items tagged with musicals

LOVE & OTHER DRUGS

In my 2009 review of the director’s turgid World War II drama Defiance, I opened by asking, “Am I the only person who wishes that Edward Zwick would go back to making sharp, bitchy comedies like his 1986 Rob Lowe-Demi Moore romance About Last Night ... ?” Well, less than two years later, Zwick has returned to those romantic-comedy roots with Love & Other Drugs. Because, apparently, I needed another reminder to be careful what I wish for.

FAME

Not long into Kevin Tancharoen's remake of Fame, there's a brief sequence that completely underscores the difficulty - if not impossibility - of successfully updating Alan Parker's R-rated musical drama from 1980 for young audiences in 2009.

OBSERVE & REPORT

It's been a couple of days, and I'm still not sure what to make of writer/director Jody Hill's unexpectedly disturbing broad comedy Observe & Report, in which bipolar security guard Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) attempts to apprehend a shopping-mall flasher and win over the skank of his dreams (Anna Faris).

CADILLAC RECORDS

At roughly 105 minutes, writer/director Darnell Martin's Cadillac Records is so jam-packed with character, story, incident, and musical interludes that it sometimes feels as though six or seven movies are being projected on the screen simultaneously. This is not meant as an insult. Films that overreach oftentimes give audiences too much of a fine thing, yet Cadillac Records is just enough of a really fine thing - a soulful, impassioned, beautifully enacted drama that delivers all the pleasures of the musical-bio-pic genre without the obviousness and sanctimony.

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3: SENIOR YEAR

Sure, its storyline is simplistic and its romantic ballads are pretty dull (and compose half of the film's soundtrack), but in nearly every other way High School Musical 3: Senior Year is fantastic - a supremely spirited, candy-colored pop extravaganza that sends you out of the cineplex on an exultant high.