Like a virgin...Hey!

Rating: 2/10 (17 March 2002)

Bialystock and Bloom themselves couldn't have come up with a better formula for a bad movie. Rip off an old musical ("Cabaret"), set it in the past, and force your characters to spend the entire movie singing bad 80's pop songs. Wait--not bad enough. Let there only be about four or five bad 80's pop songs, and force your characters to sing each one for a half an hour straight, until no one who watches the movie can ever hear the songs again without being traumatized all over again. Get some real A-list, truly great actors, and run their careers into the ground by forcing them to dress in tablecloths and prance around serenading random passersby. Then edit it all so that it's completely incomprehensible and impossible to understand.

That's a pretty good formula for a bad movie. And the fact that "Moulin Rouge" is now nominated for eight Oscars and is well entrenched on the top 250 list only goes to prove that Mel Brooks was even more visionary than we thought. "Moulin Rouge" is the real world's "Springtime for Hitler."
Where did "Moulin Rouge" go right? I haven't the faintest idea. I sat there for two hours watching this thing, knowing that so many people loved it--I just assumed it would get better after a while. But it just kept getting worse.
This really is a love-it-or-hate-it movie. I don't think there's any middle ground. And I think it really depends on what you think of the use of modern pop songs in a movie set in 1900. Apparently Luhrmann justified it as necessary to convey the idea that Ewan McGregor's character was writing lyrics that transcended time and spoke to the true nature of love (or something along those lines). Even if that's true, that still doesn't justify the "Like A Virgin" sequence. Or "Smells Like Teen Spirit," for that matter. Or "The Sound Of Music." And if I ever thought "Your Song" transcended time and spoke to the true nature of love, I certainly don't now, after having to endure McGregor and Kidman first singing the lyrics, then speaking the lyrics to each other, then speaking the lyrics to other people, then singing them again, then singing them again later...
I like Elton John, but that went on for a half an hour. (Interrupted, that is, by another song that was "So a-nnoy-ing! I can't clear it from my head! So a-nnoy-ing! It will stay there till I'm dead!")
So, in conclusion, I hated this movie. I gave it a 2/10 on the strength of the acting, which at least is very good. The fact that Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor and Jim Broadbent are at least watchable in this movie is a testament to their respective greatnesses as actors. If Kidman wins Best Actress, I won't be too upset. (If it wins any other Oscars at all, I will break my television with a hammer.)
Warning to all: if you're watching this movie for the first time, and you get to the part (about five or ten minutes in) where Ewan McGregor belts out "The hills are alive with the sound of music," and you find yourself really hoping the rest of the movie isn't going to be like this, shut--it--off. It will not get better. If you're still tolerating it at that point, keep watching. You'll love it.