HmmmMy dogs still love me.
[flame protection on]
In addition to my previous nominations, I nominate Moulin Rouge for the Golden RAZZ or whatever equivalent you have for a particularly overblown movie.
In support I submit the following article. Agree with it or not its quite well written and puts the film and its director under the spotlight. Its Golden Razz nomination material.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/click/movie-1107863/reviews.php?cri tic=columns&sortby=default&page=4&rid=222891
I particularly like the following incisive comment:
"Never before has a film this loaded with potential seen fit to demolish its intention of realizing a love of the cinema by way of a pure, absolute contempt for finding and appreciating unity between form and content"
Enjoy
cheers Peter
Moulin Rouge
by Chuck Rudolph, Film Editor
It is a common occurrence, at this time of the year, when critics, who have slogged through the predictable Spring cesspool of lame comedies and lousy action movies and are understandably anxious to latch their spirits onto anything remotely fresh, will start making proclamations about this or that movie being a sure thing, one of the “best movies of the year.” Desperation is understandable, not just in the critical world but in the realm of all varieties of moviegoing, and it is with an empathy of such a situation in mind that I hesitantly, but assuredly, stake the reversed claim that Baz Luhrmann’s bohemian rhapsody Moulin Rouge will wind up as the biggest botch-job of 2001. A vociferously overblown spectacle that unites a classical musical form with Luhrmann’s obsessive pop culture pilfering and whirligig stylistic pastiche, it is the most striking and exhilarating bomb in over a decade. Money frivolously burns onscreen, and that we’re asked to string together the bits and pieces of Luhrmann’s fractured psyche is a direct insult to whatever motivated an excitement about the picture in the first place.
I don’t intend to deem that the film’s unyielding reluctance in adhering to any guideline of basic cinematic coherency is what directs it into that pantheon of failures; such a factor makes the film nearly unwatchable, if not unmemorable, but certainly does not put it in the league of the grandiose follies of incompetence, like Gladiator and Mission: Impossible 2, that summed up 2000‘s bankruptcy. What separates it from most common duds is the reckless manner with which it courts brilliance. Though it certainly will get a rise, good or bad, out of just about everyone who ventures forth to take in its wayward splendor, its overreaching encouragement of whimsy and its willingness to include any snippet of imagination, no matter how scattered or incompatible with the film’s thematic structure, sends it spiraling down a black hole of insignificance. Never before has a film this loaded with potential seen fit to demolish its intention of realizing a love of the cinema by way of a pure, absolute contempt for finding and appreciating unity between form and content.
Built on an expansive soundstage that Luhrmann treats like a pre-school playground, the sets for Moulin Rouge sparkle with an infantile grandeur; if you added the calculating, hermetic creative impulses of the Coen Brothers and the films of Jeunet and Caro, as well as the pioneering instincts of Melies, you‘d be about halfway there in imagining just what kind of madness plagues Luhrmann‘s flights of fancy. His camera repeatedly swoops around the film’s main location, a bawdy dreamland called Moulin Rouge that is symbolized by the endless rotations of its glowing red windmill, and digs into the nooks of heartache that lie in the corners of Paris’s bohemian existence. Imbedded in the endless movement and splintered editing structure is the film’s fundamental reason for being: an overflowing jukebox of 20th Century pop tunes, ranging from The Beatles to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Elton John to Nirvana. The characters that populate this paradise are often keen to fall back on such standards when relating the reverence of their innermost emotions and desires to one another.
