The heart and soul of the good-bad movie

Rating: Null/10 (22 May 2001)

Yes: it's fragmented, MTV-ish, shallow, cheesily postmodern, hyperbolic,
and filled with frog-eyed faces sticking tongues in the camera. The
writer-director Baz Luhrmann cuts even rudimentary expository scenes
like boffo trailers. And yet and still: the movie manages to be
extraordinarily powerful, transporting, and sheerly fun. Can it be that
Nicole Kidman, she of the snow-white skin, endless legs and playful
eyes, is in fact the most beautiful woman in the world? With the
superlative Ewan MacGregor (who gives his all and more as a singer) as
her love match, the movie resembles less the Cuisinart musicals of the
MTV era than the elegiac dinosaurs of the late sixties: MOULIN ROUGE is
a millennial version of DARLING LILI or PAINT YOUR WAGON. For all
Luhrmann's dumb and overwrought ideas, the movie evokes that rarest of
emotions--nostalgia for that which is n