Rent (Blu-ray)

 

Picture: B+     Sound: B     Extras: C-     Film: D

 

 

Why was the Musical dead for so long?  Was it because few new good ones had arrived on or off Broadway?  Maybe.  Was it because live stage versions are so hard to catch on film?  That could be a factor.  Is it from waiting too long for from stage to screen?  That did not help Jonathan Larson’s Rent (2005) one bit, but even worse, should this landmark work be trusted on celluloid to Home Alone director Chris Columbus?  Absolutely not!

 

And that is why the film became a critical and commercial bomb, with Columbus clueless on how to handle the project.  The film is a mess, the liberties the Stephen Chbosky screenplay takes with the original is too often poor, Columbus is trying to make it mall-movie safe and as its 135 minutes winds on, it just gets worse, and worse and worse.

 

Of course, that did not stop diehard fans of the original from almost turning it into a cult item, but it suffers the same problem just about all Musicals until recently did made more obvious by Music Videos.  Since the Grease films, all musicals (Annie, A Chorus Line) on film have felt like restrictive, sanded-down, package-deal versions of the genuine item, constipated with a lack of energy, range, pace and ambition that becomes more shocking and ironic when you stereo finally returned to all major film productions and none of the studios knew how to translate this into an exciting new cycle of Musicals.  The record labels had cornered the market on visual music.

 

Now that we have Chicago, Dreamgirls and Hairspray, the many, seemingly endless failures of this train wreck are instantly more obvious than even when it was released in theaters and on DVD.  Even the presence of original cast members including Anthony Rapp, Adam Pascal, Rosario Dawson, Jesse L. Martin, Tracey Thoms, Idina Menzel, Taye Diggs and Wilson Jermaine Heredia cannot overcome the results.  That once again leaves a bad film version of a good Musical that people will hopefully not think is a true representation of the original.

 

 

The 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image was shot in Super 35mm film by the Stephen Goldblatt, A.S.C., B.S.C., whose work has been impressive as early as Peter Hyams’ Outland (1981) and notable films like Tony Scott’s original 1983 version of The Hunger, Francis Coppola’s The Cotton Club, the first two Lethal Weapon films, Batman Forever and Mike Nichols’ latest triumphs: Closer and Charlie Wilson’s War.  As the default highlight of this release, color is consistent, Video Black solid and detail has its moments, though this is not always a consistent transfer overall.  Goldblatt is also undermined by production design, where the streets can look more like 21 Jump Street than a musical.

 

The Dolby True HD and PCM 5.1 options offer a clearer version of the horribly realized, annoyingly mis-mixed film, with terrible soundfield, sound leakage and other annoyances that helped kill the film at the box office.  That the cast just cannot pull off the songs like they could in the early days is only adds to the agony.

 

Extras include No Day But Today documentary, piece on Jonathan Larson’s Performing Arts Foundation & National Marfan Foundation, deleted scenes/musical performances and audio commentary by Columbus & “select” cast members.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo