Hurt Him. Hurt Him, To Save Him: Moulin Rouge! (2001)

This film is a mess.  A beautiful, cinematic, saccharine and unadulterated mess.  It is also a perfectly realized mess, something that could only come from the feverish mind of post-modern prodigy Baz Luhrmann.  While I am not a complete Luhrmann apologist, based almost primarily in his excessive appropriation of the misunderstood artist moniker, one that he claims is affirmed by his own vilification for 'ruining' classic texts.  While this is debatable, his visionary work Moulin Rouge! stands in a world all of its own, between its mash-up of classic songs into a GirlTalk like musical, or his near seizure inducing visual layering, everything Lurhmann offers his viewers is potent and pleasure inducing.  Between a haptic camera and quickened heartbeat at work in this film it is quite easy to lose out to the visuals of the film and overlook the very well executed, even if decidedly simplistic, story.  I have not seen all of Luhrmann's work and while I am holding out high hopes for Strictly Ballroom I am playing it safe in assuming that this is his current masterpiece.  Sure The Great Gatsby has an equal pacing, but problems like Toby MacGuire's acting and a hesitancy to go down a few of the darkest corners of the novel lead to a film that is not entirely perfect.  Moulin Rouge! is not perfect either, but damn if it is not as close to being such as possible.  I understand that the style of Luhrmann is not for everyone and I am willing to concede to this point of critique in some cases, simply attributing the frantic and overly referential nature of his oeuvre as a point of frustration.  In some cases, however, the critiques being mounted against this particular filmmaker are from individuals who also happen to think Quentin Tarantino is a consistently rewarding and masterful filmmaker, never seeing past his equally pastiched and kitschy veneer to realize he is doing precisely the same things in his films.  If critics and cinephiles alike are to concede to Tarantino being the bad boy of the post-modern styling, then it should also be extended to suggest that Lurhmann is in contrast its angst-laden rebel, the latter using culture in a far more curious and, I cannot believe I am saying this, far less pretentious manner.

Moulin Rouge! follows the experiences of Christian (Ewan McGregor) a struggling writer who has moved to the most rundown parts of Paris in hopes of discovering a space where he can blossom as a wordsmith, telling his disappointed father that his pursuits are purely inspired by the notion to understand the complexities of love.   The problem with Christian's noble aspirations is that he has never himself been in love.  Moving, however, into a dilapidated apartment, Christian immediately comes in contact with a variety of weird and wonderful characters including the squeaky voiced Toulouse-Lautrec (John Lequizamo) who is part of an acting troupe that is headed by the bombastic but keen Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent).  When they realize that Christian is indeed skilled as a writer they employ him to help compose a play, hoping that his prowess will convince local burlesque dancer and object of affection for many Satine (Nicole Kidman) to join in the production.  By using a combination of his poetry and his actual attractions, along with the fortune of being mistaken as a duke, Christian immediately attains the affections of Satine.  However, when the real Duke (Richard Roxburgh) emerges things prove troublesome as Satine is quickly required to avert her burgeoning desires for Christian and replicated them, if falsely, towards The Duke.  This is made all the more troublesome by Satine's suffering from tuberculosis.  The Duke an admittedly possessive man threatens to buy out the Moulin Rouge club from Zidler should Satine not agree to be his property, the worried Zidler agreeing immediately.  While Satine understands the gravitas of the situation, she and Christian continue to use the guise of preparation for the play as a means to further their relationship, stealing kisses and glances behind The Duke's back.  When Satine's sickness immobilizes her for an entire evening, The Duke assumes her to be galavanting with Christian leading to his final demand that he be removed from the picture entirely, in turn leading to Zidler telling Satine that she must end things with Christian.  However, when Satine does this, Christian refuses to accept this as a reality and crashes the final production one that is garish and almost nearly fatal.  Tragically, however, even when their love is rekindled, the reality of Satine's sickness causes her ultimate demise, though not before forgiveness is afforded to all involved.

