Please tell me it was a spoof....

Rating: Null/10 (24 February 2002)

WEll...as I do every year, I make a late end push to see all the films with oscar buzz, thus I found myself renting Moulin on DVD. First the good points:
A) the technical merits were all stunning. The lighting, sound, cinematography,(esp the opening CGI shot), costumes(brilliant) and art direction were all world class. As I sat and watched the film I said to myself "this may give LOTR a run for its money in all things technical that arent CGI". So, kudos to the grunts who did the tech work
Now the bad parts.
Script, script, script. All of the above was ruined once the actors openend their mouths. Now, granted, I didnt walk into the theater expecting say the drama of Eisenstein..but still, for an oscar-touted film I expected some sort of ...I dunno....depth to the screenplay. Around hour three,(right around the time my rear started to really ache) I finally said to myself "you know...maybe its like a spoof..an Homage to the culture of the late 19th century fin-de-cicle Paris...maybe its intent is not to *really* tell a story as much as it is to paint a sketch of the time period..." I really hope this was the case. Any decent opera fan will have flashbacks of familiarity during the film. It is a combination La Traviata( doomed courtesan(whore-)with comsumption(Tuberculosis) gives up her idealistic(and dim) lover to save him and goes under the protection of a powerful Duke), and one part La Boheme( poor, penniless artists of late 19th cen paris[ Mcgregor and CO} live it up while their writer friend [Mcgregor] falls in love with a woman doomed to die of consumption[kidman]). So, with that pre knowledge of the genre and of the time period I thought to myself, maybe the director is giving an homage to these operas and the time period in general, and making them accesible to the modern viewer by using 'pop' melodrama instead of an original score to underline the story. Now, that idea settled better with me than the trite garbage that I sat thru for close on three hours. But still, even if it was the directors intention, its nearly a waste of good lighting and costumes. Now..I enjoy a silly spectacle as much as anyone ( I love Rocky Horror, hell, I even own a copy of Pirates of Penzance on VHS...but those movies had no pretensions of serious filmaking in either case nor the budget of Moulin)....but, I just found the whole film , while pretty to look at, trite and vapid. Granted, the storylines of the original operas arent that much better...but at least they had the brilliance of Verdi and Puccini to elevate the words and give them meaning...sadly, Madonna doesnt quite do that in this film.

In short....its a visual spectacle, but at the end, all I really wanted to do was put on my cd of La boheme and flush the taste of this movie out of my mouth.
Incidentallly, I also saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch that night, and by far that was the smarter, and better made musical....with original music to boot! However, Moulin did win on eye candy. But, I do think that maybe one reviewer on here had it right when he said this film was sort of an experiment, on just how far you can stretch a story with the soundtrack. Lets face it, the mark of movie lacking any real strong storytelling is the proliferance of the score to give weight to the 'emotional' moments of the film ( see Titanic, Pearl Harbor, LOTR,nearly any Speilberg movie etc) So, this movie takes it one step further, by incorporating the score into the actual storyline...I must say, judging by the result of the hoopla, MR. Luhrman may be on to something...and thats very sad to learn.