Review of Moulin Rouge! (2001) by Baurushan J — 28 Aug 2012

Let's talk about musicals. There's been some good ones which we'd like to remember and some bad ones which we don't want to talk about but the one we'd like to discuss now is Moulin Rouge! Everyone started liking this film because of how artistic, original, visionary, dramatic and let's save the rest for my valuation because this is my prologue so far and even though I love this movie, I'll try and promote this film to those who haven't seen this so they can experience Moulin Rouge.

So the story is set in Paris 1900 as the film starts with an English typewriter named Christian played by Ewan McGregor who is obsessed with love. So he types his flashback of what happened one year ago when he arrived to Paris,France to become a romantic poet.

As he first steps into Paris to seek his fortunes, he meets a dwarf named Henri de Toulouse Lautrec played by John Leguizamo and three other men who are all theater crew members. They then take him to the theater known as the Moulin Rouge where Christian is introduced to a musical world and meets a tragically doomed courtesan Satine aka The Sparkling Diamond played by Nicole Kidman.

She later becomes the star of Christian's play which slowly starts to parallel the couple's romance. Now for those that hate it, they have said this movie is really goofy and kinda silly and I can see why because there are some scenes that prove that and I'm not trying to give anything away; but I don't get why they used that tone for a seriously artistic drama.

But other than that problem, in this movie's logic, it makes sense. I guess you could argue that they recycled all the cliches but for me I can see that this movie has tried to make new things with the old cliches plus this movie is set at the beginning of the 20th Century so it was the beginning of those cliches which is where just about all really bad movies copied directly off movies like these And like I said earlier, it was artistic, original, visionary, dramatic and it was romantic, lively, epic, poetic, stylish, beautiful and there are some scenes that had me tearing up.

Everyone who worked on this movie have done a great study on how to get this movie right in the right form based on the play this movie was originally from and I give them all a round of applause. As a fan of musicals myself, Moulin Rouge gets a 10/10 and this movie will always stay with me.