Oh No. This won't do at all.

Rating: 1/10 (9 September 2001)

How gloriously camp this drivel is. Remember Riverdance and Lord Of The Dance and how everyone thot it was so cool at the time? The same applies to this movie. And the story is up to very little indeed, in fact it is like Grease mixed with Luhrmann's version of R+J. Very weak and totally unoriginal.
A movie is a movie and musicals are musicals. Plain and simple. Any attempt to merge the 2 have never been met with successful results in my opinion. If you want ironclad proof just take a look at Bollywood. This should have seriously just been a Broadway hit and not a big screen hit. But, of course, if every critic and every woman who sees this with all over her girlfriends like it and if they rave about how good it is because everyone else says it is great and they only went to see it because people are telling them that it is a great movie (fact!) then they are only going to watch the great movie that it everyone says that it is. Me? I just watch the movie for what it is. No bias or pre-movie opinions. And what I saw was a stinker.
Almost everything in this movie seems so forced and shoved in our faces. Every shot is cluttered with overly decorated sets, too many occurrences and detail to register with us in 2 seconds cuts (I ain't seeing it twice if that's the idea), heinous ADR that is about as unconvincing as Orson Welles masquerading as Mickey Mouse, VERY bad CGI that Luhrmann seems to be in love with and too many androgynous and weird looking characters.
This film is all visual, or, if I were unoriginal (like the movie) I would say all style and no substance. Take away the indulgent and increasingly annoying sets/backdrops and all the jumping around and dancing and you are left withwhat? A tedious movie that is good only because people say it is good. Another victim of `Insider Syndrome'.
For me, every set in a movie should, at the same time, be realistic and reflect tone and mood of the scene. EVERY-SINGLE-SET in Moulin Rouge is overly-decorated to the point that we cannot tell what the set is. They are and eyesore, ugly to look at and extremely garish. A representation of everything this movie stands for: indulgence, ego, campiness and pointless extravagance. Lowest markssorry.
Oh and one last thinghow come no one speaks French in France?