Because I felt as if I was cheating with the musical this morning (Ray really was not a musical), I decided to watch some short movies on YouTube to cover the bases. I did three of them.
“Taylor Swift-All Too Well: The Short Film” (2021)
“Incest! The Musical” (2011)
“Zombie Musical” (2011)
The Taylor Swift short was basically a song with a story being told over top of it. It is a music video. However, Sadie Sink did appear in the video as one of the main characters. I did enjoy the song, but, again, it most likely not a musical. The story of this collapsing relationship was sad and engaging. Sadie Sink is an excellent young actor.
Incest! The Musical was really fun, which I know it is an odd thing to say. A brother and a sister sing about their attraction for one another and how they don’t care what the world says about their relationship. This has some really clever lyrics on the songs satirizing a subject that everybody considers queesy.
Then, in 2011, in the middle of the zombie craze, Zombie Musical appeared. Basically the same idea that you have seen all over the place with zombie shows/movies, but with songs. This short was remade into the film “Anna and the Apocalypse,” which was fun and I watched during the first DailyView.
I watched Ray, the biopic of Ray Charles, starring Jamie Foxx, which lead to Foxx winning the Academy Award for Best Actor. However, it absolutely falls into the category that I spoke about at the beginning of the Genre-ary DailyView. It is not a musical.
It did have musical listed on the summary for the movie, but it is one of those movies that has music in it, is even about music, but is not a musical. I did say at the beginning of this month that I might not follow that rule as I was going through it and so I have broken it.
According to IMDB, “The story of Ray Charles (played by Jamie Foxx), music legend. Told in his adult life with flashbacks to his youth we see his humble origins in Florida, his turbulent childhood, which included losing his brother and then his sight, his rise as pianist in a touring band, him writing his own songs and running his own band, and then stardom. Also includes his addiction to drugs and its affect on his working life and family life.“
Jamie Foxx is sensational as the legendary performer. He seemingly brought back to life the larger than life character of Ray Charles Robinson, better known to the world as just Ray Charles.
The biopic sections of this movie are the best parts. Watching Foxx develop Ray through his relationships, his struggle to find the right sound, his drug habit and other problems was the standout of this film.
The music was used well, but I could have used more of it. It seemed to only give a flavor of the songs in the film. Again, another reason why I would not consider this a musical, necessarily.
I thought the weakest part of the movie were the daydreams/delusions that Ray would have flashing back to the traumatic event of his brother’s death. The appearance of water in his suitcase or on the floor were too cartoony for what the movie was trying to go for. This felt way too artsy for the story. The straight up flashbacks were considerably more powerful and more effective than that.
I do appreciate that the film did not shy away from some of the negative aspects of his life. Many of these types of musical biopics leave out major issues in favor of a more positive spin. We see Ray Charles and his drug addiction, which led to his arrest, and his extra-marital affairs, one which even gave him a son.
Along with Jamie Foxx, the strong cast included Regina King, Kerry Washington, Clifton Powell, Sharon Warren, Richard Schiff, Larenz Tate, Terrence Howard, Wendell Pierce, Bokeem Woodbine, and even Moonlighting’s Herbert Viola, Curtis Armstrong, himself. I was able to get past my dislike of that actor because of his Moonlighting role. Being fair, he did a solid job here.
This was a movie with a lot of good and some areas where I would have liked something different. Jamie Foxx is tremendous as are the rest of the cast (shout out to Kerry Washington for her role as Charles’s wife, Bee). Ray is a touch long and, not really a musical, but it is a solid film overall.
In 2023, Jason Statham starred in two of the top three worst movies on my Worst Movie list. He is starting off 2024 better than that.
Adam Clay (Jason Statham) is a beekeeper who has rented some space from Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad) for his hives. When Eloise gets scammed out of all her money, including 2 million dollars from a charity that she ran, she kills herself. This set off Clay, who turned out to be a retired member of a special governmental group called the Beekeepers, and he went on a killing spree of everyone involved in the scam.
This was absolutely a poor-man’s John Wick. There is even the scene where the cocky young guy is told by a father-figure that he has messed up and is going to be killed and that there is nothing they can do about it. This felt right out of John Wick’s first film.
The cocky young guy behind the scam scheme is Josh Hutcherson and he does a decent job of being slimy as could be. The ‘father-figure’ was a former CIA director played by Jeremy Irons. Both of these two did a great job as their characters, even if there is not much to them. This is a good example of good actors elevating parts that might not be very deep.
