Directed by Chris Columbus. Starring Taye Diggs, Rosario Dawson, and Jessie L. Martin. Rated PG. Now playing at the Cinemark Tinseltown, the SilverCity Coquitlam, the Granville 7, and others

New York City is a lot of things. It's flashy with its fashionistas, celebrities, and champagne-swilling glitterati. It's cultured with its artists, writers, musicians, and dancers. It's colourful with its street performers, drag queens, and goths. And it's grimy, with its dealers, pimps, and hustlers. New York is many things, but there's one thing that it's not-corny.

The Big Apple is infamous for eye-rolling cynicism, which is why the Broadway musical-turned-movie RENT is so difficult to digest. Ostensibly a celebration of bohemian life in the famed city-based on Jonathan Larson's award-winning stage play RENT, a remake of Puccini's opera La Bohí¨me-the movie comes across as syrupy and sentimental.

RENT follows a year in the life of eight outcast friends struggling with poverty, drugs, and illness in the East Village of New York. Thomas (played by Jessie L. Martin) is an eccentric professor and HIV patient who falls in love with Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia), a transvestite who believes in the healing power of the local AIDS support group. Maureen (Idina Menzel) is a head-tripping performance artist who dumps her adoring boyfriend for no-nonsense lawyer Joanne (Tracie Thoms). Roger (Adam Pascal) is a reclusive rock musician mourning the death of his drug-addicted girlfriend; he can't bring himself to return the affections of his neighbour Mimi (Rosario Dawson), a junkie stripper-and ex-girlfriend of Benny (Taye Diggs), the yuppie landlord who evicts the whole crew on Christmas Day. And Mark (Anthony Rapp) is an up-and-coming filmmaker, documenting each and every one of the 525,600 minutes that make up the year.

The emotional thrust of the movie is captured in the film's theme song, "Seasons of Love", which champions a dare-to-love philosophy.

Despite an impressive musical score, imaginative cinematography, and a talented cast, RENT is unforgivably corny. The film rambles on and on and on and serves up enough seize-the-day platitudes to last a lifetime. It paints a hopeful picture of those living with disease, true, but in the process it opts for tedious pacing and wide-eyed, sappy delivery. A little harsh? Perhaps, but then so is New York.