Reviews

The cartoon is undeniably appealing and well-made. If this is actually about the cultural conflict between classical and jazz, though, it's a little vague about what the reconciliation is supposed to be - what kind of 'crossover' music is getting played on the bridge of harmony? Is George Gershwin the hero here? The soundtrack at the end makes it sound as if the real solution was just for the snooty queen of classical music to, uh, loosen up a little and join the party. Just putting a string section underneath the jazz doesn't make it classical.

Anyway, what's most impressive about this cartoon is the high quality of the instrumental voice imitation, which out-wah-WAHs Charlie Brown's teacher any day. "I now pronounce you man and wife" is amazing!

Another favorite bit - the goofy little scales in the score, while the two instruments are chasing each other around the tree...the composer was clearly having fun.

Is anyone else uneasy when the king twangs the ukelele's strings?

You'd think, from all the hype, that this movie is more than "just" a thriller, but no. That's fine with me, but it's still sort of a disappointment. The many people who say this movie has depth are cutting it way too much slack - it has about as much psychological/dramatic content as your typical Stephen King invention, though at least King is more up-front about admitting that psychology is just the mechanism that drives the scares. Here, at times, you get the sense that they think they're actually getting at something more substantial. The title, for example... If this movie were more honest with itself, it would have been called "The Dressmaker From Hell!" or somesuch.

And the famously classy acting, writing and directing? Whatever. I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if nobody told me it was really amazing - it seemed like people just doing their jobs well, making a scary movie. There are little spots where the acting, the writing, and the directing each get downright clumsy; wouldn't normally be an issue except that this movie's bloated reputation makes it an issue. I'd much rather not have been watching this movie at a level where I cared about those things...

I'm not saying that a psychologically intriguing horror movie isn't possible - when, near the beginning of the movie, Clarice more or less dares Hannibal to analyze himself, I thought, "ooh, that'll be fascinating, when he eventually does that." But that was, of course, a stunt this movie didn't have the focus to pull off, so the issue was just dropped, which I saw as implicit acknowledgement that the character is a psychological impossibility and that the movie's pretentions of depth were just that, pretentions, for atmosphere's sake.

And hey, that's not such a bad thing - there were some good scary ideas in the movie - the night-vision bit at the end was really nice, I thought - and there's no shame at all in making a scary movie with some pseudo-psychological atmosphere. But I hold this movie responsible for the new sub-genre of "sordid serial killer gothic" which tends toward the tasteless and pointless by suggesting that the outlandish psychoses of made-up serial killers are in themselves worthy subject matter. Like "Seven," or that one with Jennifer Lopez in a box. And others. You know what I'm talking about.

These people need to reread their Edgar Allan Poe and understand how psychology can actually relate to horror. Or just settle for making gross-out movies and being honest about it.

Is real life this whimsical, this airy, this bewildering and amoral, this grim yet carefree, this stilted yet lyrical? Etcetera? No. Not my life, anyway. Does that mean I can't enjoy a movie that's all of those things? No, I can enjoy it, but I have to raise one eyebrow at the people who gush about how close to their hearts this is. Likewise I reserve the other eyebrow for the people who proclaim this to be genius. It felt to me like a little pencil doodle - it might have had charm when it was tossed off, but hanging on the wall in the museum it gives me pause. Yes, it works out a little world that is neither escapist nor realistic, neither sugary nor bitter. It just floats there. Is that what we're meant to applaud?

If I detected it saying anything, it was saying things no less trite than the things it was apparently trying to be fresher and freer than...and if it genuinely wasn't saying anything, then all it achieved was a kind of sustained existential shrug, which doesn't impress me. If I had just flipped to this on TV without knowing anything about it, perhaps I'd have been amused by its flavor for the duration...is that all they expected?

Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson run around solving puzzles that some screenwriter dug out of a Martin Gardner book while Jeremy Irons strolls around with a master plan to put tons of gold in dump trucks while no one's looking. But that's not the POINT, right? That's just the filler. I know that in an action movie like this, the point is the crazy action sequences - let's have them drive off-road in Central Park! - but the next step for the moviemakers should be to come up with a satisfying (it can be ridiculous, just SATISFYING) reason for any of this to happen. But no. Why do they drive through the park? Jeremy tells them "You need to drive downtown right now really really fast because I say so." That's also why they have to do...well, everything that happens in the movie, more or less. It's so lazy it's distracting.

I was gonna say that the movie has its moments, but it doesn't, really. It just successfully maintains a low-level hum of 'Hey, zany action movie here!' which is, to be sure, a sufficiently comforting thing for a lot of people. But at least the first Die Hard 'had its moments.' So I was a little let down.

