Given that I spent a little bit of time in the sun today and it's also pretty damn hot here, I opted tonight to stay in and watch a film I hadn't seen before. I hadn't seen Moulin Rouge yet, and seeing as how it got so much acclaim -- plus I've been to Paris and seen the real one -- that I figured tonight was as good a night as any to watch it.

I was appalled. Nay, I was disgusted. Normally, I kind of like Baz Luhrmann's stuff. His version of Romeo & Juliet was interesting enough to appeal to the masses, and I absolutely loved his CD. So given the amount of praise I had heard about the film and the fact that it won a bunch of awards, I was expecting a decent amount of originality. Plus, the summary on IMDB says (and I quote): "Moulin Rouge is a shockingly creative and fascinating film about an original love story."

Shockingly creative and fascinating film about an original love story, my ass! That film is Shakespeare in Love -- a film that came out three years before Moulin Rouge -- with can-can girls and orchestral reworkings of modern-day rock songs and love ballads thrown into the mix. How much more trite, unoriginal and uncreative can a film get when it barely has any original content to begin with? I knew how the film would end about a half-hour into my viewing, but I kept watching because I hoped that somewhere along the line, the storyline would actually get creative and not follow the formulaic plot that I predicted. It didn't.

I don't know what bothers me more -- the fact that it wasn't original and it was so critically acclaimed, or the fact that people seemed to think it was so original and terrific. Do we really have that short an attention span as a viewing audience and that much appreciation for visual effects that they outweigh the lack of originality and creativity?