> I thought about you the other day when Joel and I saw Moulin
> Rouge. I wondered if you had seen it as it seemed to me that
> you would like it very much. I thought the cinematography
> was very interesting and aside from the weepy story loved the
> production. Anyway, hope your summer is going along well.

Thanks for the tip. I wouldn't have gone otherwise. A friend of mine saw it and thought it was okay, not excellent. But you're right: I did like it very much.

I agree with you that the look of the film is exceptional. ``Cinematography'' is not really the right word, though. It's a combination of cinematography, editing, art direction, and production design. All undoubtedly coming from the director's conception of how he wanted the film to look and how he wanted the camera to move.

About twenty minutes or half an hour into the film, I was looking with amazement at the images and suddenly I realized what it was reminding me of: the Disney film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame that came out about ten years ago. Both set in Paris, of course. And with Paris looking very much the same in both cases.

But then I realized what the director had done. He had basically designed the whole film as an animated feature and then made it with live performers.

Well, of course I don't know what his actual process was in making the film, but somehow he had to have been thinking in terms of the look of an animated feature.

And then I started wondering: are these sets actually real, or are the exterior sets all actually graphics? They certainly had the look in large part of something that had been drawn rather than constructed. Sort of the opposite of Who Killed Roger Rabbit? Drawing an animated world (although not all that animated, in fact) and then putting live actors into it.

And he even succeeded in making his live actors look like cartoon characters much of the time. Those shots of those theatre people who huge mustaches where the heads seem to fill the screen in the exact same way that characters in comic strips do.

The credits don't seem to validate the hypothesis that the exterior sets were all actually graphics, however, since there were only a few people credited for graphics and a lot credited for carpentry-created sets. A lot of scenes were clearly blue screen shots, though, and there seemeed to be was quite a bit of use of miniature models.

I liked the campiness of the film. The sentimental ``weepy'' story was exactly right. Films can function in different ways. A movie like The Sting, despite its great look, works primarily on the level of story. For Moulin Rouge, the story only needed to be good enough to hold the movie together while we delight in the images and songs and dialogue. Of course we know the story is totally fake and clichéd. But that's appropriate for a cartoon movie. Especially one that's so totally camp, with all those clichéd rock and rock roll songs from the past few decades.

And this sort of story seems to be appropriate for movies about the stage. The ultimate example is Les Enfants du Paradis, whose story is not quite so fake, but is still a sentimentalized fable.

But Les Enfants du Paradis is nostalgia for a theatrical era that at the time was past but still remembered. This version of Moulin Rouge is for those of us who have no actual memories of that era, but know it through the movies made about it. So it's nostalgia for a nostalgia, as it were.

And why not? Because the reality of the second half of the twentieth century is that media images and stories have actually become part of our reality. In our subjective experience, they are just as real as any other aspect of reality; more so, in fact. So naturally we can be nostalgic for them.

But it's so easy to screw that sort of thing up. I think that the choice to make this a live-action cartoon and to camp it up was exactly right for this film.