Beautiful Movie

Rating: 10/10 (15 December 2003)

This film also has a great sense of humor, with green fairies, funny uses of familiar pop music, and lots of love & emotion.
It is extremely beautiful as well as tragic. I never thought I would hear an Elton John song again in a movie and they did the song better than Elton John did it himself. (Makes you wonder if Elton John ruined other songs of his by insisting he sing them himself.)
But anyway this is my second FAVORITE movie of all time. My first being Betty Blue (37°2 le matin) which isn't out on DVD yet.
Anywho this is a love story set in France at the Moulin Rouge, an infamous French dance hall (which was the first building in the world to have had electricity). It is an amazing story in itself to read about the Moulin Rouge and Toulouse-Latrec a french nobleman with birth defects who hung out at the Moulin Rouge quite a bit despite his fathers wishes. Toulouse-Latrec is known for his artistic posters, which he mostly drew at the Moulin Rouge. It almost seems as if the whole story is just a dream of Toulouse-Latrec's.
The Moulin Rouge is the home of Satine (played by Nicole Kidman) who is a "consort". The young writer falls in love with her despite her profession and she falls in love with him despite the fact that he is broke. They have a "forbidden" love because of several factors and try unsuccessfully to escape their lives, to make a new life together.
The scenery is all at the Moulin Rouge mostly and it is beautiful. There were also quite a few supporting actors and actresses who did a very good job. The costumes made this movie. I think without the sets and costumes this movie would NOT have been as good as it was. It seems to me that instead of heaping ALL the awards on Buz Luhrmann, they should have been heaping awards on his wife, who did the set!
Also John Leguizamo was wonderful as Latrec, without Latrec this movie would be nothing. Nicole Kidman makes a convincing prostitute, because she is kind of cold and distant, as you would imagine a prostitute would be. And of course Ewan McGregor is really versatile and could probably play any part you gave him. There was some real chemistry going on with Satine and Ewan, possibly enough so that it broke up Nicole's marriage to Tom Cruise, who she is better of without anyway.