“There's an old Australian stockman, lying, dying…” begins the song "Tie Me Kangaroo Down," which gained fame around the world back in 1960. The lyrics mix a gritty sense of the outback with a fair bit of silliness. Australia, the new film from director Baz Luhrmann, essentially does the same. People still recognize the song. Some can even sing a few bars. But half a century from now, will audiences remember the film? Probably not.

Australia was clearly meant to be as grand and sweeping as the continent is wide and open. And it does deliver on landscapes. But with a running time of two hours and 45 minutes, the film’s only epic dimension is the endurance it demands from the viewers. Its plot is predictable. The characters are cardboard cutouts. The romance could have been lifted from any bodice ripper. The music swells too obviously. And every possible cliché about the Land Down Under loads it with dead weight. It’s Crocodile Dundee and Rabbit Proof Fence with a dash of Gone with the Wind. (Think of the overwrought Scarlet. And of Atlanta burning, burning, burning.)

This collection of flaws is a great pity, because admirable themes play out through the film—the harshness of life on a cattle station in the middle of nowhere, dust and dryness blessedly relieved by the arrival of the rainy season (known as The Wet), the richness of the native culture, the cruel attitudes and policies directed toward the Aboriginal population, the role of religion in enforcing those policies, and a chapter from World War II that’s little known outside of Australia.

[Spoiler Alert: If you're set on seeing the movie, stop reading now because plot points lie ahead—unless you're concerned that you'll doze off at key points and miss important moments. In that case, read on.]

The film begins with a stockman lying, dying—murdered, actually, as seen by a half-Aboriginal boy named Nullah. The plot revolves around this boy, and his voice breaks in frequently with a cheery, plucky, wise, mystical narrative. He quickly diverts the action to the UK, where the plot gets its wobbly legs.

Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), an English rose if ever there was one, receives news of her husband, who has bought a cattle ranch called Faraway Downs in Australia. That just won’t do. The ranch must be sold. And so she’s soon winging her way to Darwin. It’s 1939, and the clouds of war are gathering.

Arriving via Qantas (of course) with her parasol held aloft, Lady Ashley lands in the middle of a cutthroat competition. Both her husband and cattle baron Lesley “King” Carney are trying to sell their herds of beef to the army, and only one can win.

Lady A hitches a ride to the ranch with a brooding hunk of a cattle drover (Hugh Jackman), who hopes to get the job of driving her husband’s livestock to Darwin’s wharf. Near the end of their journey, she inquires, “How long before we reach Faraway Downs?” The drover (nameless for the entire film) replies, “We’ve been on it for the last two days.” A wide, open country, indeed.

At the ranch, Lady A discovers that her husband is the murdered stockman. But she decides that she can be as tough as any bloke. In short order she hides Nullah from officials who want to haul him off to the white man’s school, sacks the slimy ranch manager (who then goes to work for Carney), rounds up 1,500 head of cattle with a skeleton staff—herself, the drover, Nullah, a grizzled alcoholic accountant, a few loyal Aboriginals, and a Chinese chuck-wagon driver—and sets off for Darwin. Nullah sums up their mission: “We gotta to get those no good big bloody bulls into that metal ship.”

Carney’s men, acting under the orders of the former manager of Faraway Downs, sneak up on them one night and start a stampede. But Nullah uses Aboriginal magic and a Pulp Fiction pose to stop the crazed critters mere feet from the edge of a precipice.

The accountant has been trampled, but with his dying breath he tells the drover the secret of the stockman’s death: A white man made it look like Nullah’s grandfather ran a spear through him.

The drive continues. Lady A has loosened up by now, and romance sizzles amid thundering hooves and soaring violins.

The Faraway Downs folks make it safely to Darwin and race their cattle to the army’s supply ship, beating out Carney by a nose. Phew!

That evening, Nullah sneaks into the local theater to see The Wizard of Oz. He then adopts "Over the Rainbow" as his magic song. (A whimsical connection between the fictional Oz and the Oz that’s modern Australia’s nickname, perhaps?)

