MOULIN ROUGE
Saw this last night with Paddy Tynan. She and I never agree on anything related to movies. Her taste is suspect, too oriented to chick-flick manipulation. But we agreed that Moulin Rouge was pretty cool - if perhaps a bit over-the-top. There certainly aren't many movies with the frenetic visual style of this Baz Luhrmann directed film, a sort of cross between Terry Gilliam's Munchausen, La Boheme, and Oliver Stone. An epilepsy warning will probably be necessary with all the flashing red. Red satin and corsetry will definitely be the fashion of the fall and winter of 2001. (Satine) Nicole Kidman, the consumptive courtesan falls in love with the bohemian writer (Christian) Ewan McGregor but the whole thing is doomed both by bad stars and almost thwarted by the rapacious, capitalist Duke (conservative money that thinks that money buys all and equals power). Kidman is radiantly beautiful, the perfect Mimi or Violette.
The Romantics prove (I think) that Love and Beauty are greater ideals than Money in the end. Yeah, whatever. She dies, he crys. This is all of opera condensed into one film.
The music is a potpourri, the oh-so pomo trait of sampling just about every significant love tune of the 19th and 20th century working to twang on just about any demographic's atrophied heart-strings. The Roxane tango is a wicked literal interpretation. Not a musical in any classic tradition but one in tune with the aphoristically inclined and ADD infused times.
Moulin Rouge is a fantasy of the highest order that takes an archetypal story and paints it anew. Ms. Tynan redeemed her taste by agreeing.
Saw this last night with Paddy Tynan. She and I never agree on anything related to movies. Her taste is suspect, too oriented to chick-flick manipulation. But we agreed that Moulin Rouge was pretty cool - if perhaps a bit over-the-top. There certainly aren't many movies with the frenetic visual style of this Baz Luhrmann directed film, a sort of cross between Terry Gilliam's Munchausen, La Boheme, and Oliver Stone. An epilepsy warning will probably be necessary with all the flashing red. Red satin and corsetry will definitely be the fashion of the fall and winter of 2001. (Satine) Nicole Kidman, the consumptive courtesan falls in love with the bohemian writer (Christian) Ewan McGregor but the whole thing is doomed both by bad stars and almost thwarted by the rapacious, capitalist Duke (conservative money that thinks that money buys all and equals power). Kidman is radiantly beautiful, the perfect Mimi or Violette.
The Romantics prove (I think) that Love and Beauty are greater ideals than Money in the end. Yeah, whatever. She dies, he crys. This is all of opera condensed into one film.
The music is a potpourri, the oh-so pomo trait of sampling just about every significant love tune of the 19th and 20th century working to twang on just about any demographic's atrophied heart-strings. The Roxane tango is a wicked literal interpretation. Not a musical in any classic tradition but one in tune with the aphoristically inclined and ADD infused times.
Moulin Rouge is a fantasy of the highest order that takes an archetypal story and paints it anew. Ms. Tynan redeemed her taste by agreeing.
posted by Terry at
8:36 AM
