Musicals

Crap
Total votes: 15 (47%)
Not Crap
Total votes: 17 (53%)
Total votes: 32

Performance: The Musical

12
houseboat wrote:The entire genre can be justified by the ten movies Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made together, Top Hat most particularly.

The cinematography and choreography in any given Busby Berkely film is also Not Crap.


And may I add Singing In The Rain? Smart and funny, some good songs and man, Gene Kelly could dance like a motherfucker. I liked what Pauline Kael wrote, that Kelly was the one dancer in Hollywood movies who never looked like a sissy.

I'd also like to give a shout out to Pennies From Heaven, which isn't perfect but really attempted to take the Hollywood musical tradition in a new direction and has some incredible moments.
"Everything should be kept. I regret everything I’ve ever thrown away." -- Richard Hell

Performance: The Musical

13
Mark Lansing wrote:I'd also like to give a shout out to Pennies From Heaven, which isn't perfect but really attempted to take the Hollywood musical tradition in a new direction and has some incredible moments.


If you mean the Hollywood version, I'd say the original TV series was better. Regardless, good spot: I'm chagrined that I forgot Dennis Potter. The Singing Detective (TV series) was a masterpiece, and the music was integral to that. This sequence is incredible (warning: if you're squeamish about skin disorder, this might take a bit of teeth gritting - but it's well worth enduring). The musical piece starts six and a half minutes in, but the whole sequence is brilliant - the build up makes it all the more powerful.
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Performance: The Musical

14
houseboat wrote:The entire genre can be justified by the ten movies Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made together, Top Hat most particularly.

The cinematography and choreography in any given Busby Berkely film is also Not Crap.

So, musicals from the sort of Golden Age of Hollywood are NOT CRAP to a degree that, I think, saves the genre from mass dismissal.

High waffles for any musical made after about 1955.

(and what about Bollywood?)


I've only seen a few of these and it was a while ago, and I'm sure their fine. My point wasn't that their aren't any good musicals, just that they are worse off for the characters break off into song every few minutes.


On a related note, I recently watched the old Christopher Lee Wicker Man. There is a fair amount of singing in this, but it didn't bother me as much as a normal musical did. (It was still pretty crappy for other reasons).

That the music numbers didn't bother me was puzzling. Now I think this was OK because the only people who were singing were the batshit crazy people on the island. The straight cop, and presumably the rest of the world doesn't sing their way out of problems. And when they're singing the straight cop looks at them like, what the fuck?

The music isn't part of the world as a whole. So, it's not a musical.
This doesn't have a whole lot to do with the subject, just thought it was curious.

Performance: The Musical

16
Mark Lansing wrote:I'd also like to give a shout out to Pennies From Heaven, which isn't perfect but really attempted to take the Hollywood musical tradition in a new direction and has some incredible moments.


I was quickly scanning the thread and just read that as Penis From Heaven. I would go see that musical.
"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost."

-Gustave Flaubert

Performance: The Musical

18
"The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "The Young Girls of Rochefort", by Jacques Demy, are two musical films that I love. Not Crap on the genre for those two films alone.

If you have never seen them, you should. Everything about them is superb; the music, art direction, the sets, acting,choreography, from start to finish, they are both great films. Probably in my top ten, and definitely in my top twenty, films of all time.
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