Crazy Horse

CRAZY HORSE                       B                   

USA  France  (134 mi)  2011  d:  Frederick Wiseman

Wiseman seems to have altered his documentary style somewhat, discarding the long, overall view for something smaller and relatively compact, dispensing with the long takes, offering several quick cuts even within 10 seconds, which is something we would never have seen earlier in his career.  After all the dreary and social unpleasantness Wiseman and his camera crew have unearthed for decades, revealing social realism through unedited cinema, perhaps now in his early 80’s, having allegedly shot more than 7 million feet of film in his career, it’s about time he retreats into the claustrophobic confines of the fairer sex.  One could think of worse projects than being stuck for perhaps months at a time behind the scenes of the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris, known for offering the most sophisticated female nude review anywhere in the world.  Anyone who’s sat through BALLET (1995) or LA DANSE-LE BALLET DE L’OPERA DE PARIS (2009), using a style that shuns narration, emphasizing subject over individuality, knows Wiseman creates a rather hypnotic approach at studying the endless rehearsals and constant behind-the scenes-persuasion to present the cultural refinement and artistic beauty of ballet onstage, where his patience pays off in the end, as one can only marvel at the finished product, where dance sequences (including rehearsals) will be shown in their entirety, often ravishingly beautiful.  This is much different, chopped up into pieces like more mainstream documentaries, lacking much of the personal intimacy of his best work.  Nonetheless, even without his signature shot, as not one dance number is seen from start to finish, Wiseman does capture the flavor of the nightclub, founded in 1951 by Alain Bernardin, a sort of French Hugh Hefner of the erotic fantasy review business, as he originated the stylish, high art presentation, but committed suicide in 1994 at the age of 78, using a shotgun in his backstage office (not revealed in the film, as it’s something they apparently don’t like to talk about).  In this business, one doesn’t grow old gracefully.   

It’s fair to say that this erotic review features first and foremost the woman’s derrière, fixating on it as if the many forms it takes is the most resplendent example of the feminine form, the most visually enticing and sexually alluring, where the pronounced curve is nothing less than an art form and God’s gift to mankind.  No busty women here, as this is nothing like a stripper joint, instead each woman is carefully chosen for her athletic ability to move gracefully onstage and for having what one calls the money shot, the perfect posterior.  While the women are occasionally completely naked onstage, more often they wear G-strings or scant costumes where the tits and ass remain fully exposed, where one carefully choreographed dance called “Teasing” is completely dedicated to the wonders of the bare derrière.  But Wiseman’s discreet edits never allow it to become too sexy, as it would most likely be if seen in the club itself, where every table is seen with a champagne bottle placed in a bucket of ice along with two glasses.  While the glitz and glamor of the kaleidoscopic live acts are a colorful onstage spectacle, where we’re able to see short sequences, the more intriguing shots are the girls in rehearsal, still barely clothed, but without any costumes, wigs, and makeup, where they’re more relaxed and each girl has an identifiable charm and personality.  Without any narration, we never learn the identities of any of the dancers, as none are interviewed, and all perform several ensemble pieces where there’s uniformity in costume, where no individual star gets their name up on the marquee.  Even backstage where women are seen doing last minute costume or make up changes, few individuals stand out, so the way it's presented, it's all about product.  Wiseman adds just a touch of Paris, adding a few scenic outdoor shots of boats motoring down the Seine River or a few outdoor street café’s.

