Sunday, March 11, 2007
thoughts on musicals, old and new
I found the clips from musicals in last weeks lecture particularly interesting as it was only recently that I attended a screening of 'Dream Girls'. I asked myself: why is it that I find the musicals of the 50s so enjoyable and yet I detested the modern musical 'Dream Girls'? They both belong to the same genre that has rather specific genre conventions, and yet my response differed so extremely. I think perhaps we are more comfortable to enjoy the hammy elements and camp aesthetics of the old musicals because it fits into our romanticised impression the 1950s. We enjoy 'Singin' in the Rain', 'An American in Paris', 'South Pacific' as a product of the time and accept the films as they are. A modern musical doesn't have the 'retro' advantage. I critiqued 'Dream Girls' as a contemporary film and compared it to the many other films I had seen around in the weeks leading up to the Oscars. Perhaps it was in this context, when I was viewing other films like 'History Boys', 'The Queen', 'The Departed', 'The Last King of Scotland', that caused me to particularly dislike the film 'Dream Girls'. Perhaps we expect more from our films today, more social awareness, more complexity, more power to initiate change, and in this context of expectation there is no longer room for the hammy musical re-make. We can enjoy the musicals of the 1950s because we don't hang today's expectation of 'what is good film making' around their necks. In viewing 'Dream Girls' however, I couldn't help but wonder what film could have been made, what story missed out on being told. Still, I suppose you've got to have the shade to have the light.
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2 comments:
I think that todays musicals can share the same popularity as the musicals from the 1950s; think Moulin Rougue, but as you said they need to somehow comment on todays society to be a film worthy of critical study. I havent yet seen dream girls but to me it seems to be a popcorn film (like the films of the 1950s were intended)and i think as such it will fufill its audiences entertainment needs. I believe that we enjoy the 1950s musicals so much because we can get lost in a world we didnt experience. Thus we can enjoy and critique it and try to understand the society that it came from as we have the value of hindsight but we forget that these films were popular as popcorn flics and werent meant to offer critique on society. And on that note i believe Dreamgirls both suceeds and fails; it offers us entertainment but maybe tries to hard at critique that it misses the point entierly, personally i think dreamgirls was just trying to hard to become an oscar film rather than a good film.
Yes!
Oscar films versus good films, a syndrome I've thought about for years.
The fact that you can know you're making a film for Oscar contention at the level of scriptwriting just irritates me.
In any case, back on topic, I quite liked Chicago as a film. Thought it managed to be more than a popcorn film, anyway, although that might have been novelty value.
- Kevin.
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