Fantasia (1940)

14 Sunday Apr 2019

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Animation, Classical music, Comedy, Dance, Disney, Drama, Fantasy, Favourite movie, Leopold Stokowski, Mickey Mouse, Review

D: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr, Norman Ferguson, David Hand, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Ben Sharpsteen / 125m

With: Deems Taylor (narrator), Leopold Stokowski

Viewing Fantasia nearly eighty years after its release, it’s astonishing to think just how much of a gamble this was for Disney. Borne out of a desire to boost the popularity of Mickey Mouse, Disney began work in 1936 on a deluxe cartoon short featuring Mickey called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but as the budget increased beyond its original expectations, Walt Disney realised that on its own, the short wouldn’t be profitable. In 1938, the decision was made to create a feature length movie that would include not only The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but seven other animated sequences based on well known pieces of classical music. With conductor Leopold Stokowski already on board as the movie’s musical director, Disney forged ahead with the kind of project that had never been done before – and until its belated sequel, Fantasia 2000 (1999), wouldn’t be attempted again. And this was only Disney’s third full-length animated feature. There’s no modern corollary for this; only the House of Mouse has made anything remotely like Fantasia, and perhaps it’s because there’s a very obvious reason: it’s that good.

It’s a perfect combination of music and visuals, each segment given its own unique style and presentation, and the animation is so beautifully in tune with the music that it’s easy to be drawn into the narratives and to be carried along by the emotions invoked by the music. Whether it’s a sense of wonder at the depiction of Earth’s beginnings as portrayed via Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, or the fun to be had from the animal ballets of Amilcare Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours, or even the menacing apparition of the devil Chernabog in Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, the combination of sound and vision is hugely impressive. It’s a movie where the range of the animators’ imagination is such that the viewer is taken to places they could never have expected, and shown sights that remain indelible once seen. Conceptually bold, and daring, the movie is a panoply of colour and sound that is transformative and vibrant, the music soaring and dipping in time with the imagery, at once urgent and demanding of our attention, at other times, subtle and intriguing, and on yet other occasions, sensitive and emotive, all of it providing a wellspring of extraordinary moments.

That it continues to hold up as well as it does – it is, after all, a masterpiece – should be no surprise. Disney was so confident in its ability to enthrall and amaze that he planned to re-release the movie every so often with a new segment replacing one of the originals each time. But poor box office returns (the movie didn’t turn a profit until its 1969 re-release), and the US entering World War II put paid to Disney’s plan. But even though a sequel was eventually made, Fantasia should be appreciated for being one of a kind, a movie no one else could have made except Disney, and one that continues to astound today, even with all the advances made in CG animation. It’s also quite obviously not a children’s movie – though they might enjoy Mickey’s antics and the dancing hippos – and this is another reason why it’s such an ambitious movie: it knows there’s an audience out there for it, and it trusts that people will find it and appreciate it. Again, whether it’s the abstract visual concepts employed for the opening Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, or the centaurian revels depicted in the mythical Greco-Roman world created for Ludwig van Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Fantasia remains a fascinating, delightful, wonderful, and hugely effective exercise in exploring the boundaries of then-contemporary animation – and revealing the beauty of what’s been discovered beyond those boundaries.

Rating: 9/10 – the use of music is sublime, and so is the animation that accompanies it, and it’s this perfect melding of the two art forms that make Fantasia such an amazing and entertaining movie experience; breathtaking in its scope and ambition, it’s a movie that has never been bettered, and which stands even now as a testament to the visionary talents of its creator.

La La Land (2016) and the Return of the Classic Musical

13 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Actress, Auditions, Damien Chazelle, Dance, Drama, Emma Stone, J.K. Simmons, Jazz, John Legend, Musical, Pianist, Review, Romance, Ryan Gosling

D: Damien Chazelle / 128m

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend, Rosemarie DeWitt, Finn Wittrock, Josh Pence, Callie Hernandez, Jessica Rothe, Sonoya Mizuno, Tom Everett Scott, J.K. Simmons

A bona fide awards magnet, La La Land is the movie that’s grabbing accolade after accolade, award after award, and more recognition than you can shake a well-timed dance step at. It’s lively, it’s precocious, it’s endearing, it’s alluring, it’s beautiful to watch, it’s often breathtaking, and it’s absolutely deserving of all the praise that has been heaped on it since it was first screened at the Venice Film Festival back in August 2016. In short, it’s a triumph.

Movie makers – in recent years at least – have somehow managed to forget what makes a musical so enjoyable, what elevates them above all the comedies and the romantic dramas and the sincerity-driven historical biographies that we see year in and year out, never quite offering audiences anything new or different, or breaking free of their self-imposed comfort zones. Movies such as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) or Into the Woods (2014) – adaptations of successful stage incarnations – were too dark to warrant “enjoyment” as such, while the animated movie became the bolthole for musical numbers needed to pad out already short running times. Some musicals did try to be different – the “hip-hop” opera Confessions of a Thug (2005), splatterpunk/rock extravaganza Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008), biographical comedy-drama The Sapphires (2012) – but it was only fan favourites like Mamma Mia! (2008) and Les Misérables (2012) that made any impact at the box office or garnered any awards.

What modern movie makers failed to recognise when making these movies, was what made all those famous, much-loved musicals of the Forties and Fifties so beloved of contemporary audiences, and today’s aficionados. It wasn’t just the sight of Fred Astaire dancing effortlessly, and sublimely, with Cyd Charisse, or Gene Kelly pushing the boundaries of what could be achieved in a dance routine; it wasn’t even the sheer joy and enthusiasm of the singers and dancers, or the dizzying, dazzling cinematography that made each routine a small kinetic masterpiece all by themselves. What made those movies work was a shared love for the medium, a heartfelt commitment to making the best musicals they could, and by attempting to infuse these movies with a wonder and a magic you wouldn’t find anywhere else. If you need any further proof that the Forties and Fifties were a Golden Age for the movie musical, then take a look at any of the following: On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), or The King and I (1956). Now, those are musicals.

Which brings us to La La Land. A shot in the arm for the modern musical, La La Land succeeds because it combines the look and feel of those long-ago musicals with a more up-to-date sensibility, and in doing so, breathes new life into a largely moribund genre, and gives audiences the best of both worlds. By ensuring they honour the conventions of the musical, Chazelle and his talented cast and crew have created a movie that pays homage to those great movie musicals of the past, while also having one foot planted very firmly in modern musical aspirations. And there’s a trenchant, beautifully observed love story at its heart, a tale of two aspiring entertainers who come together by chance, and explore what it means to be in love through a series of primary colour-drenched sequences that provide audiences with an endorphin rush of happiness. You can’t help but tap your fingers, or your toes, as jazz pianist Sebastian (Gosling) and aspiring actress Mia (Stone) sing and dance and fall in love against a fantasy LA backdrop that is both dreamlike and alluring.

Chazelle has chosen his leads well, with Gosling and Stone displaying an easy chemistry together, a comfortable vibe that translates to the screen and makes their affair all the more believable. There are too many times when stars look at each other and the viewer can see there’s just no connection there whatsoever, but here that’s not the case (and this isn’t the first time that Gosling and Stone have been an on-screen item: check out Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011) for further evidence of how well they look together). With the central relationship served perfectly by its award-winning duo, La La Land is free to present the couple with the necessary obstacles that challenge their love, and their desire for each other. As they navigate the treacherous waters that Love and Life can put in people’s way, Sebastian and Mia transform from musical archetypes into fully-grown characters we can sympathise with, empathise with, and wish all the best for. We know them, and somewhat intimately, because we recognise ourselves – our better, more devotedly romantic selves – in them, and we want their relationship to succeed, and for their personal dreams to succeed as well.

But the course of true love never runs smooth, and La La Land‘s bittersweet ending may be upsetting for some, but it’s a perfect way to show just how passionate and all-consuming love can be, an experience akin to lightning in a bottle. Sebastian and Mia are lovers in the moment, bewitched by each other, and when the inevitable cracks begin to appear in their relationship, you’ve become so invested in their future together that you can’t believe there’s trouble ahead; in fact, you don’t want there to be any trouble. But this is a romantic musical drama, and there has to be sadness and tears amid the laughter and exultation. Chazelle, though, is confident enough to include melancholy in his tale of love, and love in his melancholy denouement.

