(no subject)
So I finally saw Rent. And um. I've never seen the show, but just from listening to the soundtrack and reading the lyrics, I'm sure that it's WOW SO MUCH BETTER.
I mean I'm glad they had the chance to make the movie. And maybe the Hair movie had the same problems. It definitely had the same 10 year wait before the movie so that it lost a lot of contemporary relevance. But I've never had any contact with the stage show Hair, only with the movie (OMG a sextastic Treat Williams - I couldn't believe it), so maybe the show was also WOW WAY BETTER.
Making movies is all fine and good - it worked for West Side Story, etc. And I'm grateful that I got a chance to watch any version with some of the original cast. But why not film the stage show too? PBS does it all the time with opera and Andrew Lloyd Webber shows. And I think that would capture the spirit of Rent better than this movie. The random shit they changed...I don't get it. Some changes were necessary and effective, but others... On the whole, I think the show didn't translate very well in this film. Stuff that totally took me out of the story: the stage acting at times, some of the camera work, the weird narrative gaps where they cut out stuff, the speaking instead of singing some dialogue and not other dialogue, the changing a song from a voiceover to sung in the middle of the song.
But still. ::fangirls Rent::