I didn't hate it.

Rating: 3/10 (4 June 2001)

On the plus side this film is visually very impressive. Colorful, and wonderfully filmed. On the down side they had a lot more film than story, the musical numbers, while charming, are fairly repetetive and, lovely though Nicole Kidman is, there were far too many extreme closeups of her and McGregor.
It began to feel like a dermatological exam with shot after shot of Kidman's nostrils or McGregor's pained eyes.
Leguizamo puts in the kind of terrific performance we've come to expect from him; in fact, Kidman is the weakest link in the cast and I thought she did fine. You can't fault the performances. Using the modern songs was an interesting touch and part of the fun was figuring out which song they were performing...unfortunately after an hour and a half it was more or less all of the fun.
This is not a film you can ignore; bold, loud and musical; it's clear that there was a vision and this is a powerful embodiment of that vision. Unfortunately the vision was a lot shorter than the film.

It's a bad sign when you're watching a movie and your mind drifts to another, totally unrelated, movie -- but 100 minutes into Moulin Rouge I found myself admiring a scene from Pearl Harbor which I'd seen the week before.
Bravo on the visuals, good performances all around. But not enough story to carry the film and I suspect that most of the audience I saw it with just didn't get it.