The Fractured Mirror entry: Something to Sing About (1937)
almost 2 years ago
– Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 09:59:11 AM
Something to Sing About (1937)
For a legendary song and dance man who won an Academy Award hoofing up a storm as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, James Cagney made shockingly few musicals. Perhaps he thought moviegoers couldn’t handle the cognitive dissonance of him terrorizing humanity with a Tommy Gun in half of his pictures and singing sweetly to beautiful women in the other half.
The vaudevillian turned turned gangster icon returned to his beloved musicals in 1937’s Something to Sing About playing Thadeus McGillicuddy, AKA Terry Rooney, a successful East Coast band leader and radio star who gets the big call up to Hollywood and makes his first major motion picture vehicle.
The experience doesn’t agree with the moonlighting musician so he takes wife Rita Wyatt (Evelyn Daw) on a cruise to the South Seas to get away from it all. When he comes back he’s astonished to discover that his movie debut is a smash hit and he’s instant matinee idol. Success comes with a very stupid price, however. The newly minted movie star must keep his marriage a secret and feign interest in his onscreen paramour to prevent losing an audience of breathless, love-struck bobbysoxers romantically obsessed a guy who looks and acts like James Cagney.
Something to Sing About has an extraordinary gift in a singing, dancing Cagney. The production number that opens the film is dynamite. Cagney is a combustible and magnetic performer, a stampeding staccato musical force. Unfortunately Something to Sing About is just barely a musical, with only a handful of songs and even fewer dances.
Any moment Cagney is offscreen or not singing or dancing feels like a wasted opportunity so while this may be worth seeing just for the White Heat star in musical mode it’s a particularly silly trifle that wastes one of our greatest entertainers in a role that allows him to use all of his gifts.
The Fractured Mirror entry: I'll Do Anything (1994)
almost 2 years ago
– Sun, Jan 29, 2023 at 09:23:47 AM
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The Fractured Mirror entry: Cannes Man (1997)
almost 2 years ago
– Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 12:51:34 PM
Cannes Man (1997)
The 1997 misfire Cannes Man clumsily combines The Producers and Pygmalion with The Emperor’s New Clothes. Hans Christian Anderson’s classic fable about a buck naked royal and the kingdom that indulges his narcissistic delusions is a perennial favorite of makers of movie world comedies because it speaks so incisively to Hollywood’s cult of the new. In Cannes Man the nude ruler is Frank "Rhino" Rhinoslavsky (Francesco Quinn), a dim-witted Los Angeles cab-driver who flies to Cannes during the festival to deliver something to Troma films and ends up the protege of lovably sleazy producer Sy Lerner (Seymour Cassel, in a role that suggests his comeback turn in In the Soup enough to suffer terribly by comparison).
Sy bets a contemporary that he can pick a random person off the street and make them the toast of Cannes based on nothing but hype. The old pro chooses the star-struck cabbie as the subject for his experiment and reinvents him as Frank Rhino, a poet turned screenwriter whose screenplay Cannes Man quickly becomes the talk of the festival despite it not existing as anything other than a cynical ruse.
Cannes Man’s primary draw is an insanely overloaded roster of guest stars playing themselves, a Hollywood who’s who’s that includes everyone from Robert Evans to Menahem Golan to Bryan Singer and Harvey Weinstein. A galaxy of big names were willing to lend the production their names and a very small amount of their time without contributing a single laugh. The comedy team of Johnny Depp and Jim Jarmusch are particularly painful in self-deprecating extended cameos as New Age buffoons tempted by Cannes Man’s scalding heat.
This feels badly made up on the spot by indulgent filmmakers and money people whose skill set does not include ad-libbing or improvisational comedy. Cannes Man is a wasted, overly familiar trip.
The Fractured Mirror entry: White Hunter Black Heart (1990)
almost 2 years ago
– Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 09:25:52 AM
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The Fractured Mirror entry: The Seven Psychopaths
almost 2 years ago
– Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 02:25:49 PM
The Seven Psychopaths (2012) FM
A frustrated screenwriter goes to seriously dark places in search of inspiration in the wickedly funny 2012 dark comedy The Seven Psychopaths. Oscar-winning playwright turned filmmaker Martin McDonagh’s meta meditation on crime movies is a funhouse mirror of a show business satire about a movie within a movie also called The Seven Psychopaths that’s also largely the movie itself.
An ideally typecast Colin Farrell stars as Marty Faranan, an alcoholic screenwriter with a title—The Seven Psychopaths—for his next script but nothing else. The struggling scribe’s fuck up friend Billy Bickle (Sam Rockwell) wants to help his buddy by finding him genuine psychopaths to talk to for research but ends up getting him mixed up in a macho underworld of dog kidnappers, lowlifes and a vicious mobster played by Woody Harrelson who will murder anyone who gets in the way of him being reunited with his beloved pooch.
Marty is a storyteller by trade and The Seven Psychopaths is a story about stories and storytelling as much as it is a movie about movie-making. Few filmmakers take as much rapturous delight in the possibilities of language as McDonagh. The joy McDonagh takes in pulpy profanity is infectious.
The Seven Psychopaths is the work of a man in love with words and hopelessly enamored with his cast’s extraordinary gifts. It’s a film of dazzling surfaces and underlying depth and sadness thanks to Christopher Walken’s heartbreaking performance as a criminal with a unique but intense interpretation of Christianity at the end of a long and strange life making peace with both his own mortality and his cancer-stricken wife’s impending demise.
McDonough’s exquisitely wordy celebration of colorful criminality is pure pulp pleasure, a very good movie about very bad people.
