Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Okay... at the moment, it's Beck's "Diamond Dogs" cover that's got me hypnotized. I love the opening of it, that dreamy sort of carnival sound we hear at the start of the trailer for the film. Puts me in mind of Moby's "God Moving Over The Face Of The Water" a little bit. First show, first day, I'm there to see this one for myself. Can't wait. Sounds like The Fanciful Norweigian didn't have that much fun with it. I'll let him explain why...
I'm here at the Cannes festival. I wasn't going to write in since I thought you had plenty of folks already there, but when I saw that there were only two reviews of "Moulin Rouge" up I figured I would give it a shot.
When "Romeo + Juliet" came out, everyone described it as "Shakespeare meets MTV"; "Moulin Rouge" basically IS MTV. It's more or less a collection of music videos strung together by the flimsiest of plots. Oh, sure, there's enough symbolism here to convince some that they're watching a film of earth-shattering import, although not much more than what's been known for months now (the lead characters are named "Christian" and "Satine"! The story parallels the Orpheus myth!). But basically, it's little more than the typical boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-tries-to-get-girl-back malarkey (do people still use that word?) we've all seen a million times before, and even that falls flat. I'll get to why in a minute.
As you may remember, this movie was supposed to come out in December. The film got delayed, though, after the test screenings, which prompted Luhrmann and Fox to go back and give it another go in the editing room. Audiences apparently had trouble following the story, so Luhrmann streamlined it. The first change was telling the story in flashback, so that, like "Romeo + Juliet," we know how it turns out. So it's up to Ewan and Nicole to generate the dramatic tension lost by knowing the outcome. This, unfortunately, doesn't happen. The problem is that Luhrmann seems so eager to "reinvent" the musical, but he forgets that great musicals are defined not simply by their music but what happens between it as well. But Luhrmann's in such a hurry to get to the next big musical number that the love story the film is ostensibly about is cut to the bone so that there's no meat on it. Ewan and Nicole do their best, but the great performances that could've been seem to have been left on the cutting room floor. And this is, for all intents and purposes, Ewan and Nicole's show -- John Leguizamo's Toulouse-Lautrec seems to have been included for sheer novelty value, and the other characters may as well be wearing signs with generic labels like "Seemingly Bad Guy with Heart of Gold" or whatever.
That leaves the musical numbers, which come close to salvaging the film. Simply put, they're gorgeous. You knew that, but I mean REALLY gorgeous. I compared this film to a music video, but no music video comes anywhere close to the stunning visuals here. Coupled with the surprisingly good singing (especially by Ewan, who goes far beyond his "Velvet Goldmine" warbling), there's enough intensity here to carry you through to the next musical number. It's not until after the movie is over that you fully realize that a) the dramatic scenes in between the musical numbers are deadly dull and b) the musical numbers do nothing for the characters or the story -- something easily chalked up to the largely inexplicable choice of remixed '80s pop dreck. You want to applaud Luhrmann for just having the balls to try it, but you want to punch him because the film could've been so much more if the music had anything to do with what the film was supposed to be about.
Then again, maybe the film's not supposed to be about anything. Maybe, despite all the pretentious posturing, Luhrmann's only goal with this was to show audiences a good time. On that level, it works. But this isn't a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, and it doesn't bear much more than a minute or two of serious thought. Naturally, it'll make bucketloads at the box office.
The Fanciful Norwegian