However, Hutcherson’s character’s eventual identity is very cringeworthy and is a big part of the finale of this movie that was so out there that it brought the film down.
The first part of the film was actually pretty decent and had a lot of fun, cheesy action with Jason Statham just killing fools. The film does go over the edge several times in the third act, stretching credibility to a thin. thin string.
There are two FBI agents that the film follows for some reason. Emma Raver-Lampman played Agent Veronica Parker, the daughter of Phylicia Rashad’s character but you could hardly guess that considering how detached she was most of the film. That plot point should have been eliminated or expanded upon instead of what was done.
And as I have hinted at, the finale is just so improbably that, even in this type of a film, it makes you roll your eyes. This was very much like those crazy action movies of the 1990s. If that is what you are looking for, The Beekeeper is enough fun to get by, even if there are better movies that feature revenge killing. There were some decent kills in the first part of the film that were satisfying. There was one that was shown in the trailer that I wish would have been kept for the film because it would have been epic if I did not know it was coming.
Some of the dialogue of this movie was silly, with so many bee-puns that you just have to shake your head.
The Beekeeper is dumb fun and a Jason Statham fan would enjoy this a lot. The dumb stuff never threatened to overwhelm the film and there was enough fun parts to make this watchable.
I.S.S. stands for the International Space Station, and this is a science fiction movie set aboard the Space Station. It was a cooperative venture between the United States and Russia.
Everything seemed to be going well until something happened on the earth. They could see the explosions from the space station. Then the Americans received a message from earth to take control of the I.S.S. using whatever means necessary.
I found most of the first hour fairly dull. I did not think most of these characters were developed and I did not have any connection to any of these people.
Ariana DeBose, Chris Messina, John Gallagher Jr, Maria Mashkova, Costa Ronin and Pilou Asbæk are the actors in the film and they are all fine, though not great in any stretch of imagination.
The effects of the film were pretty decent. The scenes of the explosions on earth were the coolest part. The use of the floating/lack of gravity was a cool effect too.
Other than that, I did not like much about this film.
In my class, we are reading The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen. There is a section in there where the main character, Hannah, tells some other Jewish girls stories about movies & TV shows she has seen. One of those she mentioned in Yentl, starring Barbra Streisand. I had never seen that and I knew it was a musical so it fit right in the Genre-ary DailyView.
However, I am not sure if the film would be considered a musical. The structure of the film is different than most musicals. Despite Streisand’s character Yentl singing in some scenes, Yentl does not sing every time. In fact, there are some songs where we see her singing and, within the same song, she is not singing any more.
Yentl (Barbra Streisand) wanted to be able to study the Talmud, a main book in Jewish theology and law, but, as a woman, she was forbidden to do so. Still, her beloved father (Nehemiah Persoff) allowed her to study is secret. When he passed away, Yentl cut off her hair and donned a disguise as a man in order to be able to continue the study. Yentl met Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin) along the way and became friends with him. Yentl fell for him despite Avigdor being in love with another.
I did not know that Mandy Patinkin was in this movie. I love him from The Princess Bride so he brings a quality to this film that may not have been there for me without him.
Barbra Streisand did all of the music in the film and her voice is, of course, stunning. The music works very well with the story that is being told. Michael Legrand won an Oscar for his work on the score.
I did have a few problems with the film. First, and most prominently, I had a difficult time accepting Barbra Streisand as a man. He voice, her beautiful face just did not speak man to me. I also wondered about the beard that this “man” never seemed to grow and never shaved.
That just is a matter of suspending disbelief, but I had a hard time believing that Mandy Patinkin, who was close up with Barbra several times, including roughhousing with her, could not tell the difference.
The film did feel cruel at times, especially toward Hadass (Amy Irving). When she married “Anshel” (Yentl’s male name), and the story had her fall for him, that felt particularly cruel and there was no pay off for that. The film really treated Hadass in a bad way.
However, the film is decent, with some powerful songs. Patinkin is great and I feel Streisand did the best she could to make her seem to be a male.
I loved Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street with Johnny Depp. So when I saw Cry-Baby on the list of musicals with Depp starring, I though this would be a great addition for the Genre-ary DailyView.
Boy, was I wrong.
I HATED THIS MOVIE!
