20th Century Fox | 2001 | 128 mins. | PG-13
After decades of box office dominance, the movie musical fell largely out of favor. With the exception of a couple of notable Disney productions, many studios seemed to abandon the musical genre altogether. Writer/director Baz Luhrmann (Romeo & Juliet, Australia) has never been a man who seemed particularly concerned about trends. In 2001, he brought the musical back into theaters in a big way. Moulin Rouge is an unapologetically romantic, pull out all the stops, razzle-dazzle bombast of a movie that doesn’t take a breath for the entirety of its runtime. Though only a moderate boxoffice success, Moulin Rouge was unlike any movie musical before it.
Set in Paris 1900, the story concerns Christian, (Ewan McGregor), a young English writer who arrives in Paris with stars in his eyes and a glorified idea of love. In his seedy Montmarte boarding house he meets a group of bohemian artists, led by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo), and is quickly drawn into their latest project — a musical entertainment to be titled “Spectacular Spectacular.” In an effort to get the play produced at the Moulin Rouge, Christian is set to meet with the courtesan/performer Satine (Nicole Kidman), the show’s star attraction. Naturally, he falls in love with her at first sight and complications ensue: In order to save the Moulin Rouge from financial ruin, Satine’s boss (Jim Broadbent) has promised her favors to a wealthy Duke (Richard Roxburgh) in exchange for cash. Ah, but Satine finds herself falling for Christian…
It’s a plot as old as time, but the fun here is all in its telling. Far and away the best part of this film is the musical numbers, performed by some pretty good singers. (All the actors did their yourself tapping your fingers in anticipation of the next musical number. Thankfully, since there’s nineteen in total, they all come along in rapid succession; moreover, there all variations on pop songs of fairly recent vintage.
In Moulin Rouge, McGregor belts out “The Sound of Music” in one scene Broadbent vamps his way through “Like a Virgin”, McGregor and Kidman duet through a host of love-themed songs while standing atop the elephant in which she lives, and the entire cast tangos to a Latin-infused version of “Roxanne,” with Jose Feliciano backing them up. If you like musicals, Moulin Rouge rocks.
The cast is uniformly fantastic. Nicole Kidman received an Oscar nomination for her work and doesn’t hurt that she never looked more beautiful. Ewan McGregor’s singing abilities were a surprise. Blessed with the ability to belt lyrics with both power and precision, he works his way through the emotions of love and loss with great sensitivity. Jim Broadbent appears larger than life, while John Leguizamo is astonishingly smaller than life… with a French lisp to boot (‘the Thpawk-leeeng Die-aaay-mon!’ — try it out loud). Of course, there is no forgetting that this is Kidman and McGregor’s, film and when the two are onscreen together, Moulin Rouge shines.
The film’s theatrical aspect ratio of 2.40:1 is faithfully reproduced in 1080p using the AVC codec. The riotous colors repeatedly pop from the screen in lushly saturated hues that never bleed but constantly dazzle the eye. The varying skin tones of the movie’s participants are replicated to perfection, easily achieved when contrast has been balanced so perfectly. Detail in hair, skin, and clothes is everything it should be in such a sharp, reference quality transfer.
The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 sound mix offers the wonderful musical arrangements in a lush and immersive way that will likely have you repeating individual. All channels benefit from the musical accompaniment with singing and speaking voices firmly anchored to the center channel. There are no aural artifacts like hiss, crackling, pops, or flutter: just beautiful high fidelity sound that matches the best musical soundtracks currently available on Blu-ray.
We get plenty of special features: The “Spectacular, Spectacular Picture-in-Picture Mode” adds a new Bonus View element to the existing DVD audio commentary with director/co-writer/co-producer Baz Luhrmann, production designer/co-costume designer Catherine Martin, director of photography Don McAlpine and co-writer Craig Pearce. Little windows pop up, sometimes more than one at a time, with song credits, photos, raw or behind-the-scenes footage, plus we can branch off to additional video pods. Or we can just watch with the audio-only commentary.
From here we get a wealth of video content that delves deep into the artistic process of Baz and his team. Some bits, like the introduction and the featurette “A Creative Adventure” are brand-new, while much of it has been borrowed from the excellent two-disc DVD. One clever twist that must be acknowledged, however: Very often, old DVD bonus material is ported to Blu-ray in the same old standard definition. Here, a stylized window surrounds the SD video clips so they only fill a portion of the HD screen, making their lack of detail less evident and the results more pleasing to the eye.
The disc is also BD-Live-enabled, with Live Lookup of the cast and crew brought to us by IMDb.com.
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