Moulin Rouge!: the After-Digital Theatrical, Music Video, American Film Musical Movie, 3rd Part of Baz Luhrmann's Red Curtain Trilogy
Learning
Goal:
To appreciate that the Classical Hollywood Paradigm has
been Obliterated, Sort Of.
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Site of the Week: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/toulouse-lautrec/
Quote of the Week: "A musical" I Hear you Say? Baz Luhrmann: In Moulin Rouge, our ultimate 'Red Curtain' gesture, the audience are awakened by the experience of music, song and dance. "A musical" I hear you say. Yes, perhaps a pop opera or a people's opera or a comi-tragi music film. An attempt at re-inventing an old tradition in a new form, dangerous, full of risks, if it works the naming of genre will happen later. Moulin Rouge, with a plot born of the Orphean myth and moulded in the likeness of a tragic 19th century novel, Dumas' Camille or Zola's Nana, is set in a heightened interpretation of end-of-century Paris seen through a very con-temporary lens, a shockingly operatic, high pop, high camp kind of lens. It's our own Moulin Rouge, with an ecstatic refit of what was originally a very raw and shocking dance, the can-can. Our Moulin Rouge, in which we hope to recreate for audiences now the thrill of what was sensationally seedy to the punters then. That is: big, sexy, straight off the boulevards and illuminated by that modern miracle the electric lightbulb to excessively kitschy effect. The nightclub of your dreams. A place where you could dance, watch a show and have sex with the participants—or at least be teased by the prospect of such. That's the experience myself and Bazmark collaborators, both old and new, have sunk our collective creative energy and wit into making real. To be clear, the whole stylistic premise has been to decode what the Moulin Rouge was to the audiences of 1899 and express that same thrill in a way that our contemporary moviegoers can relate to. (more) Baz Luhrmann Moulin Rouge! I am often impatient with directors who use so many cuts their films seem to have been fed through electric fans. For Luhrmann and this material, it is the right approach. He uses so many different setups and camera angles that some of the songs seem to be cut not on every word of the lyrics, but on every syllable. There's no breathing room. The whole movie is on the same manic pitch as O'Connor's "Make 'em Laugh" number in "Singin' in the Rain." Everything is screwed to a breakneck pitch, as if the characters have died and their lives are flashing before our eyes.(more) Roger Ebert Moulin Rouge! Baz Luhrmann's retro-modern musical "Moulin Rouge" is such a magnificent mess that it makes you feel hung over before it's even finished. It's like a shot of absinthe so strong you get the bedspins just from watching it pour over the sugar in the spoon. Normally, that wouldn't be a good thing. And yet just two days after seeing "Moulin Rouge," I can't help looking back fondly at the memory of it.(more) Stephanie Zacharek Red hot 'Moulin Rouge' reinvents musical genre with audacious, rapid-fire assault on the senses A lavish $53 million romance
starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, "Moulin Rouge" is Luhrmann's bid to
revitalize the movie musical -- to make it hip and contemporary and appealing to
a youth audience that views musicals as creaky antiquities. Edward Guthmann |
In the News: Paris: Village of Sin! In the closing decade of nineteenth century Paris a new period retrospectively christened La Belle Epoque ('the beautiful period') was born. As its name suggests, the Belle Epoque was characterised by relative calm, prosperity, enterprise and social freedom. Most importantly for our story, the Belle Epoque gave birth to a new culture of entertainments immediately recognisable as modern. To mark the centenary of the French Revolution, a revolution against privilege and inequity, Paris staged the Universal Exhibition of 1889. Here, a variety of amusements and new technologies serviced wondrous worker and bourgeois alike. This 'levelling of enjoyments' as one contemporary called it, marked a democratisation of leisure that heralded the 20th Century's invention of mass culture. (more) Moulin Rouge! Web Site The Red Curtain Trilogy?
Baz Luhrmann's films are based on myths. Mouline Rouge! Web Site The Orphean Myth
It's Greek. It's about a boy. It's a story about
love. Mouline Rouge! Web Site
Film of the Week: Reviews: In the first few moments of Moulin Rouge, the writer-director, Baz Luhrmann, pulls off a cinematic coup—a miracle. He presents a scratchy, black-and-white Paris vista that might have been lifted from a silent film; then he moves his camera into that washed-out cityscape, whooshing along the narrow, winding streets of Montmartre (circa 1900) and through the window of a garret—where his protagonist, Christian (Ewan McGregor), sits typing a memoir of his doomed affair with a beautiful Moulin Rouge courtesan called Satine (Nicole Kidman). You might still be laughing in amazement at this bit of design (and computer) wizardry—this flying-carpet ride into history—when the camera reverse-whooshes back to its opening vista, pivots, then forward-whooshes to a train pulling into a station. Suddenly, there's a whole lotta whooshing goin' on. (more)
David
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