There was really no story to it. The acting was horrendous. It was so stupid.
Johnny Depp was absolutely was just getting by. You can see flashes of the charisma that he will have later in his career, but this is such a terrible vehicle for him that those few flashes are hidden amongst the garbage.
The movie has 72% on Rotten Tomatoes which absolutely flabbergasts me.
I will say that a few of the songs were catchy. In particular the song when Cry Baby was in jail. However, honestly, none of the other songs stood out to me at all.
I had just a terrible time watching this movie and I would put it on a list of my least favorite movies ever.
Another comedy/musical with a really long title is on the agenda for tonight’s entry in the Genre-ary DailyView. It is a 1967 movie that was based on a play from 1961 and a book from 1952. I have seen the play itself back on a Fathom movie several years ago when Stephen Colbert had a guest role in the musical. That was shot like a stage play though and, to be fair, I did not remember much about that film.
So I came into this 1967 film with the most basic of knowledge, which was, I guess, the title. None of the film that I watched reminded me of the musical version I saw so it works fine for the DailyView.
According to IMDB, “Twenty-seven year old New York window washer, J. Pierrepont Finch (Robert Morse), believes he can be a success in the corporate world after he impulsively picks up the book “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying“. The book promises its reader that he can climb the corporate ladder simply and quickly. The Worldwide Wicket Corporation, the business in the office building whose windows he washes is, according to the book, the perfect type of business. There he meets secretary Rosemary Pilkington (Michele Lee), who sees in Ponty (as she calls him) an unassuming man who she believes the corporate world will eat alive. But Ponty, memorizing what the book tells him, does quickly climb the corporate ladder but not by doing any real work.”
I have to say that I was much more interested in the Fathom Events version of this than the 1967 movie, especially at the start. As the film moved on, I was a little more engaged in the film because it was kind of fun to see how Finch was going to get himself out of the obvious trouble that he was in.
The film certainly portrayed the people involved in business as incompetent boobs. Even the very top of the field were taken in by a little flattery and some machinations.
I did like the fact that the actual book purchased by Finch would narrate the story, as Finch would read each entry. This was a neat feature.
The songs themselves were not as memorable as I would have liked.
If I remember correctly, I enjoyed the Fathom Events one much more than this, although this did improve as it moved along.
This musical started off immediately with “Comedy Tonight,” a song that I have heard many times, but had no idea was from this movie. It has been quite an education during the Genre-ary this year with songs in musicals.
According to IMDB, “Pseudolus (Zero Mostel), the laziest slave in Rome, has one wish: to purchase his freedom. When his master and mistress leave for the day, he finds out that the young master has fallen in love with a virgin in the house of Marcus Lycus (Phil Silvers), a slave dealer specializing in beautiful women. Pseudolus concocts a deal in which he will be freed if he can procure the girl for young Hero (Michael Crawford). Of course, it can’t be that simple, and everything begins to go wrong.”
A great cast including Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Michael Crawford, Buster Keaton, Jack Gilford, Annette Andre, Leon Greene, and Michael Hordern do a great job with this clever, slapstick comedy.
Zero Mostel was hamming it up the entire film. He was so committed to being over-the-top that it really worked with this movie.
The chariot chase at the end of the movie was absolutely insane.
Now, there were not that many songs that really stuck out, except for the opening “Comedy Tonight” and the reprise of it at the conclusion of the movie. The songs were written by Stephen Sondheim.
It was a silly movie that was fun to watch. Much more of a comedy than a musical.
How could you do a musical list without an entry from the King?
I have not seen very many of Elvis Presley’s movies, despite the fact that he made dozens of them. However, Viva Las Vegas worked as the musical for the Genre-ary DailyView and so we take a trip around the race track with the King.
Lucky (Elvis Presley) was in Las Vegas for a Gran Prix race, but he had yet to purchase the motor for his car. In an attempt to earn the money gambling, Lucky was very successful. Unfortunately, trying to woo a woman he met at the hotel named Rusty (Ann-Margret), he lost the money in the swimming pool.
Since he had no money to pay off his hotel bill, Lucky had to start working as a waiter to work it off. He spent the rest of the movie either dating Rusty, singing, or working on his car.
There was a conflict in the film that Rusty did not want him to race because she thought it was dangerous. Nothing came from this conflict, except that Lucky just ignored her and dismissed her. This only seemed to make her more agitated.