Meanwhile, Lady A is here to stay. Dressed in a fetching frock, she appears at a charity ball—the scene of the truest, most intriguing scene in the film. Carney, played by the ever-riveting Bryan Brown, takes his defeat with good grace, dancing with Lady A, then laughing and tipping back a cold one as she sashays off with the drover. In those brief minutes, the character reveals himself as a real son of the outback—fiercely competitive but fair, and up for a good time under the right circumstances.

With the romance of Lady A and the drover now on the front burner, it’s time for Nullah to join his grandfather on a walkabout, the traditional spiritual journey that connects Aboriginal Australians with their landscape. Before they get very far, though, Nullah’s grandfather is arrested for the murder of Lady A’s husband, and a priest hustles the boy off to a proper school for Aboriginal children.

Then, on February 19, 1942, Japanese airplanes swoop in to drop bombs on Darwin. Ships sink. Houses burn. Columns of smoke choke the sky. It’s the largest foreign attack ever launched against Australia, and the first of about a hundred to come during the rest of 1942 and 1943.

In the midst of the chaos, Lady A believes the drover is dead but hopes against all odds that Nullah has survived. The drover thinks that Lady A is dead, and maybe the boy too. With his school under attack, Nullah is sure the drover will come to his rescue. Cue "Over the Rainbow" as a key signal in this muddle.

Baz Luhrmann reportedly shot several endings to the story. The one he chose for U.S. audiences is true to the glowing, hopeful way in which he depicts Aboriginal people throughout the film. An epilogue soberly reminds us that in 1973 the government abandoned its policy of Aboriginal assimilation in the Northern Territory, and that in 2008 Australia finally issued an apology to its Aboriginal community for generations of ill treatment.

The credits for a film this long are inevitably dense, but buried in the middle there’s bit of fun: A nod to Rolf Harris for playing the wobble board. It’s an instrument he invented—a hardboard made for artists, wobbled back and forth— which made the whoopwhoopwhoop sound in his hit "Tie Me Kangaroo Down." I couldn’t help it—I left the theater singing. “There's an old Australian stockman, lying, dying…and he says: ‘Watch me wallaby's feed, mate, watch me wallaby's feed.
They're a dangerous breed, mate, so watch me wallaby's feed.
All together now! Tie me kangaroo down, sport. 
Tie me kangaroo down….’

-Ann Williams

During the final days of Liberia's civil war, women whose only authority consisted of the silk-screened logos on their T-shirts helped bring the country back from the verge of national suicide. The "Women's Peace Building Network" practiced a shrewd and audacious African brand of feminism that won the activists a voice in a society that long barred women from power. They did this despite the degradations of a conflict that cast women as displaced people, rape victims, and helpless bystanders doomed to watch their husbands murdered, sons conscripted, daughters violated, and children forced to go without food. Pray the Devil Back to Hell, a film that will be screened in at least ten U.S. cities, documents the gentle but determined uprising. If you want a feel good movie, this is it. If you're in the mood to think, this is it, too.

To make themselves heard, the women first off embraced religion--both Christianity and Islam. They put on their version of "sackcloth and ashes": white T-shirts with slogans, head ties instead of elaborate hairdos, no makeup, little jewelry, and white lapas (cloths wrapped around their waists as skirts). Then they took their message to churches and mosques and the streets. When challenged or thwarted, they used their traditional roles for leverage. Wives refused to have sex with their husbands until the war ended. They demanded respect from police and soldiers. Turning the passivity that had been their lot into a tool to shame those in power, they gathered by the main road leading from President Charles Taylor's house into the capital of Monrovia and sat there day after day, in the hot sun, and in the driving rain, until he was forced to take notice.