Upon doing some very basic research for this film, I discovered that Moulin Rouge! is often referred to as a jukebox musical.  This is a term often applied to musicals, specifically theatrical, that appropriate the songs of one artist into a larger narrative, notable examples including ABBA, Bob Dylan and The Beatles.  Yet, Moulin Rouge! is a bit more complicated than this and as Baz Luhrmann has suggested, he intended his work to be palatable to the MTV Generation of music listeners.  This claim helps to better ground the idea of the film, one that is both sporadic and hybrid in its musical composition, indicative of a TRL Top Ten, while also heavily visual, bowing to the music video generation, wherein how the music looks plays as much into the nature of the song itself.  Think about the seeming inextricable connection between Miley Cyrus' Wrecking Ball as a song and as a music video.  Of course, nearly every musical intends for the visual nature of the film to take precedence, but often does so in a linear and formalist structure, wherein Luhrmann rejects this for layering and subtext.  Indeed, the film begins by showing a stage, thus calling attention to the projected nature of the film, but within the film there are often extra layers of staging, whether it be the wonderfully lavish production of the play in the closing moments of the film or the various dioramas that appear either in possession of the characters or as spaces in which the characters occupy.  It is in this execution that Luhrmann's use of special effects becomes quite interesting.  For a filmmaker like Tarantino this is almost always used to emphasize a degree of violence, moving it from bloody to hyper-violent.  In contrast is Luhrmann's invocation of the cgi to achieve a degree of meta-theatrics, already at play agains the layering of music, this causes the film to work almost like a gyroscope always rotating and viewers attempt to keep focus on the center.  Indeed, when this is achieved it is often the most climactic moment in the film where everything comes to a jarring halt evoking emotion by stripping away the melodramatic elements.  Indeed, this is perhaps as post-modern as the musical can get, by working in the opposite direction from the hyper showy to the simplistic.  Moulin Rouge! really is quite a fascinating work of cinema.

Key Scene:  The Kismet-inspired final production scene is magical.

I am sure quite a few of my readers are opposed to Luhrmann for various reasons and may have already encountered this film in the past.  I would strongly urge you to revisit this film and consider it from a counter-structuralist standpoint.  It is as impassioned an argument for rethinking the language of cinema in the post-digital age as one can hope to find.

Crackling Metacinema, Vanity And The Malaise Of Humanity: Fireplace For Your Home (2008)

There are a few times in your life when cinephiles discuss realizing they have viewed a piece of cinema that will invariably alter the entire way in which they understand cinema.  I recall moments like this occurring with, of course, Do The Right Thing, but more recently with works like Persona or Secret Sunshine.  These films, to varied degrees, not only ask questions about the role which cinema plays in our societal discourse on politics, religion, gender roles and variety of other heavily debated topics, but also reflect, through the medium of film, our own struggle as sentient beings trying to better understand our world and the reason for our being.  I know many who come to this through the existential woes of a Woody Allen film, while others find themselves mesmerized by the expressionism of Welles and Lang.  For most of my filmic endeavors, I was unaware of anything that managed to combine all the elements of cinema into one grandly poetic statement on human existence, while also providing a minimalist, yet cerebrally, focused examination of the minutiae of the daily grind.  At least this was the case, until I came across the wonderment and absolutely audacious experimental work Fireplace for your Home.  Without a solid director, one can only image the efforts and involvement playing into this work, whether it be the concern for domestic intimacy and the personal struggles of Japanese mastermind Ozu, or its concern for detailed everydayness of life, which emerge in the work of Akerman.  Yet, Fireplace for your Home, is far more than a domestic narrative and branches out to a larger, fully realized consideration of the politics of oppression and the passion of revolution, invoking, quite modestly, the work of Jean-Luc Godard.  Of course, not all the films references and homages are subtle, one can quickly see the "on the nose" references to fire, as it relates to classic Douglas Sirk melodramas, or more blatantly its decided leaning on the metaphor of flames and burnings that make David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me an essential cult classic.  What Fireplace for your Home does, as a piece of cinema, is manage to both set up the perfect creation of all things known to cinema, only to immediately burn them down and reject their creation.  I once thought that the closing scene of the star child from 2001: A Space Odyssey to be the most audacious statement of art in cinema, however, when the log in this film comes to a complete ashen incineration and falls apart, everything I understood about art, culture and the meaning of life also went up in flames.

