"RENT" Movie Discussion — Page 2

I'm just cutting and pasting this from one of the other sixteen threads there were about what was wrong with the rent movie:


Starting the movie with "Seasons of Love" pretty much derails the movie from the start. It's boring. It's kind of creepy. Strangely enough, Thoms is the stagiest of the performers in this scene. She moves weird. She tries too hard. Her eyes roll around like she's on ecstasy. The opening of this film is so dull and inspired that I'm not sure it could ever truly recover.

We barrel full steam into the title song without a shred of exposition.

Why half of "Out Tonight" takes place with Mimi all bundled up, skipping down the street, I'll never know. It doesn't work as her club song, either, except during it's opening chords, when it looks for a moment like it's going to be a recreation of the stage version. It's not, and it's one of the biggest disappointments in the film.

The song sort of clicks at the very end, when Dawson climbs out on her fire escape and wails "at the moon like a cat in heat," the aforementioned robotics of ever autotuned voice notwithstanding. When it segues right into "Another Day" and it feels like things may start cookin' on screen.

"Another Day" is actually one of my favorite songs in the film. The movie really gets out of its own way for a moment, but we soon come crashing back to Columbus's totally boring movie.

"Take Me or Leave Me" had a strange sit-comy feel to it, with everyone mugging and following Maureen and Joanne around.

"Santa Fe" is one of the weirdest songs in the film. If any song called for a dream sequence, it was this one (instead of the stupid one in "Tango: Maureen"). I know a lot of people love this song, but it's never been a favorite of mine, and I wish this had been cut from the movie instead of "Christmas Bells."

So much music and recitative was cut, and yet the damn thing still clocks in at two and a quarter hours. Any time it builds even a hint of momentum, it quickly grinds down to a halt again. Songs appear out of nowhere ("Life Support" is particularly jarring) and often end with a thud.

On stage, Act One was the course of just of few hours while in the film it's about three days. It loses a lot of it urgency that way and just opens the movie up to a lot of questions.(Do they really go to Life Support every day? Why does Angel always take her wig off at those meetings?).

So much dead air, so many long, pointless silences. So many shot shots of the miserable people at the Life Support meeting.

I think another reason the movie was such a disappointment to a lot of fans was because (and people touched on this earlier) all this stuff kept coming from the production (especially Columbus and Rapp) about how it was very faithful to the stage show (which it is structurally. But it's only "faithful" if you consider jettisoning half of the score being faithful - this is a problem I had with Dreamgirls, too, when the intitial word kept saying how the first half was the show verbatim, when it wasn't in the slightest) and how nothing was going to be compromised in order to avoid a (hypothetical) R rating.

Updated On: 6/14/12 at 12:14 PM

Does anyone know if the thread with Anthony Rapp's comments still exists online, and/or have any tips on the Google search that would uncover it? That I'd love to see!

Thanks!

We barrel full steam into the title song without a shred of exposition.

That was the single most bone-headed move among many. That was the moment I knew the film was going to be completely off point.

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SweeneyPhanatic said: "I was in high school when the movie came out, and I was one of the only theatre kids who didn't know the show. When I saw it I thought "This is it? This is what everyone has been raving about all these years?" "

I could see that happening. It reminds me of my mom talking about when she saw A Chorus Line. My mom worked briefly before she had kids as a ballet, dancer, and while we lived in Edmonton, she kept fairly up to date with the dance world from her group of friends, Dance Magazine, and other mags like The New Yorker. I guess she hadn't heard any advance word of mouth about the movie of A Chorus Line, but she had heard about the play for *years* and was desperate to see it. Apparently it was a huge ordeal for her to manage to get a babysitter for all of us (three pre-schoolers), and plan to see the movie on opening, etc--and she talks about how completely depressed she was by the whole experience. She finally saw the stage version--the revival tour a few years back--with me, and felt like the experience was a long time coming to cleanse that disappointment.

I think all the issues with the Rent movie boil down to what others have said--Chris Columbus getting involved in the first place. I appreciate that he loves the film, but, my love of Adventurs in Babysitting aside, IMHO he's the epitome of a uninspired, mediocre Hollywood big name director, and questions of talent aside, blatantly wrong for the film. A Rent film would be hard to do on any level, and I think making much of the music into dialogue did it a disservice (as I feel it might for Les Miz as well--while Dramgirls largely worked for me, I think changing these shows which are sung through *for a reason* into song/dialogue movies makes filmgoers have all the more issue with watching a movie musical). The stylized sequences work for me the best, and I think keeping it through sung would have added to this because, for all its reported grittiness, Rent is not a "realistic" show IMHO.

(And yes, Dawson was pretty great).

"I felt a few scenes gems, but overall, the movie was a distaster. Chris Columbus approached the material in an applogistic manner, as if he was uncomfortable with the singing."

This seems to a big issue with most of these adaptations today. The dirEctors are embarassed that they are musicals. And the times they weren't, the films were just awful (The Producers, Mamm Mia! and The Phantom of the Opera). If you don't want to direct a musical, then don;t direct a musical!!

DAPHNE AGED BEAUTIFULLY, YOU TAKE THAT BACK!!! YOU TAKE BACK WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT DAPHNE!!!!!

Wait, what?

Okay, I read that here somewhere and I can't remember the source. But whatever the motive, it was a stupid decision.

Here is an interview I found where he discusses the date being changed: CC: "That was up for discussion. It was interesting. I asked everyone from Al to Julie, Anthony Rapp, who had been with the show the longest, "What year is this set in?" Everyone gave me a different answer — from 1986 to 1987, 1989, early 1990, and I went with 1989 and 1990 because I [was] intrigued by the concept of the end of one decade moving into another. And, because it was an ambiguous time period in the play, I just felt that it was okay to do . . . . In the hardcover Rent book . . . there's a quote from Billy Aronson, who I think was one of the people who worked on the original story. He fell in love with La Bohème essentially, and writes, "The similarity between these artists and their poverty in New York in the late eighties struck me. The numbers of homeless people were shooting up, people were dying all around us. There was AIDS and lack of government support for the arts. I wanted to rework the plot of the opera." That was in the spring of 1989, [and] he asked Playwrights Horizons to recommend a composer, and the artistic director gave him two names, one of which was Jonathan's, so I think we got the time frame exactly where it was meant to be."

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