Moulin Rouge 2001
Saw this one on DVD. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. From the previews it looked like an unrelenting audio and visual attack on the senses. And it certainly started out that way as well. But after a while it really grows on you and the movie’s creators back off of the most obnoxious stuff. Though I thought that using modern songs in a period piece would feel all wrong, the mix of the music (old and new, hard and soft rock, etc.) made an unfamiliar period seem a little more familiar, so I think it worked.
The singing by Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor was okay (my girlfriend, who has a better ear for voice, thought it was appalling). I don’t see why they couldn’t have gotten better-trained singers. It’s not like McGregor’s name is such a draw that there was any reason to make the sacrifice and I don’t think Nicole Kidman is quite to that point either. Also it seemed more than a little odd that everyone in a Paris nightclub would speak with an English accent. John Leguizamo was annoyingly hammy.
The story was fun and became almost fractal by the end as it became a musical within a musical within a movie. Classic storylines were brought together making for a satisfying mishmash of Shakespeare and Gilbert & Sullivan even while it stayed very modern and new.
If you can put reality on hold and be more than a little patient with some of the director’s tricks, the energy and style of the movie will win you over.
I’ll give it an A-, subtracting a little only for Kidman and MacGregor’s singing and Leguizamo’s acting.
P.S.: The DVD is a 2-disc set with tons of extras. Though the interviews with the music director were a little dry, the commentary track (by the creators; I didn’t find the writers’ comments that interesting) was good and they have a lot of extras that you can call up from within the part of the movie they relate to. That’s a great thing if you’ve seen the movie already and don’t mind watching it all the way through again, but I would have liked for those “making of” snippets to have been available in an index without watching the movie over again. Finding out that “Moulin Rouge” means “red windmill” gives you a clue of why that windmill was featured so prominently.
It was interesting to hear the thought that was given to how they would suck modern audiences in to turn-of-the-century France. Instead of showing a literal can-can club (which would seem dated and quaint to today’s audience), they added modern hooks of quick tempos, sampling, rock, and rap to duplicate what the newness of can-can must have felt like to the people of that time.
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital