RENT: The Movie

[Greathands]

Has anyone seen the movie "Rent" which came out this week?

 

I saw it last night and LOVED it. Plan to go tonight with some other friends.

 

I've was a bit surprised that a few friends declined to go because they heard it wasn't good.

 

I'm curious as to what those who have seen it think.

[SAdler]

>Has anyone seen the movie "Rent" which came out this week?

 

Thought it was phenomenal. Seeing it with a hot guy to grope and squeeze with certain musical notes made it that much better. Loved Idina Menzel ... definitely worth losing her from Wicked.

 

>I've was a bit surprised that a few friends declined to go

>because they heard it wasn't good.

 

The critics were total bitches. As I just finished explaining this same concept to my grandmother -- when you have critics that are ultra conservative and of a different generation, you're bound to have some disagreement as to what is art.

 

If you get to thinking about it, beside Angels in America and the soon to be Brokeback Mountain ... when do we get to see a totally mainstream gay film that doesn't pussy foot around controversial issues? I'm not saying they don't exist but the notoriety doesn't usually reach what Rent has for this release.

 

>I'm curious as to what those who have seen it think.

 

As a HUGE fan of the show I was a little dissapointed that a good 5 - 10 tracks from the original album were altered or COMPLETELY omitted. JoAnne's chat with her parents, the CONTACT scene, the Christmas Bells plot walking through the city, most shockingly GOODBYE LOVE.

 

I was also a bit interested at why they chose to put Seasons of Love at the beginning of the movie rather than as a break between "Acts."

 

And I've started rambling. SEE it! To any fan of the show the opening number RENT and the interpretation of it is MORE than worth the eight bucks

[+ Lucky]

Oh my god, I was like so bummed out that they cut those songs! I mean, like, how can you have a musical about dying men without the right songs!! Jeez, girl, don't they get IT??? It's like, wow, they are some kind of different generation or something! They actually act like they know something about this stuff, the old fools! Like they knew anyone that actually like died of AIDS or whatever it was that the songs were about! I can't wait to get the album though! Oops, I mean disc...

 

 

(I said we should lighten up!)

[SAdler]

Sarcasm noted and stupidity disregarded. While yes the plot and theme of the movie surrounded AIDS, there was a story to be told that was at some point somebody's "work of art."

 

There's really no need to be an ass and devalue the work nor attempt to negatively comment on my enthusiasm in appreciation of it. I genuinely thought at least YOU were more mature than that.

[+ Lucky]

"I genuinely thought at least YOU were more mature than that."

 

Fooled ya, didn't I?

[+ Lucky]

Now that I have seen the movie, I can understand a little better why the critic for the LA Times didn't like it. She is not an "ultra-conservative" and she is not an old hag, so maybe her point of view is worth considering. Granted, her review of the movie was the harshest one I read, but I can't say she was far from the mark.

 

Having really liked Rent the two times I saw it on stage, I would say that what the movie lacks is the charisma of the live perfomance. Rather than sincerity, these performers ooze cutesiness. I was mistaken to say that the movie is about men dying of AIDS as it is not really about that, or about drug addicts with AIDS, or about young people looking for social justice on the Lower East Side. This is a movie about aging yuppies who want to live rent free! The cast is too old to play the roles, Rosario Dawson not at all a picture of a struggling drug addict. Never has someone on heroin and AZT looked this good or had the energy she shows. Angel, the character played so well on the stage is unconvincing here. He dies without ever getting sick until the very end. Yeah, right.

And Maureen, the lesbian, is virtually insufferable.

 

I like Adam Pascal's voice, and I think he did the best job here. Just ten years too late to be believed. And yes, Scott, some of the songs are pretty good and well done here. It's just that this part is where they got the stage production right...play the music at such a loud volume that your head pounds all the way home!

 

Here's the LA Times review. (The NYTimes was nicer...he said the movie grew on him as it went along...but then, he is probably of a different generation!)

 

'Rent'

 

 

By Carina Chocano, Times Staff Writer

 

 

How to put this. "Rent" is a Chris Columbus adaptation of a smash-hit Broadway musical about artistic integrity, counterculture, political activism and squatters' rights that may have been the most successful moneymaking venture ever staked on selling the idea that "selling out" is bad.

 

(Two tickets for an 8 p.m. Friday show at the Nederlander Theater in New York, up to $295 apiece. The chance to tap your Ferragamo-shod toe to lyrics like "No pension … hating convention … hating pretension … riding your bike midday past the three-piece suits?" Priceless.)

 

 

It's hard to put the experience of watching "Rent" into words, especially after "Team America: World Police" said everything there was to say about the play with puppets, and so succinctly. ("Everyone has AIDS! AIDS AIDS AIDS! AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS! Everyone has AIDS!")

 

But I'll try.

 

"Rent" is commodified faux bohemia on a platter, eliciting the same kind of numbing soul-sadness as children's beauty pageants, tiny dogs in expensive boots, Mahatma Gandhi in Apple ads. It's about art, activism and counterculture in the same way that a poster of a kitten hanging from a tree branch ("Hang in There!") is about commitment and heroic perseverance. It represents everything the people it pretends to stand for hate. And it doesn't even know it. Watching it feels sort of like watching "Touched by an Angel" with your grandmother and realizing that although you're clearly looking at the same thing, you're seeing something entirely different. It's awkward to behold.

