In short, save the $9 ticket price, and buy the Broadway Cast Album instead. It will bring you much more joy and will give you a vastly better perspective on the composer's original vision.<br /><br />I consider the film to be an unsuccessful translation of the show, which I have seen in New York eight (8) times as of 11/23/05. I appreciate that making a film of a play must be very difficult, and I don't fault Mr. Columbus or Mr Chbosky for being unsuccessful, but I think that some of the choices made in altering the original, Pulitzer Prize winning, book were unfortunate.<br /><br />In general, I thought that the film was tedious and disjoint, but the most severe problem was that I felt no empathy with the characters in the film, whereas I do in the play.<br /><br />The film was stripped of most of the original book's wit and edge. Where was Mark's mom singing on the answering machine? Where was Alexi Darling's message from the Hamptons? And Mimi's dance at the Cat Scratch Club, like many other aspects of the film, was sanitized to ensure the film's PC-13 rating. Can you imagine Quentin Tarintino sanitizing Salma Hayek's dance in From Dusk Till Dawn to get a PG-13 rating? A correctly made film would have received an "R" or "NC-17" rating. <br /><br />If you can imagine how interesting Pulp Fiction would be without profanity or violence, you can imagine how interesting the film Rent is.