All Rent Reviews (Place Here) — Page 26

looks like they did. HAHA!!!

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haha. Nope, it is for real. And just look at the price. YIKES!!!


"Take me for what I am"--A Barbie Doll

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they've gotta be friggin' kidding me.

jeezuz....

does the Mimi one come with accesories like a hyperdermic needle?

how about Mimi's Dream Squat and Strip Club Playset?

'Rent'
*A commodified faux bohemia, the film elicits the same kind of numbing soul-sadness as children's beauty pageants, tiny dogs in expensive boots and Gandhi in Apple ads.


'Rent'


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.


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."

**snap, snap with a head twist . . . snap*

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Marquise, although I didn't like the film, Mimi's appearance actually didn't bother me. I was simply gathering various criticisms to use in my hyperbolic post.

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I didn't really want to write a formal review of this film, due to the very personal nature and effect it has had on me. I will start with my "qualifier" and then see if I can put it all into words...

The Qualifier: I knew Jon Larson when I lived in New York in the mid-'80s. We both worked at the same theatre in Michigan, although Jon got his union card and left the year before I started working there. A couple of years later, when I got "unionized" myself and moved to the Big Apple, we had mutual Michigan friends that were all starting out in the city, and that's how we met. I remember listening to Jon play us his music in a living room full of friends and talking passionately about the stories and the songs he was working on. This was not long before he started writing "Rent," incidentally. He was so excited that Stephen Sondheim had liked his music and had made a point of telling him so. He seemed to be on cloud nine about that (understandably). We listened to his latest demo tape with Marin Mazzie singing. We called him "Marv" (after Marvin Hamlisch). This was a running joke started by his close friends Marin and Scott Burkell, and Jon seemed to enjoy that and take to it in stride. He was a great guy. As nice as he was talented. So... several years later in Los Angeles, when I picked up a Newsweek magazine in an office to read about Jon's new show opening Off-Broadway... and in the first sentence, found out that our old Bohemian "Marv" had scored these amazing reviews and had also DIED suddenly... I fell immediately into a state of shock that I have never quite been able to disassociate myself from, whenever I see, hear, or talk about his "Rent." It's surreal to me. It feels like it happened to someone else, not him, not us... not this.

I walked in today to the movie theatre with a few "preconceptions," most of which proved to be wrong. I went in not thinking much of Chris Columbus as a director. He's not terrible in my eyes, just "ordinary" in his approach. I was a little worried about the new cast members and how they would fit in with a group so uniformly bonded by their experiences with the material. Again, I was wrong on both of these counts.

Let me start by saying that "Rent" is a great show. It's NOT a perfect show, and Jon knew that. It was in very good shape, and he knew that too. He was proud of it and rightfully so. But knowing Jon, he would have tinkered with it after the (ultimately successful) Off-Broadway run... changed things, edited things, and tightened and focused things for any possible Broadway run... but because he was robbed of that opportunity, the show was frozen in an "almost there" state. Forever a work-in-progress, like the painting of George Washington that isn't quite complete. I've grown to love that painting for what it is, not wishing for everything to be filled in and perfect. Just as I have grown to love "Rent" the exact same way.

Columbus did a terrific job of delivering Larson's "Rent" as a movie, faults and all. His use of camera movement to assist the heightened emotions and his eye for composition and content were really outstanding. I wasn't expecting that.

The cast surprised me as well in several ways. I was expecting a confident and steady hand from the ensemble of original cast members who knew these roles so well, but was a little mistaken by that assumption. The ones who don't have much (if any) experience in front of a camera faltered a bit initially, but NEVER stumbled completely. Most often, they worked a bit too hard at conveying their emotions. Not that they were phony or "stagy," but just a tad too MUCH, particularly in the first part of the film. I'm talking about Pascal, Heredia and Menzel in particular. The other original members who have had more time in front of a camera seemed to do better (Martin, Rapp and Diggs). All you have to do is look at the scenes with Roger and Mimi together. Dawson is a film actor, and she knows how much her eyes can show thought and feeling on screen. How much a single split-second glance can speak volumes. It comes off as effortless and natural, while Pascal seemed to work harder to show us his emotions. This was true in his scenes with Rapp, as well. Anthony knows the camera well enough already. Adam will learn to trust its lens as he gets more experience in future projects, which I'm sure he will have. And the other "new gal" Tracie knocked me out in all possible ways. She has a bright future in all media, if she wants it.

I was thinking how strange it is to watch a film that is 90% sung. "Moulin Rouge" was so stylized that I bought it without question. It was a fantasy-pastiche that created a world where anything was possible and even ultimately expected. But to see people singing virtually non-stop in a quasi-realistic, often intimate setting is a bit taxing after a while. And I'm not sure I've ever seen it pulled off completely successfully. That could be a flaw of the genre itself. An "opera-movie" is still not a proven or reliable format. "Rent" comes very close to pulling it off here... and I think "Jesus Christ Superstar" (the original movie) and "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" do so as well. But others ("Evita" and "Phantom" and even "Tommy") often leave me with a gnawing feeling of claustrophobia. I find myself wanting to come up for air a little more often than we get to, because of the confines of the material.

All of that said, there were many shining and thrilling moments: "Take Me As I Am" being at the top of the list. This was where Idina completely dazzled in front of the camera, and she and Tracie rose to a new height together in the film. Martin and Heredia's "I'll Cover You," as well as Martin's dramatic scene at Angel's memorial, were both terrific and very effective.

I found myself in tears several times watching this movie. I guess that was to be expected with my history. There was a time years ago, when I lived in New York City and knew people like these characters on screen. I knew the era. I knew the feeling. Hell, I knew the author. And I kept picturing "Marv" sitting in the audience right there with us... beaming proudly from ear to ear.

Loving every damn minute of it.

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Updated On: 11/25/05 at 07:03 PM

"Loving every damn minute of it."

Exactly the same here.

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Sorry. I may have "cut & paste" -ed but I did attribute it. Also, I followed the subject - put reviews here (NOT comments on same). Fortunately for me, my life if full enough that I haven't had the time to read all 600+ posts. I saw RENT on Bway opening night and found the show sophomoric and the staging deriverative. And, a few days later, Sam Shepard asked me if he thought he'd be more successful if he "off-ed" himself. I know that's like throwing gas on the Jonathan Larson fires, (and yes scathing because Jonathan's death was the loss of a promising - but not yet fully formed - talent) but RENT is successful popular art, not classic. There is obviously room for both but let's not confuse them.

B12B, your review gave me chills.

Thanks for sharing.

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Does anyone know what Ebert and Roeper said?

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http://epilot2.hamptonroads.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:LowLevelEntityToPrintGifMSIE_VIRGINIANPILOT&Type=text/html&Locale=english-skin-custom&Path=VirginianPilot/2005/11/26&ChunkNum=0&ID=Ar05400

thats a review from my local paper, in Southeastern Virginia( Virginia Beach/ Norfolk)

its mixed.... mostly positive!

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