DVD REVIEW:
"MOULIN ROUGE!" (2001) ☆☆☆☆
(Here's a quickie. Just because I felt like it.)
A new Blue-Ray release this week, what is considered the musical to define musicals for the decade. Oh, is it!
What is it? It's "Moulin Rouge!" It's 1899, Montmartre, France! It's the Bohemian Revolution! Of Truth, Beauty, Freedom, & Love! Raise the curtain! Cue the lights! Let's sex it up! And don't forget Marilyn Monroe!...
Musicals can't get any more crazy or more inspired than "Moulin Rouge!," from Australian director Baz Luhrmann - whose own parents were Ballroom dancers! - and did lush 1996 remake "Romeo & Juilet" and the recent critic bash, full-on-scope WW1 romance of visual delight "Australia." And "Moulin Rouge!" is such a wonderfully grand music number all it's own, of prostitute hoofers, of swinging pimps and silly/merry Frenchmen, and staggeringly lush/tacky stage and costume decor, all with implemented contemporary pop/rock music and mad edits and constant sexy zing and swivel, and all that nutty comedic Paris Cabaret, you might think twice of where in the world the whole movie might be taking place. Luckily for you, it all mostly takes place in The Moulin Rouge! And the windmill that's always there! There's also the giant elephant!
It's a classic-style love story, taken from old mythology, or older stage plays (maybe those Cabarets, or Romeo and Juliet!), or even older poems. And you could probably follow along with it so well that somewhere along you might know exactly what is going to happen. But it shouldn't spoil it for you, it didn't for me. And it didn't back nine years ago when the movie hit the Oscar circuit and soon went to bring the near dead musical genre back to it's swinging feet. The following year, "Chicago" would get the honors, and later bring resurrections of "The Phantom of the Opera," "Mamma Mia!," "Rent," "Hairspray," and what I think is to "Moulin Rouge!" in using a diverse soundtrack, "Across The Universe."
Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor are torn lovers: the-world-is-my-oyster English writer, Christian, and Nicole Kidman as lustful French Bordello courtesan Satine. There is Jim Broadbent as ecstatic showman Harold Zidler, Richard Roxburgh as wimpy, snide The Duke, and my favorite turn, John Leguizamo as nicely doofus Toulouse-Lautrec with an accent to kid any Frenchmen. Oh, and that soundtrack! Elton John. Nat King Cole. The Crusades. The Police. Madonna. Queen. "The Sound of Music."
I would say those numbers, and even the music already with the legacy, wasn't exactly the best choreographed stuff or as enduring as the moves you saw in "Chicago." "Moulin Rouge!" could have used more moving camera, than fast cuts. More bigger, elaborate numbers than the repeated type's of dance over and over with the foot-tapping nuts hitting the floors of the Rouge. Maybe we could go beyond Montmartre and have more guy and gal dancers and dreamers, and more subplot, More conflict, more going on. Either way, "Moulin Rouge!" is just too hip to care, too silly drunk on love and crazy dance to matter much. This story is about Romeo and Juliet, and we're with them to the end. Through love and death.
For a musical of such lushness and mad song and dance aesthetic, Baz Luhrmann could be the guy whose movies we should keep looking forward to. If you haven't seen this before, or have, or are a long-standing fan with your own song in your heart, than see it again, see it for the first time. It's a movie to constantly keep being taken up in. That decor! Those insane cuts! That Frenchman Toulouse! Oh, the sheer joy of a musical. On crack!
Hit it! (..."There Was A Boy. Such A Strange, Enchanted Boy...)
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