All Oversaturated Color, No Substance

Rating: 1/10 (4 August 2002)

How did this film ever become so acclaimed? Take a couple of stars, mailing it in, add oversaturated color backgrounds (possibly ripped off of the much-maligned "200 Motels"), toss in a few bizarre minor characters and non-sequitur scenes (again, done 30 years ago in "200 motels" without the self- indulgent pompousness), regurgitate as many lame top-40 songs of the last 20 years as possible (wait, that isn't ripped off of "200 Motels"- Frank Zappa made the effort to write new songs for his movie)- and, voila! A movie that is all obnoxious smoke and mirrors with no substance whatsoever.
Baz Luhrmann is downright lazy- tossing back pop culture and lame comments about "love" without adding anything is profoundly unoriginal. At least when John Waters throws pop culture back at us, he has the creativity to put his unique satirical spin on it. Luhrmann just puts a couple of stars over his lazily produced dreck, tosses in a lot of color, and then throws it against the wall and sees if it sticks. What surprises me is that, for so many people, it did stick.