And then it did. So another failed resolution. Maybe I'll have more luck in 2021 when I promise I'll finally see the Beetlejuice musical. No way an asshole producer could ruin that, right? Right?
But while plagues can take away live experiences, they can't take away filmed ones. April 2020's movie theme was therefore Musicals. I started the month out with this ambition to see a huge bunch of weird non-traditional things. Then I realized fairly early on, I haven't seen most of the great musical canon. If I haven't seen The Sound of Music, should I really aim for The Apple? I should really try to get some foundation in. So this month was full of squeaky-clean, mostly white people fantasy from the mid-20th century. And it was wonderful.
Obliviously, "'Musicals" is way too big a topic for just one month. I saw about twelve in April and could have easily seen another forty. We'll be back again. I do also want to say that even though there are some very obvious class and wealth issues with many musicals, this genre should not be as obscure as it seems to be. It seems like "movie culture", especially filmbro culture, has a memory that doesn't go back to before 1980. Blockbusters are fine, they're the workhorse of the film industry. But once upon a time, musicals were that workhorse. So many instead of appreciating Darth Vader and Batman so often, we could take some time to appreciate Gene Kelly and Barbra Streisand? You can do both. We all have plenty of time now.
10. Love Never Dies (2012), dir. Brett Sullivan, Simon Phillips
This is a recording of the Andrew Lloyd Webber stage show. Specifically, it is a recording of the Australian version that opened in 2011 in Melbourne. That show apparently fixed a lot of things wrong with the downright catastrophic West End original. It streamed last week on Webber’s Youtube channel, The Show Must Go On, which is a very noble charity drive to help out struggling performers. But that nobility is somewhat undercut by the fact that that Love Never Dies is a worse train wreck than Starlight Express. The more you study Andrew Lloyd Webber the closer you get to the horrifying realization that Cats is nowhere near the worst or weirdest thing he’s ever made.
As a sequel to Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies managed to horrify and disgust the original’s fandom. As a musical, it’s a bizarre mixture of ideas that never work. We have a grand operatic tragic love story that needs to share space with a Tim Burton nightmare circus. Plus an ultra-lame burlesque song that should have been cut entirely. The show becomes a mix of Eighties glam rock, ragtime, opera, and Carnival Night Zone Act 1. There are legitimately beautiful songs like the Phantom’s opening soliloquy. Then there are songs that are so awful like the Phantom’s song with his son (we’ll get into that) which are so utterly cheesy and over-the-top they surpass being merely terrible to actually awesome.
First off, I want to be clear, I know how problematic Love Never Dies is. The central premise of this thing is that the Phantom and Christine were actually in love. Which is very much not the read Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote thirty years ago. Their relationship in the original is... rape-y. This whole show is like a Final Fantasy VII fan fic where they imagine Sephiroth and Cloud are boning in the back ground, with all the bad consent implications intact. Once you realize the full horror of the premise, you might find quite a lot to enjoy in terms of "oh my god, this is really happening, somebody really thought this was a good idea". There’s a Baby Phantom now. Even though he’s just "TEN YEARS OLD!!" he can write music and join his father in wacky rock songs next to a freak show. Love Never Dies is outrageously bad, but is never not entertaining. I love that this exists.
Also, my sources tell me that the original version had a robot. I need to see the robot version.
Best Song: Beauty Underneath
9. Phantom of the Paradise (1974), dir. Brian De Palma
Phantom of the Paradise is a musical adaptation of Phantom of the Opera - but not that one. It’s also a famous cult rock’n’roll midnight movie with queer overtunes - but not that one. It is vastly inferior to both of those more famous things. But I think it is still a weird little movie worthy of fascination to this day. If you’re a producer looking for something to remake, Phantom of the Paradise has a ton of potential it never quite lives up to. The movie is this weird mess mixing together gothic horror, slasher horror, wacky parody, pure camp, and somehow ending up on this very dour tragic note. If the movie had picked any of those one tones, it could have been a legit classic. Instead its just a remarkable thing
The plot isn’t just Phantom, there’s quite a lot of Faust thrown in too. A supervillain music mogul, Swan (Paul Williams, who also wrote the music) screws over a nerdy composer, Winslow Leach (William Finley). This is the Seventies so you need to remember that popular music actually mattered culturally. Today a supervillain ruling the record industry is as farfetched as supervillain ruling paperbacks - why bother? But back then, if you're going to be evil, flamboyant rock wasn't a bad genre to get into. Anyway, Swan becomes the devil for Winslow, turning him into the awesome SciFi owl monster you see above. Both men also fight over the love of (Jessica Harper), an up and comer singer trapped in Swan’s net. Jessica Harper, by the way, is a massively underrated actress and singer who had an amazingly sultry voice. (Check out Shock Treatment if you want more.)