There was a conflict with a romantic rival for Rusty’s affection, another driver who wanted Lucky to drive for him. This guy died in the race, I think. I’m not sure.
The story was thin and nonsensical. This movie survived solely on the chemistry and charisma of its two lead stars. Elvis and Ann-Margret we great together and their scenes, especially of the music and dancing, were very entertaining. The music was excellent, with Elvis performing several songs including the title track of the film. Of course, Elvis’s lip synch of the song during the Talent Show was one of the worst lip synchs I have ever seen. He had absolutely no expression as he sang that song. It really pulled me out of the movie.
It was not the worst film ever by far, and there were definitely entertaining parts to it. The thing is, there is just not enough to justify watching it.
I had not watched the original version of this film until a few years ago. I did enjoy that film quite a bit when I finally did watch it during the original DailyView. However, this version of Mean Girls is actually adapting the stage play that came after the movie. And, oh by the way, it is a musical, something that the promo material for this movie skipped over.
I do like musicals, and this works very nicely as a musical for this month’s Genre-ary. Unfortunately, I did not find this anywhere near as good as the original.
The story is very much similar. According to IMDB, ” New student Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) is welcomed into the top of the social food chain by the elite group of popular girls called “The Plastics,” ruled by the conniving queen bee Regina George (Reneé Rapp) and her minions Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and Karen (Avantika). However, when Cady makes the major misstep of falling for Regina’s ex-boyfriend Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney), she finds herself prey in Regina’s crosshairs. As Cady sets to take down the group’s apex predator with the help of her outcast friends Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey), she must learn how to stay true to herself while navigating the most cutthroat jungle of all: high school.“
Oh, and you still need to watch out for those buses.
The problem is that I did not like any of these characters. I found them all to be just horribly rotten people who I did not want to spend time with. In the original film, I never felt that way and I could see the positives from all of them. Cady, Janis and Damian were meant to be the heroes of the film, I think, but they were every bit as horrible as the Plastics. Regina George was portrayed as the Devil so much that, though those scenes were fun to watch, made her into someone that you could not feel for. I just felt so much more negative toward all of these characters this time through that I felt no desire to root for them, which was not something I felt in the original.
The music was fun, for the most part. Perhaps nothing remarkably memorable, but catchy.
I had a problem with this movie, especially with the characters. It was nowhere close to the original.
This film is one I have been looking forward to since the last few months of 2023. American Fiction turned out to be every bit as good as advertised.
Author Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), nicknamed Monk, was becoming frustrated with the public at large. His intelligently written books were not being bought, while he saw books that he considered empty and stereotypical thriving in the market.
As a joke, Monk wrote a book embracing every one of the stereotypes and all the heartless prose he was complaining about: a “Black” book. To his shock and dismay, this book was bought by a publishing company and he had to pretend to be a escape black convict to secure the deal. While this was going on, he was having plenty of problems with his family while in Boston.
This was just tremendous. It was cleverly written, extremely funny, taking every racial stereotype and just ripping them through the wringer. The ridiculousness of the plot felt real and true.
Jeffrey Wright was outstanding as the constantly gruff and angry author and the rest of the cast was great too. Sterling K. Brown was a standout as Monk’s gay brother Cliff and there were some poignant moments with Monk and Cliff’s mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) and their longtime housekeeper Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor). Lorraine may have been my favorite character of the film, bringing some real kindness and heart to the constant bitterness and fighting.
Erika Alexander was excellent as well as Coraline, the neighbor and love interest for Monk.
Without spoiling anything, I loved the ending of this movie, as it wrapped up in a way that I did not expect and that I found extremely creative and original.
This marked the film debut for director Cord Jefferson and he did a fantastic job on American Fiction. The story is told beautifully and these characters are all developed wonderfully well. I really enjoyed this film and I can see why it has received a lot of Oscar buzz.
I needed a shorter musical this morning since I was heading off to the theater today, so I had this film ready for just such an emergency. It was from 1976 and it was around 97 minutes long. It worked perfectly as I woke up early this morning.
The First Nudie Musical was a strange title, and the strange title fit right in with this bizarre film.
In an attempt to save the movie studio he took over from his father, Harry Schechter (Stephan Nathan) had been filming pornos. However, the ideas were drying up when he came up with something different: the first porno musical.
