Moulin Rouge!

I saw this for the first time on the big screen in Rome after having been told by a film friend to make sure my eyes were wide open to drink in all that craziness Baz Luhrmann had created. It is a crazy film, with its multiplicity of colors, characters and music, but it really does work. Luhrmann states that this is the last of his Red Curtain Trilogy films, each one of which focuses on problems surrounding falling in love. I admit that this is not my favorite of the three (Strictly Ballroom has a tighter story and has all that great ballroom dancing in it) but that's not saying much because I loved this film as a rental as much as I did in the theater. For most filmgoers, the big surprise was Ewan McGregor's incredible tenor voice. He downplays this in the making-of documentary on the DVD, insisting that he'd never done it before, but I find that quite hard to believe. He knows when to sing soft and when to sing loud and he simply steals the show. To be fair, Nicole Kidman's voice is a beautiful alto, she's just upstaged. There are numerous weirdly done homages, such as the dance in the elephant turning into every film Gene Kelly made and "Like a Virgin" morphing into a vampire film. Luhrmann requires audience participation in his films, and perhaps that's why there is so much cutting and such an over-the-top style. We remain in our reality and enjoy the film as the spectacular spectacle that it is.

year: 2001
length: 127 min.
rating: 4.0
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203009/combined