The direst of the dire (Moulin Rouge! (DVD))

Member Name: dawnfrancis

Product:	Moulin Rouge! (DVD)
Date:	07/09/01 (49 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: it was free

Disadvantages: awful, awful, just AWFUL!

I had the misfortune of winning two preview tickets to 'Moulin Rouge'. Having suffered over two hours of complete claptrap I really thought I was going to either have a complete nervous breakdown, or go mad and massacre the people in front who seemed to be enjoying it so much with my overpriced Cornetto.

So why is it so bad?? I think the question should be rather why do so many people think it is so good? Am I missing something? Us two poor ticketwinners spent the evening gazing in total amazement at the other audience members, many of whom appeared to be having a whale of a time.

This film is neither a true film in the sense of a narrative, nor a musical. It's an odd hybrid and it just doesn't work. It's got no plot to speak of. Ok, there's a very loose story....bloke (Ewan McGregor) goes to the Moulin Rouge and meets courteasan (Nicole Kidman) and falls in love.....but there's a hitch, in fact more than one hitch.

Had it been either a film or a musical the bittersweet nature of this production just might have come through better. As it is, the best I can compare it to is a pantomime.

The characters are overloud, overdressed, and overact. They shriek and bawl and break into song at odd moments. The songs themselves are not original - they're all modern ones such as Elton John's 'Your song', and they 'tell' the story through the use of these songs. In fact it just doesn't work - the recency of the songs is at odds with the era in which the film is set.

after an hour I couldn't have cared a kipper whether Ewan or Nicole got it together or not. I just wanted to murder the all-singing, all-dancing, all-prancing, all-pratting around lot of them. Admittedly the dance sequences are very, very good, but they didn't make up for the rest of the trash.

Perhaps the thing I disliked most about the film was the way it is filmed. Most of the set was
actually digitally created so that the scenery could change from 2D to 3D at a flash. The camera has a horrid habit of rapidly panning in and out, and jerking around - enough to make you puke your popcorn. REmember Blair Witch? the camera technique is like that.

The whole effect is like some weird children's animation - flat, grey, 'cardboard' like scenery, I found it most unnerving. It looked real - but then it didn't.

not giving anything away but there were a few truly emotional bits in the film. But they were overshadowed by the whole pantomime-like nature of the thing. awful. Absolutely dreadful - the most agonizing two hours of my life. I'd rather put my head in a gas oven than watch this tripe again! I'm going to sue the free tickets providers for unnecessary suffering to a human being ;-D

Summary: