[CTRL] Moulin Rouge Sucks

[Archibald Bard]

Moulin Rouge Sucks Moulin Rouge Sucks No, really, it does. And don't let its eight Oscar nominations fool you into believing otherwise. by David Skinner 03/21/2002 12:00:00 AM   David Skinner, assistant managing editor   HERE'S MY considered opinion of "Moulin Rouge": It sucks. There's no need to get defensive. It's no big deal. A lot of movies suck. But then again, a lot of movies don't snag eight Oscar nominations. Okay, okay, calm down. The truth hurts, I know. In fact, the movie's suckiness was, in fact, a bit of a disappointment to me, too. I rather like several of the actors involved, and I adored director Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" a few years back.   Sadly, I was one of a very small number of people who seemed to realize how bad "Moulin Rouge" was. After the Oscar nominations came out, there were those other awards, you know, the ones that are supposed to predict the Oscar winners, and everywhere I looked this crapalicious pseudo-musical was being feted.   It made me wonder if my hostility to the picture was rooted in ignorance. See, I haven't watched all that many musicals, so I decided to rent a few. My choices were "West Side Story," "Cabaret," and "My Fair Lady." These weren't picked from a hat, of course. They are the three most Oscar-winning musical movies ever. And here's what I learned. It's not musicals that suck, it's only "Moulin Rouge."   An important thing to know about musicals (I just learned this myself) is that they have music original to themselves. And, in fact, the quality of their music is a primary criterion for judging their overall quality. In fact, a musical without its very own music would be something like a drama without any drama.   Yes, yes, I realize I don't know that much about musicals. One of my most shameful memories ever is falling in love with Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats" when I was in fourth grade. (No, really, it was kind of cool when those slinky feline creatures crawled into the audience rows.) So I can't actually make any claims about having the most exquisite taste in the world, but this thing about musicals having original musical was, until the Oscar nominations, kind of a hard and fast rule. Furthermore, stringing together numerous, unrelated pop songs to merely tickle the memory chords of an audience was something only insufferable piano-lounge hacks were supposed to do.   Now back to these other musicals. Not only was their music original, but their songs constituted a permanent contribution to the culture. "Wilkommen," the opening song from "Cabaret," "Tonight" and "America" from "West Side Story," or "Get Me To The Church On Time" and "On The Street Where You Live" from "My Fair Lady" represented net additions to preexisting music. Now, as far as I can tell, "Moulin Rouge" is merely borrowing music that was already around. Which means that, musically, "Moulin Rouge" offers nothing.   The storylines of the three classics I saw were also much, much stronger. Even after watering down George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion," "My Fair Lady" was bursting with character and ideas. Rex Harrison as the mischievous, self-pleasing misogynist versus the romantic-souled "guttersnipe," played beautifully by Audrey Hepburn (though of course sung by someone else), helped provide a thoughtful and even wise comedy about men and women.   More than any individual performer, New York City provided a wonderful geometric vision to a running, splaying choreography that made me laugh only about three or four times in "West Side Story." The warring of sides and the two romantic hearts in between--borrowed of course from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"--made for an excellent story of gangs and young love. Not a great character movie, but a splendid picture show with several classic songs.   "Cabaret" I feared the most, having never seen any version of it. But the movie was hilarious, erotic, and unnerving--a double picture of sensual amoralism oblivious to the raised fist of Nazi evil. As for the performances: I now understand why Joel Grey is forever associated with the role of the emcee; and you'd have to be gay to have enjoyed Liza Minnelli's Sally Bowles more than I did.   "Moulin Rouge," which had been hyped by its director and others as an homage to the heyday of music on the silver screen, is really an embarrassment to the great Hollywood musical. Its story (one area where it might have compensated for its lack of original music) is a 19th century dime-store melodrama that uses the phoniest dramatic devices imaginable to keep it moving. (Somehow, audiences love to be reminded of songs written five years ago, but are totally amnesiac when it comes to age-old melodramatic cliches about starving artists and dying beauties.) Only in its spectacular picture-book cinematography can "Moulin Rouge" lay claim to singularity. And if the movie's visual teams win awards, justice will have been done. Any other Academy Awards "Moulin Rouge" receives will be no more than spectacular proof that the competition was consumptively thin this year.   David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Correction to my hard and fast rule: In my ignorance of the great tradition of Hollywood musicals, I overstated the originality of their music. Although the three Oscar-winning musical movies I discussed used original music, many others did in fact recycle already published and recorded songs, but not in the winking, post-modern manner of "Moulin Rouge." By distinction, the music in such classics as "Singing in the Rain," "A White Christmas," and "An American in Paris" was not intended to be merely allusive--to tickle your nostalgia for the present. Furthermore, it is my understanding that these movies tried to accommodate their unoriginal music in a narrative and not simply trot them out for thirty seconds at a time in the fashion of a cancan revue. Thanks to Joseph William Naccarato at the University of Delaware.   -DS   This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm