Rent check
23/11/05 23:28![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomy(A few updates since the original post)
'Cause everything is
Well. My expectations were very low a few months ago, and then they got very high, and on balance I'm somewhat satisfied, somewhat not.
I will say that the movie did one thing right: it shortened the painfully long and depressing second act, which had fewer good songs and exactly one--unearned--happy moment.
There are two weaknesses that I'll admit exist in the play. First, the second act; second, Mimi not dying. This was an understandable choice, given Angel's death, given that people usually don't want to walk out of Broadway musicals wanting to slit their wrists. But it's sentimental, unrealistic, unearned, and would have made me dislike the rest of the play if the rest of the play were not so superlatively good. (It doesn't help that "Your Eyes," Roger's song to Mimi at the end--his "one great song"--is, I think, one of the weaker songs overall).
One final thing I liked about the movie: casting. They couldn't go too far wrong, I suppose, having brought back most of the original cast, but I had only two minor quibbles: Maureen was too flat-chested and not gorgeous enough to sing that she couldn't help if people stared at her, they always had; also, Roger didn't match my mental image of him. Collins, I adored beyond words. Mark, too.
Okay. Weaknesses in the movie, starting from the top.
1) Opening with Seasons of Love is like the guy proposing marriage on the first date. It's "LOVE ME!" without ever having earned any emotion yet. "Remember a year in the life of friends," when we don't have anything to REMEMBER yet. It would have worked better at the end, although they couldn't do that because they wouldn't be able to reprise it several times during the movie; it would have worked better in its original spot at the end of the first act, though I understand why they didn't put it there, too. It's too much emotional intensity to have it crammed there right after "La Vie Boheme."
2) The flashback scenes with Roger and April ("One Song Glory") reminded me of nothing so much as bad karaoke music videos. Likewise (not so much) with Roger in Santa Fe. I think this is partly because of Roger's late-80s-prettyboy looks.
3) The pacing of the movie is such that it flashes from one high point to another without much space to rest. Again with the "LOVE ME!". I almost wish that they'd cut one good song and took the pacing a little slower.
4) "Out Tonight" made me nervous. It was...distracting, I think, in such a queer musical, to have an entire sequence that takes the male gaze for granted: "You like to look at half-naked women performing in stereotypically arousing ways." I can see that ANYWHERE.
Also, B. who I saw it with was confused at the argument between Roger and Mimi that followed--precisely, I think, because Mimi was singing "Out Tonight" to an audience, and only a few lines to him. A few lines of "out tonight" ought not to be taken as an intrusive unwanted come-on; the whole song, yes.
5) Mimi spends several hours dancing in painfully high heels, goes home, and asks Roger to take her out tonight?
Well... I want some of those drugs.
6) The soundtrack was too slick. There were very few moments I actually bought the characters as SINGING their lines; I felt that they were lip-synching them.
And then, well. There's a reason all my quibbles are from the first act. Sometime between "Will I lose my dignity/ Will someone care?" and "No day but today," I bought into it completely, mawkish sentimentality and all. I cried. (I heard sobbing in the audience when Angel died).
7) Oh wait, I do have one quibble from the second act. A lot of reviews complain that it was "dated"--AIDS is no longer a death sentence, Alphabet City has gentrified, that kind of thing. I say that doesn't make it dated--it makes it *historical*. They couldn't set the movie now, perhaps--if only because the characters are "Living in America/ at the end of the millenium."
So...given that the date is explicitly no later than 1999... the gay engagement party? Hm? I guess complaining that it feels political is beside the point in a movie such as this one, but it DOES feel political in a movie that can't take much more politics, and it feels anachronistic, and setting a single scene in a country club breaks up the unity-of-place in a way that's a bit distracting.
(Belated update: Oh, RIGHT, the YEAR is explicitly mentioned. I stayed up too late last night. The point stands).
I didn't love the movie. I loved the broadway musical, and the movie is at best methadone for the musical--it brought up enough memories of what the musical was like to satisfy me.
I liked the movie well enough, overall, at a distance after I had stopped tearing up. I'd buy the movie to bring home for karaoke night, but that's about it; the people who I saw it with liked it well enough, or said they did, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone who wasn't a Rent-head.
And yet, you know...it bothers me a lot that opinions are shaking out along the lines of "OMG BEST MOVIE EVER If you don't like it you went in there prepared to hate it and cynical and MEAN!", "They changed one tiny thing! Heresy!", and (in mainstream media reviews) "Ha ha, people who think they're artistic and don't want to pay their rent. Ooh, they think they're so much better than us. Ha ha."