Behind the scenes at management meetings, however, it’s a continual jostling match, where despite the obvious talent of all involved, it’s a dysfunctional family relationship, where it’s a wonder anything ever makes it successfully to the stage.  The artistic director Philippe Decouffé, who choreographed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, seen as a Bob Fosse style relentless perfectionist and workaholic, pleads at length for time to break in and prepare new material, but the club operations manager, Andrée Deissenberg, insists there is no other option as the shareholders refuse to allow any break in the current onstage productions.  This forces Decouffé and the dancers to invent, rehearse, and stage all new material during existing working hours, as the show must go on.  The sad truth is management simply doesn’t care, where “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is their working business model.  So long as there are beautiful girls dancing naked onstage, they’re giving the public what they want.  What do they care if the costumes are worn, if a dancer misses a step, or if the lights are off cue?  Ironically, Decouffé and Deissenberg have a history, as both worked together at the Cirque du Soleil before coming to the Crazy Horse.  It’s a battle of egos, as the costume designer can’t keep up with the new numbers, as Decouffé’s imagination simply runs away with him, where he’s continually adding new elements into existing works to keep the show fresh and alive.  The club does give Decouffé something of an alter ego in the form of Ali Mahdavi, a man he obviously loathes, an artistic consultant brought in to modernize the look of the routines, a guy who hogs the spotlight in front of Decouffé and the cameras every chance he gets, namedropping Fellini and Fassbinder to the international press as he exaggeratingly explains that working for the Crazy Horse is the highest pinnacle in art.  There is no mention of the shelf life in the career of a nude dancer, as none appear to be out of their 20’s, and at the tryouts, where interestingly a male transsexual auditions, plenty of even younger girls fit the bill looking to showcase their physiques for the future. 

All That Jazz

ALL THAT JAZZ            A                

USA  (123 mi)  1979  d:  Bob Fosse

What’s the matter? Don’t you like musical comedy?
—Joe Gideon (Bob Fosse) appealing to God

Talk about a movie with a death wish, this is a movie that explains what a heart attack feels like, where you’d think with this level of intimate autobiographical detail about death that the director would have dropped dead on the set somewhere, but he survived another eight years.  While the critical consensus claims this autobiographical Bob Fosse piece is a take-off on Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), not really, as it doesn’t have the plotless, stream-of-conscience, avant-garde modernism that implies being at a creative stand-still and existential impasse.  Instead, Fosse continually draws inspiration throughout the entire film, even including his infamous death sequence which he turns into an extended, deliciously irreverent, musical song and dance number.  One must give due consideration to Fellini’s JULIET OF THE SPIRITS (1965), which is flush with surreal, extravagantly idealized hallucinogenic set pieces filled with dancing showgirls.  Fosse’s continuous stream of womanizing rivals that of the surrealistic Fellini drama as seen from his wife Giuletta Masina’s jealous and increasingly exaggerated point of view, where every woman he goes out with becomes a voluptuous beauty that is so ravagingly attractive that no mere mortal could resist.  Both films feature artists that love living in the surreal world, where the world of the living is where all the problems occur, so they both have a great deal of difficulty determining where the dream ends and reality begins.  Fosse (Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon) has a repeating shower sequence set to the music of Vivaldi every morning with eyedrops along with a handful of Dexedrine to get him started each day. Rarely is he ever seen without a cigarette dangling from his mouth.  The constant use of pills, booze, and cigarettes create a pervasive theme of death that haunts the entire film, even including an everpresent angel of death, Jessica Lange (in only her second film after the 1976 remake of KING KONG), foreseeing the New York City AIDS scare of the early 1980’s, where death ravaged the theater district, leaving a devastating impact. 

This is a film where the director continually takes chances and pushes the boundaries, using experimental devices to express the visible disorientation of the Fosse character, who has a continual back and forth, satirically humorous dialogue with a mysterious angel hovering at his side, who quickly loses his concentration from one idea to the next, or one character to the next, changing time spans, continually intermixing thoughts in his head as he’s developing and reworking pieces in his head, often with abrupt visual cuts and simply brilliant editing, where in the reading of the dialogue from a new show the sound actually disappears altogether for an extended duration, as Gideon literally spaces out on the real world.  However nothing is more shocking than a brilliant hospital sequence where he films his own death, actually structured upon an interwoven comedy routine by Frankie Man on Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s 5 final stages of death, an extremely imaginative, wickedly clever, musical montage from a near death state of hallucination that turns pleasantly familiar song lyrics into a cruel and sick joke on himself.  The aggressively sarcastic and irreverent tone may not be for everyone, but it’s clear the style is highly inventive, which when added to the appeal of his jazzy, meticulously choreographed dance numbers make this one of the more uniquely original films ever made.  Fosse got his start as a dancer and quickly earned a reputation as a supremely gifted choreographer for which he won no less than eight Tony Awards, but he surprised everyone when for CABARET (1972), a song and dance musical, Fosse actually won the Academy Award for Best Director over Francis Ford Coppolla in THE GODFATHER (1972), currently listed as the #2 (Top 250 #2) greatest film on the IMDb all-time list.   Fosse revived the interest in song and dance movies, as these are arguably the two best musicals made in the past twenty-five years, perhaps since Judy Garland in A Star Is Born (1954)

