La La Land (2016)

Mia (Emma Stone) is an aspiring actress trapped in the industry cycle of waitressing by day and failing auditions by night. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is an ambitious jazz pianist trapped playing Christmas music at a restaurant while dreaming of setting up his own club. After a series of chance meetings they enter into a romantic relationship, which struggling to balance their love for one another with their separate ambitions.

There is a great film buried somewhere inside La La Land, a new film musical by writer/director Damian Chazelle. Unfortunately Chazelle never quite manages to find it. The film he has made hints at that greatness quite regularly, but never seems to fully nail a scene or moment. The promise is everywhere. The anticipation is palpable and regular. It is never completely satisfying. It never goes that extra mile to turn a good scene or moment into a legendary one. The end result is a film with a lot of intermittent charm and glimmers of profundity, but which is ultimately a bit of a boring confection.

Three for the Show (1955)

When stage performer Julie (Betty Grable) loses her husband Marty (Jack Lemmon) during the Korean War, she moves on by marrying his former writing partner Vernon (Gower Champion). Two years later Marty turns out to have been marooned on an island all along, leaving Julie with two husbands at the same time. Rather than choose one over the other, she decides to keep both.

Three for the Show is a slightly bizarre Hollywood musical starring Betty Grable in her penultimate film role. As one career wound down, however, another picked up, with the film giving Jack Lemmon one of his key early roles as the competitive romantic Marty. The film is unusual in the way it aggressively skirts the line in pushing references to its characters' sex lives in such a mainstream studio fare. The Hays Code, which had rigorously policed movie standards in relation to sex and violence, was winding down by 1955 but it was certainly still there. I was slightly surprised at how enthusiastically Three for the Show seemed to enjoy prodding it.

Office (2015)

The massive Hong Kong corporation Jones & Sunn is about go public. CEO Winnie Cheung (Sylvia Chang) is set to become a major shareholder after being a mistress to Chairman Ho Chung-Ping (Chow Yun-Fat) for twenty years. At the same time Winnie has been secretly romancing one of her executives, David Wong (Eason Chan) - and he has been secretly stealing company funds to play the stock market. New recruit Lee (Wang Ziyi) arrives eager to impress, and immediately falls for fellow new employee Kat (Lang Yueting), not knowing that she is actually the Chairman's daughter. This tale of corporate intrigue and romance plays out on a stylised set the size of an aircraft hangar, is shot in 3D, and is a musical. That certainly makes it one of the stranger Hong Kong film productions of recent years.

The film is directed by Johnnie To, my personal favourite filmmaker, and of course that means I arrived at the cinema with extremely high expectations. That may have been a mistake: it is a disappointing film compared to To's best, but it admittedly still a well-staged and often inventive musical - and how many musical films do you see coming out of Hong Kong anyway?

Into the Woods (2014)

It's been such a pleasure in recent years to see Hollywood re-embrace the musical as a genre worth exploring. While there were occasional attempts to produce a screen musical through the 1980s and 1990s, it's only really been in the last decade and a half that we've finally seen the studios actively pursue new films with the likes of Moulin Rouge, The Phantom of the Opera, Le Miserables, Rent, Sweeney Tood and a host of others. Into the Woods is the latest attempt: a Walt Disney production directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago) and based on the popular Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine stage production.

The simplest description of the plot goes something like this: in a fairy tale kingdom, the Baker and his wife rush to break a curse that's preventing them from having a child. On the way their quest becomes tangled with the stories of Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk. Into the Woods is an ensemble film with multiple protagonists, overlapping storylines, a highly cynical edge, and an unusual two-act format that is almost its undoing.

Annie (2014)

Annie begins with a cloying and irritating red-headed young moppet do a twee little song and dance in a classroom, before she sits down and is replaced by another Annie: African-American, smart, inventive and outgoing. Within seconds she's hooked her entire close into a rhythmic musical presentation about how great F.D. Roosevelt's Presidency was back in the 1930s. It's a scene with multiple angles at the same purpose: here is Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie, re-imagined as a contemporary African-American story and thus much cooler than the lame 1982 film, but still with one eye firmly on its roots. It also carries a second, unintentional message, which is that this is a remake that is trying much, much too hard.

