Why Baz isn't up to the job

If you love film musicals, you'll love Moulin Rouge, right? Wrong, says Kim Newman. When it comes to making a song and dance, just about everyone does it better than Baz Luhrmann

It's easy to see the thinking behind the expensive gamble that 20th Century-Fox has taken on Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. In the last decade, dead-duck genres have regularly stirred to profitable life – the Western in Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven, the Second World War movie in Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbor, the Roman epic in Gladiator and Titus. Whether tailored for Oscar-appeal or the box office, these are tombstones rather than revivals, ostentatious and presumptuous Last Words on their subjects. Moulin Rouge would like to do the same thing for the cinema's youngest major form, the musical (b 1927, The Jazz Singer).

As a devotee of the genre, my reaction to this latest flurry of interest is mixed. Its traditions and conventions intertwined with, but separate from, opera and the stage musical, the film musical is the most purely cinematic of genres, which means all directors would love to do one. In the late Twenties and early Thirties, musical numbers were forced into films in the way CGI (computer generated imagery) is these days. Films billed as "all-singing, all-dancing" either had to have Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers delirious together, or a thousand chorus girls worked into a vast machine by mad genius Busby Berkeley. For decades, the musical produced extraordinary work, at once popular and surreally innovative: the Vincente Minnelli and Donen/Kelly efforts of the Forties and Fifties, the stereophonic widescreen vigour of Broadway transfers, from Oklahoma! to West Side Story.

Conventional wisdom has it that the only musicals of the last 25 years have been exercises in disastrous hubris, such as Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love, Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart, and Julien Temple's Absolute Beginners (two of which have a lot going for them), but there has actually been a steady trickle of activity. One From the Heart and the Steve Martin-remake of Pennies from Heaven may have lost money, but they remain interesting films – as is Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, another film that tries to be about its genre rather than a part of it.

Broadway/West End transplants such as Evita (ugh!) and Little Shop of Horrors (not as good as the show, but sweet), or semi-experiments such as Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You (iffy) and Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labours Lost (wretched), tend to have soft box-office returns and not please many people, leaving the field open for more interesting musicals-in-disguise, which range from Saturday Night Fever through Topsy-Turvy to O Brother, Where Art Thou?.

So, does the genre need Moulin Rouge's rescue mission? This season offers another glammy spectacular, based on an off-Broadway show to boot, John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which enshrines a notable stage performance and offers an original score of songs composed for this particular story. And the teen-skewed likes of Coyote Ugly, Bring It On or Get Over It have (like Fame, Flashdance and Footloose a generation ago) quite a bit to offer to anyone who'd audition for a school production of Guys and Dolls without feeling any need to proclaim themselves the saviours of a Great Tradition.

Sadly, Moulin Rouge isn't up to the job anyway. Luhrmann spins the plot around a David Bowie cover of "Nature Boy", a Nat King Cole hit that came originally from an obscure non-musical film (Joseph Losey's The Boy With Green Hair) and which weirdly shows up in another of this summer's worst films, Angel Eyes. Apart from a jokey (contemptuous?) appropriation of a chorus from The Sound of Music, Luhrmann mostly looks to the MTV era for hits redelivered in startling ways – Jim Broadbent singing "Like a Virgin", an Argentinian tango built around "Roxanne".

To placate the purists, Luhrmann has rightly pointed out that musicals have always used songs not strictly in keeping with the times the movies have been set, notably the 1940s songs in the 1900-set Meet Me in St Louis. Rather more of a problem might be that this device is a bit old-hat: there was 18th- century techno in Plunkett & Macleane, and medieval jousting audiences sing Queen or Thin Lizzy in A Knight's Tale (out next week). And pop songs, deeply identified with the artists who created them, aren't quite as flexible as show tunes: Frank Sinatra could take a Fred Astaire song ("One For the Road") and make it his own; when Broadbent does Madonna, it's hard not to think of "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody, "Like a Surgeon".

Disastrously, Luhrmann doesn't trust the material, failing at the most basic task: presenting song-and-dance numbers that allow a demonstration of talent or vision while advancing the story.

By cutting and mixing and patching and skittering away from anything like actual performance, the inference is that neither Ewan MacGregor nor Nicole Kidman are up to snuff in the musical talent department. The "Roxanne" tango might have been a blazing bit of invention, but it's directed in such a jittery way that we'll never know whether the choreography was any good. In contrast, one strength of Hedwig, a fairly clumsy expansion of a play that was almost a nightclub act, is its realisation that performance is all, allowing director-star Mitchell to own the screen even before his show-stoppers come along.

Apart perhaps from the porno movie, no genre makes such a promise to deliver pleasure to the audience or can be so painful if the promise is unfulfilled. I've never much liked The Sound of Music, for example. Its rigid wholesomeness excludes anything approaching sex, which was always the simmering subtext of all those dancing couples whirling across reflective floors, or singing singles burbling out their hearts about adoring the boy next door. Julie Andrews' hills aren't alive with the sound of orgasmic moaning, unlike the obviously eroticised Oklahoma! landscape, in which "the corn is as high as an elephant's eye".

But times change. In Moulin Rouge, Kidman's Satine is a cabaret star and a courtesan, in a genre where the former was usually a euphemism for the latter, but in an era where the euphemism is no longer necessary. The whole point of the musical was to express sexuality on an extravagant scale; since mainstream films can now be explicit to the point of hardcore, there's no point in the substitution fantasies of those 1,000-girl extravaganzas (witness the failure of the neo-porno neo-musical Showgirls) or the more elegant dance couplings of Fred and Ginger or Gene and Cyd.

The recent picture with the finest sense of the history and possibilities of the big- screen musical is South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. It is a significant indicator of the unfairness of the universe that "Shut Your Fukkin Face, Uncle Fukka" was not even nominated for the Academy Award (that went to the instantly forgettable Phil Collins Tarzan number), since South Park has a) the best original song score for any movie since The Jungle Book, and b) manages merciless but affectionate parody of every major style of movie musical from 42nd Street to The Lion King.

If the musical has a saviour, it makes more sense to look to the Trey Parker-Matt Stone team than Baz Luhrmann.

'Hedwig and the Angry Inch' is to be released on 31 August, and 'Moulin Rouge' on 7 September