He’s also made the music and dance elements work independently of the main story, but at the same time, ensured they’re intrinsically connected in such a way that they elevate Sebastian and Mia’s love affair. You can watch only the musical sequences and gain an understanding of the emotions and feelings the couple are experiencing, but as expressions of their love for each other, they take on an extra weight when interlaced with the main narrative, as each strives to be successful at what they love (or at the expense of each other). Desire and sacrifice are often two sides of the same coin when it comes to intense love affairs, and Chazelle shows how these two facets can co-exist for a time before they take on a disastrous over-importance in the couple’s lives.

La La Land is an amazing visual experience, a gorgeous, splendid ode to the Land of Dreams and an inspiring dreamland all by itself. It’s a bright, happy, sad, poignant, beautiful, wonderful confection that wraps up the viewer in its warm embrace and keeps you there as it makes you laugh and cry and feel a myriad of unexpected emotions. There’s not a wasted moment in La La Land, and Chazelle has created a world where each second is infused with meaning and significance, and the beauty of two people finding each other becomes paramount. For once, it’s an award winner that fully deserves all the acclaim that’s been afforded it, and is that rare thing: a modern classic musical.

Rating: 9/10 – ravishing, and astonishing for how delightfully beguiling it is, La La Land is a treat for the senses, a movie that keeps on giving and giving and giving; bold and exciting, there’s no room for churlish brickbats or grumbling sentiments, this is a lively, handsomely mounted movie that has, or will have, no comparable, contemporary equal, either now or in the future.

For One Week Only: Unnecessary Sequels – 5. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004)

14 Saturday May 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Cuba, Cuban Revolution, Dance, Dance competition, Diego Luna, Drama, For One Week Only, Guy Ferland, Havana, John Slattery, Music, Patrick Swayze, Review, Romance, Romola Garai, Sela Ward, Sequel

Introduction

There are dozens of sequels that turn up uninvited, years after their predecessor was first released. Some arrive without any kind of fanfare, while others appear with all the promotional backing available under the sun. Beware of those that arrive under the latter circumstances – sometimes the hype is designed to grab as much at the box office as the movie can manage before word of mouth kicks in and people begin to realise the movie is one to avoid. When the movie in question is a belated sequel to a much-loved original, any abundance of hype is perhaps the biggest clue that the sequel should be avoided. Here is one such example, a movie that came along seventeen years after the original, and still begs the question, why? (Read on for the answer.)

Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004) / D: Guy Ferland / 86m

Cast: Diego Luna, Romola Garai, Sela Ward, John Slattery, Jonathan Jackson, Mika Boorem, January Jones, René Lavan, Patrick Swayze, Mya

If you watch the opening credits of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights closely, you’ll find that one of the producers is called JoAnn Fregalette Jansen (she also has a small, non-speaking role in the movie itself). Jansen lived in Cuba, aged fifteen, during the period the movie is set in, 1958. Playwright Peter Sagal wrote a screenplay based on Jansen’s experiences of the Cuban Revolution, and her relationship with a Cuban revolutionary. The screenplay was titled Cuba Mine and was a serious examination of the events that occurred in Cuba at the time, and how the country’s political idealism became polluted by the Communist ideology that replaced the more liberal regime that existed in the Fifties.

The script was commissioned by Lawrence Bender in 1992. Bender was fresh from the success of producing Reservoir Dogs (1992), but the script went unproduced until Bender revisited it again ten years later. However, Sagal’s script was only used as the basis of a completely new script by Boaz Yakin and Victoria Arch. The end result? A disastrous attempt to recreate the magic of Dirty Dancing (1987).

With the original having proved so successful, and having gained a place within the cultural zeitgeist (“Nobody puts Baby in a corner”), a sequel was always likely to appear eventually, but this is a movie that spends its thankfully short running time replicating the original’s storyline instead of coming up with something new. It’s the eternal problem facing sequels everywhere: how to combine enough DNA from the original movie with newer, fresher elements to make a satisfying whole. Sadly, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is a sequel that can’t even assemble enough DNA from its predecessor to make much of a difference. It’s perfunctory, lazy, and lacks impact.

It also has a hard time doing the one thing that it should get right above all else, namely the dance routines. Thanks to the movie’s Cuban setting, the music and dance numbers are meant to be energetic, effortlessly fluid, and somewhat mildly erotic, but thanks to the movie’s determined efforts to edit the dance sequences into bite-sized shots that often don’t match the moves on show immediately before and after each shot, the very elements that are meant to draw in an audience are undermined from the word go. Now this could be a conscious, artisitic decision made by director Guy Ferland and his editors, Luis Colina and Scott Richter, in which case the trio have no idea of how to put together a dance sequence; or it could be that Luna and Garai’s moves weren’t quite as impressive as everyone hoped and they needed a little “help” in looking so accomplished (you decide).

