World Famous Comics: Moulin Rouge! (Widescreen Edition)
Moulin Rouge! (Widescreen Edition)
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, John Leguizamo, Jim Broadbent, Richard Roxburgh Directed By: Baz Luhrmann Average Rating: Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) Binding: DVD Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, NTSC Label: 20th Century Fox Number of Items: 1 Region Code: 1 Release Date: January 14, 2003 Running Time: 128 minutes Theatrical Release Date: June 01, 2001
Amazon.com essential video: A dazzling and yet frequently maddening bid to bring the movie musical kicking and screaming into the 21st century, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge bears no relation to the many previous films set in the famous Parisian nightclub. This may appear to be Paris in the 1890s, with can-can dancers, bohemian denizens like Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo), and ribaldry at every turn, but it's really Luhrmann's pop-cultural wonderland. Everyone and everything is encouraged to shatter boundaries of time and texture, colliding and careening in a fast-cutting frenzy that thinks nothing of casting Elton John's "Your Song" 80 years before its time. Nothing is original in this kaleidoscopic, absinthe-inspired love tragedy--the words, the music, it's all been heard before. But when filtered through Luhrmann's love for pop songs and timeless showmanship, you're reminded of the cinema's power to renew itself while paying homage to its past.
Luhrmann's overall success with his third "red-curtain" extravaganza (following Strictly Ballroom and William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet) is wildly debatable: the scenario is simple to the point of silliness, and how can you appreciate choreography when it's been diced into hash by attention-deficit editing? Still, there's something genuine brewing between costars Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman (as, respectively, a poor writer and his unobtainable object of desire), and their vocal talents are impressive enough to match Luhrmann's orgy of extraordinary sets, costumes, and digital wizardry. The movie's novelty may wear thin, along with its shallow indulgence of a marketable soundtrack, but Luhrmann's inventiveness yields moments that border on ecstasy, when sound and vision point the way to a moribund genre's joyously welcomed revival. --Jeff Shannon
Description: A spectacle beyond anything you've ever witnessed. An experience beyond everything you've ever imagined. Behind the red velvet curtain, the ultimate seduction of your senses is about to begin. Welcome to the Moulin Rouge! Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor sing, dance and scale the heights of passionate abandon in the year's most talked-about movie from visionary director Baz Luhrmann (William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Strictly Ballroom). Enter a tantalizing world that celebrates truth, beauty, freedom and above all things, love.
Loves It! I love this movie. I know a lot of people think it's weird, but they obviously just don't get it. Great story line.
And the star goes to..... .....Nicole Kidman's hair extensions, which outperformed the majority of this woefully inept cast.
Genius? High art? Spiritually infused with symbolism? Evidently I needed to be drinking something stronger than I was when I first viewed this film. Maybe there was a method behind the film's references to absynthe after all.
Two things drive a good film: plot and character. When both are developed properly and the right actors are chosen, movie magic occurs. For me, this film had the potential to create magic, but failed miserably due to a directorial lack of focus and unbelievably poor casting. To be sure, the sets are grand and the costumes visually stunning. However, the choppy editing, sophomoric musical score and trite story line would have been far more palatable--and forgivable--had it not been for the deplorable acting.
Many reviews have cited Nicole Kidman as the "sexy" "erotic" "passionate" centerpiece of the film. For me, this tall, skinny, anemic woman with protruding gums and motionless facial features had all the sex appeal of a wet noodle. When I think of courtesans, I picture smouldering, voluptuous women whose eroticism stems from a raw and steely core hardened by worldly excess and exploitation. Women who are a bit rough around the edges. Kidman and Luhrmann needed to take a page out of Jessica Rabbit's book and watch Dr. Frank N. Furter come down the elevator shaft a few times before fashioning Kidman's high class [...], who was too busy looking "pretty" on a swing to truly afford the character any depth or soul.
Adding to Satine's lack of proper characterization is Kidman's lousy acting. Her performance first begins to completely unravel during the "Rhythm of the Night" scene, in which she awkwardly chirps, trills, and trapses around the club shaking her ostrich feathers in the face of the lead. It's hard to determine just who she's channeling here, but it appears to be a combination of Carmen Miranda, Gloria Estefan, and Lucille Ball on crack. The film unravels further as she rolls around on the floor in some fake, cheesy, orgasmic trance as Ewan McGregor recites cliched lines from "Your Song," which supposedly send her into some freakish sexual frenzy. (At this point in the film her accent is quasi-American but will morph into something like British later in the film).
Continuing scenes are intermittantly punctuated by a lot of fake hacking and coughing and breaking out into song, which showcases a weak voice by traditional blockbuster musical standards. (In other words, your not gonna get the goose bumps that break out when you hear Jennifer Hudson sing.) After a few extremely contrived crying scenes at the end of the film (one of which must have relied on glycerine and amonia), Kidman pulls out a dying scene so ridiculous and prolonged that I thought the protagonist was going to die before she did (there's a cinematic opportunity that was missed!). The only dying scene that rivals the cheesiness of Kidman's death in Moulin Rouge! is Sophia Coppola dying in Godfather III. Folks, it's that bad.
