Our friend, neighbor, and furniture-mover Chris Kalb couldn't say enough good things about Moulin Rouge, Baz Luhrmann's latest. He called it "a cross between Singin' in the Rain and Flash Gordon." I'd have to agree. No one makes good movie musicals any more; Luhrmann skips over the songwriting stuff and gets straight to the point -- that moment when musical logic takes over and everyone bursts out into song. He uses songs we all know from the last few decades, and it works. It could have been really cheesy, but somehow he pulls it off. Ewan MacGregor does the starry-eyed artist, Nicole Kidman as the H. with an H. of G., Jim Broadbent (from Topsy Turvy) is fantastic as the impresario. (I'll charitably skip over John Leguizamo as a lisping Toulouse-Lautrec.) And Luhrmann's saturated visual style fits for a musical in the way that it didn't quite fit Shakespeare. Most compare it to MTV, but Debbie says (and I agree) that it's closer to Caro and Jeunet's City of Lost Children. So if you like musicals, check it out.
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