Swing Time Dances Well But Has Two Left Feet Otherwise

John "Lucky" Garnett (Fred Astaire) is a dancer with an affinity (read: addiction) to gambling and its that affinity that ends up seeing him entirely forgot about his marriage to Margaret (Betty Furness). Eventually, John remembers that he was supposed to walk Margaret down the aisle and, in a distraught fashion, races to Margaret and her Dad to apologize. Margaret's father gives John a deal: if he can make $25,000 in the next few months, John can regain Margaret's hand in marriage. In order to get all that cash, John hightails it to New York City with his pal Pop (Victor Moore), where he accidentally stumbles into a dancing gig alongside Penny (Ginger Rogers).

Sing a Song of Passionate Romantic Turmoil With The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

There were a whole barrage of live-action musicals in the mid-20th century but none of them were quite like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  A 1964 directorial effort hailing from French filmmaker Jacques Demy, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, much like a typical opera and in the vein of certain beloved Broadway musicals such as Les Miserables or Hamilton, is wall-to-wall singing, everybody communicates through song, there isn't a note of speaking to be found here. Interestingly, unlike Les Miserables or Hamilton though, which have characters solely singing in traditionally organized musical numbers, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg makes no use of the usual parts of conventional cinematic musical numbers.

The Hills Are Alive With Ambition In The Sound of Music

From the opening scene of The Sound of Music, you know you're about to watch an event. These initial shots make it clear that director Robert Wise is not gonna be playing a restrained game here, whether you actually end up liking or disliking the movie, Wise and everybody in the cast & crew is going to be swinging for the fences and beyond. For those unfamiliar, this extravagant opening scene depicts helicopter shots of the gorgeous Austrian landscape, with the mountains in this region getting particular visual emphasis. Right away, we get a sense that the main characters in this story inhabit an environment that's far bigger than themselves, a clever way to visually foreshadow how these same characters would become swept up in terrifying European World War II historical events that are also bigger than themselves.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again Exceedingly Delivers On What It Needed To Get Right: Eccentric And Fun Musical Numbers

The most important question one must ask when making a follow-up to 2008's musical movie Mamma Mia! is simply this: will it have enough nuttiness and fun, frequently at the same time? A huge part of what made that original movie work was how often it just swung for the fences in terms of bringing to life eccentric musical fun, such as in sequences where men in scuba gear belted out ABBA tunes or Pierce Brosnan trying to harmonize his way through a rendition of S.O.S. By the time Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again was concluding one of its very first musical numbers with a crowd of people in graduation caps and gowns on bicycles crooning I Kissed The Teacher, well, I knew this follow-up was keeping its predecessors gonzo sense of entertainment alive and well.

Hedwig And The Angry Inch Is A One-of-a-Kind Musical Treat

The early years of the 2000's saw the musical, a genre that had long been seen as over-the-hill, make a big mainstream comeback in American cinema thanks to Moulin Rouge! and especially Chicago, but woe to those who forget to also credit John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch for helping the musical get revived as a high-profile subgenre for the 21st century. Sure, Hedwig and the Angry Inch was a box office non-starter compared to the likes of Chicago, but the movie was awesome and it managed to garner the loyal following it deserved in the years after its initial theatrical release.

West Side Story Mostly Holds Up Today As Superb Musical Filmmaking

By 1961, the golden age of Hollywood musicals was in high swing as numerous musicals scored major box office success and secured countless prestigious awards. This was a period of glory for the genre that lasted roughly from the 1950's to 1960's and perhaps its highest point came in 1961, when West Side Story came out and became a pop culture phenomenon that ended up scoring a Best Picture Oscar win as well as creating numerous tunes that have become iconic over the years. Thankfully, watching West Side Story today reveals that this is one highly-famous musical from the past that manages to (mostly) hold up, unlike, say, Grease (though that Grease soundtrack is still amazing).

High School Musical 2 Hits Too Many Sour Notes To Live Up To It's Potential

It was always gonna be difficult to pull off a High School Musical sequel. The whole point of the first movie was that it embraced corny storytelling so heavily that it might as well have swept up that type of storytelling in a big old bear hug. Adhering to this sort of storytelling means you've wrapped up all the characters stories in tidy little bows at the end so that the viewer believes they go on to live happily ever after. How exactly do you create further adventures for Troy Bolton and his fellow wildcats then, especially when you have further issues like trying to create a premise that still feels like it's a High School Musical production without just coming off as a weak retread of its predecessor?

Mermaids! Monstrous Murder! Musical Numbers! It's All Here In The Lure!

Remember that brief period in the early 2010's when we had gritty reimaginings of fairy tales? It didn't last long, mostly because more classical retellings of those fairy tales proved to be far more financially lucrative, but for a moment, we got just enough of these titles to qualify as a mini-trend in American cinema. Jack The Giant Slayer, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and Snow White & The Huntsman all emerged as attempts to rework children's fairy tales into dark PG-13 or R-rated cinema. In the end though, most of these attempts to be "adult" just ended up feeling derivative of other movies or tv shows and resulted in lackluster motion pictures (I do remember Giant Slayer being decent, to be fair).

High School Musical Is Pure Musical Cheese And, Delightfully, Very Much Knows That

How have I not seen High School Musical before? There are numerous classic movies that I've reviewed for this website that I'm not entirely surprised I've never seen due to a myriad of external circumstances, but seriously, how did I manage to avoid watching High School Musical prior to December 31st, 2017? This Disney Channel original movie was a touchstone for my generation, something whose songs were belted out ad nauseum by people in my age range all throughout my first years of middle school and is now looked upon with nostalgia by those very same people. It's baffling it's taken me this long to get here but I finally made it to High School Musical!

It's Thematically Messy But The Greatest Showman Does Come Through On Providing Fun Musical Numbers

It's time to play the music, it's time to light the lights, it's time to meet The Greatest Showman at the circus show tonight! Who is The Greatest Showman you ask? Why, it's P.T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman), a real life figure who is thought of having a complicated legacy at best (a good example of this is how he was a staunch critic of slavery but also heavily utilized blackface in his entertainment programs) and has now been recontextualized for the American musical The Greatest Showman as being a staunch advocate for the downtrodden and the oppressed. How does he advocate for such individuals? By creating a haven for them that he calls...the circus.

In Laman's Terms: It's Time For MGM To Get Back Into The Musical Game

In Laman's Terms is a new weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

After spending the 1980's and 1990's as an infrequent presence, the American musical came roaring back to life with the early 2000's double-whammy of Moulin Rouge! and Chicago. Since then, it's been common to get a new live-action musical adapting a famous Broadway musical (see: Nine, Les Miserables, Dreamgirls, Into The Woods, etc.) dropping around the holiday season in order to be a heavy presence around awards season. Though the American musical feature film has been far more common in the past 15 years compared to decades prior, the vast majority of them (save for Enchanted and Across The Universe) have been based on previously existing Broadway musicals or remakes of already existing musical movies.

Come Sing Along With The Thoroughly Delightful Mary Poppins

I have been a Disney geek my entire life, to the point that my first word uttered on this planet was "Disney". I was doomed from the start to be a total nerd for all things Disney which is a key reason why I have such an encyclopedic knowledge of animated Disney fare and hold the man known as Walt Disney in such high esteem. Despite all of that though, I'd somehow never seen the movie Mary Poppins until just a few days ago. Perhaps the running time had put me off the movie as a lad, or perhaps because I wasn't as enamored with other classic live-action Disney movies as I was with classic animated Disney fare, but whatever the reason, Mary Poppins had evaded my eyeballs for over two decades of my life.

Gene Kelly And George Gershwin's Music Shine In The Terrific Musical An American In Paris

Whenever we talk about modern actors, us film critics tend to have a habit of comparing newer movie stars to prolific actors of the past. I'm not exempting myself from this trend for sure, I totally did that with Michael Fassbender in my Steve Jobs review. It's not an inherently bad thing, but I do have to ponder if this tactic (which, again, I'm as guilty of as anyone else) when used so ubiquitously does tend to damper newer movie starts chances to establish their own identity while also reducing the uniqueness of the legendary older actors they're being compared to.

Dreamgirls Is Frequently Entertaining But Not Quite A Dream Come True

Certain movies have these massively iconic sequences that have, in many cases, managed to become even more famous than the movies they originally came from. Notice how the scene of Adolf Hitler breaking down from the Oscar-nominated 2004 German drama Downfall has garnered far more notoriety than the actual movie due to that scene being appropriated for comedic reasons so that the subtitles in that particular scene have Hitler reacting to more mundane modern-day circumstances. Such a phenomenon also includes the 2006 musical Dreamgirls, which has a certain showstopper musical number so powerful it eclipses the rest of the movie it appears in.

