Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Directed by Baz Luhrmann
A celebration of love and creative inspiration takes place in the infamous, gaudy and glamorous Parisian nightclub, at the cusp of the 20th century. A young poet, who is plunged into the heady world of Moulin Rouge, begins a passionate affair with the club's most notorious and beautiful star.
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Even though, for late comers like me, you can't help but think of Ewan McGregor's take on it from "Moulin Rouge!".
When Christian has a chance encounter with a group of petty unconformists, led by dwarf Toulouse Lautrec (John Leguizamo), and helps them to come up with the lyrics of "The Sound of Music" for the musical revue they are preparing for the Moulin Rouge, they immediately hire him to be their writer.
Not since "Funny Girl," "Fiddler on the Roof" and "The Sound of Music" of the '60s and '70s have we seen engaging movie musicals.
It's a fantasy, and, because of this, the presence of songs like "The Sound of Music", "Your Song", and "Roxanne" don't seem out of place.
"The Sound of Music" is also a featured song in the film.
For entire stretches of Moulin Rouge!, we cannot possibly know what we are going to see next: The Sound of Music recast as a Hindu passion play, for example, or a derby hat tossed Mary Richards-style into the air and bounced off the Eiffel Tower.
In a plot twist borrowed from "La Bohème" (which Luhrmann filmed for Australian television in 1993), she is also suffering from tuberculosis.
Set in Montmartre in 1899, the story is a star-crossed romance reminiscent of "La Boheme" that centers on Christian (Ewan McGregor), a struggling young writer new to the bohemian Paris neighborhood.
An innovative, feverish pop musical with Busby Berkeley dance numbers and a "La Boheme" story.
Besides the which, it's not like the writers are exactly hiding the fact that they're stealing almost everything from the operas La traviata and La bohème (Luhrmann directed a production of the latter shortly after the film's opening), and the Greek myth of Orpheus.
Add a diagnosis of consumption to the mix, and you've got "La Bohème" played out as a modern musical.
It's got plot points from "Camille", "La Traviata" and "La Bohème" (the latter of which Mr. Luhrmann directed in 1993), the emotions of a Broadway show and musical numbers taken directly from the pop culture of the last three decades.
Luhrmann shamelessly borrows from wide sources, plagiarizing Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" production number almost intact except for placing Kidman at its center, and purloining Gene Kelly's lamp post pose from Singin' In The Rain .
(I was reminded of Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor's motto in " Singin' in the Rain ": "Dignity.
It's a brilliant tribute to many things: Paris's bohemian era, the evolution of pop music from Gilbert & Sullivan to Nirvana and musicals from "Gold Diggers of 1933" to Lars von Trier's "Dancer in the Dark."
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With an agility reminiscent of (and occasionally borrowed from) James Cameron's Titanic , Luhrmann fesses up early to the thinness of his characters, the sentimental predictability of his plot, and the inevitable fantasy, however historically grounded, of his setting.
Viewers are likely either to love or hate the movie's excesses, much as was the case with Luhrmann's oft-discussed 1996 production, Romeo + Juliet (the one starring a pre-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio and a pre-Mod Squad Claire Danes).
The screenplay by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce steals shamelessly from "42nd Street," "Camille" and any other film the writers managed to catch on the late show.
The pale Nicole Kidman, in a career-best performance, is the doomed, corseted Satine (think a lankier, more fragile variation on Greta Garbo's Camille) and the crooning Ewan McGregor her wannabe-lover (happily rekindling the light in his eyes that went dim in The Phantom Menace ).
You can also throw in a little "Camille" (1937) and a smidgen of "42nd Street" (1933) into the pot.
Kidman is sinuously sumptuous and, in her full-out rendering of a fabulous song and dance girl after a filmography as a pretty well straight dramatic actress brings to mind a similar breakout, that of Michelle Pfeiffer amazing the film world with talents never suspected in "The Fabulous Baker Boys".
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Add a dash of Cornel Wilde hawking blood onto the piano keys as Chopin in A Song to Remember (Charles Vidor, 1945) and we are in the presence of more fables about Romantic Love and Death than Fox Studios' press kit ever imagined.
Other glorious musicals like Singin? in the Rain, Easter Parade, and The Pirate also enchanted me while I was growing up.