Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "MOULIN ROUGE!"

In the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series we look at pre-selected movies and name what we think of as the best (or at least our favorite) shot. Anyone can play along and we link up. Next wednesday's topic is Fritz Lang's noir "The Woman in the Window".

But tonight, we celebrate Baz Luhrmann's "Spectacular! Spectacular!" which went wide on US screens ten years ago on this very day.

MOULIN ROUGE!

SHE'S CONFESSSSSSSIIIIINNNNGGGG!
She suddenly had a terrible desire to go to a priest."

We begin with a confession.

Though I was an early veritably possessed cheerleader for Moulin Rouge! since I beheld its genius on opening night at the Ziegfeld theater in NYC, though I saw it five times in the movie theater (a post '80s personal record), and though I named it Best of the Aughts when the decade wrapped, I hadn't actually sat down and watched Moulin Rouge! in full for at least five years. This wasn't intentional. I wrote about the movie so often from 2001 to 2005 that at some point I just put it on the shelf, afraid of breaking its spell. I worried, sitting down in the dark, the remote far from me as if I were back in the temple of the movie theater, 'would it still thrill?'

A silly question it was. From the first frames I was swept up. By the time Zidler and his diamond dogs came rushing at the camera (best shot!?!), a chaotic swishing mess of vibrant color, sexual promise and mashed-up music, I forgot to take any notes at all. By the time Satine, the sparkling diamond, descended from the ceiling onto the dance floor, I had completely blanked on the the "best shot" assignment. So, returning to skim again today, a decision: I would only choose a shot from the film's second half, which I haven't written as much about.

Moulin Rouge! famously borrows, sometimes with song and other times visually, from dozens of famous musicals but it's comic/tragic masks are not unlike the work of the great Stephen Sondheim. In many of Sondheim's most famous musicals, he starts out light and comic and you leave the theater at intermission for fresh air that you don't even need since you're already walking on it. Within seconds of returning to your seat, he's out to crush your heart. Into the Woods provides a famous and literal example: the first act, which is a play on famous fairy tales, ends with the "ever after" part. When you return for the second act you're left to wonder what comes next and that "happily ever after" part sure turns out to be a false bill of goods.

And so it goes with Christian and Satine's romance, which comes on, like the whole of Moulin Rouge!, in a heady hallucinatory rush of color, comedy and eroticism and then dives straight into tragedy after the (literal) romantic fireworks. Consider the juxtaposition of the shots above, one when Christian sings "I-I-I-I-I-I will always love you" (best shot!?!) and Satine is fully on board" and the much later shot of Satine, realizing she has to give Satine up singing "today's the day when dreaming ends" (best shot?!?) which she sings with her eyes glassy, not really looking at the caged bird sharing the frame, who we already know she feels a kinship towards (Someday I'll Fly Away). Both shots are audaciously clichéd, but that's how Moulin Rouge! plays it, boldly throwing ALL tropes at you and daring you to not reembrace them in a fresh dizzying form.

Zidler himself precipitates this vacant "you're dying"/ 'I'm already dead' staring and the longer I live with the movie the richer the Zidler/Satine relationship becomes. So for the moment, and there are roughly 100,000 shots worthy of the name "best" in the film, this is the one that absolutely kills. A slow cold zoom out on Zidler performing Zidler as The Maharaja (aka also the Duke) claiming Satine all over again. It drains the last life from our heroine. Art is imitating life and then life will imitate the art again.

She is mine. She is mine."

The cinematography by Donald McAlpine which so deserved the Oscars that year (sorry LotR), loves to shoot Nicole Kidman with blue light whenever she is bereft of love. Even in the "Elephant Love Medley" when she's first resisting Ewan McGregor she's lit in blue while he is glowing with warmer light right behind him. By the end of "Spectacular! Spectacular!", beginning with the exact moment when she coughs on stage, all the hot pink light which had been battling it out with the blue, vanishes to leave her like this.

She is mine. She is mine."

She always was... Zidler's that is. Christian was never able to steal her away, only playing with her in her gilded cage for that Summer of Love, 1899.

Madonna's classic "Like a Virgin" number is only used comically in the film, to mock the prostitute/john Satine/Duke relationship. But it could just as well have been used dramatically, with Satine in Christian's arms; thawed out, shiny and new. This beloved movie, ten years familiar, can still touch you for the very first time. It hasn't lost a drop of heart or magic in a decade's time. 

