We've been taken for chumps! - brilliantly!

Rating: 4/10 (18 March 2002)

Yes, this is a brilliant movie. Visually dazzling; purposefully stunning.
And it is satire with us, the paying audience, as the victims.
Like the theatre of the grotesque that was contemporary with libertine France of the Moulin Rouge's historical heyday, the audience are being made to confront their own pretensions.
The original practitioners were more honest, though. They would use ordinary buckets of poop on their stage. The poop in this elaborate plaything is a vast, elaborate artifact, but it is well aimed.
Just as in the old original stage happenings, we gasp, discuss and admire. What fools we all are. And that is exactly the message that the writer and director of this gaudy thing is conveying.
One cannot deny that he did it successfully.