What’s unusual about the success of this film is that the songs themselves, unlike Fosse’s CABARET (1972), are not showstoppers.  Instead it’s the staged, theatrical inventiveness of the incomparable dancing routines that take one’s breath away.  The exception is the highly appealing opening number set to the music of George Benson’s “On Broadway” All that Jazz ' Opening " On Broadway " YouTube (8:27), which really sets a likeable tone for the film, as the audience quickly identifies with a thriving energy, as Fosse punctuates the seemingly impossible physical and artistic demands of life in the theater, creating a mesmerizing backstage portrait that includes his ex-wife, Leland Palmer as Audrey (based on Fosse’s third wife, Broadway star Gwen Verdon), his adorable daughter Michelle (Erzsebet Foldi) and current girlfriend Kate (Ann Reinking, Fosse’s live-in partner), where all three women are featured in exceptional dance sequences.  One of the best and easily the happiest number in the movie is “Everything Old Is New Again,” All That Jazz—"Everything Old Is New Again" YouTube (3:28), lovingly performed for Gideon by Michelle and Kate, an affectionate portrait contrasting the young and old that is wildly free and uninhibited, while the centerpiece of the film and perhaps the most extraordinary example of modern dance on celluloid takes this whimsical and bouncy musical ditty, All That Jazz " Take Off With Us " YouTube (1:14), and turns it into this completely restructured, highly evolved, erotic ballet, 'Take Off With Us' from 'All That Jazz' (Fosse, 1979) on Vimeo (7:46), a modern era dance masterpiece that is incredibly shot as a rehearsal once-through.  Where this all leads is to an inevitable heart attack, where confined to a bed Gideon starts imagining song and dance sequences that have a chilling element of personal truth for him, where a similar idea resurfaces again as a fantasy Raymond Chandler escapist novel in both a British TV mini-series (1986) and Keith Gordon’s remake of THE SINGING DETECTIVE (2003), where ironically Gordon plays a young Joe Gideon in Fosse’s film.  The magical finale opens with four elaborately connecting showbiz production numbers, All That Jazz (1979) "Hospital Hallucination, Take 1" scene HD  YouTube (10:06), leading into the sickest rendition of the Everly Brothers “Bye Bye Love” Everly Brothers - Bye Bye Love [Very Good quality]. YouTube (1:29) ever conceived, emcee’d by the incomparable Ben Vereen, seen here All That Jazz - Bye Bye Life (HD) YouTube (9:48) as a phantasmagoric, musical tribute to death and dying. 

Funny Girl

FUNNY GIRL                                                 B+                  

USA  (155 mi)  1968  ‘Scope  d:  William Wyler

I'm the greatest star there is by far, but no one knows it.                 

—Fanny Brice (Barbra Streisand)

It has been commonly said that the musical 'Funny Girl' was a comfort to people because it carried the message that you do not need to be pretty to succeed. That is nonsense; the 'message' of Barbra Streisand in 'Funny Girl' is that talent is beauty.          