Elsewhere the movie is equally determined to rely on cinematic and cultural clichés in order to tell its story. If the movie was even remotely realistic, it would be easy to believe that, before the revolution, all Cubans were happy-go-lucky souls who never tired of singing and dancing on pretty much every street corner. There are moments of casual racism that don’t amount to anything in terms of the drama, as well as cursory references to the political struggle happening at the time. Luna’s hotel waiter, Javier, evinces his distrust of Americans only until Garai’s preppy Katey waves the lure of competition prize money under his nose, while Katey’s family hang around in the background waiting to be given something to do.

The performances are average, with Luna and Garai developing an uneasy chemistry that seems more convincing on the dance floor than anywhere else, while Ward and Slattery get to play good cop/bad cop once Katey’s relationship with Javier is revealed (the scene in question is notable for playing like an outtake from a TV soap opera). Spare a thought though for poor old Patrick Swayze, co-opted into the script as a dance class instructor who gets to show Katey some moves before being reduced to providing reaction shots during the dance competition. Swayze looks uncomfortable in his scenes, as if he’s having second thoughts about being in the movie but also realising it’s too late to back out.

The movie is a sloppy mess, shot through with an earnest quality that wants to be taken for drama. But like so much on display it’s often involuntary, as if the various elements of the screenplay were put together in a blender rather than a word processor. Ferland directs it all with little or no attention to the emotions of the characters – Garai spends quite a bit of time looking upset but gets over it all just as quickly as it’s started – but at least he manages to make the Puerto Rican locations look suitably beautiful, throwing in wondrous sunsets and sunrises with giddy, artistic abandon.

Rating: 3/10 – unimaginative, even in its dance routines, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights lacks a compelling storyline and characters to care about; with so many aspects not working to their full potential, the movie proves to be inferior in almost every way to its predecessor – and no one should be surprised.

Match (2014)

30 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Carla Gugino, Dance, Dance community, Dissertation, DNA, Drama, Interview, Matthew Lillard, Paternity, Patrick Stewart, Review, Stephen Belber, The Sixties, Theatre production

D: Stephen Belber / 92m

Cast: Patrick Stewart, Carla Gugino, Matthew Lillard, Jaime Tirelli

Tobi Powell (Stewart) is an aging ballet instructor at Juilliard. He’s a lonely man, given to rejecting offers of friendship from his colleagues, and he lives by himself in an apartment in New York’s Inwood hamlet. Despite this he agrees to give an interview to Lisa Davis (Gugino) who is writing a dissertation on the dance community during the Sixties. Accompanied by her husband, Mike (Lillard), the three meet in Tobi’s favourite Greek diner. Lisa is bright and attentive to Tobi’s flamboyant personality, while Mike is more reserved. The interview continues at Tobi’s apartment, but Mike, who is ostensibly there to support his wife, begins to ask more pointed questions about the Sixties and in particular, Tobi’s sexual liaisons.

Tobi is initially perplexed by Mike and Lisa’s focus on the sexual mores of the period until they mention the name of a dancer he knew called Gloria Rinaldi. Tobi had a brief affair with her in the latter part of 1967, but she gave up a potential career as a dancer to have a child. That child is Mike and he thinks Tobi is his father. Tobi denies being this and tells them both that it would have been impossible as he always wore a condom in those days. Mike doesn’t believe him and becomes aggressive; Tobi asks them both to leave. Instead, Mike refuses and pins down Tobi so he can take a DNA swab from Tobi’s mouth. Having got what he came for, he leaves, but not before Lisa has made it clear that she’s unhappy with the way things have gone.

While Mike heads for a nearby forensics lab where a friend works, Lisa stays with Tobi and they begin to bond over prune pastries and Tobi’s love of knitting. He lets her know he can see the cracks in her marriage to Mike, and Lisa admits Mike has become a different man in recent months as the idea of finding and confronting Tobi has eaten away at him. Moved by Lisa’s honesty, Tobi shows a newspaper clipping he’s kept from when Mike was fifteen and he’d taken part in a fencing competition. He reveals that he knew Gloria was pregnant and that she asked him to be the child’s father but he refused; instead he decided to focus on building his career. And when he saw the newspaper clipping he sent Gloria a sum of money towards Mike’s college fund. But with all this he still can’t be Mike’s father: it’s all too late.

