Just recycled, nothing original

Rating: 1/10 (6 June 2005)

When I first saw the movie, I gave up after 10 minutes, walked out of the theatre and kicked myself that I just have wasted 8$ on it. I just could not connect the use of modern songs with a historic setting. Convincing myself that I might just have had a bad day, and telling myself to have an open mind, I watched the DVD all the way through. Good grief, what a drag, and was I happy that I have just borrowed it from friends! A poor excuse for a plot, no character development at all, recycled (or, dare I say, massacred) pop songs, recycled ideas (La Boheme, La Traviata, Orpheus in the underworld), and, on top of that, dialogues which are mostly made up of strings of song titles, or repetitions of the key lines of the songs that have just been performed, the rest being commonplace statements. The only amazing thing is the art direction ,scoring a well deserved Oscar, but that's about it! Seemingly, Baz Luhrmann could not decide whether to make a movie (not enough plot) or an MTV video clip (too long, but still using the modern editing style of a video of light-speed camera moves and nano- second scene changes, which makes everyone older than 21 just nauseous!), and , most probably to keep the risk factor low, did not use even the tiniest bit of original ideas! Zip! Zero! Zilch! It has its funny moments, but they are too rare to make up for its shortfalls, such as lack of depth. The term love is used about 1000 times, however I could not connect to the characters (there is just not enough plot), and Satine's death left me stone cold. In short: a total waste of time.