So what if this is, as another reviewer noted, the stuff of a hundred Tom and Jerry cartoons to come? The character animation is the real attraction here, and it's excellent. This is some of the best drunken mouse animation I've ever seen, and that's saying something.

It's true, they've turned the actual storyline into a goofy succession of tabletop gags with a chaotic climax tacked on (much like the one to appear at the end of the Pink Elephants sequence in Dumbo), and so the short as a whole is somewhat less satisfying than it could be, but the individual sequences are all nice - I particularly liked the bit with the sliced bread, and the mirror routine straight out of Duck Soup. Monty just sort of disappears at the end, doesn't he? Oh well, so maybe it's not the most memorable thing ever, but it's still a polished piece of cartoonery, to be sure.

An early attempt at the Brothers Grimm world to which Disney would soon lay claim. But more awkward and with much sloppier animation. The Hansel and Gretel stand-ins ("whose names I don't know") are shockingly devoid of personality - they've got weird little blank faces that even I could draw. When the boy is turned into a spider, it's both icky and somewhat of a relief, because at least now he's got some personality. Turned into a spider, not fattened up to be eaten. This witch just imprisons and transforms kids...the standard cannibalism was apparently too edgy.

The whole thing is also dated by the utterly inane song.

Is it just me, or is there something unearthly and horrific about the witch's final moments, after which the ring of laughing children just seems bizarre? And is the fact that the rock's 'arms' seem to have disappeared with the passage of time suppose to be a hint that this is all just the stuff of myth? So many questions.

I had heard that this was "an actors' movie" both because it was, of course, written and directed by two actors, but also because it was basically constructed to be a showcase for acting - plot, visuals, 'message,' etc. are all secondary at best. And that's pretty much true. But it's not entirely a problem, because the acting here is all quite good, and for the most part at the subtle end of the spectrum. "Actors' movie" suggests that the actors will get to scream and shout and cry - but here, rather, it's the many layers and shades of tension at a party that are the focus... ...well, until the second half of the movie, when they all scream and shout and cry. Which was a disappointment. I enjoyed the first half quite a lot - it achieved a sense of "this social world really exists, and we all know about it and we're presenting it as faithfully as we can," which is, to me, always an interesting thing to watch onscreen, regardless of what that world is. The second half was more about DRAMA and REVELATIONS, which has its place, sure, but which inevitably pales in comparison to seeing a really convincing game of charades.

People who take this movie and its creators to task for rampant self-indulgence are probably on to something - but that didn't really bother me, since I enjoyed it from a purely people-watching standpoint, and didn't feel it necessary to wonder what the filmmakers thought they were SAYING about these people. I hope nothing too grand, because they certainly didn't achieve it. Perhaps if that was MY world, I'd find this movie absurd and half-baked, but it's not my world, and so the movie had a certain anthropological value to me. At least the quiet parts.

When nothing much is happening, so to speak, all there is to care about is the acting - and those are the times when this movie has the most to offer.

As for the digital video issue, I'll just mention that I had heard when it first came out that the movie was shot in DV but forgot while I was watching it...and on two or three occasions thought, not knowing the cause, "oops, something funny happened with the film there." They all involved high contrast creating a splotchy look or a blurry quality to the motion. I'm sure the production benefits of DV more than compensate for little stuff like that, and I'm all for it - I'm just reporting that it wasn't ENTIRELY invisible.

I went to see this after hearing a lot of hype about how it was one of the most unimaginable oddities in all movie-dom...and anticipation like that can often ruin a movie for you. I had, after all, read all the comments here on IMDB and already knew that Groucho Marx was going to play God, Carol Channing was going to take her clothes off, and Harry Nilsson was going to sing the entire credits. You'd think that the shock of the viewing experience might be compromised by that kind of foreknowledge.

But no. Hearing that this movie exists is one thing, but the true surreality of its existence can only really be appreciated once you've actually SEEN all these actors actually performing this script, putting in various degrees of professional effort to bring to life the tale of 'Skidoo.' The credit song is doubly stunning in that it calls our attention to the names of all the many REAL LIVE PEOPLE who for some reason collaborated to produce this film. To be told that there is a movie in which Austin Pendleton talks Jackie Gleason through an acid trip is merely amusing; but to actually witness Gleason's bulging eyes as he reacts to a hallucination of Groucho's head sprouting from a giant screw - for this there is no substitute.

I admire all the hard work that went into this big fancy movie. It looks like it was expensive and complicated to make, and all the designers and actors do a really impressive job. Good for them.