 

18 Children of the Revolution
Visit these fine blogs for more on this "Spectacular! Spectacular!"

• Victim of the Time "vibrant infatuations"
• Film Misery Christian, trapped
• Amiresque the blue eyes of Moulin Rouge!
• Cheap Seat Reviews thank you for curing him of his ridiculous obsession with love!
• Intafada afternoon delights
• Movies Kick Ass the camera loves her
• Film Actually "You're daying, Satine"
• Being Norma Jeane Midnight in Paris?
• Stale Popcorn "brash. cold. bright"  You can can can.
• Mosaical Musings "Roxanne... you don't have to put on the red light."
• Ahora Satine and her beauty.
• Derrek's Tumblr "romance on a grandiose scale"
• Moved by a Screen Dream Christian in agony
• Antagony & Ecstasy when in doubt, go puerile.
• Serious Film love/hate relationship: best and worst shot.
• Awww, The Movies couldn't possibly choose one.
• missemmamm "smoldering temptress?"
• Sketchy Details a sunny moment via "Come What May"
• Sorta That Guy a love that will live forever!

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Reader Spotlight: Sergio

Oopsie. We missed a week of our series of mini reader profiles. We're getting to know other members of The Film Experience community.

Today we're talking to Sergio from Guatemala who has been a very welcome consistent contributor to our HMWYBS party on his tumblr "Awww, The Movies ♥". Check that out.

Nathaniel:  Do you remember your first movie or first movie obsession?
SERGIO: The first time I went to the movies, it was with my father and sister. It was a strange/random act from my father, because we were going somewhere else, I was 10 years old and I had never been to the movies! The movie? Nothing relevant, but I was captivated by the experience. Two years later I started to skip events at school to go to the movies by myself.

Uh-oh. Okay, when did you start reading the film experience?
It was around 2004/2005. I even have an e-mail that I sent to myself (lame, I know!) in which I copied the site's address, like a prehistoric bookmark, although in those years I just read the Oscar Predictions. Later, I discovered the blog and I blame Nicole Kidman and my Moulin Rouge's obsession, they were the reason why I came back and found myself immersed.

First question Part 2: Yes, Moulin Rouge! was my first movie obsession.

Nicole & Baz are Moulin Rouge! WinnersWhat is your favorite film genre and why?
I know technically it’s not a genre, but my favorite movies are from Auteur, some people consider the Auteurism like the anti-genre, but that is irrelevant in this question. I just want to say I love to watch a true original director making magic, knowing what he is doing, trusting more in his instincts than in a studio or external influences. The artists, the pioneers, the virtuosos, they are the ones who make me buy the ticket.

Your 3 favorite actresses. Go.
To make my answer easy and shorter, I'm limiting it to modern actresses. This is going to sound like a complete cliché, but I can answer the question with two words: The Hours. The cast is so amazing, a total turn-on for me. If only these three could be in the same scene. La Streep + Nicole Kidman + Julianne Moore = Heaven! They are my trinity, if they demand, I obey.

Take away one oscar and give it to someone else. Who when why?
Can I do this every year? I could easily take Forest Whitaker’s Oscar and give it to Ryan Gosling for Half Nelson; take Jim Broadbent’s for Iris and then give it to him back again for Moulin Rouge! Brokeback Mountain over Crash, duh! That was a no brainer. In my perfect dreamy world Julianne Moore would have won for “Far from Heaven” and I would agree with Nicole’s loss, because Nicole Kidman would have won the year before for MR! Meryl would have won her third Oscar for ‘Doubt’, but Kate Winslet would have won for ‘Eternal Sunshine…’ and my re-history also has a happy ending, no second Oscar to Hillary Swank.

Umm, I can't believe Glenn Close doesn’t have an Oscar yet, so I would take Jodie Foster's first Oscar and I would give it to her for Dangerous Liaisons (1988).

One does not applaud the tenor for clearing his throat.

Close wasn't only clearing her throat, she was singing opera.

