Product Description

A spectacle beyond anything you've ever witnessed. An experience beyond everything you've ever imagined. Behind the red velvet curtain, the ultimate seduction of your senses is about to begin. Welcome to the Moulin Rouge! Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor sing, dance and scale the heights of passionate abandon in the year's most talked-about movie from visionary director Baz Luhrmann (William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Strictly Ballroom). Enter a tantalizing world that celebrates truth, beauty, freedom and above all things, love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2316 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-01-14
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 127 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
A dazzling and yet frequently maddening bid to bring the movie musical kicking and screaming into the 21st century, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge bears no relation to the many previous films set in the famous Parisian nightclub. This may appear to be Paris in the 1890s, with can-can dancers, bohemian denizens like Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo), and ribaldry at every turn, but it's really Luhrmann's pop-cultural wonderland. Everyone and everything is encouraged to shatter boundaries of time and texture, colliding and careening in a fast-cutting frenzy that thinks nothing of casting Elton John's "Your Song" 80 years before its time. Nothing is original in this kaleidoscopic, absinthe-inspired love tragedy--the words, the music, it's all been heard before. But when filtered through Luhrmann's love for pop songs and timeless showmanship, you're reminded of the cinema's power to renew itself while paying homage to its past.

Luhrmann's overall success with his third "red-curtain" extravaganza (following Strictly Ballroom and William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet) is wildly debatable: the scenario is simple to the point of silliness, and how can you appreciate choreography when it's been diced into hash by attention-deficit editing? Still, there's something genuine brewing between costars Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman (as, respectively, a poor writer and his unobtainable object of desire), and their vocal talents are impressive enough to match Luhrmann's orgy of extraordinary sets, costumes, and digital wizardry. The movie's novelty may wear thin, along with its shallow indulgence of a marketable soundtrack, but Luhrmann's inventiveness yields moments that border on ecstasy, when sound and vision point the way to a moribund genre's joyously welcomed revival. --Jeff Shannon

From The New Yorker
A frantically ambitious postmodernist musical in which no single song is performed from beginning to end and no dance number is staged without the dancers' movements being kaleidoscoped into a dozen angles. Set in a stylized and digitalized Paris, the movie offers the Moulin Rouge night club as a seething Belle époque Studio 54, where a fresh-from-the-provinces poet named Christian (Ewan McGregor) falls in love with Satine (Nicole Kidman), a consumptive cancan dancer and courtesan. The story is no more than a flimsy outline, but it still manages to combine the Orpheus myth and "Camille" and to vaguely evoke about a dozen other films. When the lovers sing a duet, they begin with a few bars of the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" and pass through bits of Phil Collins, U2, and David Bowie and Brian Eno before capping it off with Elton John's "Your Song." It's as if the director, Baz Luhrmann, felt that he could hold the target audience of young people only by making reference to their entire experience of pop music. Luhrmann has a talent for décor, sudden shifts in perspective, and gentle, twinkling nighttime effects, but he whips much of the movie into an opéra-bouffe clownishness. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Not really worth thr trouble.
After reading so many of the other reviews, I resign myself to the fact of varied tastes make one man's trash another's treasure. I picked up a copy and watched it with a friend. While I am a fan of some obscure Euro flicks that most of my friends cannot understand or enjoy, I just could not get into this movie...The "kaleidoscope" of people and colours is well enough, the general storyline isn't bad, and the main actors are people I like and make a point of watch filmes they're in. However, all the music being essentially plagiarized from various pop songs, and characters flipping, running, and jumping about like it is some Kung-Fu movie set in a circus, ruined the show for me, and even the tease-eroticism that can be the spice to make a movie worth the money to guys like me is overshadowed by the general mayhem that make this flick as irritating as a bad radio commercial. Not the worst movie I've ever seen, but it does seem to me that the only people this movie was mad for are the type that still haven't matured from lots of flash and snippits from some overplayed pop icons. Maybe it's fun for some, so try it and form your own opinion. But rent it first...you will not have wasted as much movie should you end up feeling like I do about it.

Baz Lurhmann does it again...
Baz Lurhmann has taken another classic tale and spun a twist into the mix of a self-standing complicated story. Although I didn't particularly care for "Romeo + Juliet", I loved "Moulin Rouge!" The classic story is a tale of a well-bred and educated young Englishman, Christian, who is swept up in the Bohemian revolution of the 19th century. He travels to France, against his father's, wishes to become a truly revolutionary Bohemian writer. He becomes swept up in a life of women, drink and drama. Lurhmann turns this tale into a musical of... unique standing. Taking classic rock-n-roll songs and rearranging them to form a truly entertaining and innovative, Lurhmann leads the way into the dark, seductive world of the Moulin Rouge.

A Treat For Romance Lovers...
Moulin Rouge is a movie that you really can't "sort of like." Either you do, or you don't. Warning: it can be taken to come off as a little corny, but as long as you can get past that...the movie is FABULOUS! The songs are "on point," the acting is commendable, and the story...wow, well you'll just have to see the movie for yourself!