Phantom of the Paradise is certainly a movie I respect more than I enjoyed. It has gay rock stars, a parody of KISS that’s significantly better than the actual KISS, Paul Williams loses his face, and one of the coolest masks in film history. I want that mask. Let me also say, the music just wasn't memorable enough.
Best Song: Old Souls
8. True Stories (1986), dir. David Byrne
Riding high on the success of the concert movie, Stop Making Sense (see my March post), David Byrne was given blank check to make his singular film vision. Unfortunatley, at the time, nobody but David Byrne really understood that vision. Actually, I’m not sure if anybody understands it to this day. I sure don’t. Wikipedia calls it “satirical” but I’m not entirely sure of what. Who is the target of the satire and what is the goal? True Stories is mostly a slice of life of the mid-Eighties with a few extra ridiculous elements. But in a decade as ridiculous as the Eighties actually was, how much stranger can you make it? Byrne creates vignittes about a rich lady that won’t get out of bed and a lady who claims to have written all of Elvis’ songs. It's weird, but the Moral Majority and tech capitalism seem weirder to me. Maybe that is the idea.
True Stories isn’t really a Talking Heads project so much as a David Byrne project that borrows songs from their album, also called True Stories. David Byrne stars as some kind of Narrator figure documenting a fictional town called Virgil, Texas. He drives a big red car and wears a big ridiculous cowboy hat. He gains no particular conclusion from the experience. The nonexistent plot is broken up by townspeople ocassionally singing a song off the album. Other than Wild Wild Life which the town lip syncs, most of the music is actually not that great. But the ever-lovable John Goodman has a very large role, getting the closest thing to a character arc this movie has.
The whole vibe of of True Stories is somewhere between Twin Peaks where the oddity is freakishly sincere and Adult Swim, where the oddity is brutally ironic. I can’t really tell what level David Byrne is operating on here.
I would call True Stories a fascinating experiment in confusion. It’s got this mumblecore-ish vibe of matter-of-fact awkwardness. The feeling is like being invited to dinner at a stranger's house where everybody is trying a bit too hard to be pleasant. (This is literally a scene too, David Byrne goes to Spalding Gray’s house where the food lights up for some reason.) True Stories is full of all these off-kilter little details that you can’t quite ask about due to politeness. Why does the talent show have dueling auctioneers with a yodeler? Why are there twins all over the town? Who is filming this documentary anyway? I don't see a single camera.
Best Song: Wild Wild Life
7. Polyester (1981), dir. John Waters
One of the larger holes in my film history is the work of John Waters. At some point I'll have to roll up my sleeves and shove my arms deep down into the joyous muck of this guy's filmography. Maybe John Waters will get a whole theme month to himself, I don't know. We're going to see a lot of very wholesome movies from the Fifites and Sixties as this list goes on. So its good to get some filth on ourselves first because we descend fully into nauseating purity.
Polyester was the first John Waters film made with mainstream audiences in mind. It actually looks like a professional film with lighting and steady camera work. There's a helicopter shot to open the movie. Waters bothered to let the MPAA rate it, getting a respectable R. Instead of an outright assault on all morality, Polyester is just a suburban satire. Specifically its riffing on "woman's films" - a now mostly dead film genre that was effectively the Forties or Fifties version of modern Lifetime movies. You could package this as something like an Airplane!-style comedy, just with a bit more Troma edge. Sure, it still stars the drag queen Divine, and if drag is controversial now, think about what it was like forty years ago. But all told, this is John Waters at what was then, his most tasteful.
Still, Polyester when released in theaters came packaged with a gimmick called "Odorama". The various repulsive smells of the movie could be brought to the audience with a scratch-and-sniff card that came with your ticket. (Sadly I could not replicate that part of the experience.) That should give you a hint as to what kind of highbrow humor you're dealing with here.
Divine plays Francine Fishpaw, a troubled housewife with an awful family whose life has begun to dissolve. Her husband owns a porn theater and is cheating on her. Her daughter is very excited for her upcoming abortion. And her son has such a foot fetish he's going around town stomping on women's heels for the sexual thrill. Along the way, Francine breaks down and guzzles every bit of alcohol she can find in a frenzy of depression. The whole movie is a rather brutal assault on poor Francine and her dreams of happy living. But maybe this hot stranger played by Tab Hunter can save her? Probably not. This is a movie where angry women can bust tires with their bare teeth. This is a gross world. Don't look for much in the way of good outside of Edith Massey's character, who is this glorious beacon of sweetness.
