Rent

I love musicals. I love New York. I love the East Village. I've been a starving artist. I dress up in drag sometmes. I've lost dear friends to AIDS. I know many people, actors and friends who are HIV positive. A close relative of mine lost a few years of her life to drug addiction. I've gone to self-help meetings. My last name is Larsen.

I SHOULD be able to find SOMETHING in this musical to connect to and appreciate, but I can't. I hate the material. I hate it. I hate the lyrics, I hate most of the music, I hate the original musical and I hate this fucking movie.

I've been trying for the last 30 minutes to write this review and I don't know where to start.

I cringed thru every moment of it. I could write a frame by frame smackdown of everything wrong.

The only thing I liked in the movie, besides Sarah Silverman, who stole the movie for the two minutes she was on screen was the low-budget footage of the "movie" one of the characters, Mark Cohen, is shooting.

Maybe if the whole movie had been shot in that style and it was done as an abstract portrait of downtown and the songs played over the images, and all the actors were unknowns and looked like actual penniless-HIV positive-drug addicts living without electricity or running water in the East Village...maybe, just maybe I could have enjoyed it cause I did enjoy the rough footage but everytime one of those fresh-faced, well-scrubbed, costumed, polished Broadway actors opened their mouths to sing about the pain of life, I felt insulted.

HIV positive strippers on heroin do not look, dance or sing like Rosario Dawson. Filmmakers do not walk into 12 step meetings unannounced and start filming. Drag Queens don't walk around New York dressed up as if everyday is Wigstock. I live in NY. That movie is not NY. The whole thing is ridiculous, bizarre, juvenile and as the credits rolled I kept mutttering to myself, "Oh my God...Oh my God!"

This may sound like back pedaling but I'm glad Rent exists because I know it has brought tons of joy to millions of audience- members and the original musical launched careers of many talented people. And I'm truly sad that Jonathan Larson did not live to create more musicals and I have enjoyed films by the director of Christopher Columbus. BUT, having said all that, Rent is by far, the worst movie I saw all year.

No other movie this year was so wrong in so many ways. I literally can not think of another film I saw this year that felt like such a complete and total failure in every department. I love many movie musicals; Sound of Music, Chicago, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret. Each of those movies is approached completely differently but they all work on their own terms.

Rent fails and it fails hard and I sat through it. I wanted to leave, but I I didn't. I stuck with it and it's an experience I will never forget as much as I wish I could.

PS The Rent mug above is for sale for only 10 dollars on the official Rent website. Everyone should start their day with coffee in a cup from a musical about people dying from addiction and poverty. Delicious!