For reasons I really ought to turn into a memoir, I maintain a deeply abiding and psychologically unhealthy passion for music and movies from 1979-80, my 10th year on this mostly blue marble.
The impactful pop-culture encounters that affected me during that time, many of which I likely wouldn’t have been exposed to by today’s child-rearing standards, number in the hundreds. From a narrowed-down list of fascinations that includes the coming-of-age favorite ‘My Bodyguard,’ the drag classic ‘La Cage Aux Folles,’ Cheap Trick’s ‘Dream Police,’ the wry beauty of ‘Being There’ and ‘Manhattan,’ Alan Alda & Meryl Streep in ‘The Seduction of Joe Tynan,’ and ‘The Long Run’ by the goddamn Eagles, there continues be a clear Top 5. In no particular order: the pivotal divorce drama ‘Kramer vs. Kramer,’ Pink Floyd’s alienation epic The Wall,’ Blake Edwards’s sex romp ’10’ with Dudley Moore & Julie Andrews (and more importantly Bo Derek), Robert Redford’s ‘Ordinary People’ (which, yes, shouldn’t have beat ‘Raging Bull for best picture and director, but it’s still an impeccably wrenching watch) … and this rapturously bleak masterpiece, Bob Fosse’s narcissistic fantasia ‘All That Jazz,’ the cinematic experience that drilled down furthest in my soul. Saw it in 70mm at the Cinedome in Orange, definitely didn’t understand it, yet felt it to my core. As a handicapped soundtrack, deprived of Harry Nilsson’s ‘Perfect Day,’ it holds together better if you have the movie’s erotically energized images and emotional scars seared into your memory. Frankly the George Benson and Peter Allen favorites are best heard on their respective live LPs. But that opening sequence set to ‘On Broadway’ … WOW. Still one of the greatest kickoffs ever.
#SoundtrackSunday 009:
‘All That Jazz’
Casablanca, 1979
d: Bob Fosse