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Just Got Back From "Rent"
Nov. 28th, 2005 | 01:58 am
mood: 
amused
music: Everyone Has AIDS-Team America
Not the stage show, the movie (*shudders* didn't mean to throw in an old RHPS line there...). The soundtrack was great! And the.... soundtrack was great! Now first off let me say I have never seen the stage show, so I can't make any comparisons there. I'll just explain what it was I saw. If you haven't seen the movie yet, then please continue reading. Believe me when I say there are no spoilers...
The movie starts off with that famous song about how you could measure the minutes of a year. The actors are singing on a stage in a nod to its Broadway roots. Then we get to the story. Christmas Eve 1989 (I was anxiously awaiting for my copy of "Batman" for Christmas that year). The story introduces us to Mark and Roger, two struggling, jobless artists wondering why they are being evicted just because they haven't paid the rent for the past year. Then in comes Benny an old friend and roommate of theirs that happens to have a plan for revitalizing the neighborhood. But because he has financial backing he is shunned and called a "sellout". Benny tries to tell his old friends that everything is cool, he's got their back, but he needs a little help. Seems that Maureen, a forty-year-old drama queen who dresses like she's twenty and acts like she's fifteen, wants to put on a little stage show in protest of cleaning up the area. She feels the need to be better than anyone else and the only other people around are bums and crackheads. If the neighborhood is cleaned up, no one would come to her shows and she might have to *gasp* get a job! Plus no one would pay any attention to her! What a bum out! Benny wants Mark to talk some sense into her because she's embarrassing the neighborhood and that might scare off any investors. Mark refuses and even helps Maureen set up for the show (even though she had just left him for another woman). Some other characters are introduced such as, Mimi, the heroine addicted, nineteen-year-old (who looks thirty, but drugs'll do that to ya), dancer at the local strip club, Joanne, an uptown yuppie lawyer whose looking to slum it with Maureen, and Angel, a cross-dresser dying of AIDS because you can't have a story about a bunch of artsy people in New York without including a drag queen.
The story drags on with some pretty good musical numbers about how great it is to be addicted to heroine, dying of AIDS, freezing in the middle of winter because the power company expects you to PAY them for power and how people who actually have a plan for making their lives better so they can follow their dreams are sellouts and are to be spat upon. Roger Boy eventually kicks his heroine-shootin' girlie to the curb (about the smartest thing he does in the whole movie), Angel the Drag Queen takes an eternal celestial dirt nap, and Mark gets *gasp* a REAL job!! But because he's actually getting paid to do what it was he was doing for free he feels like he's sold his soul to the devil (the devil in this case being Corporate America). But he hates getting money to buy food and clothing (indeed he hates buying clothes so much he only has two outfits). He quits his job to finish his home movies (that he calls a documentary) so he can show his friends he made something. On the night of the "big premier" (and exactly one year after the start of the film) the crackwhore is found to be near death and Roger Boy sings a song that took him all year to write ( I can empathize, finding words that rhyme is hard). In the end everything is gonna be hunky-dorie because Angel's boyfriend, Collins teaches everyone how to steal money out of the ATM machine, thus insuring that they will never have to cop out to their dreams, have to make an honest living, and can stick it to the Man.
Then they all die of AIDS.
Except for Mark...
...because he had never even seen a woman naked before...
But it was worth the price of admission that we paid... oh yeah... I got in for FREE!! HAHAHA!!!
For some odd reason I kept calling Roger Robert. Peekaboo (a real Robert) informed me of my gaff and it has since been corrected.
The movie starts off with that famous song about how you could measure the minutes of a year. The actors are singing on a stage in a nod to its Broadway roots. Then we get to the story. Christmas Eve 1989 (I was anxiously awaiting for my copy of "Batman" for Christmas that year). The story introduces us to Mark and Roger, two struggling, jobless artists wondering why they are being evicted just because they haven't paid the rent for the past year. Then in comes Benny an old friend and roommate of theirs that happens to have a plan for revitalizing the neighborhood. But because he has financial backing he is shunned and called a "sellout". Benny tries to tell his old friends that everything is cool, he's got their back, but he needs a little help. Seems that Maureen, a forty-year-old drama queen who dresses like she's twenty and acts like she's fifteen, wants to put on a little stage show in protest of cleaning up the area. She feels the need to be better than anyone else and the only other people around are bums and crackheads. If the neighborhood is cleaned up, no one would come to her shows and she might have to *gasp* get a job! Plus no one would pay any attention to her! What a bum out! Benny wants Mark to talk some sense into her because she's embarrassing the neighborhood and that might scare off any investors. Mark refuses and even helps Maureen set up for the show (even though she had just left him for another woman). Some other characters are introduced such as, Mimi, the heroine addicted, nineteen-year-old (who looks thirty, but drugs'll do that to ya), dancer at the local strip club, Joanne, an uptown yuppie lawyer whose looking to slum it with Maureen, and Angel, a cross-dresser dying of AIDS because you can't have a story about a bunch of artsy people in New York without including a drag queen.
The story drags on with some pretty good musical numbers about how great it is to be addicted to heroine, dying of AIDS, freezing in the middle of winter because the power company expects you to PAY them for power and how people who actually have a plan for making their lives better so they can follow their dreams are sellouts and are to be spat upon. Roger Boy eventually kicks his heroine-shootin' girlie to the curb (about the smartest thing he does in the whole movie), Angel the Drag Queen takes an eternal celestial dirt nap, and Mark gets *gasp* a REAL job!! But because he's actually getting paid to do what it was he was doing for free he feels like he's sold his soul to the devil (the devil in this case being Corporate America). But he hates getting money to buy food and clothing (indeed he hates buying clothes so much he only has two outfits). He quits his job to finish his home movies (that he calls a documentary) so he can show his friends he made something. On the night of the "big premier" (and exactly one year after the start of the film) the crackwhore is found to be near death and Roger Boy sings a song that took him all year to write ( I can empathize, finding words that rhyme is hard). In the end everything is gonna be hunky-dorie because Angel's boyfriend, Collins teaches everyone how to steal money out of the ATM machine, thus insuring that they will never have to cop out to their dreams, have to make an honest living, and can stick it to the Man.
Then they all die of AIDS.
Except for Mark...
...because he had never even seen a woman naked before...
But it was worth the price of admission that we paid... oh yeah... I got in for FREE!! HAHAHA!!!
For some odd reason I kept calling Roger Robert. Peekaboo (a real Robert) informed me of my gaff and it has since been corrected.