RENT:The Movie....a rant(Spoilers)

Cafe Society
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I finally saw it this last weekend when I borrowed the DVD from my RENT-head sister.

I liked it somewhat. I liked many of the songs, the singing was good for the most part. The staging seemed to work(not that I have a critical eye for staging) and you got what you expected with the film medium.

However, this is tempered by a few things. The biggest thing is: It felt rather Whiney. Much of the cast is starving and freezing and going to be evicted…after a year of not paying rent. For some of them, their solution never seems to be “Get a job so you can pay for rent and heat and food” but rather “Live life to the fullest by being unemployed and artistic”. The two who try to leave the life by (in Mark’s case) getting a job and (in Roger’s case) moving to New Mexico seem to be regarded as sellouts(“Sellout” in this context apparently meaning “Trying to improve one’s state of affairs by doing something different”).

There’s, Benny, the “bad guy” because he’s figured out something better to do with the property he partially owns(or works for the owners of) then let a bunch of bums, pimps and freeloaders live there. It actually sounded like him the and “republicans”(the two white guys in business suits who never speak that he follows around) were trying to improve the area by getting rid of some of the shitty buildings. You know, move the neighborhood in the direction so eventually you don’t get mugged just outside your home(like what happened to Collins).

Maureen’s Protest. I’ll just say…I don’t get it. I spent the entire thing trying to figure out how this was a protest and why are the “republicans” worried about it want to bribe Roger and Mark to stop her. If I hadn’t known it was a protest, I would have spent the entire time wondering just what it was and what the purpose was. And I still have no clue what the mooing was supposed to be about.

La Via Bohme. I kinda liked it but also felt that I was being beaten over the head by a bleeding heart for the entire song. And I can see why the waiter didn’t want them coming in.

Angel…My sister thinks he’s the best character in the play and apparently so does every other character(Angel’s funeral), whereas I’m still trying to figure out what was so wonderful about the guy. He helped Tom and occasionally donates money(from what source I don’t know) but it doesn’t seem quite in porportion with how wonderful everyone seems to think he is.

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I second your post entirely.

From what I understand, Angel has a bit more characterization in the stage version.

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Columbus ::coughHACKcough:: worked his usual movie magic on otherwise fine source material. Big sweeping, distracting crane shots, stretching the first act from a single night to a weekend (which meant some pretty strong story and lyric rewrites), and bringing in the original cast 10 years too late are among some of the most egregious faults.

From the OP, it sounds like HPL hasn’t seen the show live. Even with a touring cast, it is much better on stage. One of the major benefits of the stage version is that there really is NO scenery to speak of. For the most part, everything is constructed via scaffolding, a few folding tables and chairs, and just enough props to get the job done. Very minimalist. And it’s a method that really does help to immerse the audience in the story, because they have to imagine the world out of a blank stage.

But here’s the thing with most of the OP’s storyline critiques: yes, the show is whiny. The characters are all proudly poor and valiantly suffering for their (truly mediocre) art*. But at least they have integrity in the morally bankrupt turn of the 21st century, right?

The story as rewritten for modern AIDS-pocked times really just isn’t that good. But the music, and most of the characters, is absolutely stellar. That’s what the diehard Rentheads focus on, more than anything else (though there are those who find some kind of misguided glamour in the idea of art born out of self-inflicted whiny hardship at a working rate of 10 hours per week).

I love the music, and ten years ago, when I was an impressionable teenager whom nobody could ever possibly understand, ever, I bought into the entire show a bit more. Today, it still has some relevant points about tolerance, sexuality, and compassion. But it doesn’t have the versatility of many other works to be able to adapt itself to an audience that grows, ages, matures.

*C’mon. Mimi strips ("…her lawnchair handcuff dance to the sound of ice tea being stirred."). Angel makes her own clothes and exhibits a bit of rhythm banging on a pickle tub. Maureen screams about how the evil establishmentarian Benny oppresses her in a weak, strained allegory with a cowbell. Mark aims his extremely out of focus, shaky Super 8 film camera like it’s a gun, then feeds the stock through a blender in the cutting room.

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A third-rate movie of a second rate musical that would have closed in a week if it weren’t for the writer dying with such good dramatic timing.

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And we all know how unpleasant THAT can be!

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I had real mixed feelings for it, most of them addressed in the theatrical release thread. I intend to buy a copy on DVD, which has cut scenes that were better than the included scenes, when it goes down to the $5 used movie bin at the local Movie Gallery but only so I can occasionally watch the musical scenes and skip through the rest.

