Posted on 12/16/2021 8:34:21 PM PST by Borges
People ask me why I say, "Just saying". I'm just about ready to say why I just say just saying. It is just that just saying is saying the just thing to say. I just told you just why I just say just saying.
Just saying.
‘Nuff said… 😂
It’s much better than the original in just about every way. Also this mania of attacking “remakes” is a function of the availability of information about film history and the films themselves. When MGM made a film of Showboat in the early ‘50s, nobody was complaining that there had already been a film in 1936.
I do not need to lick the contents of the cat box to know it is not tasty chocolate no matter how much the dog likes it.
There is no story there and I do not like movies or plays that do not have stories.
2002.
It’s Romeo and Juliet. Probably the most famous of all stories. I do admit your opinion of what you haven’t seen is very valuable….
And not the good parts either.
I do admit your opinion of what you haven’t seen is very valuable….
Enjoy snacking from the litter box.
I’ve seen it multiple times now and I’m pretty comfortable saying that it’s the best cinematic adaptation of a Broadway musical ever made. It’s helped by the fact that it was directed by a cinematic genius and the score by the most talented musician ever born in the United States (Leonard Bernstein) is the best ever written for a Broadway musical.
Completely irrelevant.
But still irreverent 😂 (BTW: subtitles were appropriate and my Spanish-speaking wife agrees).
Shouldn’t be an impediment.
Pyramus and Thisbe
A corollary to just how “popular” the songs from WSS are would be the musical “Chicago. The current revival has been running on Broadway for 25 years and still going. The 2002 film was a big hit and won the “Best Picture” Oscar. Yet how many people really know any of the songs? Does an average person in the street know songs like “All That Jazz” or “Cell Block Tango”? That suggests it’s far more niche than people realize.
Theaters declined as society did.
Yeah but the Chicago movie had Richard Gere, Rene Zellwiger and Catherine Zeta Jones all right around peak popularity. And it didn’t have the baggage WSS had, because it was niche. Everybody conceptually knows WSS. It has name recognition without necessarily having popularity or draw. It’s very much in the “that thing my mom/grandma liked”. While Chicago got to come in fresh really. It had never been the cultural landmark WSS was. I doubt more than a dozen people who saw the 2002 film had seen the 1927 film, and I doubt most had seen any of the stage versions. So it got to come in as a “new” movie. WSS can never do that. Any new rendition of WSS, even the various Broadway revivals, has to drag the past with it, and is automatically limited to a largely nostalgic audience.
But the new WSS has Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler! Both at the peak of their...:) Interesting that “Chicago” was nostalgic *by design* when it was written in the ‘70s. WSS was cutting edge as far as Broadway musicals were concerned. It was considered difficult and discordant.
I wouldn’t say the Fosse version was nostalgic, more anti-nostalgic, satirizing nostalgia along with a lot of other stuff.
Then WSS became “the standard”. Then like so many “standards” it became “old people” fair. WSS in a lot of ways is Wizard of Oz. There have been a lot of attempts to do adaptations of that. Either the movie, or going back to the books. And they’ve mostly failed in the market, because you just can’t redo WOO without automatically dragging Judy Garland and those damn red slippers into people’s brains. Wicked is really the only thing to have any success in that, and it cheated by riding the “maybe the bad guy wasn’t bad” wave that had become popular in that time frame. That gave it a lot of separation and really allowed it to stand on its own. Also avoiding having Wizard or Oz in the title probably helped.
I’m feeling really old.
When I was a kid, to see a “new” motion picture you had to go to a theater. IF they, in a couple of years, featured the movie during ABC’s Sunday Night at the Movies it would be chopped up, edited and full of commercials.
HBO reared it’s ugly head and started showing movies uncut, unedited, and without commercials. You could finally see the “real” movie, but you had to wait a while before it got released to cable.
Then came VCRs and, with them, video rental stores. If the movie was a blockbuster, it might be over a year before they released it on tape.
With DVDs we still had rentals - remember when Netflix was primarily a DVD rental service? - and there was a lot of consternation regarding how fast a movie went to disk.
Now we have streaming services that show the movie in an unedited form, sometimes at the same time the movie is showing in theaters.
Movie theaters are soooooo screwed...
It’s the communal experience that I value. Also seeing something on a huge screen...
Spiderman just pulled a $260 million weekend. Theaters are fine. So long as it’s movies people want to see.
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