Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #548 in VHS
• Released on: 2002-03-04
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English, French, Spanish
• Number of tapes: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Watching Baz Luhrmann's award-winning Moulin Rouge is a lot like falling in love. It is total immersion cinema and while you're experiencing it ("watching" is too passive a word) you can't imagine that cinema could be for anything else. In the harsh, objective post-viewing daylight Lurhmann's gaudy spectacular might seem like a triumph of glossy style over any genuine substance, but as the film unfolds Lurhmann subjects his audience to a such a barrage of overtly stylised music, dance, colour, design and human passion that the senses are overwhelmed and critical faculties put on hold for the duration.

The story is paper-thin, but that's hardly the point. Nicole Kidman's courtesan Satine falls for poor poet Ewan McGregor while pledged to a psychotic English Duke. The show goes on, of course, and we know it will end in tragedy--because that's the sort of story this is, and the only thing that makes it bearable is the knowledge that it's all just brilliant artifice. The third of Luhrman's "Red Curtain" trilogy (after Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet), Moulin Rouge reinvents musical cinema, acknowledging its debt to past masters like Vincente Minnelli (Gigi) and Michael Powell (The Red Shoes), but taking in the best of rock video along the way. The incessant MTV-style editing might seem like a distraction, but in the end a film insane enough to include Jim Broadbent's cover of "Like a Virgin" defines its own genre rules.

On the DVD: this double-disc package sets new standards of presentation while also having an ideally appropriate light-heartedness. The extra features are as inventive in their use of the format as the film itself. Highlights include not one but two commentaries--one by Luhrmann, his designer and his cinematographer, the other with Lurhmann and his fellow scriptwriter Craig Pearce. We get two videos of "Lady Marmalade" and there are also uncut dance numbers, for example the fabulously dark Tango sequence in all its detail, which come with alternate camera angles so that you can edit your own version. There are whole segments on the glittery costumes, the three-dimensional model of Paris and the transformation of Kylie Minogue into the Green Fairy of absinthe. The film is presented in anamorphic widescreen (formatted for 16:9 TVs) with a visual aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and has lush, velvety Dolby Digital 5.1 or DTS 5.1 sound options. --Roz Kaveney

Special Features
"Making Of" Featurette
"Lady Marmalade" Music Video
"Come What May" Music Video

Synopsis
Set in the late 1890s this is the tale of a young poet called Christian who travels to Paris to make his fortune in the Moulin Rouge. He meets with the alcohol addicted Toulouse-Lautrec who introduces Christian to a seedy underground world full of drugs, sex and musical theatre. The innocent Christian is thrown into a passionate but doomed affair with Satine, the star of the show...

Customer Reviews

Brilliantly dazzling
The subject is banal : Paris, 1900, the famous Moulin Rouge music-hall and their never-ending shows that are titillating and mysterious, fascinating and prodigious. Love above everything else, romantic love with its passion, the little thing deep down inside, dramatic love of course, melodramatic even. The actress of such a show is supposed to finance the show, and the work of everyone else, by providing the patrons, the generous financiers with some carnal pleasure, illusionary or real according to the desires and potencies of these rich even if rather aging males. The melodrama is reached when the actress is dying of consumption. The red of blood is mixing with the green of absinthe. But that is without taking into account Nicole Kidman who transforms that baroque and rococo tall tale of love and prostitution into what it is supposed to be, a blinding explosion of colors and fire, lights and flames. And she can keep the tears on the stage exclusively and prevent the audience from watering the succulent plants in the lobby of the movie theater. Then we are dazed by the brilliant dances, the mesmerizing music, the fascinating songs, the nostalgically innovative melodies, the special effects that are exploding everywhere and transforming a plain stage or a plain screen into some kind of cosmic big bang on the retinas of our eyes, not to speak of the eardrums of our ears. More brilliant than that you die. And Nicole Kidman, or Satine if you prefer, can die on the stage in the arms of her beloved author who is crying so much and so loud that we do not even need to do the same. And then the whole world can fall apart and we can jump into an elliptic flash forward and projects our asses from the flash back of the recollection back into the future when this Christian is reminiscing the thunderous passion of theirs and the flashes of craziness that went along with it. Thanks God this is already a classic for the next generation.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Review
Moulin rouge!



This is a musical love film set in the bohemian part of Paris in 1900 staring Ewan McGregor a young English writer who has moved to Paris to write in the bohemian revolution and Nicole Kidman as Satine a young actress at the Moulin rouge. The two find themselves at the hart of a new era for the Moulin rouge as an investor is set to invest and what better way than to set up a new show called spectacular spectacular a show the two lovers come up with. The show is a mirrored image of their secret love life and the investor known as the duke Richard Roxburgh has other plans for Satine when the duke finds out about the lover's affair he goes crazy with jealousy and tells the one man who will stop it Harold Zidler Jim Broadbent the owner of the Moulin rouge who orders Satine to break up this relationship that sends Christian mad with rage. He eventually storms in to the opening night of the show and he shows his anger and as he is walking out Toulouse-Lautrec John Leguizamo shouts the one phrase this film is based on `the greatist thing you'll ever leard is just to love' and all of a sudden everything is ok between the lovers



This is an amazing film but only if you like musicals becouse there are lots of great songs all jazzed up making them bohemian. There is an amasing harmony between mgregor and kidman in the film that will make you believe that they are proffesional singers. You will find that director Baz Luhrmann has done and exelent job with the coriography and the singing that deserves hundreds of awards. I think you should buy this film as it never gets boring and you will allways love the music



David Devereux,14

Absolutely BRILLIANT!
It seems that Moulin Rouge is a movie that you either love or you hate, out of everybody i know either they love it with a passion, or its too outlandish for them and they absolutely loath it.
As you can tell i'm one of the people who love it with a passion! The synopsis and other reviews tell you what the movies about so i'm not going to bore you with that, all i want to say is that this movie is a rollercoaster of emotions. More than any other movie i know it seems to be filled with emotion, one minute it will have you laughing and then next the music will die and it will go straight into breath-taking romantic scenes (this is the moment when Ewan sings 'my give is my song' - once you've seen it you'll understand).
Its an amazing film, with a brilliant storyline, fantastic acting and a cracking soundtrack to boot. I beg of you to go and watch this movie, because if your one of the people who love it, you'll cherish this movie forever and will re-watch it again and again.
My favorite all time film, and trust me i watch a LOT of films.