Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
The best jazz documentary just got better Turn a fashion photographer loose on the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, and what do you get? Lots of artsy-fartsy shots of sea,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
There may be trouble ahead.” Follow the Fleet is perhaps the most problematic film in the Astaire/Rogers series. It has an excruciatingly bad plot; it has a singularly lame performance[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
What’s black and white and simply reeks with class? Top Hat is the apotheosis of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It has five dances, a total they matched in only[…]
Damn we’re good. With the single exception of biting the heads off of rats, lounge acts are the lowest form of show business. As such, they exert a perverse fascination[…]
Experimental & Underground · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Punks hail Britannia in their own peculiar way in this little-seen gem by the late queer auteur Jubilee (1978), Britain’s only decent punk film, still isn’t respected at home as[…]
Asian · Music & Musicals · Reviews
If “Asian face” isn’t bad enough, how about names like Nanki-Poo and Yum Yum? Mike Leigh’s 1999 film Topsy-Turvy reenacts Gilbert and Sullivan’s staging of The Mikado, the 1885 comic[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Rock’s aging bad boys finally give it up The 25-year hissy fit between Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols continues to rage in Julian Temple’s engaging documentary about everybody’s favorite[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“Heaven rest us, I’m not asbestos” Roberta is one of the least known,1 and one of the very best, of the films that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did together. It features some of[…]
Fred and Ginger get continental on your ass The Gay Divorcee1 is the quintessential Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. It’s not their best – largely because Ginger’s dancing skills[…]
The kids are not all right! Riot girls have a long and noble history that extends far back beyond Hole and Courtney Love. No doubt the experts in this realm[…]
Composers · Music & Musicals · SF & Fantasy
Serling’s groundbreaking series was also a warm haven for Hollywood’s greatest composer Last weekend I purchased the Herrmann Twilight Zone double-CD, and I’ve played it about ten times by now[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“Hey fella, twirl that old propella” Hollywood producer Merriam Cooper loved three things: airplanes, the tropics, and giant gorillas.1 In Flying Down to Rio, Cooper’s 1933 airborne musical, he went[…]
Music & Musicals · Pre-Code · Reviews
This 1934 musical mystery has girls, grins, guns, and Duke Ellington, too “Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world.” That was the legend above the entrance[…]
Hot licks and high kicks in a rare early musical The King of Jazz is a time machine. This 1929 musical, filmed in Technicolor, preserves a part of America’s musical[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
The crazy careers of the King of Pop and his Queenly Sister – or is it the other way around? For more than a decade, starting in 1986 when she[…]
Directors · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Sluts, stoners, and screeching drag queens decorate Morrissey’s curdled campfests Gerri Miller: “You used to be dynamite, Joe. Don’t you miss it?” Joe Dallesandro: “Uh … yeah.” – Trash It’s[…]
Forgotten biopic offers a baker’s dozen of delights Is Words and Music, MGM’s 1948 “and then they wrote” biopic of songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, a masterpiece? Although long[…]
Music & Musicals · Pre-Code · Reviews
“All Singing! All Dancing! All Color! All Racist!” Whoopee is a find, a treasure, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Most of all it is a chunk of Flo[…]
Thrill as the withered opera hags revisit their vital past! Scream as the mock-incestuous-lesbian sisters kiss and waltz! Shudder as hunky baritone Sergei Larin makes goo-goo eyes at a twink![…]
