RENT 2 – BEDFORD BOOGALOO
Dir – Joel Schumaker
Starring – Haley Joel Osmont, Hayden Panateri, Mary & Ashley Kay Olson, Rory Culkin, John Turtorro

Seymour Lawson produced Rent 2 after a long-running legal battle. To quote Sir Thomas More, “What Hath Man Wrought?” And why must they ride bicycles?

It’s striking to this reviewer how much Rent 2 has in common with Grease 2. Both change the time & place of the original in small increments. Yet both have no relationship to the original except for plot and thematic similarities.

It’s the summer of 2000 in New York City. Austin, Jon, Ashton, Jesus, Mimi and gang are living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Our singing and dancing stars share a 1 floor loft of a rent-stabilized building on the prominently displayed Bedford Avenue (a.k.a “Bedford Boogaloo”). Though struggling artists all, they share an affinity both for song, dance, and expensive yuppie bistro food (Life in the original, Planet Thai in the sequel.)

Our conflict comes in 2 forms. The first is a greedy Hasidic landlord who wants to evict the kids & renovate for more RENT. Played by John Turtorro, mimicking the exact same character he played in “The Gentrifiers”, Turtorro seems dead set to strive for the elusive “Lifetime Achievement for Promoting Anti-Semitism.”

The second, less odious conflict involves Culkin’s character, who has chosen to abandon “art” to get a “norm job” in the financial area. The conflicts this causes threatens to tear the group apart. Or at least that’s what they sing to us.

In a bizarre twist, the September 11 attacks are substituted for AIDS as a way to kill off some of the characters, which leads to a musical number about the infamous attack; sung as office debris reigns down upon them.

But don’t turn the film off in the first 20 minutes as you’ll then miss my favorite part: A song by the entire cast sung while riding bicycles. The song, “Ghost Bike! (We mourn you); seems to be both an epic and ballad concerning bicycle riding in Brooklyn. This is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

And so ends Rent 2, a film that somehow manages to be more maudlin and offensive then the original.

DVD Extras – “A Musical Critical Mass – The Making of ‘The Bike Scene’” Featurette, “Billy Burg – We’re Hip! We’re Beautiful! And We’re Here To Stay!” Deleted song and scene, “9-11 – The Featurette” (Features cast members Rory Culkin and the Olson Twins giving their observations and feeling about that day)

I’d like to submit a new term for the urban dictionary of life:

iPod Fart - The phenomenon of loudly farting in public under a subconscious pretense that if you can’t hear it, no one can.

Sentence - “I had an iPod fart on the train today. It was embarrassing, but I got the 2 seats next to me.

Hating social networking sites as I do, I don’t see what the appeal is. Gotta say though, when the Limerick gangsta young fellas join the rest of youth of Ireland on Bebo with Al Capone skins, I took notice.

WE ARE COOL KID COZ WER 4M WESTON FUCK GARRYOWEN ND DA ISLAND FIELD