The Emperor's not-so-new clothes.

Rating: 1/10 (6 June 2001)

This is one of the worst films I've ever seen. It's too bad that the IMDB rating scale only has `1' as the lowest possible rating. `Moulin Rouge' is a textbook case for much of what is wrong with some contemporary popular films. It substitutes technical tricks for style, and frenetic cutting in place of meaningful development. The story is the epitome of triteness, creating a soap opera melange out of Camille, Orpheus, and the old Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movies where they decide `let's put on a show.' As a deconstructive musical, it depends on send-ups of popular songs to fill out most of its excruciating two-plus hours (there is some undistinguished new material), and this is interspersed with bits and pieces imitating scenes from a wide variety of films of the past, most notably the works of The Three Stooges. The dialogue is extremely lame, often painfully mistaking popular song lyrics for great poetry, and it certainly lives down to the level of the story. The overall attitude of this film, is that if you take the kitchen sink approach and throw in as much stuff at as fast a pace as possible, many people will be tricked into thinking that there's substance here, rather than just the frantic hyperactivity of a desperate mind with a vague notion and a lot of money to spend on bringing it to the screen. This becomes quickly apparent after the same gimmicks are used over and over even in the very beginning of the film. By the end of the film you've seen the same devices so many times that a nauseating numbing effect results. While, like a cinematic junkyard, it is truly crammed with great numbers of things (cuts, costumes, camera moves, set pieces, computer effects, etc.), there is no overriding sense of purpose or vision, just the effects of juxtapositions of elements, and this quickly creates a tedious and irritating result. Nevertheless, many will be fooled into mistaking quantity for quality, and will believe that they saw something of merit. It might also be appreciated by younger people who have been weaned on music videos. `Moulin Rogue' may be the first commercial film created expressly for the ADD crowd.