Okay it’s about time I whittled down my slew of brainspew-on-the-page reviews and write something proper on this one, so as of now, those old reviews I wrote with my internal censor entirely bound and gagged are confined to a text file on my desktop – so don’t worry, they haven’t gone for good … but I don’t intend for anyone new to read them.

So let’s start at the beginning. I always tend to say I found “Rent” late, but now I look back and realise I first listened to it only 3 years after Jonathan Larson’s death, I realise, I didn’t do so bad afterall. I became a Renthead for a good year or so courtesy of my first and only true batch (give or take a person or two) of online friends. That line the whole show revolves around, “No Day But Today”, got me at the right time, and I guess that’s where the undeniable brilliance of this movie for me personally starts. It still has that persistent line, and that’s one star out of five you can’t take away from it. Add the use of the original cast where possible and you’ve got your second.

The movie took years to finally happen – I believe they were working on it practically from the day it became a Broadway hit. Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese were attached, they went from an entire, practically devoid of music rewrite to a verbatim reproduction and everything inbetween … it’s amazing even a second of goodness remains let alone the scene upon scene that does, so there’s your third immovable star right there. It finally landed in the hands of Chris Columbus, who did a good job of the first two by-the-numbers Harry Potter movies. Sure those first two movies lacked the cinematic adventure of the subsequent productions (actually, I’d argue that only Azkaban fit that description, the last was quite messy by comparison), but they were undeniably faithful to source.

Anyway, it’s the same situation here: though often the movie lacks the punch of its source, the times when it is heartbreakingly faithful are more impeccably done than anyone could’ve expected. Though whole chunks of music have been stripped away, more often than not it is entirely made up for by what follows or preceeds the breach. For example, I don’t like the fact that “Goodbye Love” has been taken away (even though it’s one of the few removals they did film, and is available on the DVD and soundtrack) ... but the use of that song’s music as underscore during the “Search for Mimi” montage is almost equally indispensable. In the same way, I don’t like the restaging of certain scenes – Tango Maureen turning into Tango Roxanne from Moulin Rouge, and the entirely incomprehensible staging of “Take Me Or Leave Me” being the main offenders – but it’s always made up for. Mimi leaves Roger as she sings the last part of “Another Day”, but I loved her desperation as she sung that into his face when I saw it onstage … here, though, the image of Angel, Collins, and Mark coming round the corner behind her is just as indelible.

In the end, as my old reviews fleshed out, there are a lot of things wrong with this movie, and I can entirely understand why newcomers in particular could be turned off quickly, and this annoys me no end; the movie pretty much failed to make the show any new fans, so why did they attempt to change it at all for the big screen? The point is, yes, it’s flawed; but it’s so consistent in its style, that beautiful rusty colour scheme making every single frame undeniably RENT, they brought back a good 2/3rds of the original cast, people who knew Larson, who really knew the show better than any of us will, and those standalone scenes like “I’ll Cover You” on the street and “Sante Fe” on the subway – in the end, no matter how much this movie infuriates me, even if it catches me in the worst of moods … I can never say that it’s less than a masterpiece, and I hope that everyone who ever needs exactly what it offers will find it like I did all those years ago.

Okay, I’ll admit, that still got away from me a little, but it’s better than what preceeded it lol. What can I say, this movie sends me into a tizzy. Oh … and I still seriously think the one thing that could’ve made the movie better would’ve been a tiny glimpse of Larson in that end montage, à la Douglas Adams in the H2G2 movie.

I’m sure my opinion will lose a lot of respect when I say this (lol like it has a lot to lose) ... but this is now one of my ten favourite movies ever, and it damn near tops the bunch. There’s just so much in this movie that hits me in the places I want movies to hit me. The Dakota tea-cup ride scenes hit me in a really personal place so hard, that look on her face that’s just like, typical, one week early to ride, pulling the glasses down over her eyes so Brittany Murphy can’t see her tearing up; and later when they finally ride it, both of them working out years of frustration on the wheel and each other; and like, I guess I can’t deny that where I am in life right now makes the whole “grow up” theme resonate deeper too, Murphy’s response to somebody telling her, “But this isn’t you!” – “I can’t afford ‘me’ anymore …”.

I can understand why a lot of people will put this movie down before they even see it, and I can understand why not a lot of people will consider it anything more than a bit of fluff to pass the time – but I can’t understand how anyone could see it and say the amount of bad things that have been said about it … I mean, I can’t believe how I gave it only 3 stars on my first viewing, I can’t believe it didn’t get me in the way it got me today. And the finale … it just doesn’t get better than Dakota letting her hair down and leading a ballet troupe armed with electric guitars.