Told mostly via flashback, the film opens in 1900 with the tense recollections of a writer named Christian (Ewan McGregor). Pounding away at his typewriter, he spews forth a tragic story that begins one year earlier. A novice who equates pennilessness with inspiration, Christian arrives in Paris with the broad goal of making art. He quickly becomes involved with a troupe of outcasts, including a midget called Toulouse Lautrec (John Leguizamo) who bears little indication to the real artist, that is in the early stages of creating a stage musical called Spectacular Spectacular that presently features no defining characteristics other than being set in Switzerland. Christian’s boundless energy--epitomized in a moment when he breaks into a verse of “The Sound of Music”--wins him the post of the troupe’s writer, and they collectively win an interview with the owner of the sensational nightclub Moulin Rouge, Zidler (Jim Broadbent, looking like a demonized version of the character he played in Topsy-Turvy). New to the extreme and immaculately photogenic forms of debauchery that Moulin Rouge proudly claims as its specialties, Christian takes one look at the club’s lead courtesan, Satine the Sparkling Diamond (Nicole Kidman), and becomes transfixed.
Satine is introduced to Christian, and us, as a materialistic gold digger--singing the insatiable phrases of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” she is, at least on the surface, a whore with a taste for the finer things in life. (Snatches of Madonna’s “Material Girl” are the film’s none too subtle way of underlining this point.) But in a one-on-one audition with Christian later on that is plagued with double entendres and misunderstandings, it is revealed that this hooker does indeed have a heart of gold. Since she’s the type of Madonna-whore character that frequents movies about a guileless layman who falls for a courtesan, the movie throws in restrained allusions to her dissatisfaction with her occupation, and why she even does it in the first place--her reasoning is, she’s good at it, so why the hell not? “I make them believe what they want to believe,” she tells Christian about her services, though once Christian serenades her with an impeccably timed ballad, the possibility arises that, in his case, her feelings might be sincere. Though there is no doubt in the film’s mind that Satine does indeed love Christian, it falls victim to the trend of inventing their blossoming relationship without laying any groundwork for it whatsoever; once he sings to her, she’s practically putty in his hands, and with the overamplified visuals trampling any subtlety that might be present in the yearning looks Christian and Satine share, their romance is completely unfounded. “You’re going to be bad for business,” she casually remarks behind his back, and that dismissal of earnestness hangs over the rest of the film even as it signals to us that theirs is a love to end all loves.
Spurred on by the circumstances, Christian hastily invents the plot for Spectacular Spectacular: changing the setting to India, it will be about a poor sitar player in love with a high-priced courtesan simultaneously being pursued by the powerful Maharajah. This transparent scenario ends up mimicking real life in Moulin Rouge, as the romance between poor writer Christian and expensive hooker Satine is thwarted by a character known as The Duke (Richard Roxburgh), who is providing funding for Spectacular Spectacular with a complicit understanding that Satine will be his in return. Though the sniveling, effete Duke is undoubtedly the movie’s main scoundrel (Luhrmann wisely saw fit to equip Roxburgh with a handlebar mustache, as he twirls it venomously throughout), he is not the film’s most despicable character; that distinction goes to the demented, clownish Zidler, whose desire to get Spectacular Spectacular off the ground turns him into Satine’s vindictive pimp. He signs away the deed to the Moulin Rouge as a guarantee, and thus repeatedly urges Satine to forsake her feelings for Christian so the show’s future, as well as his club’s, will not be in danger. At one point Broadbent undertakes “Like a Virgin” as a production number, attempting to quell The Duke’s fears over the possibility of a Satine-Christian romance with the enticing vision of bedding a virginal Satine. “She’s gone to a priest,” he tells The Duke, “to confess her sins.” Not only is that a sickening, contemptuous positioning of Satine (the film makes her a whore, then uses her “sins” as evidence of her corruption), but it is indicative of a general hatred of women that has run rampant through many so-called tragic love stories as of late. Are female heroines nothing but scornful, damaged goods that must be run through the ringer time after time? Are they not allowed to perform any actions that earn them pride, or at least allowed to own up to their “sins”? Von Trier violated Bjork last year in the sour Dancer in the Dark, and now Luhrmann barely disguises his hatred for Kidman in Moulin Rouge by treating her character as a ruined object desperate for a whiff of redemption.
