The New Old West Side Story
The Sharks and Jets may have been initially inspired by Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues, but the gang members we see are really first cousins of the “troubled youth” in popular[…]
Tagged: musical
Music & Musicals · TV & Streaming
Something to Sing About: Why Cop Rock Fails
“The height of the Bush era was a weird, giddy time.” – Stephen Thomas Erlewine on Milli Vanilli’s Girl You Know It’s True (1989) * * * Cop Rock (ABC,[…]
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Meta-Anti-Musical: Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark
Dancer in the Dark is largely about movies, in particular, about those movies in which people sing and dance their troubles away. Even this self-reflexivity situates the film in the[…]
Focus on Robert Altman: Three Takes on Popeye
Unassimilated weirdness is typical of Popeye – even in its soundtrack, where goofy “boing” effects are used to accompany ordinary, unheroic movement. Sweethaven’s anthem, the Harry Nilsson song “Everything Is[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Music & Musicals
Los Angeles Cinema and the Utopia of La La Land
Few movies have represented LA with such fawning reverence and nostalgia as La La Land. The filmmakers depict a clean, spare, elegant city, sluiced in mid-century Technicolor, consisting almost exclusively[…]
