Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "MOULIN ROUGE!"

In the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series we look at pre-selected movies and name what we think of as the best (or at least our favorite) shot. Anyone can play along and we link up. Next wednesday's topic is Fritz Lang's noir "The Woman in the Window".

But tonight, we celebrate Baz Luhrmann's "Spectacular! Spectacular!" which went wide on US screens ten years ago on this very day.

MOULIN ROUGE!

SHE'S CONFESSSSSSSIIIIINNNNGGGG!
She suddenly had a terrible desire to go to a priest."

We begin with a confession.

Though I was an early veritably possessed cheerleader for Moulin Rouge! since I beheld its genius on opening night at the Ziegfeld theater in NYC, though I saw it five times in the movie theater (a post '80s personal record), and though I named it Best of the Aughts when the decade wrapped, I hadn't actually sat down and watched Moulin Rouge! in full for at least five years. This wasn't intentional. I wrote about the movie so often from 2001 to 2005 that at some point I just put it on the shelf, afraid of breaking its spell. I worried, sitting down in the dark, the remote far from me as if I were back in the temple of the movie theater, 'would it still thrill?'

A silly question it was. From the first frames I was swept up. By the time Zidler and his diamond dogs came rushing at the camera (best shot!?!), a chaotic swishing mess of vibrant color, sexual promise and mashed-up music, I forgot to take any notes at all. By the time Satine, the sparkling diamond, descended from the ceiling onto the dance floor, I had completely blanked on the the "best shot" assignment. So, returning to skim again today, a decision: I would only choose a shot from the film's second half, which I haven't written as much about.

Moulin Rouge! famously borrows, sometimes with song and other times visually, from dozens of famous musicals but it's comic/tragic masks are not unlike the work of the great Stephen Sondheim. In many of Sondheim's most famous musicals, he starts out light and comic and you leave the theater at intermission for fresh air that you don't even need since you're already walking on it. Within seconds of returning to your seat, he's out to crush your heart. Into the Woods provides a famous and literal example: the first act, which is a play on famous fairy tales, ends with the "ever after" part. When you return for the second act you're left to wonder what comes next and that "happily ever after" part sure turns out to be a false bill of goods.

And so it goes with Christian and Satine's romance, which comes on, like the whole of Moulin Rouge!, in a heady hallucinatory rush of color, comedy and eroticism and then dives straight into tragedy after the (literal) romantic fireworks. Consider the juxtaposition of the shots above, one when Christian sings "I-I-I-I-I-I will always love you" (best shot!?!) and Satine is fully on board" and the much later shot of Satine, realizing she has to give Satine up singing "today's the day when dreaming ends" (best shot?!?) which she sings with her eyes glassy, not really looking at the caged bird sharing the frame, who we already know she feels a kinship towards (Someday I'll Fly Away). Both shots are audaciously clichéd, but that's how Moulin Rouge! plays it, boldly throwing ALL tropes at you and daring you to not reembrace them in a fresh dizzying form.

Zidler himself precipitates this vacant "you're dying"/ 'I'm already dead' staring and the longer I live with the movie the richer the Zidler/Satine relationship becomes. So for the moment, and there are roughly 100,000 shots worthy of the name "best" in the film, this is the one that absolutely kills. A slow cold zoom out on Zidler performing Zidler as The Maharaja (aka also the Duke) claiming Satine all over again. It drains the last life from our heroine. Art is imitating life and then life will imitate the art again.

She is mine. She is mine."

The cinematography by Donald McAlpine which so deserved the Oscars that year (sorry LotR), loves to shoot Nicole Kidman with blue light whenever she is bereft of love. Even in the "Elephant Love Medley" when she's first resisting Ewan McGregor she's lit in blue while he is glowing with warmer light right behind him. By the end of "Spectacular! Spectacular!", beginning with the exact moment when she coughs on stage, all the hot pink light which had been battling it out with the blue, vanishes to leave her like this.

She is mine. She is mine."

She always was... Zidler's that is. Christian was never able to steal her away, only playing with her in her gilded cage for that Summer of Love, 1899.

Madonna's classic "Like a Virgin" number is only used comically in the film, to mock the prostitute/john Satine/Duke relationship. But it could just as well have been used dramatically, with Satine in Christian's arms; thawed out, shiny and new. This beloved movie, ten years familiar, can still touch you for the very first time. It hasn't lost a drop of heart or magic in a decade's time. 

