What were they thinking?

Rating: Null/10 (9 December 2001)

They were not thinking, that's the problem. I wanted to like this movie, but I couldn't get emotionally attached to the characters. The songs were just plain bad. No movie made me hate "Roxanne" and "Like A Virgin" like this one. The only really good thing was that the visuals were nice, but there wasn't enough content to make me get involved. I sat in the theatre, bored to death, wishing the movie would end, with everyone dying in the end or something. Seriously, though, I wish Nicole and Ewan had been used a lot more effectively and been given an actual "ROMANCE" instead of just a really contrived, forced, tragic love angle that never really convinced me. I actually laughed when I saw it, but not because it was intentionally funny. If you want a musical with actual CHARACTERS, watch Sound Of Music, West Side Story, or even Dancer In The Dark. Maybe the later is a not technically a musical, but at least it told an involving STORY, and not just a bombardment of flashy, MTV-paced images that attempt to convince you that even though it has no real actual content with it's pretty pictures, it's a honest-to-God-Best-Picture-Contender... it's not that at all.

For the discerning viewer, there are much better pictures in 2001. Pictures that make you think and have a good story. If you haven't seen Moulin Rouge, you've already seen it in, as one other reader commented, as Shakespeare In Love, the undeserving Best Picture winner from 1998, which beat out Saving Private Ryan, for those of you who have forgotten. At least Shakespeare in Love had better dialogue.