La Vie Boheme

Rent is on my mind today.
No, not the one I'm paying every first week of the month. I'm talking about the Tony award-winning musical which was adapted to film last 2005. I cant believe I let about two years pass before I watched this movie adaptation. The thought of downloading this movie came to me because of my current frustration in finding a decent Sweeney Todd movie torrent file. When El finished downloading the Rent torrent last night, I immediately forgot all about my cases and excitedly played the movie. I have fallen in love with this musical since I first heard of it. I have a copy of the songs from the original Broadway soundtrack which Ive downloaded a few years back so I am acquainted with the songs and even memorized some of them. Having watched the movie last night brought back the frenzy once again. I have been singing songs from the soundtrack all day today and when I'm not, the songs just kept on playing in my mind.

Rent is about a group of friends and young artists and their struggles with work, love, and life. The plot is amidst the background of aids and transgenderism. The "bohemian" or impoverished artist culture is the pervading theme of this story which I totally dig. Each character is very unique and very familiar at the same time. There's Mark, a struggling film maker who makes a lot of documentaries and who thinks working for big media corporations is a sell-out. Roger is the aids-stricken songwriter and ex front man of a band whose love interest is Mimi, a dancer in a club who also has aids. Maureen is a performance artist who leads the protest against Benny and the landlords of the East village of New York. She dumped Mark for a lawyer named Joanne (incidentally!). Tom Collins is a philosophy professor who also has aids who falls for Angel, my favorite character, a cross-dresser with aids who plays percussions on the streets. I love how this musical emphasizes on the importance of how we ought to relish in living our lives and forget our unnecessary pretensions. There's no day but today.

All but two (Mimi and Joanne) of the movie cast are reprisals of their roles in the original Broadway version. Rosario Dawson's portrayal of Mimi is surprisingly good. I always thought shes a good actress but I didnt know she sings. Tracie Thoms as Joanne is superb. The first time I saw her in the movie I thought, this girl looks really familiar. That's when it hit me that I saw her in "Devil Wears Prada" playing as a friend of Anne Hathaway there. Jesse Martin (Tom Collins) and Taye Diggs (Benny) played roles in Ally McBeal that are very lucid in my memory that I had quite a hard time disintegrating the doctor/lawyer character in them that I was accustomed to. And oh yeah, Adam Pascal (Roger) was Theo, Jack Black's former bandmate, in the flick "The School of Rock".

I have always been a musical enthusiast and ever since I became one, I have been dreaming of going to New York and watch the runs of my favorite Broadway musicals in the New Amsterdam theater. But since that dream is quite far out for now, Ill just settle on film adaptations and singing librettos in the shower.