Its reputation is as the most intellectual of musicals, lacking big musical production numbers in favor of lines like “The Rain in Spain is Mostly on the Plain.”
Tag Archives: Musicals
ALL THAT JAZZ (1979)
An “incredibly self-indulgent” sort-of musical in which Bob Fosse “choreographs his own death,” which I gotta say I was absolutely fascinated by.
FANTASIA (1940)
Disney’s early foray into “high culture” is probably weirder to than you remember and also includes a satisfying amount of dinosaur-on-dinosaur violence.
THE JAZZ SINGER (1927)
The film that brought the sound revolution, cementing a place in movie history all out of proportion to how good a movie it actually is (it is not a good movie).
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951)
A well-produced musical extravaganza starring Gene Kelly, with the music of George Gershwin, it still left me surprisingly cold.
ANIMALYMPICS (1980)
Our Virtual Film Festival continues with a movie seemingly made for me as a kid and absolutely no one else in the world.
SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937)
It is the original full-length animated movie, and helped to launch a media empire. For me it holds up today, um, intermittently?
1776 (1972)
Before Hamilton took Broadway by storm, there was another musical about the Founding Fathers, one that I love too much to be objective about.
WEST SIDE STORY (1961)
About three-quarters of my favorite movie all-time, but not quite. Still sort of elemental to where musicals have gone since then.
GOING MY WAY (1944)
Bing Crosby plays a laid-back, musical priest in this very laid-back musical that was a huge hit in the middle of World War II but mostly forgotten today.