Ewan McGregor as the lovestruck poet is not entirely terrible, but he's not spectacular either. Throughout the film, the young man in the monkey suit attempts to win the affections of Kidman's holy [...] (archetypes, people, archetypes) with trite endearments such as.....breaking into song. His vocal talents are a bit stronger than Kidman's, although the delivery is somewhat flat. While I truly do feel his anguish at the end of the film when Satine chokes out her last breath, I do not witness the incredible chemistry between the two actors so many others do. For example, at the crescendo of the "Elephant Medley" when the two are facing each other in the entrance to the, umm, "Elephant Room," their hands are at their sides while they're singing! At a moment when both lovers needed to passionately embrace at the completion of a very important medley that tells their "STORY," the actors were too busy concentrating on hitting the high notes of the songs to stay completely in character. Knitpicky, you say? For me, this obvious oversight epitomizes the lack of passion and chemistry between the two throughout the film. They do not, by any means, raise the room temperature with their sizzle.
As for John Leguizamo's midget artist with a speech impediment, I found the performance goofy and embarrassing. All anyone can do is pray that his "To Wong Foo" days are not completely over and that he hasn't completely degenerated to just a second rate supporting goon in high budget disasters like this one.
For those of you still on the fence about seeing this movie, I heartily recommend you do. A film that invites this much discussion and passionate debate is worth seeing, if for no other reason than to become part of the ongoing dialogue. Is this film phenomenal? Hardly. Did it deserve an Oscar? Please. Do the lead actors do the story, sets and costumes justice? No. Did it convince many members of film-going audiences over the last seven years that all they need is love? Allegedly. And while it is my contention that other films have done a far better job of packaging and selling the "love" construction, Moulin Rouge! retains a heavily-contested yet no less viable place in the ongoing conversation of how it should appear on screen.
Broadway in you own living room One of the Best movies of it's year. Every moment, sink or swim, feels infused with love of showmanship, love of highwire creativity and love for the cinema itself. Moulin Rouge is probably not a perfect film, but the cinema is first and foremost a visual medium.
Jody Bissoon
Those with ADD Will Love It... For people whose attention span can be measured only in nanoseconds, this movie must be a treat--a perpetual motion machine, never giving the viewer time to think, otherwise the poor soul might perceive what an emptiness it all is. The generation who grew up on video games and MTV no doubt loved it (or did it move too slow for them?), but we over-40 dinosaurs found the kaleidoscopic nonsense a bit much, not to mention the tomfoolery of transplanting pop music standards into the Paris of 1900. Granted, Nicole Kidman singing 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend' was rather amusing, but most of the songs were put over badly, and the attempt to mine humor from this--the foppish men singing 'Like a Virgin' comes to mind--failed to get a laugh out of me, sorry. I rather like Ewan McGregor, but the poor chap was all at sea in this mess, and God knows he sure never be allowed to sing, ever, nor should anyone, under penalty of long imprisonment, be allowed to sing (or quote) Elton John's 'Your Song' on film, to the end of time. (There are, heaven knows, hundreds of much better 'I really love you, baby' songs in the pop reportoire, and I don't think Sir (or Madame?) Elton needs any extra cash at this point.) Toulouse-Lautrec and his entourage were, I gather, supposed to provide some Three Stooges style comic relief throughout, but they were annoying as all get-out. The movie gives the impression of being designed by a committee, with the members decided that huge profits could be repeated by combining two sexy stars (Kidman and McGregor), constant sexual innuendo (about as subtle as a wounded grizzly), songs that everyone was familiar with (whether the songs were good or not, or fit the historical period), loads of color and filters, and a spastic camera, topped off with a film editor who must've drunk a cocktail of coffee and speed (with a side dish of Ecstasy).
Watching the very talented Jim Broadbent made me a little nostalgic for another (and a thousand times better) musical film in which he shone, Topsy-Turvy, with him as operetta composer William Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame), in a movie that wonderfully evoked the late Victorian theatre world (and included some fabulous songs, of course). Moulin Rouge did not evoke the Paris cabaret scene of 1900, rather, it put the scene on LSD and then set fire to it. The 1952 John Huston film Moulin Rouge, though not a five-star classic, does a decent job of capturing that world (and, thank heavens, no horrible songs and off-key singers). Maybe someone trying to buy or rent this 2001 bit of mess will, by accident, pick up Huston's film instead.
Excellent rock opera This is by far one of the best "rock operas" ever made (up there with Tommy and Yellow Submarine). The writers for this film did an incredible job of combining songs together that normally wouldn't (like "Lady Marmalade" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit") along with visually stimulating costumes and sets and people you wouldn't expect to sing, singing (Ewan McGreggor and Nicole Kidman).
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