The 2008 Stage Version Of Rent Shows Why This Gut-Wrenching Musical Has Endured For So Long

It's interesting to me how a large amount of art can be dubbed both timely to the specific period it premiered in and timeless in the types of emotions and characters it grapples with. Rent, a Broadway musical penned by Jonathan Larson, is very much one such production, with its story chronicling the experiences of eight adults in their early twenties grappling with financial insecurity and the AIDS crisis being very much something that resonated powerfully with audiences in the mid-1990's. For decades at that point, the AIDS crisis had ravaged the LGBTQA community and instead of creating more empathy for members of this community, individuals like former President Ronald Reagan only made those suffering from AIDS and the LGBTQA community itself even more of a pariah in American society than it already was. 

Plenty Of Well-Done Musical Numbers Pop Up In Chicago, Though, Sadly, There's No Pizza

We've had plenty of "ladies-in-prison" movies in the history of cinema, to the point that it's become its own subgenre so ubiquitous it inspired a fake trailer on Grindhouse. Such a concept has endured so much that it's even eeked over into television with Orange Is The New Black being a hugely popular show for four years now. Despite the huge amount of content fixated on the idea of women getting into shenanigans in prison, I doubt any other piece of "ladies-in-prison" pop culture is quite like the 2002 Rob Marshall movie Chicago, which is based on a hugely popular and long-running Broadway musical of the same name.

Liza Minnelli And Bob Fosse Joins Forces For Thoughtful Musical Fare In Cabaret

The idea of Liza Minelli and the late great Bob Fosse teaming up feels like as natural a pairing as peanut butter and jelly or dogs and cuteness or Donald Trump and racism. EGOT winner Liza Minnelli most certainly knows her way around a musical number while you'd be hard pressed to find individuals in American pop culture from any era more adept at the art of dancing than Mr. Bob Fosse, whose knowledge of how to pull off the most exquisite dance moves seemed to come as naturally to him as breathing air. Such a promising pairing came to pass in the 1972 musical drama Cabaret, which also managed to rope in Michael York into the proceedings.

Disney's Live-Action Beauty And The Beast Is Overly Derivative Of The Original Animated Classic But Is Still An Entertaining Musical Romp

This new live-action take on Beauty And The Beast is an oddball little movie. It wants to be so much like the original 1991 animated classic its remaking, yet it also wants to be a more quasi-realistic take on the source material. That sense of realism also rubs up against its desire to be a big splashy over-the-top musical in some spots. When it just goes for being a straightforward fairy tale (not unlike the tone set forth in Jean Cocteau's 1946 take on this tale as old as time), it actually works fine. When it's trying to figure out how to ground things in realism while also being overly slavishly faithful to the original movie, well, that's when problems emerge.

La La Land Explores The Costs Of Reality By Way Of Stylized Musical Numbers

In our dreams, anything is possible. You can go anywhere, you can be with anyone, you can do anything. In its own way, musicals are akin to dreams in that the stylized nature of these productions allows for an "anything goes" approach for storytelling to make the frequent action of bursting into song feel acceptable. Events like The Paris Uprising Of 1832, the psyche of felines or even the life of Alexander Hamilton can all become easy fodder for musical theater, all told with a heightened guise that allows the musical aspect of these productions to truly flourish. After all, just because you're telling a somber tale doesn't mean you can't use a musical number to express a characters emotions (just look at how enduring opera has been through the centuries).

The Toxic Avenger Musical Has Energy To Spare But Doesn't Utilize That Energy Properly

The Toxic Avenger is a musical currently being performed by the Uptown Plays at the Kalita Humphreys Theater in Dallas, Texas from August 27, 2016 through September 11, 2016. This review covers the opening night performance given on August 27, 2016.

Many of Broadway's biggest musicals have been based on motion pictures, most notably adaptations of animated Hairspray and Beauty And The Beast. Following in the tradition of said movies is The Toxic Avenger, a musical adaptation of a well-known 1980's B-movie (a film I have not seen, for full disclosure) that debuted in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 2008. And in terms of Broadway musical adaptations of notable Hollywood movies, it's overall quality is closer to Bullets Over Broadway than The Lion King.