13 JUNE, 2001: My friend Navarro and I are at war, and it’s not over me winning our Oscar bet for the third year running (my prize this year was that nice new "Close Encounters" DVD. But I digress…). We have found ourselves head-to-head over two recent movies. On each one, one of us (and the general population) loved a recent popular film; the other of us finds himself the sole voice of dissent.
It all started innocently enough, I suppose. In the post-script of some friendly email correspondence a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned something along the lines of "Hey, have you seen ‘Shrek’ yet? We saw it last weekend I thought it was charming and pretty damn funny." He replied that he thought the movie was tiresome, uninteresting, and possessing not one good laugh.
I beg to differ. I laughed from Shrek’s first entrance and giggled all the way through. Mike Myers voices the forest-dwelling ogre, who is retained to save a princess (voiced by Cameron Diaz) for a diminutive king… oh, blah blah blah. You know the plot already, and movies like "Shrek" aren’t about plot, anyway. They’re exercises in style and humor, and "Shrek" has both in spades.
The movie is great to look at. Computer generated animation continues to grow by leaps and bounds, and there are some moments here that are breathtaking, as well as some really cool little touches, like Donkey’s hair and the grass in the forest. What makes "Shrek" stand out, and has (I believe) made it such a huge hit, are the jokes. The Disney in-jokes are great, the Gingerbread Man almost steals the show, and there’s a great moment with the Princess sharing a morning song with a bluebird that quickly develops into one of the biggest laughs I’ve had in a theatre in some time.
Many of the movie’s biggest laughs come courtesy of Eddie Murphy’s Donkey, whom Navarro felt was a lame re-hash of his dragon character in "Moulan". I found this character funnier, more interesting, and much more fully realized than the Disney’s film’s typical wacky animal sidekick.
"I think I'm the only person on the planet who hated 'Shrek'," he wrote me recently. "EVERYONE I talk to just raves about it. I just look at them wall-eyed like Homer Simpson." So, in short, I was really high on this movie, and my buddy just whizzed all over it, completely deflating me.
However, revenge would be mine. A couple of weeks later I got another email from him, titled "Moulin Rouge mini-review":
"Nav sez -- go see this movie!… Electric! Dazzling! Entertaining! Visually stunning! Campy! Hilarious! Nicole Kidman soars and Ewan McGregor shines. Jim Broadbend is superb! Baz Lurmann delivers a spectacular spectacle!… The songs, the costumes, the sets, the production numbers...! What a fun film… It started out so fast... going 0-60 with ‘The Sound of Music’... that I wasn't sure what to make of it. I was thinking, ‘oh my god... what the hell are they
doing?! Where's the nearest exit?’ But once I got into the movie's groove, it was SO enjoyable, so fun. And if you didn't laugh out loud during 'Like a Virgin' -- you surely have no soul. ‘A’. "
Well, call me a soulless bastard, because "Moulin Rouge" just didn’t do it for me. And it breaks my heart, because my buddy and I usually agree on movies, the "Shrek" debacle notwithstanding. But I can’t help it—what a disappointment this one was. Everything I'd read had me thinking that I was going to love this movie. I really liked Lurhman's "Romeo + Juliet", I thought the idea was cool, and the trailer was dynamite.
Come to find out, the movie was like a 130 minute trailer. The whole thing just tries too goddamn hard. It’s too busy, too scattered, too EDITED. Good God, Luhrman needed to give his editor some fucking Ritalin. Why use one edit when you can use three? By the end of the movie I had a wicked headache.
All this is unfortuante, because there is much to recommend here. It looks great (it'd look even better if Luhrman would hold a shot for more than three seconds so we could take it in). Kidman is ravishing and turns in a fine, sexy performance.
Ewan McGregor is even better, and has a fine singing voice. And, like "R + J", the movie is at its best when it settles down and lets its young lovers breathe,
love, and sing. And I should remember that I do have a tendency to edit out, in my memories, the parts of that film that didn’t work—many of the supporting characters were overplayed, and many of the outside scenes were entirely too high-pitched (especially in its opening scenes). The same problems plague his new film, but kicked up four or five notches to a point where I couldn’t get past them the way I did in the earlier film.
There are some good numbers (I really liked the use of "Your Song"—at least, I liked it the first 11 times they sang it). There are also some truly, inarguably bad numbers. "I Will Always Love You" should never be sung again, by anyone, ever. And Nav and I couldn't disagree more on the "Like A Virgin" number, which, for me, was like a long, painful, unfunny joke with no punchline. I could sense the entire theatre shifting uncomfortably in their seats, waiting for it to end (to this point, Navarro responds, "I'm shocked to hear of the reaction to 'Like a Virgin'... audiences here were on the floor from laughter -- and that was in snooty San Marcos. Maybe you should get drunk and see it again.")
Ultimately, for me, "Moulin Rouge" is a big, loud, empty movie that makes a lot of noise and goes to a lot of trouble to say absolutely nothing. And I’m in the minority on this one, which is fine by me. I’m getting a feel for how Navarro feels when people like me go nuts over "Shrek", wondering if everyone else saw the same film I did. But what the hell, it’s a subjective medium, and when people love movies like we do, we’re bound to disagree.
But I’m pretty sure I’m right on these two…