Rent is one of those wildly popular cultural artifacts that was never more than in my peripheral vision. I am not a fan of musicals and I always assumed that a musical cast under the shadow of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s would be cloying and sentimental, as musicals, almost by definition, tend to be.

The video production of Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway is about as good as filming a live Broadway show can be. Given the inherent limits of the task, the filmmakers do a fine job of keeping the action moving with a nice balance of close-ups and views of the entire stage. The stage production–trying, I supposed, to capture the bleakness of the characters’ physical world–is bland, but that is no fault of the filmmakers.

I’ll admit, given my bias against musicals, that Rent started out at a disadvantage. But I will also admit that my being charmed by an excellent musical is in no way unprecedented. However, I found Rent to be beyond cloying and sentimental, more unintentional self-parody than the insightful rock opera it pretends to be.

I found many aspects of Rent to be rather trite. The characters are mostly stereotypes. The vision of the artistic world, one struggling against greedy financial interests, offers nothing new or inventive. I have never seen La Boheme, on which Rent is supposedly based, so I am at a loss at making any pertinent comparisons or to assess to what level this triteness is due to a faithfulness to the source material.

I was disappointed that I found even the music bland. Everything about Rent seems to be trying so hard to be “edgy” and different that it becomes anything but. It feels like an outsiders view of what it means to be “artistic.” It suffers from a preciousness that belies the seriousness of some of the issues it incorporates. And that preciousness brings Rent precariously close to being exploitive, which is a deal-breaker for me.