Hey folks, Harry here.... there are filmmakers that electrify their audience, and Baz Luhrmann is currently that creature.... There is a vibrancy and verve to his work that just charges you in the theater... You leave with compounded energy and life.... infused with the bottled genie of power he captures on that rectangular slab of white, augmented by the chemical nature of film and thrown startlingly fast through your eyes and etched into the memory of your mind. STRICTLY BALLROOM and his ROMEO AND JULIET are unlike anything I've seen. David Jenkins at the Telegraph in the UK has been following and keeping tabs on the life and mind of one Baz Luhrmann... and his writing seems to capture an ounce of the energy that Baz seems to broadcast. There is tons for you to read there... Far more than I would dream of making off with, but the taste below should give you a charge for the directional heading that Baz wants to head in. Take a look....
"And what we wanted to do was take that notion and turn it on its head. Now, through research, we know it's a fact: (1) Montmartre was Bangkok - a slum/sex industry.' He clicks his fingers and pauses for the most fleeting of nano-seconds: '(2) Moulin Rouge was Studio 54. You know, a place where an entrepreneur invented something based on a dance-craze where the rich and powerful - Bianca Jagger, and Mick, and Elizabeth Taylor - could go down and mix with the young, the beautiful and the penniless. And, as in Bangkok, people at the Moulin Rouge could pay money and have sex with them afterwards. It was a Disneyland of sexuality, a carnival of flesh for sale. Combination: theatre, dance-club, brothel. Now, that's a fairly serious theme, but we want to deal with it in a disarming, fun way. So we're musicalising it. And the musical contract is: how do we understand that da-da da-da-da-da da-daÉ [he sings the famous Offenbach can-can tune] was the most hard-core techno of the time? How do we show that this young kid, this poet, is like Bob Dylan?"
For much much more, CLICK HERE AND EXPLORE!!!
Now something rather confusing here is a statement about getting MOULIN ROUGE ready in time for the deadline to qualify for the Oscars this year.... Now I had heard, as we all have, that the film was going to get a Summer 2001 release... Has this changed? (GOD PLEASE HAVE IT CHANGED!) Most likely this is just a factual error on the part of the writer... but if not... I can't wait! Here ya go....
