Unique

Rating: 10/10 (14 August 2011)

The wife dragged me along to Moulin Rouge when it first hit the cinemas. I didn't want to go. It did not appeal to me in the slightest.
And then it started with a little bloke with a baton at the front, giving it some wellie as the 20th Century Fox fanfare played. And I was completely hooked.
The introductory sequence featured a creepy take on Nature Boy and some dazzling (and funny visuals), and I was so deeply into it that I am still recovering ten years later.
This film tells a melodramatic and tragic story set in the Toulouse Lautrec era Moulin Rouge, and does so by mixing and matching a vast array of theatrical, cinematic, musical, visual and storytelling styles. The music is largely contemporary, often with assorted songs cut up and snippets sewn together, and delivered brilliantly by the cast, especially Nicole Kidman and Ewan MacGregor (although I must award bonus points for Jim Broadbent delivering an eye-boggling, but plot-relevant, version of Like A Virgin).
The visuals are imaginative and dazzling. Richard Roxburgh is a terrific funny and scary pantomime villain.
I remember people walking out of the cinema during the movie, and I can quite understand them doing so - it is not to everyone's taste. But, in its outrageous fusion of elements which should not work together (but which do), it is a unique film of immense bravery. And, best of all, it is highly entertaining.