The film begins in deceptive simplicity,  darkness, perhaps the beginning of time welcoming the viewer with silence, only to be followed by crackling and the emergence of a faint light, arising out of seeming nothingness.  The birth of the universe perhaps, an opening that beautifully references every creation myth known to humankind, while also taking a decidedly scientific and philosophical approach to the the emergence of life, suggesting it exploded into everythingness out of physical necessity.  Perhaps, explosion, is the best word to describe what occurs in the next act of the film.  With the three logs slowly being consumed by fire, the film moves into its next moment of historical narrative, undeniably drawing on the Roman and Greek pillars, slowly being consumed by the fire of modernity, a rejection of classicism, so bold and vindictive, as to cause viewers to viscerally reject everything they are shown.  Of course, once the film rejects history, it cannot retract such actions, therefore, its instantaneous transfer into the post-modern, metacinematic world of affect theory demands that the viewers not only ask what the images of the flames and logs represent, but, subsequently, what does their relationship to the logs and fire mean in regards to their daily lives, as well as their own reactions and affects as they synthesize the images being shown.  It is at this point in the narrative that Fireplace for your Home becomes a consideration of semiotics, symbols and languages that embraces, what can only be described as a deconstruction of ecriture feminine, suggesting that oppression extends to such a degree of intersectionality that to depict anything would be to inherently engage within a discourse of power and privilege.  The result of this narrative shift, of course, where the self/other dichotomy becomes discussed, yet, in the traditional sense, these two division are clearly delineated and identifiable, but as the fire begins to falter, one cannot help but think of the way the yin and yang are at once different and the same, so to is the fire by its final flickers of light.  When the image finally fades and the viewers have been taken on the whirlwind of emotional and interpersonal reflection, they cannot help but recall the famous Biblical lines "vanity of vanities; all is vanity," for what is left after such an experience, nothingness, coldness or perhaps enlightenment.

It is no coincidence that such a work of art ends with a decided incorporation of Biblical metaphors, because Fireplace for your Home is truly a work that could stand up against all the classic works of literature, including "The Greatest Story Ever Told,"  in a much briefer time frame, this film manages to consider the necessity and problems of religion, while also questioning the proclaimed "brevity" of a certain work of the history of time, written by the late Stephen Hawkings.  Fire, of course, seems to be a major factor in every major creation story, as noted earlier, yet Fireplace for you Home, in its moments of pure cinéma vérité, manages to remind its viewers that fire does play a role in our daily engagements, both physical, and, as should be no surprise, metaphysical.  It is in this entrenchment within the physical, however, that a person can read into its clear dueling ideologies concerning the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.  Marx would become famous for his creation of an economic, and eventually political, theory revolving around property, power, and oppression of the working class, yet through the fire, revolution is put in the forefront of this film and questioned both as an image of political action, as well inquiring as to what role the "hearth" and the "home" played into moving the proletariat into action.  Although to call Fireplace for your Home a rejection of communist sympathies and suggest it to be an embracing of conservative values is quite unfair, after all, who is to say that these logs represent any degree of heteronormativity, or even suggest the tradition of family values, remember it is a fire destroying things and not building upon itself, or, in this case, tradition.  In its single, uncut shot, the entirety of the capitalist tradition is cast away, there is no conspicuous consumption, or individual endeavors for success and promise of reward for hard work.  Viewers only receive one certainty, in the end, all things burn, it is far more important that as a society we value moments of shared experience, and that we must, simultaneously, be aware that a shared experience is still quite individual.  The film questions how it could be possible that any two people would ever admire, loathe or even acknowledge the same flickering portion of a flame, or, that the flame is anything more than a meaningless experience towards an eventual, arbitrary death.

Key Scene:  Every second of this film matters and nothing should be approached as lesser or greater, to do so would be to betray the vision of this film, which for all intents and purposes, manifested itself without human production and involvement, at least the IMDB credits seem to suggest such a thing.

I would say that you should go out and watch this, however, as I hope you have come to realize, this is very much an April Fool's Joke.  However, I did actually watch this, what kind of blog post would it be if I did not really commit to the viewing.  It is actually kind of soothing and makes for an excellent background ambience for reading.