RENT
By Rachel Deahl
Review Film Critic

While it may take 525,600 minutes to get through an entire year, as we learn in the opening sing-song refrain of "Rent," it takes a seemingly longer stretch to get through this tedious musical: 135 minutes. After 135 minutes into the screen adaptation of the popular musical of the same name, we've learned little about the cast of New York City dreamers holed up in an Alphabet City loft, save some details glimpsed through a barrage of sub-par pop songs. 
 

Proving why movie musicals died as a genre after their heyday in the '50s, "Rent" is little more than a series of clichéd flashback montages and forced solos. The music, which is all the film really offers up, isn't nearly stirring or memorable enough to tackle the weighty issues the film is trying to deal with: Love, death and the commitment to the life of the artist.
 

Set in the East Village in 1989, the film follows the lives of eight friends over the course of a year. The neat trick that the musical pulled was in modernizing "La Boheme" taking the Puccini classic and setting it in the Bohemian world of the Village in the late '90s as opposed to Paris in the early 1800's with the killer of the day being AIDS instead of tuberculosis. And while the play was lauded for ingeniously updating Puccini's opera to modern day-it's the 8th longest-running play in Broadway history-the adaptation offers little for those who are not merely enamored with the idea of seeing the hit on screen.
 

The characters, whose pithy backstories are laid out in a series of solo numbers-the geeky wannabe filmmaker, Mark (Anthony Rapp); the HIV+ transvestite with a heart of gold, Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia); Angel's lover, the HIV+ math genius Collins (Jesse L. Martin); the HIV+ struggling musician Roger (Adam Pascal); Roger's drug-addicted HIV+ girlfriend, the exotic dancer, Mimi (Rosario Dawson); Mark's ex-girlfriend, the boisterous performance artist Maureen (Idina Menzel); and Maureen's new girlfriend, the uptight lawyer Joanne (Tracie Thomas)-never come alive as their interactions are relegated to forced musical interactions.
 

Failing where recent musicals like "Chicago" and "Moulin Rouge" (another take on "La Boheme" which does the opera far more justice) have succeeded, "Rent" doesn't deliver its characters and storylines through songs but, instead, tries to stuff itself into the music. The result is that the music trumps everything else, an abysmal reality since the film is filled with a barrage of forgettable numbers.
 

Most frustratingly "Rent" doesn't actually say much about anything. Instead of making a statement or, as with "Moulin Rouge" telling an age-old love story about boy meeting girl and then losing girl (here the love story between Roger and Mimi is a subplot at best), the film instead chronicles its "alternative"-living characters as they dance on tabletops and prance through garbage-strewn pre-Guliani city streets, supposedly thumbing their nose in the face the man. In the end, since none of them actually do anything very revolutionary, it's hard to know why we're supposed to care.

Grade: D

 

THE LIBERTINE

In the eyes of the Oscar Gods, playing it sick and/or ugly is often a sign of true acting chops, the kind of thing that is most often rewarded with little gold statuettes or, at the very least, a nomination.
Let's face it, that nebulous organization known as "The Academy" has a weakness for pretty people becoming ugly (from Cahrlize Theron as the overweight, buck-toothed sociopath Eileen Wuornos in "Monster" to the nose-prosthetic-wearing Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolfe in "The Hours") and dramatic deathbed scenes (see Hillary Swank in "Million Dollar Baby" to Tom Hanks in "Philadelphia") so it follows that Johnny Depp is likely trying to kill two birds with one stone as the 17th Century literary bad boy, the Earl of Rochester, in "The Libertine."

 

Depp, who sports a mouth full of discolored teeth (in sticking with the unfortunate realities of the era's dental hygiene), manages to become disturbingly disfigured and bed-ridden as he painfully succumbs to syphilis. Do you smell Oscar?
 

Oscar potential aside for Depp, "The Libertine" doesn't play as it's intended: a peek inside a freewheeling, self-loathing, bad boy who ideas and actions are a little too racy for conservative the twenty-first century, much less the 17th. As John Wilmot, a defiant and spoiled member of the moneyed London aristocracy, Depp begins the film by talking to the camera and telling the audience they will, mostly, dislike him but that he doesn't really care. That Wilmot ultimately does turn off more than anything else is ultimately a disappointment, as Depp's character is finally more spoiled brat than forward-thinking, boundary-pushing rogue.
 

Charting Wilmot's two seminal relationships-with the stage actress Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton) and King Charles II (John Malkovich in how own prosthetic nose)-"Libertine" tries to show the how talent and arrogance drove the young Earl to an untimely demise.
 

Barry, whose first appearance in the film is on stage drawing boos from the crowd, winds up becoming the love of Wilmot's life and a subject for his teaching. Offering to make her into the finest stage actress in the world. Wilmot watches as his unlikely promise comes to pass (after much intense rehearsing and sex) and Barry, who takes the teaching on the condition that she will never become someone else's protégé, ultimately rejects him - a cruel twist of fate for a playboy who traded in merely sleeping with women (chief among them his doting wife) as opposed to loving them.

The other focal point of the film, and one that draws on the literary legacy that almost was, is Wilmot's relationship with the troubled king of England. A noted poet, who had yet to write his greatest work (or much work at all), Charles II turns to Wilmot to be the shining star of his kingdom. Hoping that Wimot will do for him what Shakespeare did for Elizabeth, Charles commissions a play from the poet that winds up putting the monarchy and the monarch to shame in front of the French ambassador. Wilmot is consequently banished and, ultimately succumbing to syphilis (a disfiguring diseases which eats away at his face and forces him to wear an eerie mask in public), forever unappreciated for the art he was unwilling to publish (much of which came out posthumously).
 

Despite the fact that Wilmot is an interesting, under the radar, historical figure and that his connections to both Barry and Charles II are truly interesting, "Libertine" never gets past the notion of portraying bad boy behavior through the historical lens. Much of Wilmot's life seems diluted to his philandering, self-absorbed ways while the more interesting aspect of his personality-that of a talented and gifted man who couldn't let his light shine because of an intense and unexplained self-loathing-isn't given nearly enough focus.    

Grade: C-