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December 06, 2005
I don’t care about your 525,600 minutes. Stop singing about it.
I must let it be known that if there is one thing I hate in movies more than anything else, its musicals. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, not even one-dimensional characters played by actors who can’t act, that aggravates me so much as singing and choreographed dance on film. More than that, though my hatred for musicals extends to stage performance as well, at least in that medium the performance is live and the energy isn’t distilled over a hundred takes in an effort to get everything just right.
So after two hours and fifteen painfully long minutes of Rent, if you have any sense left in you that hasn’t been sapped by this AIDS-saturated joyfest, you’ll find yourself bewildered as to how every act felt so poorly executed. But then, what could you really expect from director Chris Columbus whose “accomplishments” include Monkeybone, the first two Home Alone movies and Jingle All the Way? In fact, the only highlight of the movie for me was the glee I felt creep over me when I thought about writing a review on a movie that doesn’t have enough depth for us to empathize with the characters with out using giant ‘dues-ex machina’ to feel bad for them, in the form of AIDS (in case there was some confusion).
Set in New York City in 1989, the film revolves around a close-knit group of friends who seem to have nothing in common except for being free spirits who only want to stick it to the man and, oh yeah, AIDS. It would be all right if it wasn’t the central drive of the movie, but it is. This movie was already done a decade ago; I’d rather see Kids, which makes things serious, than this disturbingly upbeat film whose characters lackadaisically stumble through life.
I don’t want to be completely negative about the movie, but really, neither the two roommates, Mark (Anthony Rapp), the asexual emotional angst rag filmmaker, or Roger (Adam Pascal), a washed up rocker who tries too hard to be like Kurt Cobain, or any of the other cookie cutter stereotypes do anything for me.
Sorry to all the nostalgics out there who loved the original Broadway production, because this just isn’t it. Moreover, this is probably the only movie that parodies, dates and dismantles itself and isn’t a satire, though with all the singing and dancing you have to wonder if the actors don’t have a sense of self-parody. So come Friday night, if your looking for mid-90s flashbacks, go out and watch Aeon Flux for some real trashy fun.
Posted by msveum at December 6, 2005 11:52 AM
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