Nic & J-Lo.

The Australian director Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was clearly a misnomer. The work's reduction to the taste of the MTV generation was plainly Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. About his Moulin Rouge, the buzz from Cannes was pretty bad; as it turns out, its Baz is worse than its buzz.

Luhrmann's forte-if it can be called that-is splash, swirl, and frenetic cutting, to leave the viewers breathless and unthinking. Since his audience tends to come equipped with the latter attribute, he can concentrate on gaudiness and breakneck speed. In this Moulin Rouge there is far more decor and frippery than plot and character, and the dialogue is a blend of the cribbed and the cliched. But the tempo is such that hardly a shot exceeds six or seven seconds-many shots, in fact, are virtually subliminal-and the crass display of opulence is a veritable nouveau-riche banquet. Whatever else it lacks, the film suffocates in sheer razzmatazz, or, more exactly, Bazmatazz.

You had best come to it supplied with Dramamine or some other anti- seasickness drug; it is easily the equivalent of a stormy Atlantic crossing, though the shipboard orchestras are far more chaste and melodious than a Luhrmann soundtrack. The only times this one's fury abates is when Nicole Kidman-as Satine, the "Sparkling Diamond" of the Moulin floor show-chirps in her own fragile voice, so dainty that even electronic enhancement sits on it like falsies on a flat chest. When the men vocalize-Ewan McGregor in more than mezza voce, and Jim Broadbent in spunky sprechstimme-I suspect that the two masculine names billed in the credits as "vocal doubles" deserve the applause.

The story is a brazen concoction from La Traviata (lovely courtesan dying of consumption sacrifices herself for her beloved's good by pretending to prefer a rich nobleman), La Boheme (hero surrounded by merry bohemian friends, heroine succumbing to obligatory consumption after loving reconciliation with him), the musical On Your Toes (while hero is on stage, killer stalks him with gun but must find proper moment to shoot him), and heaven knows where else.

Our hero, a young Englishman named Christian (McGregor), is trying to make it as a writer in turn-of-the-century Paree (a setup borrowed from George du Maurier's Trilby, and countless others). Never before in love, he falls fatally for Satine, the courtesan-dancer who herself has never before loved, but reciprocates, harboring as she does under her lust for gold a repressed heart of same. But roughening the course of true love are Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent), the near-bankrupt owner of the Moulin, and the wealthy Duke of Worcester (Richard Roxburgh), who will finance the "spectacular spectacular" Christian is writing for Zidler and Satine in exchange for the lady's utter and undivided favors.

The banalities of the meager plot will not be rehearsed here; suffice it to say that Christian's pal Toulouse-Lautrec (whom his intimates here call Toulouse; Henri might confuse a Luhrmannite audience) is played wretchedly by John Leguizamo, who doesn't even manage to look as convincing as Jose Ferrer in John Huston's 1952 version. As Satine expires in the arms of the sobbing Christian, she exhorts him that he must go on, having so much to give to the world. Earlier, in her Camille mode, she said, "The difference between you and I [sic] is that you can leave anytime, but this is my home, the Moulin Rouge." By a cruel irony of the Grim Reaper, it is she who is leaving, but she assures Christian, "I'll always be with you." We see him throughout typing his musical, entitled Moulin Rouge, on his trusty vintage '99 Underwood. If Satine is truly watching from above, she may not, alas, see his work crowned at the box office.

John Huston's Moulin Rouge at least had a fine score by Georges Auric, and did not depend on musical scavenging. Here we have recycled old songs along with new ones by Lil' Kim, Mya & Pink, Fatboy Slim, and David Bowie and Massive Attack. The film's attack on the eyeballs is massive indeed; mine started throbbing at midpoint.

-- The surprising thing about Angel Eyes is that Jennifer Lopez gives a highly respectable performance in it. Playing Sharon Pogue, a tough Chicago cop, she manages to convey an attractive vulnerability and range of emotions under the steel. In short, she lets it all hang out in another, better sense than the sartorial.

Right off, we see her moral fortitude. At the scene of a car wreck in which a woman and child have been killed, she keeps a horribly wounded man, whose face we do not see, alive with the squeeze of her hand, the solicitude in her eyes, and the compassionate concern of her voice. After the medics cart him off, we lose sight of him.

Her next valorous feat is overpowering a murderous man with her iron grip. She also has a bantering hardball relationship with her partner, a young, black, married cop. She is less warm toward her brother, Larry, who tries to persuade her to reconcile with their father, whom she hasn't seen in ten years, since she arrested him for beating her mother.

Gradually, she becomes aware of a young man trailing and observing her. Unshaven and shabbily dressed, he nevertheless is no ordinary stalker. He has the poetically emaciated, excruciatingly soulful face of an anchorite, the gaze of a supernatural being (it is unclear whether the film's title refers to him or Sharon or both), and speaks with the halting gentleness of hypersensitive movie heroes and village idiots. He goes by the cryptic name Catch (no last name), lives in an ascetic pad that makes a prison cell seem luxurious, has mysteriously caring relationships with a wheelchair-bound older woman and an awestruck neighbor child, and has no occupation other than walking the streets and popping up in Sharon's purview.

So it is that on a night when Sharon is chasing after yet another lethal criminal through a godforsaken back alley, and the perpetrator wheels around, intent on killing her, Catch materializes out of nowhere and saves her life. I have an awful feeling that in some earlier version of the script, Catch was a guardian angel; in the definitive one, he is something almost as unlikely: the man in the opening car wreck whom Sharon helped save. From that providential encounter, romance develops.

I cannot begin to list the shabby and sloppy sentimentalities of this movie, which equal, indeed surpass, its flagrant improbabilities. Contrivance, implausibility, and tearjerking have their unholy heyday here, perhaps expectably from the Mexican-born American director Luis Mandoki, who has several heart-wringers to his credit, and who previously teamed up with the similarly endowed screenwriter Gerald DiPego on the preposterous Message in a Bottle. DiPego, a specialist in dime-store mysticism, also gave us, among others, the insufferable Phenomenon with John Travolta. Marco Beltrami's score helps this brimming tureen of soupiness overflow.

You may remember Jim Caviezel (Catch) as the sacrificial hero-soldier in The Thin Red Line and the saintly would-be suicide of the inspirational stinker Pay It Forward. Here, again, he is a beatifically hollow-cheeked scarecrow with suction-cup eyes and a swoony voice. The rest-including Sonia Braga, Victor Argo, Shirley Knight, and Terrence Howard-swim as well as one can in a sea of goo, and, except for her distracting accent, Miss Lopez, I repeat, cops the palm.