The climax of their struggle came in mid-2003, six years into Taylor's corrupt and brutal rule. Rebels were closing in on the capital of Monrovia. The women's dogged petitions and protests had helped bring both parties to peace talks in Ghana. But negotiations were going nowhere. Taylor, indicted for war crimes, had just left the bargaining table and fled to Liberia, vowing to fight to the end in the besieged capital. A top  rebel commander promised to kill everyone in Monrovia and repopulate the city with his supporters. The women were sitting outside the room where the negotiations were being held seemingly to no effect. They continued to chant and sing for peace, but some were breaking into tears of frustration. Finally, one of their leaders, Leymah Gbowee, decided they must blockade the hall and force the men inside to experience the hunger and thirst people in Monrovia were suffering—the misery the women heard about everyday as they phoned home. So the activists formed a human chain across the entrance. Immediately, a security guard arrived to arrest Gbowee. It seemed as if the women's act of civil disobedience would quickly be defused. But in a moment of cultural genius, "General Leymah" undid her head tie and made as if to strip naked. The officer stopped dead.

"What?" readers in the U.S. may be wondering. But, as the film explains, it is considered a curse in West Africa for a man to see his mother naked, especially if she has purposely taken off her clothes. Gbowee, assuming the role of the guard's mother, asserted her control of the situation (in West Africa, younger men often address older women who have children as "ma," as a sign of respect, even if they are not their actual mothers). The women's blockade continued until they extracted a pledge from the rebel and government leaders to be more serious. After this pledge, the tone of the negotiations changed and progress became possible. Soon, there was an enormous breakthrough. Charles Taylor agreed to go into exile on August 4, 2003, and the rebels agreed to halt their offensive and allow U.N. peacekeepers to enter Monrovia. Thousands of lives were saved.

It is hard to communicate the courage of these women. The film does a good job by repeatedly showing the sinisterly impassive face of Charles Taylor, eyes hidden behind sunglasses—a charismatic rebel leader turned president who was single-handedly responsible for the war's beginning and many of the conflict's atrocities. Taylor never displays a hint of guilt or remorse. The women have to literally face down this ruthless, increasingly paranoid ruler. "Come out!" Taylor taunts them in a radio announcement. "I'm waiting for you. Nobody will get into the street to embarrass my administration." Viewers of the film might think that perhaps the women activists drew some sense of security from their appeals to God and their white dress, with its religious symbolism. But there was nothing sacred in wartime Liberia. At the start of the conflict in 1990, St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Monrovia, where the group's leaders were often shown rallying women to their cause, had been the site of a terrible massacre. More than 600 civilians who sought sanctuary were slaughtered by soldiers of the soon-to-be-overthrown Doe government firing their guns into a cowering crowd. In 1992, five American nuns, beloved for their service to the poor and thought to be immune from the violence because of their nationality and high profile, had been brutally murdered by Taylor's rebel forces in a suburb of Monrovia. Their white habits did not save them.

Here is the film's challenge: Who among us is more powerless than these women were during the midst of the war? Who is more at risk? If they could turn their position around and so influence those in power, any of us can. There is no excuse not to act.

-Karen Lange

Last week, The Amazing Race featured a glistening soup made with chunks of sheep rump. Some contestants slurped. One gagged. A vegetarian tried but failed to take it down (thus losing out on a chance for the $1 million prize). And here at Pop Omnivore, we wondered. What is this dish all about? And what's up with using the backside?

First of all, a bit (more than what Borat taught us) about Kazakhstan. It is the ninth-largest country in the world. Its official language is Russian. Its state, or national, language is Kazakh. It is the world's seventh-largest producer of wheat. Its biggest city is Almaty, where the soup slurping took place, and the capital is Astana.

But what about its food?

Having never been there myself, and living in a city (and country, for that matter) that is sorely lacking in Kazakh restaurants, I've yet to get a taste. But I have learned that horse meat and sheep meat (aka mutton) are eaten in abundance, and that dumplings and pasta tend to round out most meals. The national dish is something called besparmak, which translates to "five fingers." It involves hunks of horse meat and noodles, and is meant to be eaten with the hands, hence the name. Another horse-derived favorite is a drink called kumis--this is fermented mare's milk. And then of course there is that soup. Recipes for it are elusive, but the star ingredient, as we know, is the back end of a sheep—specifically, a fat-tailed sheep. According to The Oxford Companion to Food, the tail on a fat-tail "may be a wide, beavertail-like flap, or a long kangaroo's tail with fat deposits along its length, or any intermediate shape. Among the world's hundreds of fat-tail breeds there are many odd curls, S-shapes, and wedges...the tail can be home to a substantial slab of fat with a texture somewhat like bacon, though of course with a muttony aroma."

