LogFAQs > #933348893

20. Rent

Inviso: 12
JONA: 15
Johnbobb: 16
Karo: 17
Scarlet: 22
Genny: 26
KBM: 28

Inviso - This is another musical that Ive had the opportunity to see in a theater, and I passed it up. So, this was my first real encounter with Rent, outside of the cultural mind, where everyone knows 525,600 Minutes. And it kept my attention. It felt like a true screen-adaptation of a stage musical, transitioning from song to song with only brief interludes. And the songs felt diverse in their tone and sound. For a musical dealing with some severe hardships (namely: Angel having AIDS and dying over the course of a montage, and Mimi dealing with drug addiction and getting kicked out of her apartment), it manages to maintain a light and hopeful atmosphere. I appreciate that, given some of the headier movies on this list and how dour they are in their handling of the subject matter. Ultimately though, this feels like a good movie that just happens to be filler. Its watchable and enjoyablebut I just dont come out of it with any memorability.

JONA - I had no idea where to rank this. I dont like most of the characters. I found them generally to be pretentious and entitled. Even though I didnt like them, I was engrossed with their problems though. The problems ended up being a bit ridiculous due to how many characters are dealing with the same problem. What really saved this movie for me was the music. It really is fantastic and is worthy of its praise. Even then, it has its problems. Since this is a movie, it needs to do things which are bigger than the stage version. When the song Rent was playing, I was confused on whether or not everyone in the neighborhood had problems due to the other buildings coming into play during the number. In Tango: Maureen, theres a big dance sequence and Maureen shows up there. I didnt find that to be a good decision because for me, one of the appeals of the song was imagining what Maureen is like. It feels like there are a bunch of unnecessary things added. That could just be me talking out of my ass since Ive never seen the stage version though. The music carries this movie incredibly hard but since its a musical I guess that makes me a bit more forgiving.
Favorite Song: Tango: Maureen

Johnbobb - yeah it's pretty decent I guess, pay your damn rent though
Favorite song: La Vie Boheme

Karo - As the title says, this is about a lovable group of misfits who cant pay the rent for their ghetto apartments and so they sing a bunch a weird songs.
That's pretty much the whole story, the bunch of them doing stuff together and occasionally protesting the removal of a homeless camp or dying of aids.
A lot of the things they try are very musically... uh.. avant-garde, and they don't always work. I shouldn't ever need to ask myself is this a musical number, or did someone forget to take their medication.
The movie goes on for what seems a bit too long and could have benefited from both a little of trimming of the fat and a better effort at congealing the various songs into a coherent narrative, but it still makes the cast likeable and that is a whole lot more than can be said for so many other films in this project.

Score: 63/100

Best Song: 'Seasons of Love'

Scarlet - Two conflicting opinions - one, that the stage musical Rent is phenomenal. Two, that the movie version of Rent feels look, I dont want to make the joke. I really dont. The cast line-up is of course, phenomenal. Jesse Martin, Taye Diggs, Menzel the music remains the anchor of the musical, but when you transition to film from stage, you have to keep in mind that the power of musicals portrayed live lose the raw charisma and need to rely on a stronger presentation of story that doesnt slog for two and a half hours.
Best Song: Season of Love, specifically when Jesse Martin is awesome.

Genny - I really like Seasons of Love, but Rent as a whole is a little much if I'm being honest. It suffers the same syndrome as another four letter musical in that it follows a lot of characters, but these people are at the very least already interconnected by something other than attending the same school. Still, it's a lot and while I realize it's a major theme the focus on HIV/AIDS made me a bit uncomfortable. I suppose that was the idea and helps to raise awareness, but I can't say I enjoyed it in all honesty.

KBM - Why I Chose It: The original musical from 1996, adapted by Jonathan Larson from Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohme, was one of the defining Broadway successes of the '90s. It won four Tony Awards, including for Best Musical, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and its 12-year Broadway run made it the 11th longest running Broadway show in history. However, when the Chris Columbus-helmed film adaptation of Rent was released nine years later, starring much of the original Broadway cast, it was met mostly with indifference, flopping at the box office and getting middling reviews from critics. Still, the film is noteworthy for being a fairly accurate adaptation of the stage musical, and did enable the popular show to reach an even broader audience.

My Thoughts: I would like to say I've never really liked Rent, but that's not entirely true. When I was an impressionable young teenager, I thought it was the shit. Between its unapologetic representation of queer people and its fuck-the-system attitude, it was very appealing to a kid like me. As I've grown older, however, the show's flaws have become more and more clear, and the movie only serves to amplify them to the nth degree. First and foremost is the fact that almost none of these characters are in any way likeable; they're basically all entitled brats who just want to live a Bohemian lifestyle for the ART and ROMANCE of it all. Even the more likeable characters have problems Angel murders a dog for money and we're supposed to find it endearing, Mimi is a codependent addict who tries to get a sober guy back on drugs, Mark is an asshole who appropriates other people's suffering for his own (terrible) art, Maureen is a sociopathic abuser... the list goes on. My second major problem is that only about half the music is all that good to begin with. The big production numbers, like Rent, La Vie Bohme, Take Me or Leave Me - these are all great, and reasons I revisit the soundtrack and even the live show time and time again, despite not being a huge fan of it. It's the connecting threads, though, that leave something to be desired, with some really bad spoken-word poetry lyrics that really fall flat (see especially the atrocious song I Should Tell You for more details). My third problem here is exclusive to th