accidental feminist

Here is a great review of RENT from the LA Times. Right on the money.

MOVIE REVIEW

‘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.

By Carina Chocano
Times Staff Writer

November 23, 2005

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.

(Two tickets for an 8 p.m. Friday show at the Nederlander Theater in
New York, up to $295 apiece. The chance to tap your Ferragamo-shod toe
to lyrics like “No pension … hating convention … hating pretension …
riding your bike midday past the three-piece suits?” Priceless.)

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.”

–end–