It’s the movie that is in need of redemption. The final act is straight out of the book of a panderer like Adrian Lyne: Maintaining their love, Christian and Satine must deliberate the proposal of her sleeping with The Duke to satisfy the villain’s twisted pride, a move copped directly from Indecent Proposal--if she does, they may be home free. Christian swears he will forgo jealousy in the name of keeping their dreams alive, and Satine maintains that physical discrepancies are meaningless; but when she must enter into the viper’s lair, Luhrmann gives the couple (and the audience) the easy way out by allowing her to not go through with the act. I’d like to believe that the film’s agenda was as innocent as Satine turns out to be (for a hooker, she doesn’t hook once in the entire movie), but such pledges of allegiance to true love are far too simplistic to be taken seriously. If she’s as immaculate as Moulin Rouge ultimately asks us to accept her as, why did it even bother making her a hooker in the first place? There are any number of reasonable possibilities, but my suspicions are that Luhrmann, and his co-screenwriter Craig Pearce (who previously collaborated with Luhrmann on Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet), simply couldn’t be bothered to come up with something a bit less obvious and stereotypical. It would be a lot harder to make the story tragic if Satine was, say, a receptionist.
What makes the film’s sadistic sexual bent all the more wearisome is Luhrmann’s decision to back it up with mostly pre-written music, albeit in new arrangements. When I first heard about the project, I was anxious to see what Luhrmann was going to do with the musical genre, but my hopes sank by about fifty percent when I learned that he wasn’t taking the traditional route of creating entirely new music, but instead designing the majority of the film’s musical numbers around well-known Top 40 tunes. Similar ideas have been successful in the past--Woody Allen did a great job of incorporating big band standards into his familiar New York milieu in the beautiful Everyone Says I Love You, and Kenneth Branagh transplanted the same era of songwriting into the world of Shakespeare, with even more invigorating results, in last year’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. But more often than not such a conceit is simply an artist’s way of signaling to his audience that he doesn’t have any new ideas of his own, and Luhrmann falls victim to exactly that implication.
The musical high point of Moulin Rouge is not Kidman’s enthralling “Diamonds” nor Broadbent’s nauseating “Like a Virgin,” but instead a medley that Christian sings to Satine atop her (literally) elephantine apartment. Using a debate on the nature of love as its launch pad, this wild, fiercely liberated explosion of melodies has the naïve but idealistic Christian relating all sorts of romantic clichés to the cynical, wary Satine in the form of song: “All You Need Is Love,” “I Was Made For Lovin’ You,” “Pride (In The Name Of Love),” “Up Where We Belong.” Peaking with a swoony, deep-focus shot that has McGregor and Kidman positioned, in close-up, at opposite ends of the CinemaScope frame while he belts out “I Will Always Love You,” it is the moment in which the film is primed to finally take off--universal pop sentiment cultivated into a personal, resonant outburst. But with the gaudy, synthetic background all but dominating the expressiveness of the actors, this instance appears to have been designed not for maximum emotional impact but as an apex of the number’s tribute to the pop-culture savants in the audience--it recognizes we’ve all seen The Bodyguard and heard Whitney Houston‘s version of the song about a zillion times, and practically rubs that familiarity in our faces, winking slyly all the while. This moment had the potential to be as evocative as the visual bond between Danny and Sandy that climaxed “Summer Nights“ in Grease, but doesn‘t begin to touch that heightened sense of harmony on any level.
It is in this area that Moulin Rouge could be speciously perceived as a hackneyed but veritable triumph of style over substance; Luhrmann’s blender frappes on such high speeds that just going with the flow and appreciating the exaggerated splendor might be the film’s supporters way of defending it. Such reckoning might be possible if the movie’s style, if it could even be called that, were not so chaotic and inaccessible. The editing, perpetrated by Jill Bilcock, could inspire epileptic seizures in even the most seasoned of moviegoers--watching Moulin Rouge spill out onto a large screen has an effect similar to staring at a strobe light for two hours. Its cuts zig and zag every which way, but the shots and edits don’t add up; barely connecting the frenzied movement of the actors, the montage, which is light-years beyond the hyperactivity that Michael Bay and Darren Aronofsky have been faulted for, can’t begin to visually link the emotional concerns the film holds so close to its heart. Donald McAlpine’s photography is lush and surely predestined for an Academy Award nomination next February, yet Moulin Rouge’s inexorable visual tone of forged passion doesn’t connect with the wrenching effect the story is supposed to have. Such tales of ill-fated romance, with their familiar tropes and predictable outcomes, are only original now if done with subtlety and compassion, and Luhrmann’s heavy-handed excess feels like tons of dead weight strapped to the back of the plot.