Annie (Quvenzhane Wallis) is a foster child living with a group of girls in the dismissive and cruel care of the drunken Miss Hannigan (Cameron Diaz). A chance encounter with billionaire and mayoral candidate William Stacks (Jamie Foxx) leads to her being temporarily taken into his care.

Invitation to the Dance (1956)

This is a review of Gene Kelly's 1956 film Invitation to the Dance, the discussion of which requires a quick primer on vanity projects.

So here we go: there's this thing in Hollywood known as the 'vanity project'. It goes like this: an actor appears in a string of hit movies, so many that the studio that produced those movies comes to see the actor as a vital asset to their ongoing business. They want to hire the actor for as many of their projects as possible. Meanwhile the actor is getting more and more ambitious: he or she has ideas of their own, and artistic projects that they become passionate about. When the studio comes to the actor with an offer to appear in their next big motion picture, the actor comes back with a counter-offer: I'll make your film, so long as you bankroll mine.

So it is that, from time to time, a commercially savvy movie studio will sink a pile of money into project for no other reason than to please one of their leading actors. It might have little or no commercial prospects. It might be a poor fit for the over-ambitious actor. It gets referred to as a vanity project, since its only purpose appears to be in appeasing someone's over-reaching self-love.

Mary Poppins: 50 years on

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Mary Poppins. Not the character, you understand, nor the novel by Australian author P.L. Travers. Today is the 50th anniversary of the feature film adaptation, produced by Walt Disney, directed by Robert Stevenson and starring Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke and David Tomlinson.

It was a contentious film at the time, since it took fairly serious liberties with Travers' novel, and generally against her wishes and better judgement. The historical setting was changed. Mary herself was made a much less authoritarian character. On the other hand, Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi took a beloved but rather simplistic children's book and transformed it into a heartfelt story about a father who properly discovers his children for the first time.

This, to me, is the genius of Mary Poppins. It's pretty much the most nuanced and melancholic of all the classic Walt Disney productions. Sure it has cartoon penguins, rousing musical numbers and comedy chimney sweeps, but Mr Banks' slow night walk to the bank in order to be fired - his ordered life in utter disarray - is one of the most emotionally effective scenes to ever come out of the company.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: 60 years on

Nostalgia-fests for this blog have covered The Lion King and The Shadow's 20th anniversaries and The Muppets Take Manhattan's 30th. Today I want to jump back even further, because today is the 60th anniversary of Stanley Donen's 1954 musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

We tend not to talk about Seven Brides too much these days, probably because it's based on a fairly repellent premise: a farmer comes down from the mountain into town and finds himself a wife. His six brothers then kidnap another six women and hold them hostage over winter until Stockholm syndrome runs in course and all the women fall hopelessly in love. On the other hand the film's got a nice line in hummable songs and at least one stand-out dance sequence. What's a musical lover to do?

As always the key to enjoying Seven Brides is context: its premise is unsettling to us today, but in 1954 it was considered harmless fun. The film was a big hit for MGM at the time, far more so than their intended prestige musical for that year - Vincente Minnelli's comparatively sterile Brigadoon. Seven Brides even lost some of its budget to Brigadoon mid-shoot, so it must have been satisfying for Stanley Donen and his crew to see Seven Brides become one of the year's biggest hits and win an Oscar while Brigadoon lost a truckload of money.

It's Always Fair Weather (1955)

Three GIs, just returned from World War II, share one last drink together in a New York bar. They promise to meet up again at the same bar in ten years. A decade later they do reunite, but discover to their mutual horror that they don't like each other any more, and that their lives since the war have fallen far short of where they expected to be. For one of them in particular, Ted, the meeting makes him realise he's actually a bit of an asshole.

Oh, and it's a dance-filled musical.

It's Always Fair Weather is an outstanding musical feature, starring Gene Kelly and directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen, whose collaboration on Singin' in the Rain three years earlier had resulted in what is arguably the best feature film of all time. At the time of its release Fair Weather flopped: it was too dark, too cynical, just a bit too off-kilter to engage a mainstream audience at the time. Six decades later, and it's very close to topping Singin' in the Rain as my favourite film musical.