Gear Guide Set for Filmmakers – Century Optics

Gear Guide Set for Filmmakers – Century Optics
Video Rating: 5 / 5

In virtually every musical, the characters break into song to express their inner selves. But in Rent, the movie version of Jonathan Larson’s exuberant pop-rock tribute to the squalid lower Manhattan bohemia of the late 1980s, the characters have almost no outer selves. When they sing, their catchy epiphanies of deep-dish feeling are all there is to them. The movie is literally a series of showstoppers, unified by the impulse to turn life, at its scruffiest, into theater — into a rhapsody of the everyday. Rent doesn’t look like the sort of musical that would age well. A reflection of the era when AIDS was still a death sentence, it was, like Hair, a contradiction on stage: an adrenalized crowd-pleaser that romanticized the East Village culture of drag queens, drug addicts, holier-than-thou indie filmmakers, and other misfits by doing something they all would have hated — making them safe for mainstream audiences. When Rent debuted on Broadway in 1996, the hipster-squatter vitality the show celebrated was being steamrolled by Giuliani-ization, and my reaction was just as contradictory: I melted at the gorgeous descending cascade of a song like ”Seasons of Love,” yet the actors all blended into one another. They were a heartbeat away from the look-at-me ”creative” brats in Fame. All of which makes Rent, as a movie, a joyful surprise. The director, Chris Columbus, usually a meister of clunk (he made the first two Harry Potter films and Home Alone), has opened up the show …