Friday, 13 April 2001

WEEKEND PREVIEW

Looks like another weekend of product.

Of the four new wide releases, Joe Dirt, Josie & The Pussycats, Kingdom Come and Bridget Jones’s Diary.   I’ve only seen one.   I’ll remedy at least part of that over the weekend.  But from the distance, it seems that all four releases has a very specific target audience ... that each has enough of what its audience is seeking to make some money ... and that all four films will ultimately be more forgettable than not. 

Meanwhile, another spring has passed without a single great movie.  There have been some decent movies and there has been some crap, but there hasn’t really been a film that’s found an audience and which is strong enough, for lack of a better yardstick, to have any impact in the end-of-the-year awards races.  The two exceptions are The Dish and Memento.  Warner Bros. hasn’t really laid out the full national presentation of The Dish yet so, hopefully, it will find its way.  I have said from the start that this is a big film.  So far, it hasn’t seemed to have gotten the push that My Dog Skip got last year, though it would appear that Warners is attempting to match that family film’s success and in Week Four, The Dish is in about the same place as Skip was in its fourth weekend.  Skip ended up with $34 million.  I think that The Dish could do double that easily.  As for Memento, it goes to 174 screens this weekend ... and we’ll see whether it starts to build.

BOX OFFICE EXTRA is here.

THE GOOD:  I have been anticipating one film ahead of many others for a long time.  And though many readers have shaken their heads - and keyboards - over my dreams of Moulin Rouge, preferring to focus on A.I. or Planet of the Apes or Pearl Harbor as their summer object of obsession, I got confirmation of my excitement yesterday in the form of an 11 minute piece of film that was edited by Baz Luhrmann just for people like me.  So I trekked over to Fox and I watched the footage.  Twice.

Luhrmann has done something extraordinary.  He has made the first true Hollywood musical in decades.  And he made it in Australia, with non-Americans in almost every role and with a mélange of pop music replacing any kind of traditional scoring.  (Actually, there is original music by Craig Armstrong, Marius DeVries and Steve Hitchcock, but not much of it in the footage Fox has.) 

At first, the two-hour-film-reduced-to-eleven-minutes package feels a little like a big music video.  But as it roles along, the richness of Luhrmann’s vision becomes clear.  He has taken what Vincente Minnelli did with color and imagery in The Pirate, American in Paris and The Band Wagon and cross-bred it with Coppola’s electronic efforts on One From The Heart (which was scored by Tom Waits and sung exclusively by Waits and Crystal Gayle, creating a kind of Greek chorus musical).  The result is quite spectacular.  The reality of the moments and the emotions come right out of the actors, who inhabit the semi-real world that Luhrmann has built around them, as dreams mix with reality in ways that only Luhrmann could imagine for us.

As for performance, Nicole Kidman is all there.  This is a true movie star performance and it seems to me likely that this will be the highlight of her career for a long time.  The minimalist performance that Claire Danes gave Luhrmann in Romeo + Juliet was just right for that film, as she drew attention to herself by being the one quiet element.  Here, Kidman plays the ultimate, unabashed seductress and then gets more than even she can handle, on both the side of love and hate.  Ewan McGregor has a pretty amazing singing voice.  I was shocked.  He has his limitations, but like great singers of the past, he embraces his limits and makes them a part of his style to great effect.  John Leguizamo is not in much of the current footage, so it’s hard to get a read on his Toulouse Lautrec.  But he seems to be, at least in some part, a part of a four-man comedy team - Luhrmann’s Greek chorus, if you like - that reminds me of The Brothers, Ritz or Marx.  And Jim Broadbent, a great star of British cinema, looks to have the "Joel Grey role," leading the team at the Moulin Rouge.  But his earthy, tough, rich, fearless appearance and singing voice seems, from this small view, put him right in the way of Grey territory -Best Supporting Actor Oscar territory. 

As coincidence would have it, I was also able to catch footage of two full length musical numbers while I was at the studio.  My only real concern watching the 11 minute package were the solo singing moments by Ewan McGregor, singing parts of Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong and In The Name of Love.  But one of the two full length bits I got to see was the sequence between McGregor and Kidman in which he sings lyrics from those songs.  And it was amazing to me how well it worked.  Luhrmann and his team were clearly unabashed in their efforts to break up the songs and to use the subtext that is built into them, in a fearless way that leaves you wondering how they pulled it off.  But they did pull it off. 

The second sequence was The Tango Sequence, in which the Moulin Rouge dancers come together in a massive tango that reflects in the intensity and pain of The Police’s Roxanne, as sung by Jacek Koman a.k.a. The Argentinean.  Luhrmann juxtaposes this sequence, with the two lovers, McGregor and Kidman, separated by their roles in the world.  Amazing stuff. 

People say "breathtaking" all the time.  What I have seen of Moulin Rouge so far is literally breathtaking.  As each scene ends, you need to take a deep, deep breath and try to reflect on what you’ve seen.  Luhrmann has created a thick, thick stew of passion here and it will be fascinating to see whether the complete film will allow the audience to breath at all.  I’m bringing the oxygen tank.

PAGE TWO:  Josie, Steve & The Mullet