Entries associated with the tag "Julie Taymor":

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? 

It's satirical and ironic....It's humorous and dark at the same time. It doesn't have to make sense. We're liberated because it's a musical. —Julie Taymor on Across the Universe in Variety

Liberated? Well, I dunno...though the not-making-sense part seems about right. But this isn't a slag, it's an appreciation. Because from one extravagant setup to the next, there's hardly a frame in Taymor's Across the Universe that doesn't do more than it reasonably ought to—or ever would have in the hands of anyone less attentively committed. It's a film that never stops working, at a tightrope level of awareness, even when what it's working at—a musical tale of "peace and love" in the shadow of Vietnam, as refracted through the prism of 60s Beatles lyrics—is certifiably brain-dead.

Obviously a problem of, umm, "content"—as opposed to the logistics of production, which for the most part are impeccable. But how many big Broadway musicals (including Taymor's The Lion King, for which she's almost routinely canonized)—to say nothing of standard-repertory operas: Puccini, conventional bel canto, those double dagger moments in Bellini, etc—aren't missing an intellectual screw or two in exactly the same way? Or take French academic painting of the 19th century, those veritable "grand machines" of technical precision and detail. What's not to like about the level of conscious craft? Actually a lot, as the early modernists understood, but there's still a lot to appreciate as well. Which is where Universe performs its own kind of mise-en-scene magic, every visual cue meticulously engineered and choreographed, foreground to back and all points in between. Tie-dye to acid, the inevitable 60s checklist: more than simply citations here, it's the compositional riffs that matter.

So yeah, I mostly enjoyed the thing. Like an evening with the old Boston Pops Orchestra under Arthur Fiedler's baton, those brass and string textures caressing every popcorn strain of "Roll Out the Barrel" as if it were Beethoven or Mozart. Or legions of Cirque du Soleil performers—jongleurs and tumblers and animal handlers, maybe a dancing bear or two—as technically marvelous as they are "intellectually" undernourished, like a succession of stupid pet tricks that everyone can applaud. Isn't there a place for that in our lives, for craft without a brain? So close your eyes and think of Cats—oh god, no! ... but you get the idea.