If you peek at my story from time to time, you might have noticed we had a family screening of this the other night; I shared clips from the breathtakingly beautiful ballet sequence, still so stunningly staged and shot 70-some years later. (I’ll always be convinced the finale is why it won the top Oscar over ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and ‘A Place in the Sun.’)
This flick is still a wicked knockout a decade later, a near-epic with Scorsese-level aspirations that quite often measures up to the master’s flashiest sagas, ‘GoodFellas’ and ‘Casino.’ The reason why, however, ultimately has less to do with director David O. Russell’s consummate skills, even if this was his strongest work since the startlingly funny war drama ‘Three Kings’ in ’99, concluding a superb three-picture run of vivid realism begun by ‘The Fighter’ in 2010 and extended with ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ two years later.
There’s a really great film to be made about the influential rise and payola-plagued downfall of seminal rock ’n’ roll disc jockey Alan Freed. This well-intentioned yet utterly incoherent mess isn’t that flick any more than the ’99 TV movie that miscast Judd Nelson as the ingenious impresario.
Half a century later this is still the oldies set par excellence, a prescient feat all the more astonishing given this curated compilation was merely a decade removed from the pre-Beatles limbo it resurrects.
This was the first Fellini film I ever saw as a young impressionable teen curious about international cinema — and the promise of sex. What I watched that day was undoubtedly a cropped-and-chopped print muddled by woefully incomplete subtitles, broadcast on proto-cable, probably ON TV.
This one is too serendipitous to keep from fulfilling dual purposes. Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical ‘Almost Famous’ is not only his finest film and one of the very best of its era (or in rock-flick history), it also yielded one of the mightiest compendiums of compiled classics this side of ‘Forrest Gump.’
The way I alphabetically see it, this toppermost Beatles parody falls not under R for the Rutles but A for ‘All You Need Is Cash,’ as that’s the actual title of the mockumentary that premiered on NBC and then BBC2 five days apart in March ’78. Just as easily could file under B, however — for bloody brilliant.
Thought you’d encountered the worst movie musical ever when Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees starred as ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ in ’78? You ain’t seen nothin’, Billy Shears — a pronouncement applicable to this misbegotten mishmash in myriad ways, considering it was pulled from theaters after two weeks in late ’76, rarely to be witnessed since.
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.
I grew up between the two golden ages of Disney animation, when less-loved creations like ‘The Rescuers’ (’77) and ‘The Fox and the Hound’ (’81) portended a protracted slump from which the studio wouldn’t emerge until ‘The Little Mermaid’ leapt ashore at the end of ’89.
