Rent Details

RENT INDEED

If you watch this film you will feel like renting out your brain, believe me. I made it through the firs 20 mins or so before the mind numbing twaddle made me switch it off. Watch at your own risk. You have been warned

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It's so cute when they have AIDS...

The most disgracefully sentimental and kitsch take I have ever seen on poverty and being HIV positive. Rent has taken its idea of being poor straight out of a Jon Bon Jovi song - the hair is glamorously wild and the bohemian scarves are attractively frayed. A blatant and inaccurate romanticisation of poverty by people who have obviously never had a tight month in their life. These tragic - yet conveniently beautiful - waifs can't afford their rent so they go to a cafe and sing a rousing bohemian tribute to the virtues of tofu, yoga, beansprout salads, and the like (what? Where's the malnutrition, the greasy hair and obesity, the bad teeth?). Apparently this is supposed to be a tribute to the liberal, class-defying and uplifting values of bohemianism, but actually it just reveals it as the middle-class fallacy it really is. Even the homeless people are made picturesque hermits in the shifting mists.

The issues of living with AIDS and heroin addiction are not so much investigated as used to stab at your eyes in order to provoke easy tears with no real depth of feeling behind them. It's a sensationalist cry-fest with added sugar and fibre removed.

But, hey, it's not meant to be a documentary. Musicals specialise in emotionalism, and one ought to put aside reality checks when you watch them. Except that the songs aren't even that great, the characters are irritating and obnoxious, and you just can't get passed the offensive rainbow-hued vision the makers seem to have of poverty and disease.

Oh, and when the girl comes back to life you want to jump through the screen and stab her pretty, heroin-shadowed face (they're all wearing it on the catwalks these days) with her own hypodermic.