This movie is an Insult.

Rating: 2/10 (1 July 2001)

When I saw the previews for this movie I thought it was a movie I would fall in love with. Unfortunately the movie was NOTHING like the previews, at least the ones I saw. For the first 15 minutes of the movie i thought this was going to be fabulous. I even thought the use of Nirvana's song when first at the Moulin Rouge was a nice touch, the song was well used and appropriate. Soon after that everything went to pot. This movie was an attempt at a modernization of La Boheme... La Boheme is a fabulous piece of literature. A few years back a show came out on Broadway called RENT. This was an absolutely wonderful show, a rock musical with an entirely original score. Moulin Rouge was an insult to both La Boheme and Rent.

Aside from Beautiful costumes (which most sequences went entirely too fast to even catch a good glimpse of) this movie has few redeeming qualities. The plot is shallowed, cheesed out and lacking and the whole story brought to an elementary level. It seems perhaps Luhrman used the renditions of 80s songs to gain the interest of younger generations that might not have gone to see the film if they knew it was a musical all its own. Gilbert and Sullivan style 80s songs do not a good movie make. If they had went to the trouble to make an original score I would have been impressed. Seeing the list of people he had working on the movie there was more than enough creative people that that movie could have had original score. Instead the butchered hit songs from a previous decade. It was a show of bad judgment or cowardice of attempting a modern musical on it's own two feet.
I truly appreciated Baz Luhrman's version of Romeo and Juliet. It was good not only in art direction, but in modernizing a masterpiece as well. Luhrman did Not live up to his potential.