Best Song: N/A
6. Funny Face (1957), dir. Stanley Donen
If you want a perfect example of a repulsively clean musical, Funny Face is it. Italian critics back in the days of Mussolini used to call the propaganda junk his regime made "White Telephone Movies". They were Bourgeoisie fantasy movies about family morals and prosperity. It was a glamorous illusion which real Italians could not afford. Funny Face is like the American version of those White Telephone movies. How many Americans could just up and fly out to Paris to fall in love and dance about fashion? Funny Face has no deep thoughts and is purely there to remind you that your Fifties consumer culture will exist forever. But if I were going to dimiss all capitalist propaganda I'd have very few movies to watch. Funny Face is actually a really good movie despite that.
I mean, there are a few other issues in this movie. Audrey Hepburn has to romance a half-way mummified Fred Astaire. He doesn't look that bad for his age, but he's thirty years her senior and its a bad look. Plus, the title "Funny Face" points to another flaw in the plot. Audrey Hepburn’s Jo is supposed to be this intellectual Greenwich Village beatnik type who is too unusual for the fashion industry. But she's Audrey Hepburn!! She's practically sculted out of marble she's so perfect. Really then, the plot is an excuse to put one of the most beautiful women in history in a lot of very pretty dresses. Then she dances and – unlike My Fair Lady – actually sings. That’s a damn good movie as far as I’m concerned.
Let us also not forget Kay Thompson as the fashion boss, Maggie Prescott, who practically steals the movie. She also looks Fred Astaire’s age, has better chemistry with him, and would have been better suited to romance that character.
One element of Funny Face is (again) how totally out of touch this movie is. Jo is part of the nascent intellectual underground boiling up in the Fifties. Funny Face has no interest in politics or philosophy. Jo follows this made-up school of thought called "Empathicalism", which Fred Astaire rolls his eyes at. You’re supposed to roll your eyes with him. This movie comes off hilariously square right on the verge of the Sixties Culture Wars. I truly enjoyed it, but I feel like I'm at a Versailles ball having drinks with Marie Antoinette in 1788. Movies like this are why the Musical died a decade later. But you still have to love the glitz and glamour.
Best Song: None of the songs are that great, I'll give it to instead Audrey Hepburn doing a wild Bohemian dance in a Paris bar.
5. Newsies (1992), dir. Kenny Ortega
It is pretty obvious why Newsies failed in 1992. The age of big saccharine musicals had been dead already for about twenty years by then. In the entirety of the Ninties, I think there were only two big budget non-animated musicals: this and Evita. And this one can't sell itself with Madonna or a big show-stopping emotional ballad that your mom absolutely loved. (But it does have Bill Pullman.) Newsies is clearly aimed at younger audiences, perhaps younger female audiences based on the sheer volume of handsome teenage boys in its cast. Let’s just say very few things in Western media are this sexually charged with very young male bodies, and leave it there.
Also, turns out I’m not at all comfortable talking about this topic, so we’ll move on.
I need to also celebrate Newsies for being one of the very few proudly leftist movies of its time. There wasn’t much nostalgia for late-1800s labor disputes in 1992 either. This was the era when even the Democrats were basically Reaganites. Unions in Nineties media are either mobbed up or lazy. Plus, it isn’t like Disney has any history of battling collective action or using Red Scare tactics in petty revenge. No sir. This is a movie where the robber baron villain is a hilarious camp supervillain played by Robert Duvall. Sure, to get to all this pro-labor storytelling we need a cast full of pretty mostly--white American boys in what should be one of the most diverse cities in the world in 1899. But I’ll take what I can get.
1992 was wrong. Newsies should be much bigger than it was. This is a fun time. It is a remarkable movie that well-earned its cult following over the decades. And it got a fantastic Broadway show just a few years ago. Both the original movie and the stage musical are available on Disney+ right now. The stage version is superior in almost every way with better dancing, better singing, better jokes, and actually gives the love interest character something to do. But the original movie is also great. There’s Baby Christian Bale leading the charge of big celebratory dance numbers across a huge handsome set. Newsies looks great, it sounds great, it has the right message, and is generally a thing that makes the world a bit more pleasant. We should have had more musicals in the Nineties.
Best Song: King of New York
4. At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964), dir. José Mojica Marins
Let’s talk about one of the great horror icons that almost nobody in the English-speaking world has heard of: Coffin Joe. Coffin Joe (AKA: Zé do Caixão in the original Portuguese) is Brazil’s answer to figures such as Dracula or Freddie Kruger. He’s a godless hedonist with a unibrow, a cape, a top hat, and long fingernails he likes to gouge eyes out with. Coffin Joe is the creation of exploitation filmmaker José Mojica Marins. After playing the character in something like a dozen movies, Marins eventually became the character in a lot of ways. That twisted identity crisis would be the feature of a few of the later, more experimental Coffin Joe movies of the Seventies.