But this movie is, simply, wrong. If they made Casablanca and instead of Humphrey Bogart, they had a chimpanzee playing Rick, we'd point to the chimp and tell the director, "No, sorry. You screwed up. That chimp shouldn't be here. It's a mistake and now your movie doesn't work. You have to scrap this all and start again." Baz Luhrmann needs to scrap this movie (and 'Strictly Ballroom,' too, incidentally) and start again.

The problem is this: there has never been a movie so exuberantly kitschy (or do I mean campy?) as Moulin Rouge Exclamation Point - but there's already some trouble brewing in the whole idea of doing something to be INTENTIONALLY outrageously kitschy. When outlandishly dumb things happen in this movie (Boing! Whoo!), we can't chuckle and say, "oh my god, can you believe how ridiculous that was?" because of COURSE we can believe it - it's the whole point, after all. If we were watching a REAL old musical, and someone started speaking the lyrics to a song, we might have something to chuckle at - what naivete! what sweetly, pathetically sincere absurdity - but in this in-your-face movie, the dumb-ness is just part of the game, and so it's hard to see it as anything but...dumb. I guess you have to suspend your disbelief - disbelief not that the story is real, but that the movie is naive.

But that pales in comparison to the real problem, which is that once we're thinking, "how outrageous and ridiculous this crazy show is!" we are at the diametric opposite point on the emotional circle (as it turns out, emotions come on a circle - thought you should know) to being moved by anything. When Baz et. al. come out shouting that this is a movie about Truth, Beauty, Nutmeg and Whatever, I'm thinking, "I hear ya - Boing, Whoo!, Truth!, Beauty!, I gotcha, buddy." But then as it goes on I get this creepy feeling that he really DOES think it's about Truth, Beauty, Whatever. Good lord. If this is a movie about people's emotions, where are the people? Where, even, are the puppets to represent people? All I see are bits of cultural flotsam being thrown against each other to create sparks of camp - a pretty empty show at best.

What really pains me is that so many people (people I thought were my friends! people I used to respect!) are of the same mind as Baz, and eat this movie up. They're saying, "It's so MOVING when Rick puts Ilsa on the plane and doesn't go with her - and the monkey was so FUNNY!" No. Either this is a movie about a funny monkey, or it's a love story. It can't be both - I can draw a diagram on paper to show you why if you don't believe me. I KNOW there are people reading this right now thinking, "he just doesn't get it - the whole point of this movie is that it uses a veneer of crazy kitschiness to get at the real live beating heart of emotion," but they are, in fact, wrong. If you find yourself moved by the hackneyed nonsense that serves as the plot of Moulin Rouge(!), I'm happy for you, I really am - but that means you're absolutely not entitled to pretend that you understand the point of kitsch. Unless you really don't, and you just love it all at face value! God help us if all these Moulin Rouge! fans think the beyond-infantile 'Boing's and 'Whoo!'s are actual comedy as opposed to meta-comedy. Maybe it all just RESEMBLES kitsch, but it's been assembled by a total naive, who really doesn't know the difference. A chilling thought - but having seen the movie, I could believe it.

If you thought this movie was about love, you (and Baz) have been so deeply blinded by a post-modern world that you don't realize that to move from irony to emotion, you go DOWN a level in manic allusiveness, not UP. It's just a fact.

One more time: "The Sound of Music" is a song about something, from a musical. "The Sound of Music" as it appears in 'Moulin Rouge!' is just a floating fragment of culture used as a prop to make a joke that is so corny and childish as to be only excusable by the idea that it is the joke itself that is being made fun of - and thus is not a song, is not about anything, and is not in a musical.

No amount of WILD FLAMBOYANT PRODUCTION and FAST CUTTING can disguise the fact that this movie has a chimp in it - or, really, that this chimp has a movie around it. And a flimsy one at that.

This movie left me pretty uneasy. It is, of course, a "horrors of war" movie, with really strong direction and photography of the action sequences, which are, truly, most of the film. And, I'll admit, right off the bat, that was a neat thing to see on the screen. Look at that! Look at that! Fine.

But while I'm watching this and thinking "look at that!" I'm also thinking, "but, wait, why is watching people get blown up a good thing for me to be doing?" Or, more specifically, when I was presented with a surgery-channel-style extreme-close-up deep into a gruesome, gaping wound, I had to wonder, "What am I supposed to be getting out of all this?"

And I just don't have any answers to that question that make me feel comfortable with this movie - there's just something irresponsible, for want of a better word, of making a gory action movie out of recent, still relevant events; of turning a real soldier who died less than ten years ago into "the guy who got blown in half!" Yea, even in the name of glorifying U.S. military heroism.