April 2nd, 2005:

I love how nearly all Dakota Fanning movies seem to have come from some kind of story meeting where someone goes, “Okay, she’s an amazing actress… but she’s 11… who’re we gonna put with her? I know, she’s gonna need some-one to look after her – she’s a kid, afterall… but who?” So we have a giant talking cat, a psychotic killer, a hitman, a mentally retarded man, and here, a spoiled bitch. I may just steal this system when I run dry of ideas for my own screenplays, lol…

Once again Brittany Murphy makes her character 800x more sympathetic than she probably deserves (see last year’s Little Black Book, which I loved), and once again Dakota Fanning steals the movie.

Watching it reminded me of last year’s Raising Helen. Boaz Yakin is an interesting director, lots of visual ideas à la Bronwyn Hughes (Forces of Nature, Harriet the Spy). There’s a neat continuing idea about the spinning tea-cup ride at Coney Island, one beautiful image where Dakota is just staring at it; and in the final ballet recital scene, loads of little ballerinas carrying electric guitars.

I’m one of those people who objects to a hell of a lot of things that are like the Olsen Twins in pop cultural terms (eg, American Idol, Big Brother, Paris Hilton, anything you can find in those magazines that seem to be made for illiterates, I guess), and yet I’ve never truly objected to the Olsen Twins. They’ve never got in my face like the other things, I guess. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but I’ve never really seen them gracing talk shows every month, or even seen them on that many magazine covers. Generally, if I see the Olsen Twins, I’m expecting to see them. They’re on their fashion label, they’re in their doll section, they’re in their DVD section. They stick to where they’re meant to be found, and are generally inoffensive.

So, even if I was to hate this movie, it would not be for the reasons that nearly everybody else who hates this movie seem to give, which seems to boil down to a phrase that must have taken them years to assemble, “Olsen Twins [annoyed grunt] suck!”

But I don’t hate this movie. Not one bit. But, equally, let’s not make this about the Twins. It’s clear that this is not the usual Olsen Twins movie, and I think it’s only fair to look at the movie as just any old movie, and talk about it without any further mention of the stars.

From a great manic set of opening titles, this movie is basically a fairly old-fashioned chase across the city of New York when a couple of twins, each with their own agenda for the day, get waylaid by a Chinese piracy operation. Millions of dollars of pirated music are stored on a “chip” (okay, this part really is stupid, but go with it: they’d have been better leaving it as an unidentified Hitchcockian McGuffin…) that accidentally finds its way into one of the twins’ bags. The movie then follows three strands, with the Chinese trying to get their chip back, the girls trying to get to their planned events, and the girls trying to resolve their typical sibling differences. If that’s not enough, there’s a truancy officer (Eugene Levy, is he ever not funny?) on the heels of the “evil” twin, Roxy.

So it borrows from a bunch of movies for its plot, big deal, can anyone say Tarantino? So it gets most of its pace from dizzying MTV editing and pounding hits on the soundtrack, big deal! Personally, I enjoyed the ride of this movie. It keeps moving, which is more than can be said of many, many movies.

I know, it’s hardly the right time to be watching this movie but I’ve been intending to watch it since the beginning of December. It’s one of my favourite Christmas movies, I had it lined up to watch, it was even on TV, but I never got round to watching it until now. Really all I wanted to do was see if the reason I cried last time I watched it was because I was drunk (more likely than ever at Christmas) or if it’s actually a crying movie. The answer – it’s actually a crying movie.

I don’t know if I’m right in saying this because I have odd misconceptions about the 80s and I often rush into saying things like, “No good movies were made in the 80s!” then I realise that loads were… but this movie really seems ahead of its time to me, even the way the Paramount logo sweeps out of view as Danny Elfman’s brilliant title theme plays.

This is another movie like You’ve Got Mail for me – it does everything ‘wrong’ that I hate, yet here and only here, I love it. Bill Murray’s yelling, screaming, speaking to himself while walking down the street… it all just works. I think it’s down to the supporting actors – Carol Kane and others as the 3 ghosts, but Carol Kane in particular, there’s something devilishly thrilling about her kicking and punching and pinching Bill Murray for the duration of her little segment. Then there’s the brother with the perfect life, the threatening new employee with the perfect behaviour (hand on the shoulder, shake so patronisingly), Murray’s secretary and her poor family, dressing the little mute kid up like a Christmas tree, and that little mute kid, the Tiny Tim of this retelling, the reason I cry, his delivery of “God Bless Us Everyone” is perfect, and enhanced by the mother’s reaction. And of course, the beautifully wide-eyed Karen Allen as the ex-girlfriend… she is incredibly cast here, I desperately need to catch up on her other work because she was more beautiful than ever here.

