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[theinevitable]

Good god. I suppose this is a *spoiler warning*





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I thought "Team America: World Police" was joking when the summed this play up as "everyone has aids!/AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!" but no. Every character except one had AIDS. The guy who dies of AIDS is named "Angel," for chrissakes.
As far as I could tell, this was the message:

--You should do everything anyone doesn't like. That means you are "bohemian"
--Getting a job so that you don't get evicted and starve to death is "selling your soul"
--If you dump a girl because she's a smack addict, you're a judgemental prick.
-- if you dump a girl because she constantly cheats on you, you're just a control freak.
-- intellectual thought consists of catch phrases about "actual reality," which the establishment just can't handle
--if someone who owns your apartment building has you evicted for not paying your rent for multiple years, he's a horrible horrible person.

A highlight: this horrible "performance art" show which somehow turns into a riot. The people in the theatre were cracking up, so perhaps it was supposed to be a parody?

Also, whoever wrote this had no business attempting to use rock music. It reminded me of the "angsty" character on children's shows. Utterly generic guitar music to attempt to show that it's "edgy" and "modern". This was like... if I tried to write a rap song.  Maybe it would be really well written. And convey my deep personal emotions. But I don't really understand or know rap at all, so it would consist of me aping what rap I've heard, and saying cusses a lot. I don't want to say it would be "soulless", but...

I mean, it was a really well-made movie. Well-filmed, the songs were interesting, but the points it was trying to make were... silly.

In one scene, a homeless woman starts accosting a guy for filming her being harassed by a policeman. She basically says that she's sick of wannabe-artists trying to make themselves feel all warm and fuzzy by watching her get screwed. He looks all upset, and then they go get on the subway and sing and dance. He immediately goes back to filming random people.

Has anyone else seen it?
I'm sorry if this sounds like a horrible elitist rant, but the degree to which some people I know worshipped this movie made me very upset.
Maybe someone can enlighten me?

[Ben-San]

Haven't seen the movie yet, but just a note: probably the people you know worshipped the Broadway opera-musical thing given that afaik the movie came out just today.

Going by the play, I don't think the message is "do things people don't like" but rather "do your thing even if other people don't like it". I don't think Mark or Joanne is intended to be shown as a control freak because of dumping Maureen. As far as the Benny/rent thing goes, the problem is that they had a pre-existing agreement with Benny on which he reneged.

Maureen's performance art show is indeed intended to be parodically over the top. Not having seen the movie, I don't know how clear this is made.

As far as the singing immediately after the "Hey, artist.. got a dollar? Didn't think so" encounter, I don't know whether the movie follows it or not but the reason everyone sings all the time in the play is that it is an opera. All the dialogue is in song and their poses are exaggerated into dance. Singing and dancing does not mean "we are happy" per se in this context. The next song is the gang sitting around contemplating trying to move out of New York because they're all miserable there, which is not exactly a festive sort of thing.

[jough]

C'mon everybody we've got quiltin' to dooooo....

Yeah, the Team America parody "Lease" was pretty much right on the money - with the upbeat faux-rock music, stupid dancing, and everyone pretty much having the Hi-Five.

I have a screener DVD of the Rent movie, but I only got about 20 minutes into it before I realised that those were 20 minutes I wasn't getting back.

I miss the days where I could sell these screeners on eBay.  Now they just go right into the shredder.

[side_show]

Rent story:

On Tuesday at work, the Paramount promo guy shows up with a big box.  He had called our Box Office Manager and asked if our theatre would like some RENT Promo stuff.  She said that we would.  The huge box that was delivered contained:  RENT knitted hats, RENT Gloves with each finger hacing one letter to spell out R-E-N-T on it, RENT magnetic poetry kits, and far more facinating, RENT leg warmers.  There's at least 100 items in the box.  

Now, when she opened it, she and I sort of sarcastically laughed at the contents, especially the leg warmers... and the fact it's RENT stuff.  RENT was popular in the theatre community about 10 years ago.  (That makes me feel so old.)  I have very fond memories of the time, but was later embarassed an even sold my original Broadway recording.  A co-worker and I discovered we both know all the word to the whole damn thing.  Then we got nostalgic.  We chuckle at the strange content of the box, and agree that some of the kids in the evening classes might like some of it.

My boss who is a married guy with kids tells another of those stories, about how he used to wear leg warmers until he wore them to school one day and he was, naturally, seriously mocked.

So I was sitting in my office, with this huge box of silly RENT shwag, people kept coming in and pawing through it, being all sarcastic and jaded and theatre-ish.  I was sitting at my desk, not right beside the box, which was on a table sort of behind and to the left of me, and I started to realize that my new boots were hurting the flesh of my calfs where the tough leather rubs my tender skin.  And then I realized an impossible truth - I CAN PUT THE LEG WARMERS TO A PRACTICAL USE!  I put them on, pull my jeans over so none one will see me wearing the stupid things, and viola!  The pain is gone.  I go back to work, more people come and poke at the box.  I show them that I am infact wearing the leg warmers, we all laugh ironically - we are cool, we are jaded, we would only wear leg warmers as a joke.  The artistic director comes to take some joke gifts of RENT stuff to the Scottish acting troup that's performing Cyrano for us (they Seer-ran-oh! - which makes all us Canadians titter), I insisted she bring them leg warmers.  More people come and make jokes about the box of RENT stuff, and I basically start to get annoyed.  I get up to put to box away so I can get some work done.... and to my total wonder, the box is empty!  Sure everyone is too cool, too jaded to like RENT, but all the shwag is mysteriously gone.