Previous Reader Spotlights
the lovely ladies: Ester, Leehee, Jamie and Dominique  and the gents  Borja, John, Chris, Peter, Ziyad, Andrew, Yonatan, Keir, Kyle, Vinci, Victor, Bill, Hayden, Murtada, Cory, Walter, Paolo, and BBats

May Flowers: 'The Hours'

Kurt here from Your Movie Buddy. In an intro to cinema studies course, my peers and I were tasked to select and present a three- to five- minute segment from a film for a collegiate show and tell. The terms: choose something that features effective editing and/or noteworthy use of music. With the field so finely narrowed (sarcasm), my mind went...everywhere. Rather than drive myself nuts, I opted for the opening credits sequence of a movie I always feel like I've seen recently: The Hours.

This remains one of my very favorite movies of the aughts, and it's a fine specimen for Nat's "May Flowers" series. The brisk and beautiful introduction culminates with a trio of bouquets, but more on those in a bit. Guided by Phillip Glass's score (by turns elegant, chipper and paranoid), we wake up with three women, all of them linked by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. We have Virginia (Nicole Kidman), the writer; Laura (Julianne Moore), the reader; and Clarissa (Meryl Streep), the character (in a matter of speaking). The sequence sets the stage for the three ladies' storylines, which seem to run parallel, but are decades – and miles – apart.

Click to read more ...

Batman at the Circus: 'Massacre Under the Big Top'

Kurt here from Your Movie Buddy, offering a circus-themed post to coincide with the release of Water for Elephants, 20th Century Fox's spring tentpole (nyuk, nyuk). My three-ring subject is a pivotal scene from Batman Forever, that neon-coated guilty pleasure that gave way to what's likely my most hated movie of all time. It begins with a cube of cheese:

I've really got to get you out of those clothes...

            "Excuse me?"

...and into a black dress. Tell me, doctor, do you like the circus?"

And with that, Bruce Wayne (Val Kilmer) and the bankly-named Dr. Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman) head out for a very script-friendly first date, conveniently opening the door for The Birth of Robin. We soar into the Hippodrome, a waterfront arena just outside the downtown area of Joel Schumacher's rainbow vision of Gotham, and pass multiple instances of the production designer's imperialist-society-by-way-of-paper-mâché aesthetic.

Inside, Gotham's finest gather to watch the acrobatic stylings of The Flying Graysons, a carnie clan that includes Dick (Chris O'Donnell), his brother, and his mom and dad. To my knowledge, this setup adheres rather closely to the lore of the Batman comics, though Dick/Robin was just a wee lad of 10 when taken under Batman's cape.

Anyway (getting ahead of ourselves), the Graysons prove a crowd favorite.

Click to read more ...

New on DVD: Rabbit Hole, Bergman and oh yes, The King's Speech.

Jose here, with a roundup of this week's new DVD releases.

First up we have the Oscar winning The King's Speech which surprisingly hasn't been out on DVD for decades. Doesn't it feel like one of those movies you're used to passing by on video store aisles, next to things like Around the World in 80 Days, Oliver! and all those other Best Picture winners nobody remembers anymore? Maybe I'm alone on this one, since the film was so popular it ended up making $138 million in the North American box office. Will perennial home video popularity follow?

Much less popular, but inarguably more interesting, was Sofia Coppola's Somewhere which also debuts on DVD tomorrow. The Venice Film Festival winner was supposed to reignite Stephen Dorff's career but went by almost undetected by audiences. Give it a try at home, bask in its visual richness and join Nat next week as he features it in "Hit Me With Your Best Shot".

There is also a rerelease of From Dusk Till Dawn, which includes the documentary Full Tilt Boogie: a chronicle of the behind the scenes of the George Clooney vampire fest.

Speaking of things that suck, how crappy was it that Nicole Kidman failed to win any major awards for her moving turn in Rabbit Hole? This tale of grief and sorrow also contained a powerhouse performance by the always underrated Aaron Eckhart and great turns from the reliably good Dianne Wiest and Sandra Oh. The Blu-ray includes deleted scenes and audio commentary with director John Cameron Mitchell. I'd love to hear how he found the calm to direct this after his two outrageously "visual" previous movies.

Also out on DVD is Ingrid Bergman in Sweden a boxset that includes some of the legendary actress' most famous Swedish movies. The set includes Intermezzo (which she then remade for her Hollywood debut), A Woman's Face and making its DVD debut is June Night which was Ingrid's last Swedish movie before moving to America. 

Other new releases include Jane Campion's Sweetie making its Blu-ray debut courtesy of The Criterion Collection and Peter Weir's The Way Back.

 Excited about any of these releases?