Results tagged “moulinrouge”

Remember in Moulin Rouge when Ewan McGregor's character drinks some green liquid, the camera tilts to a canted angle, the crazy music starts playing, and you felt like maybe someone had slipped a hallucinogen into your popcorn? The green liquid, of course, was absinthe, and its purported psychoactive properties have been well extolled by the likes of Oscar Wilde, Outkast, and Johnny Depp.

Been enjoying the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit at the Art Institute? Wishing you could see those can-can girls come to life in vivid Technicolor but have an intense dislike of musicals based on pop songs? Then head over to The Gene Siskel Film Center for a screening of John Huston’s 1952 version of Moulin Rouge starring Jose Ferrer as Toulouse-Lautrec. Unlike the version by Baz Luhrmann that focused on the love story between Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, Huston’s version has Lautrec as its lead.

It’s the art world version of a rock band stuck with a bad sound engineer or a gifted author languishing in B-list hell. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Scene de Ballet,” an early painting that curators and critics previously designated a hazy minor work, was given a much-needed restoration by the Art Institute. And wouldn’t you know, the painting’s more beautiful and more important than the art world realized.