My favorite movie!

So I’m going to let my dorky side come out here…and say that my all tine favorite movie is RENT! What’s not to like about it? For those who may not know, it’s a musical, but not one that’s all song and dance, it’s actually pretty depressing. But what I like the most about it that all of the characters, no matter how hard their lives get, are all happier than most of the people I know. Seriously, half the characters in this movie have HIV, but the constantly look on the bright side (“Times are shitty, but I’m pretty sure they can’t get worse”). The message of this movie can best be summed up by the reprise at the end of two of the main songs in the movie, “I’d die without you” and “no day but today.”

To summarize the movie (without giving too much away), almost everybody is dirt broke and has HIV. There are 3 couples: 1 lesbian, 1 man/transvestite (my personal favorite), and 1 man/woman, all of whom lean on each other for support and love (“without you the earth turns, the sun burns, but I die,” “life goes on, but I’m gone cause I’d die without you”). The lesbian couple isn’t really that exciting, the man/woman couple is amazing, and there are a lot of cool innuendos in different songs that talk about them and their past lives and whatnot, but the couple that I have to talk about is the man/transvestite couple.

They first meet when the man, Collins, gets beat up in an alley. Angel (the transvestite) says that he has to go to a life support meeting for people with AIDS, people like him, to which Collins replies “me too.” Thus their relationship begins… I could seriously drag on and on about these two, but to give you the gist of it all, they are in love. The only difference between these two characters and every other couple in every other movie that have ever been “in love” is that you actually BELIEVE that these two are in love. I don’t know how they do it. There is this one scene in particular, again not going to give it away (it’ll ruin the whole movie if I do!), that makes me ball every time I see it just because they are so convincing (sorry that sounded really vague…)

Long story short, it’s an awesome movie. The characters are so different than any other character in any other movie out there, not to mention the songs are pretty catchy. It’s one of the only movies that never fails to make me cry while watching it, and the motto to which I live my life by can be summed up perfectly by a lyric from “Finale B,”

“There’s only us, there’s only this. Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way. No but today.”