Though the film’s cast of characters mostly resembles a MAD Magazine parody of itself (in keeping with that idea, Kidman’s emotionally brittle character should have been named Saltine), with Leguizamo’s pint-sized, lisping Toulouse Lautrec the inflated variety of stereotypical cripple/retard that usually pops up in films by the Farrelly Brothers, both Kidman and McGregor should be hailed for their courage in staring down the 800-pound gorilla of overkill that is Luhrmann’s calling card. Though persistently fetishized by Luhrmann’s camera and lighting schemes as well as his closeted bigotry, Kidman brings a hint of warmth to Satine that is an indication of a potential base for the film’s central romance that might have shown through in a film that valued substance even an ounce more than Luhrmann’s does. McGregor is a bit of a surprise, handling a tricky, if pedantically conceived, role with gusto. Their singing voices are also superb, though that does neither one any good because in the film’s array of wired, artificial images it is all too obvious that they’re lip-synching to prerecorded music. McGregor, in particular, is a victim of this, and whenever he opened his mouth during a song I was cringing--he resembles a mime that’s trying to take a big bite out of an invisible apple, a sight that‘s none too easy on the eyes.
The film’s mantra, spoken several times throughout, is a genuinely good-natured and refreshing proposal: “Truth. Beauty. Freedom. But above all… Love.” (Those who regularly stick around through the end credits until the Panavision logo scrolls by will get the film’s most creative reminder of this.) And perhaps, in the end, that is why the film is such a maddening failure. Luhrmann’s concept of fusing a tale of true love with music that sublimely echoes the purest moments of such emotions sets the bar at almost unreachable levels, but other films, in wildly different genres, have gotten it right, as have the aforementioned musical examples of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Everyone Says I Love You. (Moulin Rouge doesn’t deserve a comparison to a true musical-romance classic like Sweet Charity.) Seeing Moulin Rouge gives a distinct impression that Luhrmann may never have had an idea of how to make a go of it in the first place, though, and that, in the end, is why the film is unforgivable. The random bombardment of images is ill-advised, to say the least, and almost none of the music fits into whatever particular scene Luhrmann is trying to cram it into. The lone two exceptions of this are a tango version of “Roxanne,” (timed precisely to hammer home the film’s veiled anger towards its prostitute leading lady) and an odd, over-dubbed appropriation of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; the only lyrical passage actually culled from that hit is a line from its refrain, “Here we are now, entertain us,” chanted in the film by the tuxedo-clad patrons of the Moulin Rouge, a perfect reflection of the way Luhrmann sees his potential audience--as a group of entertainment-starved lunatics who will devour anything that‘s as loud and garish as his movie is.
But what about another line from “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that’s also part of the song’s chorus and directly precedes the one above: “I feel stupid, and contagious.” Did Luhrmann not put that one in because it too accurately reflected his understanding of what his movie is trying to accomplish? I wouldn’t doubt it. Moulin Rouge is a film that has an infinite ability to get the blood moving and leave you gasping for air, but in the end Luhrmann's stupidity is contagious, as that’s exactly how you feel walking out after seeing him given free rein to create such a monstrosity and the gall to steal two hours of your life. Has cinema, as a stepping stone for artistic imagination, been polluted so much that what counts now is sheer volume and size? Luhrmann makes no argument otherwise, and chokes the life from his movie. Moulin Rouge smothers everything in its path, a feeling that lingers with the din the movie leaves in your ears, and the void it leaves in your soul.
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posted 02-13-2002 01:19 AM
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