of-factly while infusing them with touches of melancholy beauty. (He is helped here by Danny Elfman’s elegant score and by the expressive cinematography of Harris Savides, whose touch when it comes to framing and focus could more aptly be called a caress.)

In the years since the earnest and commercial “Finding Forrester” (2000), Mr. Van Sant has devoted himself to smaller-scale projects, some of them (like the Palme d’Or-winning provocation “Elephant”) employing nonprofessional actors, and none of them much concerned with soliciting the approval of the mass audience. “Gerry,” “Elephant,” “Last Days” and “Paranoid Park” are linked by a spirit of formal exploration — elements of Mr. Van Sant’s experimental style include long tracking shots; oblique, fractured narratives; and a way of composing scenes that emphasizes visual and aural texture over conventional dramatic exposition — and also by a preoccupation with death.

Like “Elephant” (suggested by the Columbine High shootings) and “Last Days” (by the suicide of Kurt Cobain), “Milk” is the chronicle of a death foretold. Before that subway station encounter, we have already seen real-life news video of the aftermath of Milk’s assassination, as well as grainy photographs of gay men being rounded up by the police. These images don’t spoil the intimacy between Harvey the buttoned-up businessman and Scott Smith (James Franco), the hippie who becomes his live-in lover and first campaign manager. Rather, the constant risk of harassment, humiliation and violence is the defining context of that intimacy.

And his refusal to accept this as a fact of life, his insistence on being who he is without secrecy or shame, is what turns Milk from a bohemian camera store owner (after his flight from New York and the insurance business) into a political leader.

“My name is Harvey Milk, and I want to recruit you.” That was an opening line that the real Milk often used in his speeches to break the tension with straight audiences, but the film shows him deploying it with mostly gay crowds as well, with a slightly different inflection. He wants to recruit them into the politics of democracy, to persuade them that the stigma and discrimination they are used to enduring quietly and even guiltily can be addressed by voting, by demonstrating, by claiming the share of power that is every citizen’s birthright and responsibility.

The strength of Mr. Black’s script is that it grasps both the radicalism of Milk’s political ambition and the pragmatism of his methods. “Milk” understands that modern politics thrive at the messy, sometimes glorious intersection of grubby interests and noble ideals. Shortly after moving with Scott from New York to the Castro section of San Francisco, Milk begins organizing the gay residents of that neighborhood, seeking out allies among businessmen, labor unions and other groups.

The city’s gay elite, discomfited by his confrontational tactics, keeps Milk at a distance, leaving him to build a movement from the ground up with the help of a young rabble-rouser and ex-hustler named Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch).

For more than two lively, eventful hours, “Milk” conforms to many of the conventions of biographical filmmaking, if not always to the precise details of the hero’s biography. Milk’s inexhaustible political commitment takes its toll on his relationships, first with Scott and then with Jack Lira, an impulsive, unstable young man played by Diego Luna with an operatic verve that stops just short of camp.

Meanwhile, local San Francisco issues are overshadowed by a statewide anti-gay-rights referendum and the national crusade, led by the orange-juice spokesmodel Anita Bryant, to repeal municipal antidiscrimination laws. The culture war is unfolding, and Milk is in the middle of it. (And so, 30 years later, in the wake of Proposition 8, is “Milk.”)

“Milk” is a fascinating, multi-layered history lesson. In its scale and visual variety it feels almost like a calmed-down Oliver Stone movie, stripped of hyperbole and Oedipal melodrama. But it is also a film that like Mr. Van Sant’s other recent work — and also, curiously, like David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” another San Francisco-based tale of the 1970s — respects the limits of psychological and sociological explanation.

Dan White, Milk’s erstwhile colleague and eventual assassin, haunts the edges of the movie, representing both the banality and the enigma of evil. Mr. Brolin makes him seem at once pitiable and scary without making him look like a monster or a clown. Motives for White’s crime are suggested in the film, but too neat an accounting of them would distort the awful truth of the story and undermine the power of the movie.

That power lies in its uncanny balancing of nuance and scale, its ability to be about nearly everything — love, death, politics, sex, modernity — without losing sight of the intimate particulars of its story. Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. “Milk” is a marvel.

“Milk” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has some profanity, brief violence and a few discreet sex scenes.

MILK

Directed by Gus Van Sant; written by Dustin Lance Black; director of photography, Harris Savides; edited by Elliot Graham; music by Danny Elfman; production designer, Bill Groom; produced by Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen; released by Focus Features. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes.

WITH: Sean Penn (Harvey Milk), Emile Hirsch (Cleve Jones), Josh Brolin (Dan White), Diego Luna (Jack Lira), Alison Pill (Anne Kronenberg), Victor Garber (Mayor George Moscone), Denis O’Hare (John Briggs), Joseph Cross (Dick Pabich), Stephen Spinella (Rick Stokes), Lucas Grabeel (Danny Nicoletta), Brandon Boyce (Jim Rivaldo), Zvi Howard Rosenman (David Goodstein), Kelvin Yu (Michael Wong) and James Franco (Scott Smith).