This Blog In September 2001: Day Ten.

Film I re-invigorated my love of cinema this afternoon. I wasn't expecting to - it just happened. It happened during the opening moments of Moulin Rouge. Here is a film which had stripped away all of the usual mess at the beginning of a film to do with quietly setting up character and plot and was actually giving away the end, throwing us directly into the place. We visit the cinema for escapism and here it was.Another attempt to create a hip-musical, Rouge is better than most, possibly because rather than taking it’s cues from the Hollywood of the 1940s, we have the ye olde musical exemplified by the strangely long-running tv series ‘The Good Old Days’. Yes the characters are simplistic, but no less simplistic than the average Lloyd-Webber – and at least here don’t feel like constructs of the script – even if in fact they are. As with ‘Romeo and Juliet’, director Baz Luhrmann takes his cues from music video to the point of using late twentieth century pop over more traditional music.…