Something Roger Ebert mentioned that bugged me also was

On stage, it’s understood that when you see Roger’s film at the end you’re only seeing vignettes. Also, when I saw the play (which was the road show, not sure how it’s done on Broadway) the film was projected on a white globe which gave a cool effect, and you saw the cast members (Constantine Maroulis was Roger) interacting against NYC backgrounds which was cool. In the film within the film you get the distinct impression that he made a silent film and not a good one at that- Mark, boobie, don’t walk but run back to Buzzline and lick Alexi’s ankles if that’s what it takes to get your job back.

I also wished they hadn’t cut the phone calls. Listening to the soun… ORIGINAL CAST RECORDING… I was thinking “why all the sung phone calls? They add nothing but a little exposition” but on stage they worked great. The most irritating cut phone call was in (my favorite song from the show) *

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OOPS

in What You Own when Roger is CLEARLY talking on the phone and says “Alexi/Mark/call me a hypocrite/I need to finish my own film/I quit!”, Columbus kept the lyrics BUT MARK’S ON TOP OF A BUILDING RATHER THAN ON THE PHONE! Is Alexi standing on the fire escape underneath him or something?

And the real loss was Maureen’s big entrance during the cut “Christmas Bells” number. In the film you see her for the first time (silently, which couldn’t be more atypical) in Tango Maureen which short circuits the build up and entrance. Speaking of Tango Maureen, I loved the addition of Tracie Thoms as Joanne, but at risk of being blasphemous to RENT fanatics they should have replaced Idina Mendel as well. I know she was in the original cast and that she’s now a Broadway superstar since Wicked as well as being Mrs. Taye “Benny” Diggs, but she also looks too old for the part in the film. For that matter so did Roger, especially in closeups when you can really see the crows feet and little lines (true he’s HIV+ and been through withdrawal, but those cause a different form of aging- this is clearly a man who, however good looking, is in his 30s).

But the biggest irritant to me was establishing the date of the play as New Years Eve, 1989 to Christmas, 1990- it should have been left “sometime in the last decade of the 20th century” like the play and it would have made the O.J./Thelma & Louise/Timothy McVeigh references less glaringly anachronistic. And while I know there were commitment ceremonies for gay couples in 1989 (though probably not that terribly many given by conservative wealthy black families for their lesbian daughter and her flakey “no parents would want her for a daughter-in-law” drama queen white girlfriend) that choice of setting was untrue to the play and way too 2005. In the play the song is sung on the street and the only time you hear Joanne’s parents it’s on the phone when they specifically ask her NOT to bring her girlfriend AND to wear a dress and bra and generally ‘act straight’ for “mommy’s confirmation hearing”- they’d hardly have a party.

Basically, I’d have filmed the stage play. OR, failing that, I’d have done a lot more shifting from street settings to the play. I’d have left it 90% singing- this isn’t an Oklahoma or Gypsy type musical but a 1990s type where the music propels the plot rather than accentuates it. I’d have used the original ending they filmed (in the deleted scenes) and done a mostly new cast (possibly keeping Collins and Angel and perhaps maybe Mark since he’s believable as a 20 something slacker). Most of all I’d have gone with another director.

And I too have always been bothered by the concept of the musical: these people need to get friggin’ jobs and health insurance. They remind me too much of the people I knew and loathed from my early 20s who lived lives of subsidized independence boasting they’d never sell out but not seeing that getting money from the parents they lambasted was far more “going going SOLD!” than working at Waffle House. But I love the music and when you pretend there’s some backstory you don’t know you can like the characters.

My favorite anecdote about the movie that really sums it up for me is that a part of it was filmed in a large abandoned building in San Francisco- after the film crew got a court order to make the real life SQUATTERS move out of it so they could replace them with central casting’s squatters.

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The thread I started a few months back, for those interested.

And lawoot, that criticism is pretty old-school and really doesn’t hold much water nowadays. Do you honestly think that a musical with absolutely no merits other than the death of it’s author would still be going strong ten years later? Word of mouth would spread that it was a terrible musical, and any momentum it had from Jonathan’s death would have only lasted a year or two, tops.

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FWIW, I had never seen or heard any of the original musical before seeing the film, and I thought it was pretty obvious that Mark’s “film” was supposed to be a set of vignettes. It didn’t even cross my mind that one could interpret it as a really crappy silent film until someone pointed it out a week later.