Rent
(Blu-ray)
Picture:
B+ Sound: B Extras: C- Film: D
Why was
the Musical dead for so long? Was it
because few new good ones had arrived on or off Broadway? Maybe.
Was it because live stage versions are so hard to catch on film? That could be a factor. Is it from waiting too long for from stage to
screen? That did not help Jonathan
Larson’s Rent (2005) one bit, but
even worse, should this landmark work be trusted on celluloid to Home Alone director Chris
Columbus? Absolutely not!
And that
is why the film became a critical and commercial bomb, with Columbus clueless
on how to handle the project. The film
is a mess, the liberties the Stephen Chbosky screenplay takes with the original
is too often poor, Columbus is trying to make it mall-movie safe and as its 135
minutes winds on, it just gets worse, and worse and worse.
Of
course, that did not stop diehard fans of the original from almost turning it
into a cult item, but it suffers the same problem just about all Musicals until
recently did made more obvious by Music Videos.
Since the Grease films, all
musicals (Annie, A Chorus Line) on film have felt like
restrictive, sanded-down, package-deal versions of the genuine item,
constipated with a lack of energy, range, pace and ambition that becomes more
shocking and ironic when you stereo finally returned to all major film
productions and none of the studios knew how to translate this into an exciting
new cycle of Musicals. The record labels
had cornered the market on visual music.
Now that
we have Chicago, Dreamgirls and Hairspray, the many, seemingly endless failures of this train wreck
are instantly more obvious than even when it was released in theaters and on
DVD. Even the presence of original cast
members including Anthony Rapp, Adam Pascal, Rosario Dawson, Jesse L. Martin,
Tracey Thoms, Idina Menzel, Taye Diggs and Wilson Jermaine Heredia cannot
overcome the results. That once again
leaves a bad film version of a good Musical that people will hopefully not
think is a true representation of the original.
The 1080p
2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image was shot in Super 35mm film by the
Stephen Goldblatt, A.S.C., B.S.C., whose work has been impressive as early as
Peter Hyams’ Outland (1981) and
notable films like Tony Scott’s original 1983 version of The Hunger, Francis Coppola’s The
Cotton Club, the first two Lethal
Weapon films, Batman Forever and
Mike Nichols’ latest triumphs: Closer
and Charlie Wilson’s War. As the default highlight of this release,
color is consistent, Video Black solid and detail has its moments, though this
is not always a consistent transfer overall.
Goldblatt is also undermined by production design, where the streets can
look more like 21 Jump Street than a
musical.
The Dolby
True HD and PCM 5.1 options offer a clearer version of the horribly realized,
annoyingly mis-mixed film, with terrible soundfield, sound leakage and other
annoyances that helped kill the film at the box office. That the cast just cannot pull off the songs
like they could in the early days is only adds to the agony.
Extras
include No Day But Today documentary,
piece on Jonathan Larson’s Performing Arts Foundation & National Marfan
Foundation, deleted scenes/musical performances and audio commentary by
Columbus & “select” cast members.
- Nicholas Sheffo