| re: I challenge anyone to find a better version than THIS | |
| Posted by: Chazwaza 12:54 pm EDT 05/21/24 | |
| In reply to: I challenge anyone to find a better version than THIS - DistantDrumming 09:35 pm EDT 05/20/24 | |
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| I've never quite understood this argument about movie musicals... and why it doesn't apply for you with any movie, or why the reverse doesn't happen in plays. Applying your issues about musicals adapted to film, why have any dialogue in movies at all? Why have talkies been so successful? How do dialogue heavy or dialogue-centered movies, be it by Woody Allen or Charlie Kauffman, do so well or resonate so much? Quite a lot of movies don't replace words with a close up of a facial reaction or a cutaway to something metaphoric or symbolic of the emotion, they don't all tell story through montage or quick sequences. It's a strange idea to me that film has rendered characters expressing themselves with words irrelevant or superfluous. And with music too. While audiences *became* conditioned to expect film to be hyper realistic, it didn't used to be this way, and still a lot of movies are not... and almost every movie uses music heavily to enhance or tell emotion, I don't think that automatically excludes or invalidates music that accompanies singing from characters. And inversely, plays and musicals don't all over-explain and over-verbalize every thought or emotion a character has... scenes on stage are not all automatically 3 times as long as audiences in cinemas can handle, just as movies don't all limit dialogue scenes to 1-2 minutes each. It really all depends on the film or play and the director/writer. Some film directors have figured out and mastered how to translate singing and dancing and music into their direction of the camera and the edit, just as some directors and writers have mastered it on stage, and others haven't, or have been inconsistent in their ability to make it work. I won't argue that movie adaptations of stage musicals are difficult to do right... but I don't quite find myself feeling the way you, and to a large extent, Sondheim felt about the near impossibility of the medium to mesh happily with the material. And in fact, as a child of the 80s and 90s, who grew up watching many more movie adaptations of broadway musicals rather than musicals created for the movies, flaws and all those movies are a big part of how/why I fell in love with musicals. Be it Oklahoma or Sound of Music, Little Shop or The Wiz, Jesus Christ Superstar or Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret or Brigadoon, Damn Yankees or Oliver, Hello Dolly or West Side Story, Annie or Rocky Horror... I don't know you or your timeline, but I certainly think Sondheim came up at a time where he would never be able to be satisfied with any film adaptation of a stage musical. And while many of the musicals I listed may not be perfect entirely as movies or as films of the stage shows... I don't think they just all don't work because the medium doesn't work for musicals. I would say it works and doesn't work just about as much as it does on stage. Not as often, but as much. |
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