The Flour Disease

In a despicable display of selfish apathy towards a disease affecting millions of people worldwide, including whole generations of Africans, the right-wing has compared AIDS to a “flour disease”.

Now, I won’t get on my soap box any more than to say I think it’s ridiculous to claim anyone and everyone who gets infected with HIV or AIDS today does so at totally their own fault. Some statistics show that as many as 1 in 3 people who are infected don’t know it, and will continue to infect others with it until they do find out. How fair is it to label the lover of that 1 in 3 as somehow being lazy or ignorant of the problem when they had no control over the situation?

Anyway, my real beef with this article isn’t their trashing of AIDS as an epidemic, but their trashing of “Rent” as a movie.

First, a disclaimer: I’ve never seen the play, and only heard the soundtrack maybe twice in my lifetime, both while I was living in a small dorm room with 2 roommates, one of which was a fan of the show.

For a Broadway show, and compared to most of the music out there today, the music in “Rent” isn’t half-bad, and the story can be bitter-sweet from what I can tell. So I may watch “Rent” as a movie, but I might not – I might go see the Harry Potter film instead.

But what the author of this blog post I mentioned earlier did was trash the poor quality of “Rent” as a play – whether he saw it in Broadway or somewhere else wasn’t made clear – and used his poor experience to trash the movie and completely dismiss the importance of the message being sent via the story.

As we’ve seen with so many TV to movie, play to movie, TV to play, etc., adaptations, you really can’t say whether the adaptation is going to be bad simply because you disliked the original. There are a number of cases where Hollywood did better with the movie than the original author or playwright did with the idea.

So please, whatever your politics about AIDS, whatever your experience with “Rent” as a play, don’t angrily dismiss “Rent” as a movie simply because of those other preferences. See the movie or don’t, but don’t trash a movie before you even see it for yourself.