Absinthe or crack?!

Rating: Null/10 (1 June 2001)

During the preparations for this movie, Baz Luhrmann allegedly had everyone over to his grand ol' house and they all had a lot of absinthe and sang and got silly. It was a character-building exercise.
Almost every single criticism of this film I've read was valid. It is too much. Every single musical number (and the movie is jam-packed with them) is really, really too long. I love old movie musicals, but doggone it, if you're going to have a 12-minute musical sequence, there'd better be some incredible dancing in the middle of it. If there was incredible dancing in this movie, I didn't notice - I was far too dazzled by the gorgeous, overblown costumes and mind-altering camerawork. It's a melting merry-go-round of ribbons and gilt and glittering jewels, like a superb fever dream in an antique canopy bed hung with velvet drapes...
But....
Nicole Kidman is radiant, of course; she's never looked better (or thinner, which is not really so much to her advantage). She cries so many real tears that half of her screen time is spent with her makeup in a gummy mess on her cheeks. One still wants to kiss it better. Ewan McGregor is full of that puppyish charm that endeared him to me in the first place. I do prefer him as a redhead rather than the oily jet dyejob he sports here, but it works nonetheless. John Leguziamo is, frankly, wasted; Toulouse-Lautrec was an insanely cool guy, and this should have been a great showcase for Leguziamo's amazing brand of physical comedy. Alas, he mainly lisps and swills absinthe and he doesn't even paint anything. Erh? Richard Roxburgh plays the stock baddie in a most stock-baddie way; for the first hour or so, I could have sworn he was Christopher Guest. Oh well, he doesn't have much to work with; I don't think he agonized over his "motivation" when it's so incredibly obvious.
But...
The musical aspect is probably the hardest thing about this movie. While the conceit is very clever - contemporary songs, lots and lots of them, de-contextualized and all swooshed up together in a big pop-culture smoothie - it actually starts to grate after a while.All the same, when I thought I was pretty well sick of the picture, something else really thrilling and funny would happen and I'd be shaking my head and swept back into it again.
On first viewing, I can't say definitively whether or not I actually think the movie is good (I certainly enjoyed it); however, I think the film absolutely demands at least one additional viewing, just to be able to catch all the stuff I only saw out the corner of my eye. I wish Baz Lurhmann had actually just gone ahead and made a stage show out of this instead of making it into a movie, but here's the movie, and it's really out of this world.