REVIEWED - RENT: THE great wonder of this extraordinarily terrible adaptation of an already unlovely Broadway musical is that quite a number of its set pieces manage to be even more hilarious than Lease, the Rent parody that lit up Team America: World Police.
The key early scene - an episode that simultaneously reveals the project's smugness and its hostility to reality - sees the evil owners of a New York apartment building send a representative to plead with their pompously bohemian tenants. It seems that these tattooed layabouts who, incidentally, haven't paid their rent for the last year, are planning to stage an annoying multimedia, trans-gendered, supra-racial happening to protest their imminent eviction. The suited philistines, horribly panicked by the power of mime, are desperate for the event to be cancelled.
Oh please! Nothing in Lord of the Rings was as fantastic as the notion that anybody outside the participants' own circle might give a toss about such supposedly avant-garde experiments in self-congratulation.
Space prohibits listing more than a fraction of the idiotic sequences that further confirm the utterly bogus nature of this attempted celebration of East Village life in the Aids years. But we must make mention of a particular snatch of dialogue, delivered at a drag queen's funeral.
"You were so much more original then any of us," someone warbles. "You'd find an old tablecloth on the street and make a dress and next year, sure enough, they'd be mass producing them at the Gap." Then they'd incorporate your funeral into a numbingly sentimental Broadway show. Then Sony Pictures would make it into a crass film directed by the brainbox who gave the world Mrs Doubtfire and the wretched first two Harry Potter films (for it is he). Give me a break.
The late Jonathan Larson, author of Rent, much of whose ageing original cast turn up here, is not the first person to repackage alternative lifestyles for the Broadway crowd. Hair did something similar more than 30 years ago, but that show was, at least, blessed with irresistibly catchy songs such as Aquarius and Good Morning, Starshine. The amorphous tunes in Rent slip out of your head as soon as you hear them. Thank Christ.
