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<\/a><\/p>\nNormally, when I hate a movie, I can, at the very least, see what drew a more positive response from those who liked, even loved it. Then there is Moulin Rouge<\/em>.\u00a0Every year my NCAA Basketball Tournament Bracket has some cheeky, Oscar inspired name. In 2001 my team name was \u201cKen Hated Moulin Rouge<\/em>.\u201d Needless to say, I hadn\u2019t revisit Baz Luhrmann\u2019s musical since it first came out. Would time give me a new perspective on the film? Was my original aversion a backlash against it being (in my mind) overpraised? Or was it really as bad as I remembered it being?<\/p>\nWhat I Said Then<\/h1>\n
In my original review of Moulin Rouge (at Viewpoint<\/em>, a precursor to this blog), I wrote:<\/p>\n[\u2026] Not since A Thin Red Line<\/em> have I looked at my watch so many times in the course of a movie\u2019s second hour in the desperate hope that it would be ending significantly sooner than the screen action gave me cause to hope for.<\/p>\nMoulin Rouge<\/em> does have a few things going for it. The set designs are lavish and visually interesting. The leads are attractive and have chemistry. Unlike the last anachronistic musical (Branagh\u2019s Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost<\/em>) everyone can actually sing. But on the whole the film is a prime exhibit of why Hollywood can\u2019t do musicals any more. It is not that I object to the anachronistic use of music per se, although I\u2019ve never seen it actually work. Rather it is that the songs used to express the emotion are so shallow and superficial that we fail to get any sense of the characters or their relationships beyond the most generic. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I grew up on 80s pop music, so I genuinely like these songs. But I was also around for the renaissance of the stage musical brought on by such hits as Evita<\/em>, Les Miserables<\/em>, Phantom of the Opera<\/em> and Jesus Christ Superstar<\/em>. What these shows understood that Moulin Rouge<\/em> doesn\u2019t (nor did Cats<\/em> and A Chorus Line<\/em> for that matter) is that the best songs create emotion while advancing the plot, not stopping it. The very things that makes popular music successful on the radio\u2013instant identification of emotion, repeated bridges, ironic self-awareness\u2013are poison to the movie musical. The set pieces don\u2019t merely stop the action, they prevent it from ever happening. Christian falls for Satine within five minutes of the film starting and we know no more about her than he does: she looks good in a gown and can sing \u201cDiamonds are a Girls Best Friend.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\nand<\/p>\n
Elton John, The Police, and Madonna are all talented musicians and there is a certain joy in some of their music. In three minute increments any of the show\u2019s songs would be very pleasing to watch. Strung together one after the other they all begin to sound alike and look alike.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What I Say Now<\/h1>\n
I am, I concede, in the minority on this one. Moulin Rouge<\/em> has a 78% \u201cfresh\u201d rating at Rotten Tomatoes (based on 174 reviews), meaning the admirers outnumber the naysayers roughly 4-1. That\u2019s not exactly overwhelming\u2013as of this writing, Thor<\/em>, Bridesmaids<\/em>, and Fast Five<\/em> all had similar or higher rankings\u2013but neither is it meaningless. Its score at Metacritic is a decidedly more muted \u201c66.\u201d The slightly lower score here may be attributed to the fact that the latter site calculates not just \u201cpositive\u201d and \u201cnegative\u201d reviews (the former outnumber the latter 22 to 3) but also includes \u201cmixed\u201d reviews (of which it counts 10).<\/p>\nThe Metacritic site would offer me a lifeline, then, if I simply wanted to argue that the film was \u201coverrated\u201d or not as good as its fans want to make it out. The problem, though, is that I don\u2019t want to make that claim. My claim, my experience, is that the film was bad<\/em>, and those who hold that view are a pretty thin minority on either compilation site.<\/p>\nMy reasons\u2013or my response, rather, since I really want this review to be a description of my own response and not an argument (more on that in a second)\u2013haven\u2019t changed much since the initial viewing. The first sentence quoted above jumped out at me because on this viewing I consciously tried to avoid looking at my watch, only giving in after my fifth (or so) impulse to do so. Twenty minutes had passed in a 127 minute film. Do I watch more television than I used to? Am I more impatient? Possibly. But it just feels to me like the film starts off on one note and just stays on it the whole time. The characters and plot are both so static.<\/p>\n
If I had to speculate\u2013and it is just that, speculation\u2013I would guess that what appeals to Moulin Rouge<\/em>\u2018s fans is the emotion. In an age of jaded cynicism, there can be something refreshing in unabashed sentiment. I\u2019m not against that earnest, bombastic expression of love. Heck, I\u2019m a big fan of Titanic<\/em>, Notting Hill<\/em>, and Shakespeare in Love<\/em>, each of which is fueled by similarly articulated reveries about how really, love is the most swell thing there is. Each of those films, though, had people in them that I actually believed were in love. They were talking about their particular love for another, particular person. Here, all the emoting seems to be about love in general. A lot of that has to do with the pop songs, I know, which are by their nature generic so as to serve as an objective correlative to the widest array of listeners.<\/p>\nThe Verdict<\/h1>\n
One of the points of this series is for me to examine how my approach to film has changed over the last ten years. What I realized in revisiting Moulin Rouge<\/em> was not that my review of the film would be much different. Rather, it was that today I probably wouldn\u2019t review the film at all (unless it was a particular assignment for a particular venue). I\u2019ve realized in the last few years that I don\u2019t enjoy nor get much out of critical opinion wars, and my initial review\u2013heck, even the end of year category of \u201cMost Overrated\u201d\u2013seemed to be more about carving out a piece of turf, situating myself in the critical landscape than it was about actually interacting with the work of art itself. I think, I hope, that today I would let the film\u2019s admirers, who are many (and who can\u2019t all <\/em>be idiots) have their say, investing the majority of my time and resources into championing that which genuinely spoke to me.<\/p>\nDoes that mean I only should write positive reviews? I hope not. For professional reasons I see a lot more films than most people, many earlier than others have a chance to see them. Some people, I know, just want a take on the film in order to calibrate their expectations, hone their\u00a0appetites, or get to know me a little better. That\u2019s fine, but I wish sometimes that film writing was more of a dialogue and less of a lecture. In that spirit, let me give a shout out to the readers who liked the film. Tell me about your experience. It doesn\u2019t have to be an argument. You probably won\u2019t convince me that I really do (or can) like this film, and I won\u2019t try to argue that you shouldn\u2019t. Maybe, just maybe, however, in learning about how<\/em> you enjoyed something, I can learn about you.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Normally, when I hate a movie, I can, at the very least, see what drew a more positive response from those who liked, even loved it. Then there is Moulin Rouge. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1555,"featured_media":12692,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,16],"tags":[578,328],"class_list":["post-3212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-10-years-later","category-reviews","tag-baz-luhrmann","tag-nicole-kidman"],"yoast_head":"\n
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