Strictly Ballroom (1992)
Directed by Baz Luhrmann
Brave new steps put Scott's career in jeopardy. With a new partner and determination, can he still succeed?
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What critics compared Strictly Ballroom to
With "Moulin Rouge," Luhrmann, who also directed the offbeat dance movie "Strictly Ballroom," has combined lush costumes with fanciful sets, dazzling shots with variations of scale and popular music that ranges from Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The Sound of Music" to "Nature Boy" as sung by David Bowie and Massive Attack.
That's Luhrmann, who also made the inspired "Strictly Ballroom" and "Romeo + Juliet."
But Moulin Rouge! is so conceptually self-assured that it works as well here as I think it ever has, for this was not Luhrmann's first time at something like this; the film is the third in a loosely-defined "Red Curtain Trilogy", in which the director uses conscious artifice to separate us out from the reality of the film, and then uses a specific gimmick to draw us back in at a heightened level - mechanically deconstructed dancing in Strictly Ballroom , distractingly modern-dress Shakespeare in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet , and unexpected reconfigurations of familiar songs in this, by far the most successful and sustained of the three.
Director and co-writer (with Craig Pearce) Baz Luhrmann describes the style he brought to the Australian dance flick "Strictly Ballroom" and his underrated take on William Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet" as "red curtain theatricality".
But the visual style Luhrmann ("Strictly Ballroom") embraces is less Toulouse-Lautrec and more the post-modern surrealism of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro ("City of Lost Children," "Delicatessen").
With " Strictly Ballroom " and " William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet ", Australian director Baz Luhrmann conquered the world with his brash, inventive exuberance.
It is a buoyantly excessive feat of far-fetched camp that isn’t as good as its highly-stylized cinematic cousins of the early 1990s such as Strictly Ballroom, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and Hogan’s own Muriel’s Wedding, yet which nonetheless has enough of a unique voice to work as a very Australian piece of crowd-pleasuring fluff.
Eventually, like Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom , the documentary conceit fades away and genre conventions assert themselves — in this case in a blend of violent action, humor and horror tropes, with riffs on everything from Cameron’s Aliens to Verhoeven’s Robocop to Cronenberg’s The Fly — but the film remains a startlingly fresh and provocative take on well-traveled terrain.
The incredibly attractive pair have quite the chemistry, overcoming some rather inane dialogue -- and the fact that heavy nods are given to Strictly Ballroom, Dirty Dancing, even Singing in the Rain -- with ease.
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With no chewy, ambitious themes, no movie-star charisma or auteur flourishes, "The Full Monty" is the kind of movie that critics underestimate and audiences love -- or at least that crucial segment of the film-going public who occasionally select some little film ("Il Postino," "Strictly Ballroom," "Shine") to elevate to the status of surprise hit.
Razzle Dazzle, a mockumentary set in the world of Australia’s apparently thriving world of dance schools, in effect Best in Show fused with Strictly Ballroom with a dash of Little Miss Sunshine, isn’t quite up there in the Christopher Guest league but has some hilarious moments, almost all of them courtesy of Ben Miller as a gauche teacher specialising in politically themed dance spectaculars.
In its style and its theme, artifice lies at the very heart of the book, and the director celebrated for his Red Curtain Trilogy (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo and Juliet, Moulin Rouge) is no slouch at artifice.
When the Australian director Baz Luhrmann shot his first movie, Strictly Ballroom, there was a gulf between his budget (around $3m) and his ambition that had to be bridged by enthusiasm and sequins alone.
Jeanne: The frenetic Gilded Jazz Age of the Roaring 20's is gloriously brought to life in 3-D by director Baz Luhrmann, renowned for his over-the-top films, such as "Moulin Rouge", a true favorite of mine, "Australia" and "Strictly Ballroom".
I thought of Wharton’s phrase when I saw the new, hyperactive 3-D version of “The Great Gatsby,” by the Australian director Baz Luhrmann (“Strictly Ballroom,” “Moulin Rouge!”).
It’s easily the best version of Fitzgerald’s tome yet (though admittedly the bar isn’t terribly high), and Luhrmann’s best film since “Strictly Ballroom” (again, not the greatest of compliments).
He’s been remarkably adept at having his cake and eating it, too, by steeping his films in wild countercultures – Strictly Ballroom’s backstabbing competitive ballroom set, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet’s hot bloods with too much money, Moulin Rouge’s showgirls and courtesans – and then draining off the excess to get at the pure-of-heart essence.
The film uses fake documentary interviews scattered about throughout a more traditionally filmed narrative, ala Strictly Ballroom.
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The movie is at its best when it embraces its Vincente Minnelli and Busby Berkeley roots and eschews music video aesthetics made popular for modern movie musicals after Baz Luhrmann utilized them so magnificently with Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge .
The tension between repressed Bertie, an unwilling sovereign, and irrepressible Lionel, a failed Shakespearean actor—or, better, between Firth’s controlled fury and Rush’s relaxed hamming—is played out in the moviemaking: Nostalgic for the old Miramax formula, The King’s Speech treats clipped British understatement with the percussive, mildly distortive wide-angle close-ups that characterized the hearty Australian comedies of the Strictly Ballroom era.