Rent

I watched Rent not once but twice this weekend.

I’m conflicted.

One part of me wants to say, “YES, its finally made it to the big screen!” But another part of me feels that a huge piece of the show’s charm was lost or sanitized out in the transition to film.

I’ll be honest two of my favorite songs, “Halloween” and “Contact”, didn’t make it into the movie. Halloween was apparently shot, but they didn’t even record the music for Contact. (Contact was known as the “sex” song in my mind, and for the longest time I hated it, but I’ve grown to love it.)

Cutting Contact from the film is a perfect example of the sanitization that took place in the transition. The amazing thing about Contact is that is is both a hot erotic song with people having sex, a song where the characters brashly proclaim their dissatisfaction with sex, and a song in which one of the main characters dies. Sex, sex, death. Or to be more precise, Sex, Sex, death of a gay man who got AIDS from Sex.

I’m annoyed this juxtaposition isn’t in the movie. Instead the only way HIV is showed as spreading in the film is from drug use. Granted, the show didn’t illustrate any HIV transmission methods, but alluded to multiple methods that people are infected with HIV.

By removing the allusion that HIV is transmitted by sex, and replacing it with the example that HIV is transmitted by drug use it has denigrated people living with HIV/AIDS.

Its also disheartening how some of the songs have been edited. Opening song “Rent” emasculated into a simple linear expositionary song that is a triumph in literalism. Whereas the musical’s version of “Rent” serves to introduce a majority of the main characters in wonderful polyphony and illustrate the Rent that is developing within the group, the movie’s version just about protesting the fact that people have to pay Rent. These missing pieces haven’t even been covered up, there are long pregnant beats just stick out and that now interrupt the flow of the song. Quite frankly I prefer Homer Simpson’s version of “Rent” in Rent II: Congo Fever, at least that was funny.

Also, someone forgot to educate the idiot screenwriter, Stephen Chbosky, what a sung through musical is. I understand fully that things have to be reworked and sometimes changed around so the story works in a different medium, but we’ve lost the fun sung answering machine messages, as well as numerous other pieces of music, in their place are uninteresting spoken replacements, or even worse, the same words spoken without music. Additionally, peppered through the movie to adjust for the loss of Jonathan Larsen’s wonderful work, are lame lines penned by Chbosky.

Somewhere along the line with all this tinkering and reworking Rent lost its heart and soul. The movie marginally works, but its a different animal, and it disgraces the brilliance and compactness of its predecessor.