I saw a few of the SUPER FUCKING WEIRD Seventies movies before on IFC like fifteen years ago. (Those are the perfect nightmares to stumble upon at 2 AM when you’re half asleep.) But I had never seen this very first attempt at the character. At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul was pretty groundbreaking for its time and place. You didn’t see much gore in black and white cinema. That kind of thing was only for edgy underground horror movies. Brazil had very few horror movies before this. The only reason At Midnight I’ll Take You Soul could be made was due to certain censorship laws being repealed. Marins took his opportunity to make a wonderfully dark horror movie.
The set-up is right out of Edgar Allen Poe. We follow the terrible actions of a villain until poetic justice gets him. Coffin Joe terrorizes his extremely Catholic neighbors with his edgy atheist rants and then further annoys them with a few murders. It isn’t really made clear in the film why they let Joe hang around. He seems like an absolute asshole, especially when he whips them in the bar or destroys their faces with a crucifix. This isn’t all joyous scares. There’s a rape scene, and it is graphic. Joe kisses a comatose woman whose mouth is pouring out blood. And remember, this was all made back in a time when this wasn’t just shocking, it was borderline criminal.
I'll have to visit with Coffin Joe again someday.
Best Song: N/A. Anyway, back to the gushing sweetheart musicals.
3. Singin’ in the Rain (1952), dir. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
I couldn’t do a musical month without visiting Mr. Gene Kelly, and what a Gene Kelly movie to watch. Singin’ in the Rain is theoretically a love story set in the silent era of Hollywood. "Theoretically" is the operative term since Singin’ in the Rain barely has a plot at all. The whole thing is as obviously thin as most porn movies. Right around the time that you’d shove in a lesbian scene, Singin’ in the Rain shoves in yet another tap dance. The tap dance does not need to make sense, add to the plot, or even really exist at all. But goddamn it, they “GOTTA DANCE!!” Even the title song and that iconic moment of Kelly swinging on the lamp pole is basically pointless plot-wise.
This movie actually is a Fifties equivalent of modern jukebox musicals. Nearly every song in the film is lifted from decades-older and mostly forgotten Hollywood musicals. That might explain why the plot is so threadbare. I also need to see what musicals were like in 1928 one day. They look incredible.
Singin’ in the Rain assumes, probably correctly for 1952, that the audience has no knowledge or interest in movie-making on any level. This is an upside-down universe where the starlet trying to keep her job is the villain and the poor innocent studio head is the victim. The conflict all comes from the introduction of live recorded sound to films around 1928. Unfortunately, the actress Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) has a shrill Harley Quinn accent, which makes her unsuitable for audiences. Many rather awful laughs are had at her expense. Her co-star, Donald Lockwood (Kelly) is ready to dump her for Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), an-up-and-comer whose voice is more "normal". Also, Donald O’Connor is hanging around as Gene Kelly’s sidekick, and is absolutely the best thing about this movie.
Let it be known I hate everything about this plot. Singin' in the Rain isn't quite as mean-spirited as I describe here. But luckily the plot is, as I’ve said before, completely irrelevant. In fact, by the final half hour of the movie, the story dissolves entirely. Gene Kelly loses himself in a long hallucination sequence where he turns into a Clark Kent-like figure trying to dance his way onto Broadway, while running into gangsters and women with long legs. The whole thing is so bizarre and irrelevant to everything we’ve seen before it is almost Evangelion-esque. I wish the plot had never come back at all.
Cause really, this is about the dancing and fuck me, Gene Kelly can dance. The dude is insane. You don't need me to tell you that he's probably the greatest dancer in film history. And if you don't know yet, its time you found out.
Best Song: Make ‘Em Laugh
2. Fiddler on the Roof (1971), dir. Norman Jewison
Seriously? The guy who directed Fiddler on the Roof is named “JEW-ison”? And guess what? He’s not even Jewish. He’s Protestant.
Fiddler on the Roof is one of the last great Old Hollywood musical epics. It came out after the massive failures of many other musicals, most notoriously the favorite movie of a lonely robot in the future, Hello Dolly!. Fiddler on the Roof is therefore a smaller production than the Sixties monstrocities. Not smaller in length, mind you. This is still three hours long with an intermission between acts. But there are only a few massive crowd shots, most of the film is shot on relatively small sets. And one cost-cutting move, hiring stage actors versus expensive movie stars, actually works to Fiddler on the Roof’s favor.
