Month: May 2001

This Story Is About Musicals

I was expecting to hate it, or at least think it was a pretty but unsatisfying bauble like Romeo + Juliet, but I totally loved Moulin Rouge. It was definitely the visual delight I expected, even turning out to be more lush and grandiose than I would have guessed. The typography and graphic design alone was enough to make my head spin. I thought I would pass out during the ending credits, they were done so beautifully. (I’m a type geek. sue me.)

Overall, the movie does a tricky maneuver for which I may be the target audience. It starts off as a zingy, MTV-ish pastiche of movie-musical clichés, recklessly making fun of them with a dash of affection and a lot of flash to impress modern audiences, but it switches along the way into a totally earnest musical that uses the film medium to say a few things about the nature of the theatre. It masquerades as a parody of hokey love stories, but actually tells one with a certain amount of depth. (It helps an awful lot that the two leads are good enough actors and capable enough singers to pull it off.) I had the distinct impression that to really get into the movie, you have to love musicals and appreciate the artifice of the whole genre, but still be jaded and media-savvy enough to know how goofy they are. Bingo! Nice to meet ya, I’m Sparky.

Ok, the good stuff:

  1. The music kicks major ass. It’s funny, mixing in snippets from all over, forcing you to play name that tune throughout the movie. It’s also takes goofy sentiment and makes it terribly poingnant, which is a nice touch. The pastiche is pretty clever, that way. If you’re just po-mo pop music fan, you’ll get a kick out of the camp arrangments of pop and rock classics, but if you can handle musical theater you’ll be amazed at how well the pop songs used work when they’re handled just right.

    Ewan Mcgregor, who jumps back to the top of my fantasy boyfriend list, is actually a great singer, even if he’s a bit of a belter. His gimmick in the movie of suddenly bursting (and I mean bursting) into song whenever he gets tongue-tied is funny, but again it totally makes sense as an element of a musical, whether you see it as parody or homage.

  2. Catherine Martin‘s costume and production design. Please god, throw a few awards this woman’s way. Totally lush.

  3. Balcony with sacre CoeurCGI Paris. Goofy, yes, but a pretty way of making a 3-D version of a painted backdrop that would have made MGM proud. Also, I it made me all sentimentalto see Montmarte showed like that, since I stayed right at the foot of the hill, down the block from the real Moulin Rouge (a horribly tacky tourist trap), when I was in Paris last February. Also, cheers to the Man in the Moon who lurked in the background now and then.

  4. Retro fin-de-siecle typography. Totally gorge. I can’t stress this enough. Maybe this has to do with my recent obsession with collecting wood type, but the design really made my mouth water.

  5. Knowing when enough is enough and too much isn’t enough. This is, trust me, a campy, campy movie, even if it’s being so with a coy, smart, post-modern wink. It lays on the cinematic drag really heavy, but then moves off into something a little more sincere, more restrained just when your head is about ready to explode. And just when the sincere melodrama is getting a bit too heavy, in comes some other slapstick or kooky musical number. Pacing, baby, pacing.

And the requisite irritating stuff.

  1. John Leguizamo could not possibly have been more annoying. Unlike the rest of the cast, he never becomes anything more than a cartoon. Bleah.

  2. MTV-damaged approach to editing. sometimes those quick cuts are punchy and exciting, usually they keep you from being able to actually soak in what’s good in a scene. With stuff that pretty to see, you want a chance to enjoy it. sometimes with the music, too, the tendency to throw different stuff in, fast and furiously, makes you want to slow things the hell down. (I dunno, maybe I’m just getting old.)

OK, enough raving for raving for now. The real test will be if I like it this much after a second viewing.

Does this remind you of Leyendecker or singer sargent?

Terrified of the Heartland

I am such a city kid. Really, I’m just beyond hope. I’ve always lived in big cities: I grew up in New York Fuckin’ City, and spent eight years in Boston, which seemed like a charming hamlet by comparison, but an overwhelming urban nightmare to people who’d come there from the sticks. It’s the only way of life I know, really. Everything else just seems like…well, television.

A friend/former squeeze of mine has been forced by circumstance to take a break from the big city for a while and go back to stay with his folks in Nebraska for a bit. He sent me a postcard from his hometown of Billings, Montana, where he went for a brief visit last week. The image on the card — downtown Billings surrounded by vast, hilly open space — is a curious, alien landscape to me. Weird, open, desolate, sleepy. I shudder to think of it. A teeny little burg surrounded by emptiness like that just gives me chills. Of course, when I get e-mails like this I know that my reliance on city life is cheating me from some of the truly American, rock-n-roll experiences that can be found out in the heartland:

I forget that the Montana highways make up for a lot of the other faults with this state. Nothing really beats the escape of slipping into leather pants, a muscle tee, aviators, a cowboy hat, and a pick-up truck and hitting the highway. Heavy metal is the only choice for music [well maybe some sleater-Kinney is ok]. You kind of forget where you are, who you are. Is it the speed? You can drive so fast here…but I think it’s the truck.

That just sounds so cathartic to me. Maybe I should get that driver’s license once and for all. (I say this willfully ignoring the horror I felt the one time I did a road trip to the Midwest and was confronted for the first time with a completely blank horizon, devoid of mountains, skyscrapers, or oceans and filled with more corn and soy than I care to remember.)

Subway Scoping

Riding the subway has a way of screwing up normal boundaries. See, there’s this really sexy guy I usually see on the L train in the mornings — blond crew cut, pale blue eyes little chin strap beard, thin and wiry, hipsterish — who I’ve developed a wee crush on. Nothing serious, just the kind of fascination that can be provoked by an interesting, unavailable straight boy one sees often enough to make an impression. Today, he was standing by the door as I got on, with one of the few available handholds right in front of him. As the train continued further toward Manhattan, he and I kept getting pushed closer together as the train filled up. Even though I kept my head down, reading my Palm Pilot, I was fully aware of his proximity. Especially since it’s warm today, and he was wearing an old t-shirt instead of the usual bulky Carhartt jacket, and his little round bicep dangled in front of my forehead. It was odd, the way we stood there facing each other, standing closer than we would even if we were on a date, me making myself look down, him looking down the car — uncomfortably intimate proximity with a stranger forcing each of us to pretend no one was there at all.