28 June 2001

So, after a false start and being rapped on the knuckles by a few readers for tardiness, here we are back to Civilian Voices … appearing here every Tuesday & Thursday.  So feel free to sharpen your wit – or your claws – and join in.

Up today - having second thoughts on Moulin Rouge?  Responding to a letter from Double D (read it here), Swampfox is having a few second, and even third, thoughts ..

“I really don't like to give this qualifier for Moulin Rouge, but fearing that you will label me your HOTD I will first defensively say that I walked out of thinking it was good film, worth my two hours and nine bucks. The two leads were excellent, especially McGregor. Yet I stopped short of dashing home to breathlessly exhort friends and family to see it post haste like your more rabid fellow "Rougie" fans because the film has flaws. Whoops, there it is - the emperor has no clothes!

It seems that many fans are finding all sorts of excuses for why this film is losing audience share faster than the average of 25 - 30%. "They don't understand it." "They hate the new music." "Musicals are a hard sell." "The anachronistic nature is too much for the poor dears," etc. That might explain the opening, but when the film that was going to break out based on word of mouth has none that argument just doesn't fly. Considering the rather restrained opening, I was pretty shocked to see it slid by a whopping 44%. I do concede that the final word on this trend won't be in until final numbers [are in], but I wouldn't want to buck the odds on that tiger.

Like the reader given the slightly chauvinistic moniker of Double D, I too was there for the first evening sellout showing of Moulin Rouge at the Avco in Westwood. But their impression of the crowd's reaction and their subsequent bewilderment at its lack of word-of-mouth appeal is quite telling of both personal impressions and . Only if they had sold tickets solely to filmgoers hand picked for interests and demographics could a more receptive audience been found. If you believe in such a things as being able to sense an audience's excitement level, then trust me when I say it was pretty high as the lights went down.

Yet the applause for these sequences was not as all encompassing as Double D would have you believe. Sometimes it was downright restrained, polite clapping of the "well, they tried really hard" variety. I know what the other kind sounds like. I was at the Chinese for the second night of The Matrix when the lobby scene got an electrified standing ovation. No one got up in the rows ahead of mine for any sequence including the one I thought they might, the "love medley" atop the elephant. That I believe goes to the heart of the matter. Scrolling through comments left on the Internet Movie Data Base, which I find is an excellent way to sample those outside of your own circle, just that sentiment can be found in a number of the raves about the film. Over and over the production's look and filmmaking style is the first and foremost item praised. Many actually opine that the story and characters are as thin as those cardboard cutouts found in Bruckheimer/Silver/Donner shoot'em ups that this film was supposed to be an antidote to.

To the ass who wrote in "Maybe it's my own fault for... thinking that maybe, juuuuust maybe, the American public was ready for a movie that doesn't involve car crashes, explosions, fart jokes, or Halle Berry's bare boobs,” I can enlighten with this: film is a subjective medium. That is such a fundamental law of the art form I will write it "once more with feeling:" FILM IS A SUBJECTIVE MEDIUM. Double D was obviously in the audience for the same screening, yet "with the entire audience clapping" and "the audience was all in it together" was not mine or my colleague's impression then or now. While I'm no musical booster, my co-attendee lists West Side Story and Damn Yankees as two of his favorite films.

Want to know what this suggests to me? That even the film's fans who acknowledge its agreed upon flaws expected it to succeed like all the crappy movies they loathed simply because the positives outweighed the negatives. To wit: if Con Air was a huge hit even though its story defied logic and the ending was rather dull (why is it that when I had to come up with a crappy movie that made dough, I found myself choosing from a list all produced by you know who? Hmmmmm...), why can't all those idiots do the same for poor little ol' Baz? My personal opinion is that the smarter an audience, the less flaws they will allow. Moulin Rouge is not a movie that can have it both ways - a story setting that requires a degree of sophistication for the audience to understand AND a willingness to be so dazzled by the style to forgive the major lapses in characters and characterization. For myself, I was little peeved that every time I started to get welcomely overwhelmed by the film something like the poorly executed slapstick of the
everybody-save-the-lovers-from-discovery scene would bludgeon me out of my joie de vivre like a wet fish on lips expecting a kiss. Watch the beach scene in From Here to Eternity and insert Bill Murray from Caddyshack looking for the suspicious brown lump in the pool interrupting Kerr and Lancaster. Funny as hell? Sure. Welcomed? Like a narc at a biker rally...

In the end you can't give a discriminating audience only half of the movie they paid full price to see. Luhrmann and Co, should count themselves lucky that they didn't open against another adult-skewing film like they were originally scheduled to do or they would have been stomped like the aforementioned narc.”

So is it fair to say that a director that aims at a more sophisticated audience should be held to a higher standard?  And is it fair to assume that Jerry Bruckheimer fans are simply dolts who don’t see the flaws in “shoot-em-up” movies and can’t appreciate good film?  What is your idea of a good film?  And is it different during the summer?

Do tell!

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