There’s little to say about comedies except all I can say, this is one of the best Christmas comedies there is, up there with Bad Santa and Elf, and I think before those last two appeared last year, Scrooged was probably about all we had.

I tried writing one review of this already and it ended up being all over the place. The problem I have with this movie is, it’s among a small cluster of movies that I watched almost repeatedly when I was first falling in love with the movies. Apart from the extra footage that’s in this longer version, which still catches me off guard, I practically know the movie by heart. It’s impossible for me to make a fresh judgment of the movie – it’s either an embarassing reminder of my youth, or simply, awesome.

I completely advise watching the longer version because, though the extra scenes are not essential to the story (it was a favourite movie long before I had access to the long version), once you’ve seen those scenes, you just can’t forget them. They deepen the relationship between Léon and Mathilda and I’d honestly say it’s a better handling of this kind of relationship than either of the Lolita movie adaptations or any of its clones.

This is a highly stylised movie – even New York looks strange, it’s only Central Park that truly gives away the location. The costumes are particularly stylised and probably it’s the costumes that make a lot of people even more uncomfortable with Natalie Portman’s character/performance. The fact is, she is sexy as hell in this movie, and she’s meant to be. Our connection to Léon practically depends on this point – we feel his discomfort when she dances dressed as Madonna and Marilyn Monroe… the point is to question how far a friendship of this sort should go, and as far as the movie is concerned, the one line that should not be crossed is sex, pure and simple. I actually seriously wonder if this movie would be made today, especially the long version in which Léon clearly shares a bed with Mathilda – I mean, isn’t this just what Michael Jackson’s under fire for right now? Like Mathilda says, “It’s a great game… it makes you think...”

Writing something along the lines of that last paragraph is what has held me up writing this review – ‘cos like everyone else these days, I feel like I’m going to be shot in the head if I even suggest we should remove the barriers of fear we’ve put up as far as young people and “beauty” goes. That’s all I can really say in a short review but I think there’s a lot of discussion to be done on the subject … somebody actually should make a movie like this again before children are completely outlawed and forced to grow up in seclusion with electrostatic shields or something.

I think this is a great movie… I certainly love watching it. But it could just be the combo of the old memories of watching it when I myself was underage, and the current issues I see in it.

I think my highest praise for this movie came during this viewing. My stepdad was watching it too and I commented on the physical comedy, it’s all through the movie, right from the start when Hanks and Ryan both sneak off to their computers when their respective partners leave them home alone, but my comment came in the montage where they’ve met, they’re aware of the real world conflict of small-big business, and they’re trying to avoid each other. Hanks hides behind a newspaper; Ryan hides behind flowers; then it leads into a supermarket scene, Ryan ducking behind her shopping cart, leading on to a great check-out exchange with some perfect peripheral characters, something that is completely typical of this movie.

My personal reaction to this has three parts to it: first I know it will forever resonate with me because of the internet love aspect. I wasn’t even online when the movie was made but shortly after my very first online experiences, I knew I had to see it, and my favourite moment in the movie comes when Meg Ryan receives her first IM (instant message) online from Hanks, it’s just perfect. She draws her breath in, has that look, “somebody’s speaking to me! right now! omg!” It’s perfectly done, and clearly this moment, like the rest of the movie, comes from the heart of someone who has really gone through it, the small details are just uncanny.

My second stage is, it’s a New York movie, possibly the best, and I know all the classic NYC movies, but sometimes you just have to be honest with yourself, this movie just really shows that friendly side of NYC (I haven’t been there but I trust 100% the many residents or visitors I’ve talked to) in a way that’s not like a commercial, it’s just really homely. Meg Ryan commenting on a butterfly alighting the subway; the universal Starbucks theory; early morning bakery scenes; even the main theme of the movie, the big versus the small, and the ultimate union thereof. It may be too optimistic, but I’m just saying that ‘cos I feel I have to it. It’s not extremely optimistic, it’s just realistically so. It has a happy ending, it all works out, but it’s thoroughly considered.

I hate romantic comedies. Like I wrote recently, for some reason I just couldn’t even sit through 10 minutes of Pretty Woman. I just hate shallowness in the end, and I hate entertainment for entertainment’s sake. People compare You’ve Got Mail to Sleepless in Seattle for obvious reasons and I don’t like Sleepless in Seattle. There is something about You’ve Got Mail that makes me enjoy things I don’t usually enjoy – physical comedy, romantic comedy.. I think it’s ultimately a combination of the great acting, great song selections, and my own personal memories associated with it. But I don’t want to explain it. There is something inexplicable in my enjoyment of the film, and I like that. Even though I love to pull movies apart and go behind the scenes and know everything sometimes, it’s nice to have a few movies like this where you really can’t fully fathom your reasons for loving it.