Also, I've worn the leg warmers every day to keep my calfs from getting anymore boot hickies.

No day but today.

[Bozack]

Hergh. I only know RENT because every drama kid at my high school used to jerk off to it. They actually got all indignant about why the school wouldn't let them do RENT for their big production.
Let me parse that for all of you- a group of high school drama kids were pissed because a HIGH SCHOOL, in KENTUCKY, wouldn't let them perform a play/musical/opera/whatthefuck where most characters have AIDS and many are GAY.
In KENTUCKY.
I'm not saying that we're backwards here, but hell, I don't think that would fly in New York City.

[theinevitable]

best part about the kids being mad about that:
they must have not been aware that the school would have to pay for the rights to it. and it's still on broadway, which means the cost would have been astronomical.

Don't get me wrong, I love drama kids. But in my experiences with them, they seem to have this sense of "oh, we're so oppressed! Free Speech means being able to say whatever you want, and no one can get mad!" To the point that it's like some horrible reflex.

[mudokon]

Looks all right to me.

[misterqueue]

Ugh.. yes.. coming up as a drama kid myself it was all Rent and Stomp like crazy back in those days.

I never got the Rent thing... Stomp was pretty much okay though.

They used to have circle jerks around their Rent CD recordings and then cry when they didn't win (This may be an exaggeration)

And correct me if I'm wrong, but all the singers on those recordings were absolutely terrible if memory serves...

[Bozack]

Every time I see this thread title, I think to myself, "Well, sure, renting is alright for now, but at some point a man's gotta own some property."

[V-Adore]

Guilty confession: when I was desperately trying to be a theater kid, I loved RENT.

Guiltier confession: I still like it a lot.

I realize it's no longer cool to like it (even less cool than Les Miz, which I could never get into at all even when I was supposed to), but what can I say? It's a good show. A pretty goofy plot, sure, but it's musical theater. The expectations are lower.

[AlohaDawg]

I was pushing thirty when Rent went down. Everyone I knew who was fanatical about it was (IMHO) a poser. Everyone.

[V-Adore]

I was pushing thirty when Rent went down. Everyone I knew who was fanatical about it was (IMHO) a poser. Everyone.

With all due respect, this may be an age-group-dependent thing. I didn't know any posers who were into it, but well, I was a teenager. Presumably the demographic profile of "teenagers who are really into Rent" and "people pushing thirty who are really into Rent" is different, you know?

[AlohaDawg]

Let me clarify:

The sheer number of affluent suburbanites affecting some kind of stricken melodrama in a pathological way would have been disappointing had it not been that they were mainly teens and twenty-somethings and mainly wannabe theatre-artsy types from whom you would expect such inane posturing. They were no less vomitous for that, though.

It was disturbing and not just due to my advanced age of 28 or so. And I did something like 30 dramas, comedies and musicals by that point so it's not like I wasn't a theatre kid too at that time.

But,  I had worked in HIV/AIDS for years at that point. Seeing it from the Public Health standpoint is kind of jading.

[pmcd9]

I saw Rent for the first time last year.  I can only guess that a great deal was explained in the first five minutes of the show and as I arrived late didn't really get it.  My date, who had seen it numerous times explained as we went.  Now I don't think it's really completely vital that you totally understand the story to enjoy a musical so long as the music satisfies.  That's why some recent shows, like the one about Queen or Abba, whose stories are merely flimsly pretext to hang a bunch of pop songs on are so popular.  In Rent however I never really got that excited about the music.  Me, i'll take Rogers and Hammerstein.  

~Paul

[LCB]

I hate Rent. More importantly I hate the people who worship it, the worst kind of drama geeks and drama queens.
The only thing I can't stand more than many of the recent major musicals from the tiresome Monty Python's Holy Grail to the dreary Producers to the faux Tin Pan Alley BS of Chicago are the musicals that make the rounds of fringe theater, which tends to whipsaw between the oh-so-ironic/kitschy/campy "MUSICAL BASED ON CULT MOVIE!" like the musical version of Reefer Madness or yet another regional company of some oh-are-we-clever thing like Batboy: The Musical or Psycho Beach Party ("Gee, weren't those 60s beach movies just so corny and phony? Let's spend over an hour driving the same jokes into the ground!")
The modern musical has gone to heck in a handbasket, whether you're talking about the umpteenth production of Grease starring Z-list has-beens or being stuck in some tiny college theater watching a painfuly derivative and unfunny musical based on an Ed Wood movie or whatever, written by a couple of theater geeks who giggled inanely to themselves while writing the script.