worst movie musical of the last 25 years (and that's saying a lot)

Rating: 1/10 (17 March 2003)

Despite some rave reviews when it first came out, Moulin Rouge is totally inessential. The story is a standard love triangle, with no performances to distinguish it. Plot twists are utterly predictable. The direction is generally haphazard, cutting much too quickly from shot to shot (most movie musicals today have this problem, yet Chicago succeeds despite it).
But worst of all is the music, a collection of pop standards rewritten for orchestra and vocalist. Some are almost unrecognizable, and there are interesting juxtapositions. But there's a reason it's called "pop music" -- it isn't any good musically. Most of the music is painful to listen to, without the energy of the stadium stage and the grind of drums and guitars. The gimmick is clever for 20 minutes and after that I was fast-forwarding to the end of musical numbers.
I like movie musicals, but this kind of joyless cross-genre attempt to grab younger audiences will just drive them off when legitimate musicals are made into good movies -- such as Chicago. The most recent good example of the cross-genre movie musical, Madonna's Evita, is a much better film (and an infinitely better musical). If you want to rent a newish movie musical, get Newsies. The death of movie musicals has been declared prematurely, but another Moulin Rouge will certainly doom them