That said, the soup is considered a delicacy, and I'm not one to knock another country's cuisine and pride therein. In fact, I'm curious about the taste and would love to read a recipe. Has anyone out there tried it? Can anyone share a recipe? May I please skip the fat-tail and just use bacon?

-Catherine Barker

In every James Bond movie, the suave spy travels the world, bedding beautiful women and beating up bad guys. You know who else travels the world? National Geographic. Although not quite as dangerously, and with gadgets that run more to the camera and notebook.

The latest Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, doesn’t rise much above the mediocre mark, but it’s still good world-traveling fun. Here’s a guide to the movie’s locations, Geographic-style:

Early in the movie, Bond visits Siena, Italy, during the Palio, a twice-a-year horse race held in the town’s central piazza. Of course, by “visits” I mean “chases a bad guy and breaks a lot of glass.” National Geographic’s first story about the Palio appeared in the August 1926 issue, still to be found in some grandparents’ basements; here’s a photograph from a 1988 story on the race. Falling off horses, as one of the riders does in the movie, is a pretty standard part of the Palio – the jockeys ride bareback, and a riderless horse can still win the race.

Bond’s travels include a number of visits to London. Everyone knows it always rains in the movie version of London, and this movie’s London follows the trend. How much does it rain in real-world London? Ok, about half the time, according to this BBC chart on London weather, which shows 11 to 15 “wet days” a month. National Geographic Traveler can tell you all about visiting the city yourself. (Take an umbrella.)

In Bregenz, Austria, Bond takes in an opera. By “takes in” I mean “kills people at.” The opera in question was a real production of Puccini’s Tosca at the Bregenz Festival, where the audience watches performances outdoors on a stage that floats on Lake Constance. You missed your chance to see Tosca at this year's festival, but one imagines the 2009 Bregenz Aida could also be quite stunning.

Much of Quantum of Solace takes place in Bolivia’s high desert. You’re in luck – National Geographic has had a lot to say about Bolivia recently. Why do women wear those little bowler hats? See here. The spy might have had a different experience if he’d hooked up with some Bolivian women wrestlers—now that is a Bond girl. Various locations stood in for Bolivia during filming, including Chile’s Atacama Desert, subject of an August 2003 magazine story, “The Driest Place on Earth."

— Helen Fields

Ninjas were medieval Japanese mercenaries whose clandestine tactics were a counterpoint to the chivalrous standards of the feudal Samurai class. Apparently, they’re also really into outrageous obstacle courses!

That’s what you’ll find out if you tune in for tonight's brand new Ninja Warrior marathon, a gymnastic battle of speed, strength, and agility imported to the U.S. by the gadget and games channel G4. The show challenges 100 aspiring ninjas to jump, climb, swing, hang, and slide their way through a daunting series of obstacles. Perhaps the most difficult is the spider jump, where contestants spring off a trampoline and try to catch themselves by splaying their arms and legs against two vertical panes of Plexiglass. The spills into the murky water below are all part of the fun!

To be fair to ninjas, the mystery surrounding them has allowed popular culture to have its way with them. They have been pitted against James Bond, turned into Italianate talking turtles, and promoted as landlubbing rivals to pirates. There is no historical evidence to support these interpretations or to back up the belief that they could fly, vanish into thin air, or bestow wisdom, Dear Abby style, about topics as diverse as barbecue and podcasting.

Even the famous image of the ninja as the masked man in black isn't quite accurate. They more likely dressed in a variety of disguises. Their traditional ninja-yoroi armor had a tinge of red, so that no one could tell if they were bleeding from an injury, according to ninjutsu grandmaster Masaaki Hatsumi.