Harry, along with his assistant Rosie (Cindy Williams), having to film it in two weeks or lose the studio, went about the steps in creating a musical porno, despite the hurdles that were placed in their path.
How to describe this? I’ll start off with this. It is stupid. I mean really stupid. Yet, it had some real laughs to it. The story was implausible and unlikely, but it did lead to some very funny humor… and, honestly, lots of nudity.
Cindy Williams was easily the best character on the screen, getting all the best lines and most of the funniest interactions.
The songs were mostly funny too. They were filled with innuendo and lines that surpassed innuendo and were literally sexual in nature.
The story was really just an excuse to parade mostly naked women (and some men) around the stage and to throw in songs with sexual jokes. That was really all this was.
I did laugh quite a bit during this film so I do not think it was totally a flop. It was a film I would have liked much more as a teenager.
It is Sunday morning and I went to Prime for today’s Genre-ary DailyView, and I head for the world of baseball and the classic musical Damn Yankees.
I did not know that this was a twist on the Faustus legend, where a character sells their soul to the devil in exchange for some kind of success on earth.
In this case, Applegate (Ray Walston), who was the Devil in disguise, approached middle aged man Joe Boyd (Robert Shafer) and offered him a chance to reclaim a youthful desire to become the greatest baseball player for his beloved Washington Senators and help them win the pennant. Applegate turned Joe into a younger man and named him Joe Hardy (Tab Hunter). Hardy goes to the Senators for a try-out and impresses everyone.
One of my favorite musical songs appeared in this film. I have a connection to “Heart” (which was performed on General Hospital at their Nurses’ Ball). It is such an upbeat and energetic song and this performance was enjoyable.
I loved Ray Walston’s performance in this movie. He was very much over the top and funny with his evilness.
I’m not sure I loved how the final scene played out because I am not sure it made any sense in what happened, but I was happy that it turned out as a happy ending. I’m just not sure about the execution of the decision.
Lola (Gwen Verdon) was Applegate’s demonic servant, who was brought to corrupt Joe, who was still in love with his wife (Shannon Bolin).
It was also fun to see Jean Stapleton as one of Joe’s wife’s friends.
I liked this one. It was a lot of fun and engaging performances, with some good music.
I decided to watch Man of La Mancha today on Amazon Prime for the Genre-ary DailyView. Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren starred in this tale of Don Quixote, an adaptation of the Broadway play of the same title.
I liked the initial set-up of the m0vie, with Cervantes (Peter O’Toole) thrown in prison awaiting the Spanish Inquisition. Once there, he was forced to defend himself as the other prisoners tried to put him on trial. Cervantes is an actor and so he put on a defense by telling the story of Don Quixote.
Though the premise of the film was intriguing, it failed to keep my attention as it progressed. Neither Peter O’Toole or Sophia Loren were much in way of singers and the overall silliness of the tone seemed to work against the tale.
Both O’Toole and Loren did a decent job with their performances. James Coco is likable as Sancho Panza/Cervantes’ servant.
“The Impossible Dream” is a well-known song that I was unaware originated in this musical.
The mix of tones kept me from enjoying the film and there was no music with that musical that truly engaged me. Overall, this was disappointing.
This morning, the Genre-ary DailyView pulled another well-known musical film, the 1979 film, Hair. Hair was based on the 1968 Broadway musical Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical.
Hair focused in on the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s/early 70s. It was an anti-Vietnam play, though the movie rolled that back somewhat.
The film featured a rollicking debut performance from Trick Williams as George Burger, the main hippie from the group in the film. Burger’s friends met Army draftee Claude Bukowski (John Savage) and they bonded in the last few days before Claude needed to report.
There was really not much of a plot here. It felt more like a compilation of misadventures of the group than it was any sort of real throughline. There was a connective tissue involving higher class woman named Shelia (Beverly D’Angelo) and she had some kind of relationship with Claude, kind of.
The music is great. ”Aquarius” is a classic that started off the film and ended up with “Let the Sunshine In.” Everything is catchy and the performance inside the movie were enjoyable and the choreography was well done too.
The success of this film is absolutely on the back of Treat Williams and he carries it through some ridiculousness, especially the final scenes of the movie which are so silly that it removes any of the emotional stakes of the film.
In the end, I am glad I watched the movie, and it does have positives to it, but there are just too many drawbacks for me to full recommend it.
EYG- Embrace Your Geekness 