My friend tells me that he read in The Advocate that the guys who made Chicago originally pitched a film adaptation of Rent to the Miramax folks. Obviously, they took Chicago over Rent, and were incredibly successful. Is there a chance the same crew would go on to make the film version of Rent on the back of Chicago’s success?
i think we will have about 5 dozen musical movies soon, most of which will be terrible.
Eek.
I found Rent horrible on stage. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be on screen.
Am I the only one who did not enjoy Rent? The characters well dull and I barely cared about any of them. I found myself completely unable to relate to anything in the play.
Maybe it was the production I saw. Maybe it was the poor seats I had. I don’t know. But wow, if this goes to film, I will NOT be seeing it.
I’m with you Harli, completely.
I found Rent to be pretty shallow, sappy, and not very deep or interesting. I’d say I could care less about a movie adaptation, but that’d be a lie; I’m dreading the resurgance in its popularity that would follow such a mainstream revival.
At one point Robert De Niro was going to produce “Rent” as a movie with Martin Scorsese directing. I couldn’t imagine it being very interesting, given the source materials. One of the most over-rated theatrical productions I’ve ever seen.
I read about the notion of a Rent movie in Parade a few years back. Nothing like a really reliable, high-quality source of news, eh?
I’ve got to put in a few good words for Rent. Right now, I find it patronizing, silly, and unnecessary. But when I first heard it, when I was twelve years old, it opened my eyes to lifestyles that I didn’t understand, and made me really positively predisposed to a lot of people that I never knew existed. It’s helped me a lot to deal with the everyday drama of my group of friends, who have pretty much all come out of the closet or transgendered since those happy days of junior high. I think it’s important to give kids in their early teens something like Rent to teach them that it’s pretty awesome to be tolerant of people with diverse sociocultural backgrounds.
But, yeah, I don’t know how a self-respecting grownup could tolerate such a musical.
Just so this thread doesn’t die a death where everyone in it hammers Rent (and to keep up my track record of never agreeing with Keith Berry as to what’s good in popular culture. I’m winning BTW): I thoroughly enjoyed Rent, picked up the soundtrack the next day, and would look forward to seeing a big screen adaptation of it.
What Asylum said: I absolutely love Rent. I have the Broadway original cast album and have managed to memorize most of the lyrics. How can you not love the incandescent “Out Tonight” or the romantic “I’ll Cover You” and its emotional, gospel-tinged reprise sung by Collins after Angel’s death from AIDS?
My only quibbles are the dated references in the lyrics, such as Act Up which barely exists these days and AZT which has been superseded by HAART retrovirals. Even Maureen’s song “Over Thew Moon,” a brilliant parody of performance art, looks a bit rickety (performance art? That’s so 1994). The more serious problem is the cheat at the end, in which Mimi dies, causing the audience to invest emotionally, only to take it back in order to give the play an implausibly “happy” ending. Feh.
This week’s Entertainment Weekly has a story on NBC possibly doing an adapation w/ Miramax (since they own the rights). Not many details, other than that they need approval from Jonathon Larson’s estate.