insipid

Rating: Null/10 (2 February 2002)

As I watched it I was cringing in embarrassment for the people responsible for this joke of a movie.
Nevermind the kitsch, the insipid boy-meets-girl love story, the over the top sets, or the overacted characters.
Nevermind the seemingly blissfully ignorant use of lines from rock songs which include the word 'love' but aren't about the physical love of the scenes that they accompany on the screen (hint: when John Lennon sang "all we need is love" he wasn't talking about a young hottie.) I kept thinking to myself of the line in The Princess Bride, "I do not think you know what that word means" as the characters in the movie kept repeating the word over, and over in a sort of mantra.
The single biggest failure of this movie is this: musicals live or die on their scores, and Moulin Rouge's score is a ridiculous, uninspired pastiche of lines from 70s and 80s pop music. You would think they could've spent 1% less on the visual effects and hired someone to write an original score. Either that, or make a movie in some other genre.
And say what you want, Ewan McGregor should stick to acting and leave the singing to the professionals.