Here’s a table, I got some cards in my pocket, let me lay them down: I'm Ashkenazi Jewish. My grandparents spoke Yiddish and came from peasant villages in Poland before people promising to make Germany Great Again wiped their families out. It is pretty crazy that nobody forced me to watch this movie at some point growing up, actually. This musical is set in Tsarist Russia during the Revolution of 1905. But the tale of Jews in Eastern Europe is usually same story different verse. The main character, Tevye (Topol) speaks to God (the audience) directly: “I know, I know. We are your chosen people. But, once in a while, can't you choose someone else?” This movie means a lot to me as like personal mythology. This feels like the story of my people, even if it is probably more fantasy than hard history. We all need a history, even if it isn’t a happy one.
Fiddler on the Roof isn’t really about tragedy though. It’s a show about change. Our honest dairy farmer, Tevye, lives a poor but happy existence in the (*raises arms in the air*) "TRADITION" of his people. But that society is already breaking down and evolving. During the course of the film his three oldest daughters leave home to live increasingly different lives. One marries a tailor, another marries a socialist, and the last one marries a *gasp* Christian. Tevye tries to hold on to his patriarchal power but is too good a man to really fight against their hearts. Topol as our star can rage against the injustice of losing his place in the world. But then he warms up to the better angels of his nature. He is phenomenal as the lead. This guy was never a Richard Burton-level star, but he is so goddamn good in this movie. Fiddler on the Roof is a truly great and important movie in ways that Old Hollywood musics rarely attempted to be.
Best Song: Sunrise, Sunset
1. Funny Girl (1968), dir. William Wyler
Movies like The Sound of Music or My Fair Lady remain massive classics to this day. Even if you have no interest at all in musicals or classic cinema, you know at least five songs from The Sound of Music, I promise you. Funny Girl for some reason, hasn't had that level of success. I can't say I exactly understand why. This is a truly, truly great movie. If you're my age you probably only know Barbra Streisand as the grandma from the godawful Fockers movies. Or worse, as Mechagodzilla in a very stupid South Park episode. So if you're wondering why we've kept Barbra Streisand around all this time: Funny Girl is why. It deserves to be much better-known than it is.
Much like Funny Face, much of the plot here is built on the idea that the main heroine is somehow ugly. This is clearly nonsense as Barbra Streisand in this movie is young and very hot. But it is vaguely in the realm of some kind of reality. Streisand is at least somewhat atypical to classic Hollywood beauty. She's got a big Jewish nose and won't let you forget about it. Funny Girl is something of a landmark for being maybe the first Hollywood movie where Jewishness is a positive sexual trait. (Whether fetishizing yourself actually makes for a positive change is another discussion.) You could at least see some explanation for her insecurity. Even though her hair is amazing, her make-up is perfect, and she's wearing incredible dresses in every scene. I don't love the plot point but it is central to the toxic relationship that gives Funny Girl weight that a lot of other musicals did not.
Fanny Brice (Streisand) is an early 1900s New York vaudeville star. She's quick-witted, adorable, smart, can sing her damn ass off and god I am absolutely in love with this character, just thoroughly. This is Streisand's movie but I cannot gush enough about how much she steals every moment. She's hilarious in a dozen different ways, from when she's adorably shy around her future husband to when she speaks in a Yiddish baby voice during a Swan Lake ballet. Plus the songs she sings seem incredibly difficult. It is impressive work.
Fanny falls in love with Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif), a suave gambler who is all charm and class. Unfortunately, Arnstein is also a useless asshole who demands to be the bread-winner, even while all his gambling fails him. Fanny is too insecure and madly in love to realize that 1) he's a useless asshole, and 2) she doesn't need him. This is Omar Sharif, the man is just handsome enough to cover up some of those useless asshole traits. He's the kind of man that could unleash the fierceness inside of you to belt out some incredible numbers. Don't Rain on My Parade is probably the best single song out of every musical I watched last month and I could rewatch that scene a billion times.
Best Song: Don't Rain on My Parade
Honorable Mentions (since I saw a lot of movies in April and I'm keeping the list down to 10 for my own sanity):
- Blow the Man Down (2020), dir. Bridget Savage Cole, Danielle Krudy
- The Sound of Music (1965), dir. Robert Wise
- The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall (2011), dir. Nick Morris
- Vivarium (2020), dir. Lorcan Finnegan
- Season of the Witch (1972), dir. George A. Romero
May 2020's Movie Theme: SPORTS
Are you ever going to write about Rise of Skywalker? I'd love to hear your thoughts about it.
ReplyDeletewhat are your thoughts of the FFVII remake?
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