30 Day Eviction Notice

I don't really like musicals and so I probably should have just avoided Rent altogether. But I didn't it and I suffered for it. Perhaps musicals work better on stage where despite all attempts to appear real, the confinement of the stage is recognizable. In a movie, however, filmed in a real city the very idea that a person would break into choreographed dance or staged song as they go about their day is absurd in the extreme. And from the first song as Anthony Rapp rides his bike along, I was stifling laughter at how absurd the film was truly going to be.

Under the guise of being about AIDS in the 90s, the film seems really to be about Bohemians. And I like hippies/bohemians about as much as I like musicals. Why must I watch a movie about a bunch of whiny generation x-ers who feel that reality is stifling their creativity? It seems a travesty to the people out there who really are homeless with no place to work, no family to turn to in need. Truly hungry and truly cold, these people seem almost mocked by the bohemian who rejects responsibility for no good reason.

What little background we get to why some of the characters have AIDS tend to point to drug use, which doesn't exactly earn sympathy points in my book. And of course the villain of the story is the guy who finally recognized he had to accept responsibility. Oh gosh no, evil reality we can't let that spoil our good times. The film has all the cliched roles you could dream for. There is the struggling musician (who had a name but all I can recall is that he reminded me of Bon Jovi) is struggling to find love again after having lost his true love. There is the struggling filmmaker striving not to sell out to the corporates while making what might possibly be the worst film ever made. There is the struggling performance artist, the struggling graduate student, and so on and so forth. None is particularly interesting and none ever rises above their generic template.

The film and perhaps the musical (I admit I have never seen it) doesn't even have the balls to end on a down note. God forbid anyone actually die or be sad. One hundred twenty eight minutes, how you measure the time I wasted watching this film.