When Mike returns to the apartment, both men are forced to confront some unpleasant truths about each other, while Lisa is left to hope that some degree of reconciliation can be found.

Originally a stage play by writer/director Belber that opened in 2004 (and featured Frank Langella, Jane Adams and Ray Liotta as Tobi, Lisa and Mike respectively), Match still retains the look and feel of a stage play and the type of staging that betrays its theatrical origins. That’s not an entirely bad thing, but it does contribute to several occasions during the narrative where certain developments feel artificial and/or forced.

There’s always a degree of contrivance that accompanies a theatrical adaptation, and Match is no exception. In opening out his play from the constraints of Tobi’s apartment, Belber has chosen to also constrict it (the play ran half an hour longer), and while this possibly helps, there is still a sense that the story gets a little rushed once the trio reach Tobi’s humble abode. Following a number of flamboyant embellishments to his answers, and as many sidetrack comments as he can muster, Tobi is side-swiped by Mike’s bullish demeanour, and while there’s an argument that the movie needs to pick up some speed – and get to the crux of the matter – by this point, it’s done in such a clumsy way that Belber’s careful character building is given the cinematic equivalent of a knee-capping.

From here on until the end of the movie, Match struggles to regain the momentum it has carefully built up, and the characters’ attempts at connecting with each other become more unlikely and more laboured. Tobi and Lisa at one point have a discussion about the pleasures of giving and receiving cunnilingus, as unlikely a conversation as any that two strangers would have within a couple of hours of meeting. They go through Tobi’s collection of self-made knitwear and go up to the roof where Tobi tries to get Lisa to dance. It’s uncomfortably like a courtship, and despite Tobi’s obvious homosexuality, these events still provoke an uncertainty about Belber’s motives in putting these two characters together for so long. And when Mike returns, his confrontation with Tobi is resolved – with admirable speed, but at the expense of a fair degree of credibility.

With the narrative proving unwieldy and uneven, it’s a good thing that Belber has chosen well with his cast. Tobi is the kind of camp, peacockish character that an actor of Stewart’s calibre can bring to life with the twitch of an eyebrow, or the shake of a scarf. He dominates the movie, revelling in Tobi’s arch, semi-pretentious musings, his passion for life at odds with his self-enforced solitude, and still having an insatiable curiosity about the lives of others. It’s a performance that appears effortless, and Stewart is hypnotic throughout, smoothing over the cracks in Belber’s script with a well-timed expression here and a well-considered line reading there. He’s ably supported by Gugino, though Lisa appears largely out of her depth in the situation, two steps away from being entirely subordinate to her husband. When Tobi recognises the problems in their marriage, Gugino shows Lisa to be a woman looking for the answers to questions she hasn’t thought of, and displays the character’s sad-hearted vulnerability with admirable understated precision.

Unfortunately for Lillard, Mike is required to be a kind of aggressive deus ex machina, bulldozing his tight-lipped way through Tobi’s rambling reminiscences and being unnecessarily abusive to Lisa. It’s a dangerously underwritten part, but Lillard manages to salvage some of the pent-up sadness and disappointment Mike has been feeling throughout his life, and he makes it all the more evident when he challenges Tobi’s assertion that Gloria chose her life.

Belber proves to be an erratic director, depending too much on close ups to impart sincere emotion, and never quite knowing where to place the camera in Tobi’s apartment, leading to some odd framing that sees the characters either squeezed into shot and/or suffering a kind of temporary dismemberment. The scene at the forensics lab is dramatically unnecessary (but does remind us that Mike is still part of the story), and the ending, while entirely predictable, is an example of the way in which Belber wants to both punish and celebrate Tobi’s decision all those years ago, but can’t make up his mind which is the more appropriate.

Rating: 6/10 – with strong, committed performances from its main cast, Match maintains the audience’s interest despite some clumsy, ill-considered plot developments and a sense that it’s all a bit too overwrought for it’s own good; the fact that it’s taken ten years to reach the screen may give potential viewers enough of a warning, however, not to expect too much.