 

18 Children of the Revolution
Visit these fine blogs for more on this "Spectacular! Spectacular!"

• Victim of the Time "vibrant infatuations"
• Film Misery Christian, trapped
• Amiresque the blue eyes of Moulin Rouge!
• Cheap Seat Reviews thank you for curing him of his ridiculous obsession with love!
• Intafada afternoon delights
• Movies Kick Ass the camera loves her
• Film Actually "You're daying, Satine"
• Being Norma Jeane Midnight in Paris?
• Stale Popcorn "brash. cold. bright"  You can can can.
• Mosaical Musings "Roxanne... you don't have to put on the red light."
• Ahora Satine and her beauty.
• Derrek's Tumblr "romance on a grandiose scale"
• Moved by a Screen Dream Christian in agony
• Antagony & Ecstasy when in doubt, go puerile.
• Serious Film love/hate relationship: best and worst shot.
• Awww, The Movies couldn't possibly choose one.
• missemmamm "smoldering temptress?"
• Sketchy Details a sunny moment via "Come What May"
• Sorta That Guy a love that will live forever!

 do you love the film experience, consider a donation to keep it a daily experience.

Melanie's Mini Memoir: Winslet, Jackson and "Heavenly Creatures"

Our Wednesday night series Hit Me With Your Best Shot resumes on May 4th with David Lynch's Eraserhead (see the May & June schedule here), but tonight we bring you A Very Special Episode.

We knew from Twitter that the actress Melanie Lynskey (Win Win) enjoyed this particular series. After our group gaze at Heavenly Creatures (1994), which happened to be her film debut, she sent us the following note with permission to publish it. How great! Melanie is currently in movie theaters as the troubled mom in Win Win but she's got two more films on the way. She's completed work on Eye of the Hurricane co-starring with Campbell Scott (another underrated actor) and Touchback, a sports fantasy starring Kurt Russell. 

Melanie takes it from here...

"So excited you did a Hit Me With Your Best Shot on "Heavenly Creatures". I loved reading what everyone had to say. I don't know if I can do a *best* shot, but the one that came to mind instantly as being the most symbolic of my experience on the movie as a whole is a small scene which is part of the montage in the early scenes of the friendship (you talked a bit about that montage). There's a shot where Diana Kent dabs her lips with a napkin at a dinner table and the camera swoops around the table and settles on me imitating the way she does that.

It's kind of a weird shot for me to choose; there are so many beautiful shots in the movie (the amazing Alun Bollinger, AlBol!) and so many moments I so clearly remember filming because I was so connected to Kate in that moment, or I was going through some crazy emotional turmoil for a scene and there it is, captured forever.

Filming that little dining room scene, to witness Peter's energy and how badly he wanted this tiny little moment to work out was about the most inspiring thing my little 15 year old self could see. He had this idea, and he wanted to make it work, and every take we did felt exciting, because we were all so invested in making that shot happen. I remember looking around the room and really feeling so grateful to be exactly where I was at that moment, with a group of frustrated people in a little room doing the same thing over and over.

I cant remember how many takes we did. We did it many times and I remember Peter just being so committed, even though it was proving very difficult to capture. The timing was very tricky.  The feeling of being part of a group of collaborators working together to create something was so powerful to me. I felt so fortunate to be part of the group.

The scene in the bathtub where it's all kind of blue - i remember that one like it was yesterday, it was so intense, the feeling in the room. And the shot of Kate is insane, about as beautiful as it gets. And any scene with Sarah Peirse feels extraordinary to me because she gave such a beautiful, honest performance. She just amazes me.

When I think about that shoot, the thing that I think about is how completely excited I was to be doing my first professional acting job, and how the most exciting times for me were those where I was sitting there thinking...

This is a movie. This is what it's like when people make a movie. This is amazing.

When Peter would get all excited about something, he would get like a little boy and it was adorable. Every camera move he and AlBol came up with was just mesmerising. The pieces would all click together and the chemistry of the scene would start to be created, and to me, it felt like magic.