When asked what makes a ninjutsu warrior great, Hatsumi once said. "There is only thing I would single out, and that is to keep going." So maybe the 100 contestants who confront the Ninja Warrior obstacle course are on the right track after all. Many are return contestants, coming back for more abuse and humiliation. This trend supports my favorite pop culture axiom about ninjas: the law of inverse ninja strength.

The inverse ninja law says the fewer ninjas that are around, the more deadly they become. If several dozen ninjas attack you, they'll run around like crazy and you can probably escape. But if a single ninja targets you, watch out. This Ninja Warrior TV marathon offers proof. Spills are fast and furious in the heavily populated early rounds. But as the pack thins, you will be amazed at the endurance and skill on display.

As for those who fall face first into the water with their first steps, maybe they should have stuck with that anonymous black ninja mask.

-Brad Scriber

Do sharks have eyelids?

That’s one of the questions tossed about in a TV ad for a mobile phone that will not only make prank calls but will also tap into a wealth of internet information.

Only the ad never answers the shark question.

Ever curious, Pop Omnivore went to an expert to find out: Samuel Gruber, a shark biologist who teaches at the University of Miami's Rosential School for Marine and Atmospheric Science.

Here’s what he said: “Fish have no eyelids. Sharks have among the most elaborate eyelids and ocular adnexa in the animal kingdom. There are sharks that can close their eye in a way similar to ours. Others have a third eyelid. But some do not have eyelids. instead of closing eyes, they roll their eyes upward and backward to protect the delicate transparent cornea.”

Pop Omnivore was puzzled. But, um, aren’t sharks … fish?

Gruber was very kind about our ignorance. “Ah I see--you think sharks are fishes.  This is not so.”

Our eyelids are now fluttering like crazy. How can this be?

“Sharks are fish-like vertebrates but are as different from fishes as humans are from frogs,” says Gruber. “Sharks evolved from the jawless fishes as did the true bony fish about half a billion years ago but have been on an independent evolutionary track for lo these half billion years.  Thus sharks are in a different systematic order from fishes and are very different kinds of animals.

“So when I say fish have no eyelids I mean that bony fishes (Osteoichthyes) are lidless; in contrast sharks (Chondricthyes) have a variety of mobile lids not seen in the bony fishes.”

Now I don’t care how good a cell phone is. There is no way you are going to find out all that stuff by cruising the Internet!

Plus, Gruber totally made us feel better by adding: “I would hazard a guess that not one in 100,000 people knew that sharks are not true fishes!!”

-Marc Silver

Where did the Hulk first go green? What African country supplied the rare metal Vibranium used for Captain America's Shield? Any idea where Storm from the X-Men grew up?

This summer, while big screen comic book adaptations like Iron Man, The Hulk, and The Dark Knight were all over the map, Marvel released the Marvel Atlas, its first official attempt to chart the nooks and crannies of its parallel universe. Covering fanciful, real, and reimagined locales, this reference can help you find places that won’t show up in standard sources, like the Eastern European kingdom of Latveria (home to the Fantastic Four’s arch nemesis, Dr. Doom).

Unfortunately, the locator maps are rather lackluster, and the character art is a mishmash of published work, a surprise from such a visual powerhouse. But there is enough background info to satisfy any fanboy or girl. Along with standard tidbits like population, capital city, and major languages, the Atlas also features a country by country rundown on extraterrestrial contacts, domestic superhumans, and Marvel’s take on international relations. For example, you know that the U.S. is a member of the U.N. Security Council, NATO, and NAFTA, but did you also know that it’s the international headquarters of the special police force S.H.I.E.L.D.? (Hints in this summer’s Iron Man and Incredible Hulk films mean we’ll be hearing more from this organization and its leader Nick Fury before long.) The Manhattan map also shows points of interest like the Daily Bugle just south of midtown, where Peter Parker peddles his self-portraits of Spiderman. And it reveals the answers to my opening questions: Arizona, the fictional Wakanda, and Egypt.