I am right and everyone else is wrong.
'Cause everything is
Well. My expectations were very low a few months ago, and then they got very high, and on balance I'm somewhat satisfied, somewhat not.
I will say that the movie did one thing right: it shortened the painfully long and depressing second act, which had fewer good songs and exactly one--unearned--happy moment.
There are two weaknesses that I'll admit exist in the play. First, the second act; second, Mimi not dying. This was an understandable choice, given Angel's death, given that people usually don't want to walk out of Broadway musicals wanting to slit their wrists. But it's sentimental, unrealistic, unearned, and would have made me dislike the rest of the play if the rest of the play were not so superlatively good. (It doesn't help that "Your Eyes," Roger's song to Mimi at the end--his "one great song"--is, I think, one of the weaker songs overall).
One final thing I liked about the movie: casting. They couldn't go too far wrong, I suppose, having brought back most of the original cast, but I had only two minor quibbles: Maureen was too flat-chested and not gorgeous enough to sing that she couldn't help if people stared at her, they always had; also, Roger didn't match my mental image of him. Collins, I adored beyond words. Mark, too.
Okay. Weaknesses in the movie, starting from the top.
1) Opening with Seasons of Love is like the guy proposing marriage on the first date. It's "LOVE ME!" without ever having earned any emotion yet. "Remember a year in the life of friends," when we don't have anything to REMEMBER yet. It would have worked better at the end, although they couldn't do that because they wouldn't be able to reprise it several times during the movie; it would have worked better in its original spot at the end of the first act, though I understand why they didn't put it there, too. It's too much emotional intensity to have it crammed there right after "La Vie Boheme."
2) The flashback scenes with Roger and April ("One Song Glory") reminded me of nothing so much as bad karaoke music videos. Likewise (not so much) with Roger in Santa Fe. I think this is partly because of Roger's late-80s-prettyboy looks.
3) The pacing of the movie is such that it flashes from one high point to another without much space to rest. Again with the "LOVE ME!". I almost wish that they'd cut one good song and took the pacing a little slower.
4) "Out Tonight" made me nervous. It was...distracting, I think, in such a queer musical, to have an entire sequence that takes the male gaze for granted: "You like to look at half-naked women performing in stereotypically arousing ways." I can see that ANYWHERE.
Also, B. who I saw it with was confused at the argument between Roger and Mimi that followed--precisely, I think, because Mimi was singing "Out Tonight" to an audience, and only a few lines to him. A few lines of "out tonight" ought not to be taken as an intrusive unwanted come-on; the whole song, yes.
5) Mimi spends several hours dancing in painfully high heels, goes home, and asks Roger to take her out tonight?
Well... I want some of those drugs.
6) The soundtrack was too slick. There were very few moments I actually bought the characters as SINGING their lines; I felt that they were lip-synching them.
And then, well. There's a reason all my quibbles are from the first act. Sometime between "Will I lose my dignity/ Will someone care?" and "No day but today," I bought into it completely, mawkish sentimentality and all. I cried. (I heard sobbing in the audience when Angel died).
7) Oh wait, I do have one quibble from the second act. A lot of reviews complain that it was "dated"--AIDS is no longer a death sentence, Alphabet City has gentrified, that kind of thing. I say that doesn't make it dated--it makes it *historical*. They couldn't set the movie now, perhaps--if only because the characters are "Living in America/ at the end of the millenium."
So...given that the date is explicitly no later than 1999... the gay engagement party? Hm? I guess complaining that it feels political is beside the point in a movie such as this one, but it DOES feel political in a movie that can't take much more politics, and it feels anachronistic, and setting a single scene in a country club breaks up the unity-of-place in a way that's a bit distracting.
(Belated update: Oh, RIGHT, the YEAR is explicitly mentioned. I stayed up too late last night. The point stands).
I didn't love the movie. I loved the broadway musical, and the movie is at best methadone for the musical--it brought up enough memories of what the musical was like to satisfy me.
I liked the movie well enough, overall, at a distance after I had stopped tearing up. I'd buy the movie to bring home for karaoke night, but that's about it; the people who I saw it with liked it well enough, or said they did, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone who wasn't a Rent-head.
And yet, you know...it bothers me a lot that opinions are shaking out along the lines of "OMG BEST MOVIE EVER If you don't like it you went in there prepared to hate it and cynical and MEAN!", "They changed one tiny thing! Heresy!", and (in mainstream media reviews) "Ha ha, people who think they're artistic and don't want to pay their rent. Ooh, they think they're so much better than us. Ha ha."
I am right and everyone else is wrong.
