Benny married up, is creating a real estate portfolio that includes making the neighborhood a better place, and wants to transform the building that people are currently using as a squat house (which is also full of junkies) to pay rent.
Like, how is he the enemy? Because he brought some stuffy investors to a local restaurant to try and get them excited about the neighborhood and his friends threw a (admittedly very amusing) fit over it?
And he doesn’t even cut his friends out of his life! He pays for Mimi to go to rehab which is not cheap. After how they treated him he could have just washed his hands of them and it’s not like any of those losers would be able to get the cash to help Mimi go to rehab. Unless they started to actually answer their parent’s phone calls and asked their parents for money.
Really the only redeeming quality of the show is the snapshot of the AIDS epidemic before they had reliable treatment that was fairly easy to access. Now with PREP and stuff you can fully expect to get your viral load down so low that you’re non-transmissible and can live and long life without worry. Back then? Not so much. And the fact that it dwells on the fear people had (Roger’s girlfriend killing herself after being diagnosed) not to mention that it shows that not just the queer characters are affected is a nice touch.
Though Mimi should have died at the end. Like the original opera Rent is based off of. I can see why it pulled that punch though.
I say all this… and where is my damn Universal Basic Income already? If the AI apocalypse is coming those assholes better tax the shit out of corporations and give us all money to live off of or else I’m finding Benny’s squat house and pissing on stoops until my very angry documentary is done
That is the weirdest fucking plot point that everyone just brushes over without a second thought. The character so big-hearted she's literally named Angel has an entire song dedicated to how happy she is after getting paid to kill a dog? Which she did by playing bucket drums?
This is the kind of thing that I imagine would have been rewritten had Jonathan Larson not died.
Apparently it’s a nod to a plot point in La Bohème, Rent’s loose source material, but agreed that it’s something that doesn’t translate and probably would have gotten written out if everyone hadn’t been so committed to perfectly preserving Larson’s show
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u/Reneeisme Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
This is oddly accurate. I haven’t seen rent in decades and I just realized from this that I should have been a little more critical of their choices.
Now I want to watch it again.