Moulin Rouge! (Widescreen Edition)
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Features
• Anamorphic
• Color
• DVD-Video
• Subtitled
• NTSC
In Theaters : 01 June, 2001
DVD Release : 14 January, 2003 |
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Moulin Rouge! (Widescreen Edition) Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Baz baby, you're not all that
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I'm not trying to be contrarian here, really. I'm trying to figure out why post-modern critics and movie-goers get all lathered up over anachronisms in movies. What is so impressive about porting Madonna and Patti LaBelle songs into 1900 Paris? Or about putting modern-day manners and slang into old contexts? Why does this inspire such creative awe with this generation? Monty Python & company did it, for comic effect, 35 years ago, and no one thought it was "genius." Amusing, perhaps, and that's what this film is, for 15 minutes, until it becomes obvious there's no plot and no point. What storytelling or dramatic skill does this technique show that otherwise could not have been shown? Why do it other than auteur-driven gimmick?
"Ah, but you're contradicting yourself," you say (or you would if you've read all my other reviews here in Amazon). "You heaped praise on Terry Gilliam's Brazil and talked about its anachronistic nature. Gotcha!" Well, no. Brazil wasn't really about mixing time periods, despite what most of the reviews said. They didn't catch the title card in the beginning that said "Somewhere in the 20th Century." The film wasn't about the future--a future with science fiction technology next to 1940s typewriters and fedoras--but rather an alternate *present*, a warning of how things could have turned out if history had been just a little bit different. This is not, strictly speaking, a case of anachronism, but even if it were, it makes a point, it has a function.
I don't see a function of it in this film, directed by ultra-hipster Baz Luhrmann, who, judging from the supplemental materials, seems to have an ego the size of Paris itself. Nor do I see a point in shooting everything in a hyper-kinetic style that has more in common with Looney Tunes cartoons than anything French, anything Moulon Rougish, anything musical. "It stands the musical on its head," the reviews shriek. Yeah, it does. One can stand *anything* on its head; the question is, does doing the headstand reveal anything different than with both feet planted on the ground? If in this case it does, someone tell me *what* in the "comments" section below this review. Be specific, please: nothing like "It's making the musical modern but you old fuddy-duddies can't stand that!" That's a rant, not a revelation.
The movie is shot in a helter-skelter style with an editor who to me appeared to be all-thumbs. (How was the choreography? someone asked me. I don't know; there was too much cross-cutting to see it.) Composition of shots was...well, there wasn't any; the director seemed to just line the room with cameras, "spray" the scene and bounce from angle to angle randomly in the editing process. Maybe he thinks this is the kewel new way to make movies, but I'll take the choreography of a Fosse and the cinematography of a Rotunno any day. The story itself is pedestrian, perhaps intentionally, since kitch seems to be in style among filmmakers right now, but it wears thin. We have boy meets girl (but girl is *forbidden to love*!), boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, girl dies (dramatically, of course). No, that last is not a spoiler that ruins it for you. They tell you she is dying in the first 20 minutes, and in case you don't hear it through all the noise, they show her having a coughing fit that would alarm the Marlboro Man, and when someone puts a handkerchief to her mouth, we see spatters of blood. (One of Roger Ebert's movie rules is anytime a character bleeds from the mouth they will die.) This screenplay has the subtlety of the 5:15 from Manhattan running over a chimp monk.
Kidman is good, but it's more good casting that good acting, as she's shown before she excels at cool, aloof and unreachable characters with tragedy attached. MacGregor does the best he can, but he's a caricature more than a character (which is the intention, by the way). I know we're all supposed to be impressed it's a musical inside a play inside a movie. Big whoop. Nice art direction and I dug the idea of nestling it all into a period-style presentation, but that wasn't enough.
I doubt this review will convince those who are always thirsting for the "brave" and "new" and "cutting edge," so I probably just wore the coating off my keyboard for no good reason. Brave and new is fine, if it has some kind of point to it other than to draw attention to itself. Just because something is different, that doesn't make it "genius." It just makes it...different.
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Moulin Rouge! (Widescreen Edition) dvd movie.