They always wanted movement, and we as actors were always timing what we were doing to the camera move. Kate and I needed to have so much energy at all times, and Peter and AlBol and the way they were shooting really contributed to this sort of breathless, intense, excited headspace that we pretty much lived in for 3 months. Kate and I would go home at the end of a long day and hang out for hours just jabbering away to each other."

We sincerely thank Melanie Lynskey for this mini-window back to the making of one of the best films of the 1990s. [Here's the original post which prompted it.]

Next Wednesday on "HMWYBS" we're discussing David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977). Join us with your own choice or just be here for the discussion. Eraserhead is currently available on Netflix Instant Watch.

Batman at the Circus: 'Massacre Under the Big Top'

Kurt here from Your Movie Buddy, offering a circus-themed post to coincide with the release of Water for Elephants, 20th Century Fox's spring tentpole (nyuk, nyuk). My three-ring subject is a pivotal scene from Batman Forever, that neon-coated guilty pleasure that gave way to what's likely my most hated movie of all time. It begins with a cube of cheese:

I've really got to get you out of those clothes...

            "Excuse me?"

...and into a black dress. Tell me, doctor, do you like the circus?"

And with that, Bruce Wayne (Val Kilmer) and the bankly-named Dr. Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman) head out for a very script-friendly first date, conveniently opening the door for The Birth of Robin. We soar into the Hippodrome, a waterfront arena just outside the downtown area of Joel Schumacher's rainbow vision of Gotham, and pass multiple instances of the production designer's imperialist-society-by-way-of-paper-mâché aesthetic.

Inside, Gotham's finest gather to watch the acrobatic stylings of The Flying Graysons, a carnie clan that includes Dick (Chris O'Donnell), his brother, and his mom and dad. To my knowledge, this setup adheres rather closely to the lore of the Batman comics, though Dick/Robin was just a wee lad of 10 when taken under Batman's cape.

Anyway (getting ahead of ourselves), the Graysons prove a crowd favorite.

Click to read more ...

Best Shot: "HEAVENLY CREATURES"

Hit Me With Your Best Shot. Each week we assign a movie. Participants are asked to select its best shot and post it to their own webspace by Wednesday evening. Everyone is welcome to join in. Next week's topic is Beauty & The Beast (1991) and there had better be a big crowd. Who doesn't love that movie?

Today we're gazing at...

HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994)

With last year's mania for the dehumanizing Kick-Ass, this Spring's death-skilled Hanna and the internet's current casting obsessions with Hunger Games, in which a young girl Katniss (to be played by Jennifer Lawrence) becomes a killer to stay alive in a future that loves murder games, you'd think just about every other violent act in the world nowadays was committed by teenage girls. This type of violence can still shock onscreen -- and I hope it always will -- but it almost never arrives with both bludgeon force and emotional acuity the way it does in Peter Jackson's hysteric and hysterically imaginative Heavenly Creatures.

The problem that Heavenly Creatures poses with a "best shot" blogging experiment is not that it doesn't have these images, but that the images are rarely static and eager to be captured with your typical screen capturing devices. Only full on film clips would suffice. Peter Jackson loves the motion in his motion pictures and Juliet ("Introducing... Kate Winslet") and Pauline ("And Introducing... Melanie Lynskey") are about the most spastic female characters of the past couple of decades outside of maybe Molly Shannon's "Superstar!" They're constantly flinging themselves about. (read the full post.)

Click to read more ...

Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "PSYCHO"

In this weekly series "Hit Me With Your Best Shot", we look at a pre-determined movie and select what we think is the best (or at least our favorite) shot. 

 Let's stare this down right away.

The best shot in Alfred Hitchcock's immortal Psycho (1960) comes from arguably the most famous single scene in cinema's 100+ year history. It's that devastating slow clockwise turn (mirroring blood swirling down the drain) paired with a slow zoom out. Marion Crane is dead or thereabouts. Dying in the shower allows her final posthumous tears.

In what is arguably Hitchcock's most brilliant decision in a film filled with them, this moment turns the movie's fabled voyeurism (and explicit understanding of cinema's very nature) back at the audience. We've been staring at Marion Crane, foolish bird-like Marion, for 49 minutes watching her squirm in her "private trap". We couldn't (didn't want to?) save her. Now it's her turn to stare back.

How much death does the cinema need?
[read full post and participating blogs]

Click to read more ...