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: #6151 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-10-14
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 97 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

DVD features
The "Spectacular, Spectacular" theme of Moulin Rouge continues with the two-DVD set's dazzling array of extras, a must-watch for the Moulin Rouge fanatic. The first disc contains the film along with two commentary tracks--one with Baz Luhrmann, the production designer, and the cinematographer, the second with Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, the writers of the film. Both commentaries contain lots of interesting and fun facts about the making of the film, including back story on the characters that was eventually cut, Courtney Love's long deliberation before allowing the use of Nirvana's "Teen Spirit," and contributions to the story made by the film's stars.

The second disc contains a making-of documentary, amusing footage of McGregor and Kidman goofing around on the set, and interviews with all the major stars. Deleted scenes, extended dance numbers, the MTV music-awards performance of "Lady Marmalade," and many more extras make for a detailed look inside Moulin Rouge that's bursting with as much energy as the nightclub itself. --Mindy Ruehmann

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

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!

A must have!
If you are looking for a movie filled with fun, romance and music, this is the movie for you! Although set in 1899 France, the story takes on a very modern feel with songs that everyone knows and loves. It will have you laughing, crying, singing and falling in love over and over again.

What were they thinking?
I bought this DVD at the urging of a trusted reviewer. While I was entranced by the imaginative cuts and effects during the beginning credits, my companion and I were immediately turned off by the extreme over-acting. Yes, I've been cautioned that this technique was used to satisfy the intended theatrical effect. However, in my opinion, the desired effect was dreadful, distracting, and irritating. Only the first 10 minutes of my DVD was ever touched by a laser. Unless you're a masochist, save your money.