 

The movie begins on a stage, with all of the characters lined up singing "Seasons of Love." The theater setting is the movie's single reference to its origins, but though the characters soon leave the stage for good, the movie never really does. Compared to a masterpiece of the genre such as "Cabaret," "Rent" seems to find its new status as a film more embarrassing than liberating, and it clings to its own theatricality for dear life, as though it were Blanche DuBois and someone had just flipped on the lights.

 

It's Dec. 24, 1989, and Mark Cohen (Anthony Rapp), an earnest filmmaker with a Bolex camera strapped to his handlebars, rides through the streets of Lower Manhattan, earnestly photographing homeless people and singing.

 

Returning home to his Alphabet City loft, he finds his heat and electricity have been turned off. His roommate, Roger (Adam Pascal), a musician, informs him that they've received an eviction notice from their former friend, roommate and fellow artist Benny (Taye Diggs), who has married up, up and away to the landlord's daughter.

 

Meanwhile, their friend Tom Collins (Jesse L. Martin), a philosophy professor who just got fired from MIT for his "theory of actual reality," is mugged in an alley, where he's rescued by a loving drag queen named Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia); and a heroin-addicted exotic dancer named Mimi Marquez (Rosario Dawson) swoons over her upstairs neighbor Roger, who assiduously ignores her. Wouldn't you know it — everyone has AIDS. Roger, Mimi, Angel and Tom do, anyway. The rest of the gang is merely broke and dysfunctional.

 

Soon, Benny shows up, offering to reinstate rent-free living if Mark and Roger help stop a protest, planned by Mark's ex-girlfriend Maureen (Idina Menzel). This would pave the way for his new "state of the art virtual digital interactive studio." Maureen, a narcissistic performance artist, has recently left Mark for a lawyer named Joanne (Tracie Thoms), but Mark and Roger would rather starve, freeze and sing about it than lift one finger toward the neighborhood's gentrification.

 

Not that you blame them. Or you wouldn't, if the movie didn't make it so hard not to roll your eyes every five minutes. For all its passionate defense of bohemian living ("Rent" is cribbed from Puccini's "La Bohème"), much of it delivered from atop a table at a local restaurant where the bourgeoisie stick around to be dutifully épaté, the movie's supposed admiration for the lives of noncommercial artists doesn't touch its withering disdain for their work.

 

How is anyone supposed to get behind a guy whose "films" are just home movies of the homeless and his soon-to-be homeless friends? (In one scene, a homeless woman begins to call him on it, but ends up just deriding him for being poor. "Hey, artist, do you have a dollar? I didn't think so." Oh, snap.) Or behind a blocked songwriter who spends an entire year agonizing over a song that turns out to be a bunch of moldy clichés set to power chords? Or a performance artist whose "multimedia protest" would make Laurie Anderson's eyes bleed? Only the fashion-obsessed drag queen and the uptight lawyer avoid the lethal combination of pretension, sentimentality, self-congratulation and posturing that more or less characterizes their friends' work — hey, everybody needs fashion and laws.

 

Well, so what. "Rent" isn't about work, anyway. It's about love and death on the Lower East Side, before it became the kind of place where people would pay lots of money to see "Rent." While Angel and Tom get the issue of T-cell counts out of the way in the first few minutes, it takes Roger much longer to spill the beans to Mimi. ("You tooo?" "Me tooo.")

 

After the flurry of the initial couplings — Tom and Angel, Mimi and Roger, Maureen and Joanne, Mark and his artistic integrity — things start to come apart. Mimi can't stay off the smack, so Roger walks away. Maureen can't stop chasing girls, so Joanne gives up. Mark gets approached by a show called "Buzzline," which loves his "hip 'n' edgy" footage of the protest and ensuing police riot, so he sells out. (It says something, though I'm not sure what, exactly, that Sarah Silverman, in a brief appearance as the slick TV executive who happily purchases Mark's hip 'n' edginess for $3,000, comes across as the only believable character in the film — she's so fake, she's real.)

 

The most amazing thing about "Rent" (and be sure to look for that adjective on a movie poster near you, with an exclamation point attached) is how painfully dated and achingly false the movie feels, when its central concerns are real and more relevant than ever. How is that possible? Because to scratch "Rent's" Gap fashion grunge-wear surface is to hit a mother lode of disconnect and contempt for the very things it has co-opted.

 

Is it fair, or even seemly, to expect even a modicum of authenticity or cool from a Hollywood adaptation of a Broadway musical? Probably not. But this constant corporate exhumation and trotting around of counterculture's corpse — it's not fun anymore.

 

You know what would be fun? If Columbus had turned the story inside out and made the rapacious developers and marauding executives the heroes of the story. Why not? To the victor goes the official version, etc. At least that might have rung true.

 

Plus, I have a great title for it. They could have called it "Own."