Monday at the Movies - November 3, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  We haven’t reviewed a musical around these parts, so let’s give it a go.

Rent (2005) – Let’s begin by separating the film from the stage play (which I’ve never seen) and take the movie adaptation on its own merits.  I feel about Rent very much the same way I felt about the last musical I reviewed, Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge – on a technical level, I see that the moving parts work, and there are some fine performers clearly invested in the material, but from an audience perspective both Moulin Rouge and Rent felt very empty.  I’ll qualify this review by quoting my Moulin Rouge review – I don’t think I’m the audience for this film – but as a reviewer that doesn’t let the movie off the hook.  Rent feels empty because it seems to strip away a lot of what makes the characters individually definable (see the Plinkett test) and reduces a lot of their motivations to “I’ve got problems, man, and life is tough.”  A few deleted scenes really draw this out, especially with the character of Mark, who seems hollow in the film proper but has a much fuller characterization when he gets to, for lack of a better term, sing about his feelings.  I already have a tenuous relationship with musicals – I really like exuberantly dumb musicals like High School Musical or tonally thick ones like Sweeney Todd – so I’m certain that Rent isn’t for me.  Maybe if I’d come to it with the stage play in mind:  I get the strong sense that this particular Rent is targeted to those with the stage play near and dear at heart.  For those of us newcomers, however, the effect is much closer to wondering what all the fuss is about.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week for reviews of Big Hero 6 and Interstellar, and this Friday is the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month... The Cinema King has a full dance card, so be sure to subscribe – you won’t want to miss a moment!