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On Thursday night, Chicago's own John C. Reilly worked a packed house at the Cubby Bear to promote his upcoming comedy Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, about a hard-livin', hard-lovin' fictional singer-musician (a composite of Johnny Cash and others). Swaggering and swivelling his hips in character, Reilly and his tight back-up band performed about a dozen original songs from the movie, some of which he cowrote. The music and lyrics—both ribald and nuanced, clever and dumb-funny—drive the movie, which Jake Kasdan directed and cowrote with Judd Apatow. From the robust title tune (by Marshall Crenshaw, Reilly, Apatow, and Kasdan) to the very un-P.C. ode to short people, "Let Me Hold You (Little Man)" (by Dan Bern, Mike Viola and Manish Raval), to Bern's hilarious Bob Dylan parody "Royal Jelly" and Viola's soaring, Roy Orbison-esque ballad "A Life Without You (Is No Life At All)," Reilly demonstrated remarkable vocal range and stage presence. (Check out a video clip from the show here.)
Both the live show and the film set me thinking about how I love movie musicals and wish there were more. Not that there's much to complain about this past year: you couldn't name two movies as disparate as Adam Shankman's Hairspray and John Carney's Once , but both charmed critics and audiences alike, as did Kevin Lima's Enchanted. Also notable was Christophe Honore's Les Chansons d'Amour (Love Songs), a kind of postmodern homage to Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg that played both the Toronto and Chicago film festivals. I have yet to catch up with Julie Taymor's Across the Universe, but I have seen Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which opens December 21. Burton, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Alan Rickman, and Timothy Spall put a lot of sizzle into Sondheim.
So what will it take to get more musicals on the big screen? Well, it is show business, so if box office is good, with luck more will get made. Memorable songs, actors who can sing, and inventive staging go a long way—not to mention the kind of big marketing pushes given to Enchanted, Sweeney Todd, and Walk Hard. But dangling a little gold couldn't hurt, either. Maybe the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should take a cue from the Golden Globes, which makes a distinction between dramas and musicals and comedies. If animated features have their own Oscar category, why can't musicals?
I loved "I'll Do Anything" when I first saw it in 1994, but I'm still curious to see the musical version, even if Nick Nolte and Julie Kavner's singing voices turn out to be terrible. I seem to remember reading in Entertainment Weekly back in '94 that Danny DeVito was going to prep the musical version for release on laserdisc the following year, but it never happened. Oh well, at least the movie works well without the music, thanks to Brooks's writing and great performances from Nolte, Joely Richardson, and Albert Brooks as a Joel Silver-type producer.
I agree that test marketing has a downside -- test audiences hated "E.T." back in '82, and I wouldn't be surprised if Mike Judge's "Idiocracy" was given only a limited platform release by Fox last year because of poor test screenings possibly attended and scored by the kind of people Judge pokes fun at in his movie. But some filmmakers think they help, especially when it comes to the ending of a film, and Brooks may be one of them, even though he does mock test screenings -- but not the people who conduct them -- in "I'll Do Anything."
If you know where a bootleg of the musical version of "I'll Do Anything" exists, please send out a smoke signal. I've heard bootlegs of two of the songs that Prince wrote for the film -- "Don't Talk 2 Strangers" was apparently supposed to be in the scene where Tracey Ullman says goodbye to Whittni Wright before being taken to prison ("Remember: stranger danger!").
"The remainder of the songs on here are rather hit-or-miss, and certainly of very little importance to the casual listener - unless comedy is your thing. Albert Brooks versions of 'I'll Do Anything' and 'There Is Lonely' is pure comedy gold and has all the appeal of a rapist whispering in your ear before he attacks. Likewise, Julie Kavner (yup, Marge Simpson) rasps her way through a number of Prince-penned tunes with hilariously awful results."