You say the point of the movie is to sober us up, to expose us to this event as it REALLY HAPPENED? Maybe there's something defensible there, in principle - but to actually pull that off, you've got to live up to a lot more responsibilities - you can't load the first half hour with cliched war-movie dialogue and cheap characterization, because then we're not in the world of "history" at all - we're in the world of action movies, where the explosions aren't just intense, they're really cool - and my stomach turned a bit every time it occurred to me that somewhere in the theater, surely, were people who were thinking, "duuude." The guy in front of me actually clapped in admiration at the goriest surprises. Really.

And please - you don't put Hans Zimmer's driving beat over sober history. You put it over a cool flick.

Not to mention the comic relief guys.

Plus, if this is indeed somehow supposed to be (as the 'somber' captions at the beginning and end suggest) a bit of historical perspective, it really IS obliged to be more intelligent about the politics involved. And don't tell me that it's an apolitical movie because the soldiers are just soldiers following orders - it's an apolitical movie because the filmmakers chose what to put in the movie and what not to. And so again I say: please tell me it was for some good reason and not to make a cooler movie.

I know, it was about HEROISM - but if that's all they cared about then why couldn't they make up their own story about heroism instead of making that the 'spin' on a disturbing episode of recent history? We were well beyond the "inspired by real events" realm here - this was supposed to BE real events. That's a lot to bite off, sure, but the moviemakers are the ones who bit it off, and so they've got to deal with it on those terms.

At least "Saving Private Ryan," another war movie with impressively realistic action scenes but corny writing, was off this particular hook somewhat, because the tradition of making cinematic nonsense out of World War II was well established, so any touches of grim reality in that movie were genuinely sobering and valuable. "Black Hawk Down," on the other hand, is looking back less than a decade to events which have not yet been trodden on by the Jerry Bruckheimers of the world, and in my opinion this means he is accountable for any dirt he gets on its pristine historicity, so to speak. Should he be congratulated for only getting SOME dirt on it when he would usually bury it in manure? Isn't this still a misguided endeavor?

While watching 'Kuroneko,' I must admit I was a little distracted by what were, to me, anyway, stylistic issues: The beautiful black-and-white photography was so vivid and made clear so many little details, in contrast to which the story and the action was delivered in broad, stylized strokes. Something about this didn't work for me - the image, somehow, was too unforgiving on the simply conceived story...not to mention the makeup effects. When a shot of thrillingly real roaring fire at the opening is followed by a shot of the burned bodies, two actresses with, essentially, charcoal rubbed on parts of their arms and legs, and lumpy fake blood spread on their throats...well, it hurt my ability to get into the world of the movie. As did sequences of the plot where the characters' actions didn't follow normal human psychology ("But if he recognized her, wouldn't he say something?") If the image hadn't been so vivid I wouldn't have had to keep thinking of them as actors in a stilted, stylized script. But I did. So sue me. Maybe that's culture clash - maybe the dramatic stylization is direct from the Japanese tradition and would have felt natural in its own way to someone from Japan. Well. I'm not Japanese.

But the important thing here is that, while the movie's horror, while I was watching it, was negligible because of all the above...in the days following, I found myself more and more haunted by some of the truly eerie imagery and the undertones of the plot. To return home, having become a man, and find that your family has turned to demons - demons who might sometimes, partially, still be your family, but will never talk about it...there are shadows of a powerful nightmare in there.

The fight sequence in the rushes, and the slow processions through the bamboo grove, in particular, reverberate in my mind. These scenes, among others, were well supported by the excellent musical score.

I don't know what to make of the last few scenes - the movie had spent itself several times over by that point, though, and in a sense, the exact twists and turns of the plot were only of secondary importance. Watch it for its uniquely eerie atmosphere (and lovely photography), and then enjoy as it slowly settles in to your subconscious.

Well, now, finally, I have.

Gotta say I was a little underwhelmed. That is, I enjoyed it, but not in the sincerely-on-the-edge-of-my-seat way that I expected to. More in a dude-now-he's-in-the-elevator-shaft-pass-the-mini-pretzels kind of way. Which is what they were aiming for, no doubt, and which is what everyone seems to love about it. But it was still sort of a shock to find out that this Beloved Action Classic was actually deeply goofy and directed sort of clumsily and, in many ways, didn't really make any sense.

Just now I started to list the problems more specifically, but then it occurred to me, and this is important..."what would be the point?" Consider:

'Die Hard' has a bunch of big explosions in it and Bruce Willis makes fists with his toes. Is it not then, in some sense, of a world beyond criticism?