Oh the things I do for my readers...

Recently a female friend of mine found out about a nasty little secret of mine, specifically that I have been blasting Moulin Rouge for the last year and a half or so without having actually seen the movie. Normally I subscribe to the "Know Thine Enemy" school of thought, but in this case Thine Enemy seemed so awful that I made every attempt to avoid it.

Now that my secret was out, however, I could hide from my fears no longer. She lent me her DVD so that I could educate myself, and so I did.

First of all, whoever did the editing for this movie must've had ADD or something. The scenes would flash from one over-the-top scene to the next in a seemingly haphazard fashion. If I adopted the same slick style for my posting as they used for the movie, it would look something like this:

Moulin Rouge was a Wow does the new Avril Lavigne song Apartment 12 The Movie! Monkeys wearing Midgets shooting James is posting again!

It doesn't work for writing, and it certainly didn't work for this movie either, as none of these scenes added anything whatsoever to the film except a big fat "please give us an Oscar for costume design" plea.

Rather than mention the too-numerous-to count anachronisms, I will pretend that they didn't exist. The intentional musical anachronisms were, for the most part, quite painful, including a excruciatingly-long rendition of Like a Virgin sung in a falsetto voice by a creepy man with a mustache. And it goes without saying that Kurt Cobain is rolling around is his grave due to the inclusion of Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Then there is the plot, which goes like this: writer meets diseased prostitute, writer falls in love with diseased prostitute, diseased prostitute falls in love with writer because he sings her a song, evil Duke with annoying voice tries to buy diseased prostitute's love, evil Duke tries to kill writer, diseased prostitute dies of disease. I don't feel bad in spoiling the ending, since the reveal it about 20 seconds into the film. This kind of spoils the surprise.

My biggest issue with the film, though, is that the characters' motivations make no sense. OK, so I guess I can accept that the writer fell in love with prostitute at first sight, but why exactly does she fall in love with him? It sure would be nice if all it took to make someone fall in love with you was to sneak into their room at night and sing them a song, but sadly you are more likely to be the recipient of a restraining order or a faceful of mace than a romp in the sack.

In order to verify this with empirical evidence, my old roommate Bryan actually wrote a song for our friend Elizabeth and had me write music for it and sing it to her. She did not fall in love with either of us, as predicted.

Despite all of these issues (plus the fact that John Leguizamo, the most annoying actor in the world, is in the movie), it still managed to get nominated for 8 Academy Awards, including one for Editing!

In summary:

Pro: midgets, fire breathing.
Con: John Leguizamo, butchering of popular songs, Editor needs ritalin, drooling man with creepy mustache a la Wild Wild West, predictable plot resolution is revealed at the beginning of the movie, people are singing and dancing while they're being shot at, Duke character has grating voice, no monkeys.