What a mess

Rating: 1/10 (17 June 2001)

Can you say "technicolor vomit?" The idea for this film actually has a lot of potential: Take a mish-mash of modern pop songs and blend them together in a creative way to create a romantic musical. But what do we get here? An annoying nightmare of sound and sight that almost drove me from the theater. This film is more chopped up than the vegetables in a Beni Hanna stir fry. Luhrmann never focuses on one scene for more than a few seconds and when he does, the computer enhanced colors make the screen incredibly difficult to look at. The music has moments of creativity, as when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is blended together with "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend", but all of the scenes come across as little more than videos, not pieces creating a coherent whole. With respect to the choice of songs: Gosh, can you get more random, Boz Luhrmann? I mean, I actually feel like Luhrman put a couple hundred song titles in a hat and just chose them at random. Very strange. And I enjoyed Ewen McGregor's singing for about an hour (I found myself singing "Your Song" with him at the beginning of the film), but then it started to get annoying. And Nicole Kidman...what can one say except, "Yuck." Ever since I saw her in that Battman movie, she just bugs, bugs, bugs. And I was listening to a PJ Harvey tape in my car on the way home from the theater thinking that Harvey would have been a great choice for the part of Seline. But she probably wouldn't have been interested in such an artless film. Finally, why o why does every big budget movie that is set in France have people speaking with British accents? Is this some kind of unconscious Hollywood rule? Or couldn't Luhrmann find anyone with French accents to play in this film? Man, the French must have torn this thing up at Cannes. "I hope you don't mind, I hope you don't mind that put down in words how terrible this film is while it's in this world."