Retro What the Hell Week: Moulin Rouge

 Welcome to day two of What the Hell week, where the Cap'n is exploring movies he had otherwise planned to skip out on, but is instead saying "why not?" and giving them a shot. For more details, please take a look at yesterday's review of Saw 3D.

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 Today's trip to "What the Hell" land is a little bit different, in that Retro Reviews necessitate the Cap'n having already seen the film in question. Lucky for all of us, I've seen a number of films that would, at first, seem uncharacteristic of a "Cap'n Howdy kind of movie": America's Sweethearts, Bridget Jones's Diary, What Dreams May Come, Bring It On, Pay It Forward, The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps, and practically any Disney movie you can think of*.

 One component of my movie-viewing experience that I often under represent on the Blogorium is musicals. That's right, musicals: call it carryover from all the Disney films or a byproduct of being on and off stage during middle and high school, but I know my way around quite a few musicals and I enjoy even more than that. The Sound of Music? There's a copy of it behind me. Oklahoma? Oh, I know how many people hate the movie, but not me. The Music Man? Yep, fan. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying? I used to have the DVD. Meet Me in St. Louis? West Side Story? South Pacific? For Me and My Gal? Singin' in the Rain? Oliver? Brigadoon? Annie? Chicago? Yes indeed. Don't even get me started on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I even watched Paint Your Wagon**...

 From time to time I've reviewed one or two more recent musicals, like Repo! The Genetic Opera or Hedwig and the Angry Inch (appreciated, if disliked the former and am constantly impressed by the latter), but for the life of me I still can't really explain why I went to see Moulin Rouge in the theatre. I'm hoping a colleague of mine who reads this might help jog my memory in the comments, because I am not a Baz Luhrmann fan, and on the surface there is very little about the film that be very appealing, even in 2001.

 I've been trying to rationalize it to myself beyond the fact that we saw just about everything that came out, from Ghosts of Mars to Planet of the Apes to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I was a big fan of Ewan MacGregor's going back to Trainspotting, and I had enjoyed Nicole Kidman in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (and would later that summer in The Others), but my brief love affair with Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet crashed and burned after trying to watch the spastic, ADD-edited cut and paste approach to Shakespeare on VHS. It's more apocryphal than anything, but the CD that Luhrmann released with "Everbody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)" that was falsely attributed to Kurt Vonnegut really irritated me.

 Maybe I bought into the idea that Moulin Rouge's use of existing pop songs as a musical foundation was okay because, well, Singin' in the Rain did it too. In fact, many of the studio musicals released in the 30s and 40s relied on songs people already knew, so I can see a younger version of the Cap'n drinking that Kool Aid, being lured in by the presence of David Bowie, Beck, Ozzy Osbourne, and Kylie Minogue in addition to lyrical mashups of songs from the 70s and 80s performed by actors I didn't really knew sang.

 But I also knew what Baz Luhrmann's style was: over-the-top, loud, rapid, and obnoxious. Nothing in the advertising for Moulin Rouge suggested anything different that an abrasive musical version of Romeo + Juliet. And guess what? It wasn't!

 To this day I still meet people who love Moulin Rouge, and I kind of understand why, because I almost caved in while watching the film. The first hour or so is such a sensory overload for your eyes and ears that eventually you just collapse and let the movie continue throttling along, bombarding you at every opportunity with noise and distracting editing. Had it not been for one song, I might have convinced myself that instead of being exhausted by Moulin Rouge, I actually liked it. But then "Like a Virgin" happened.



 It aims for high camp. but is so obvious in its execution that it pulled me out of the daze of Luhrmann's audiovisual assault and turned me against the film once and for all, never to return. The way that he appropriates the idea of a "drag show" performance of Madonna minus the drag, almost to say "Oh look at how clever I am! They're still dressed up and butchy but they're singing 'Like a Virgin!' What Juxtaposition!" just killed it for me, and the laziness behind appropriating existing songs was apparent.

My central problem with Moulin Rouge is not so much Luhrmann's style - something I already knew annoyed me - but that the fact that the musical doesn't do anything new with the songs. They use them in exactly the fashion you'd expect them to be used in and nothing more. There's a faux-camp quality to most of the songs, from "The Sound of Music" to "Lady Marmalade" that accentuates the hyper-aggressive editing, but in the end the film is all noise and no substance. There's nothing memorable to me about the film in a positive way. I remember plenty of moments I disliked, if not outright hated, but there's nothing Moulin Rouge does that dozens of other musicals don't do better. So what's the point?

 Which brings me back around to the question: why did I see Moulin Rouge? It's out of character for me, even in a time in my life when I happily went to see Hannibal and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. In the rare instance I tried to revisit the film, to understand why I or anyone else found something appealing, I end up turning Moulin Rouge off after ten minutes. Without fail. I never watched Luhrmann's Australia and have no interest in his The Great Gatsby in 3D. Maybe I had a "What the Hell" moment in the summer of 2001; the moment was fleeting, and I cannot say it was beneficial.




*Except Condorman. I have never seen Condorman, even though I kind of want to.
 ** That is, by the way, not an endorsement of Paint Your Wagon. If you don't believe me, see how far you can get into the three hour mess that is the film.