Sadly, there is no comparable (sanctioned) guide to the world as seen by DC Comics, leaving an open debate about the location of the two most famous fake cities in comicdom: Gotham and Metropolis. Are they both doppelgangers for the Big Apple, a point of view credited to Dark Knight creator Frank Miller. He says Metropolis is Manhattan's daytime alter ego, and Gotham is the city at night. Or are they rival Midwestern municipalities: Gotham standing in for Chicago, Metropolis a Kansan neighbor to Superman’s boyhood home, Smallville? In perhaps the least aggrandizing interpretation, do they sit on opposite sides of the Delaware Bay? There’s a case for each of these scenarios in the annals of Superman history, which contains enough geographic ambiguity to spur a spirited cartographic debate. Fan-fueled websites, maps, blogs, and Wikipedia pages for Gotham and Metropolis have stepped into the void to negotiate a truce, or at least an agreement to disagree.

While Batman is King Comic at the box office, it makes sense for Marvel to lead the way in the map department. After all, they once published under the name Atlas Comics.

-Brad Scriber

In the beginning, there were 16 designers. They sewed, cried, coined catch phrases, made dresses out of seatbelts. In the end, the winner of the fifth season of Project Runway was Leanne Marshall, a Portland-based designer with an eye for detail and a love of sustainable fabrics. Pop Omnivore spoke with Marshall (above, left) about how her surroundings influence her work, what it means to be a "green" designer, and why she'd never use Styrofoam fabric.

First up, a geographic question: Did moving from California, where you grew up, to Oregon affect your aesthetic?

Yeah, definitely. When I came to Oregon, I became much more inspired by nature and the whole sustainable materials thing really started. Portland’s a very green, ecofriendly city, and it’s just a natural thing to do here.

So Portland sparked your interest in sustainable fabrics?

You can actually buy sustainable textiles here, and I was in a pretty small town in California, so I was going to Joann’s Fabrics, where the options weren’t even available.

Is sustainability one your trademarks?

I wouldn’t call it my trademark, but over half the fabrics I use are sustainable. I think there are a lot of lines out there that are green just to be green, and that’s not me. As a designer I strive to make beautiful clothes, and if they’re sustainable, that’s great.

Are there fabrics you absolutely wouldn't use?

(Laughs). Well, if there were Styrofoam fabric, I probably wouldn’t use that. I probably wouldn’t use a lot of the traditional cottons that have been farmed using lots of pesticides, especially when organic cotton is better quality.

What was the hardest thing about the green challenge on the show?

The models chose the fabrics. I work with a lot of sustainable textiles and I’ve never seen that ugly brown [fabric] in my life! Other designers were working with the same textiles, and I was trying to do something different, but I guess that was a flop.

Your final collection was obviously influenced by nature, with lots of green and blue fabric and wavy shapes.

Being in Portland, it’s so easy to go to the park a couple blocks away and from there I sketch what’s around me. A lot of the natural shapes I gravitate toward end up being floral patterns interpreted in an architectural way.

The way I get the most inspired is when I take the materials and start playing with them and folding them and twisting them and cutting them and seeing what I can create out the material instead of a basic shirt. Once I get the details, I figure out where can I go with this, what would look good. My process is sort of backwards that way.

That you start with the details and move on to the big picture?

Yes.

Is it more costly to use organic and sustainable fabrics?

They do cost more, but it’s definitely worth it to use these sustainable fabrics. In terms of quality, I don’t think there’s any jersey that’s better than bamboo jersey. It’s not that difficult of a choice to use them. They are a bit more expensive but they always sell.

Do you think the green fashion movement will hit the mainstream?

I think it already has. It’s still a little bit behind in terms of the number of fashion designers using it. There are so many big name designers out there, and I can only think of a few names that are using it.

I want to do high fashion that is sustainable, and that’s where [the industry] is lacking. There are a ton of great green and sustainable lines, but in terms of high fashion, it doesn’t really exist so much.

What’s next for you?

I’m moving to New York. The time is right. I’ve always wanted to try being in the New York fashion scene. I’m going to get my line going and finally have some people helping me, rather than just doing it all on my own, and hopefully show at fashion week again pretty soon.

-Winona Dimeo-Ediger