—Pauline Kael

One of the few films that opens with a six minute orchestral interlude and plays with an intermission, where the film up to that point is marvelous, falling flat afterwards in a story that resembles Judy Garland’s career ascent and James Mason’s descent in A STAR IS BORN (1954).  Like that film, an old veteran director, William Wyler (in his only musical), a guy who directed 35 Academy Award winning performances, was brought in to replace Sidney Lumet who had artistic differences, as George Cukor was Garland’s choice, as he was known at the time as an actress’s director.  Cukor was much more successful, but what each film has in common is the explosive performances of the stars, as in this film Barbra Streisand, who also appeared in the Broadway role in 1964, put her name up in lights and proved beyond a doubt that everyone else in the production was secondary, as she was a full blown star, while Garland rose to heights never before reached since THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), and pulls off perhaps the greatest performance ever in a musical production.  Streisand’s career took a similar descent afterwards, but not due to any lack of talent or a deterioration of her performances, but due to her “diva” temperament where her public persona took a nosedive, known for telling everyone exactly what she wanted them to do, where she insisted that things be so perfect all the time until no one wanted to work with her anymore, developing a reputation as a control freak, this despite winning two Academy Awards, one for Best Actress in this film, another for composing the Best Original Song, “Evergreen” from the 1976 remake of A STAR IS BORN, also eight Grammy awards, four Emmy awards, a special Tony award, an American Film Institute award and a Peabody Award, while also recording over thirty Top Ten best selling albums with nearly a fifty year span in between, and is the only artist to release number one albums in each of five consecutive decades.  But due to her partisan activism in the Democratic Party, Streisand made President Nixon’s infamous Enemies List in 1971, just 3 years after the release of this film.  

The story revolves around Fanny Brice (Streisand), a turn of the century vaudeville star whose talent could easily have made her one of the first Talkies’ female stars, but her looks didn’t conform to the Hollywood standards of beauty, which is a theme that opens this film, as Brice has been raised with realistically lowered expectations of her own self image and has profound issues over her lack of what she feels are society’s standards of beauty, claiming “I'm a bagel on a plate full of onion rolls!”  Even in her initial performance as a Ziegfeld Follies girl, her self-deprecating sarcasm, altering the script (without permission), appearing pregnant on a stage filled with Busby Berkeley style beauties, won the endearing affection of the audience, and five curtain calls.   Her never take no for an answer and nothing-can-stop-me determination is what won the hearts of theater companies, where she’s seen singing “I’m the Greatest Star” to an empty theater which immediately wins her a job performing an ensemble singing act on rolling skates, a hilarious skit that veers out of control since she doesn’t know how to skate, an outlandish performance that Bette Midler would immediately replicate on stage with mermaids and wheelchairs.  Her brash wit and non-conformist style are a revelation in a business that is used to tried and true routines.  But what really bowls them over is her voice, as she’s sensational, actually acting out the songs she’s singing, adding humorous asides as if she’s speaking to an invisible character in the song.  In my lifetime, only Judy Garland and her daughter Liza Minnelli, think Bob Fosse’s CABARET (1972) and Martin Scorsese’s NEW YORK, NEW YORK (1977), come close to providing the same personal magnetism and electrifying voice on stage. 

Fanny’s onstage performance earns her a backstage admirer, Omar Sharif (an Egyptian born actor who was vilified in both the Arabic and American press for sharing his role with a Jew, including a screen kiss, shot during the deflating impact of the 1967 Six Day War) as gambler and high roller Nick Arnstein, a gorgeously handsome guy in a perfectly pressed suit who lives each day as if it was his last, where his charming and impeccable style is impossible for Fanny to resist.  Nonetheless, as his business calls him to places around the world, nothing serious develops except an initial infatuation, where she sings “People” to Nick with tears of joy in the alley behind her mother’s house on Henry Street in the Jewish slums of New York’s Lower East Side.  Meanwhile, she becomes a blossoming star whose magnificent voice and unprecedented comic timing make whatever production she appears in a smash hit.  But when they meet again, set in a luminous brightly colored red dining room, which includes a bed, Fanny is swept off her feet to the duet “You Are Woman, I Am Man,” which leads to their marriage and firstborn in a montage that stretches no more than 30 seconds.  And when people question Nick’s character, she blows the lid off their objections by belting out “Don’t Rain On My Parade.”  But as her career ascends, Nick has money troubles and he’s too proud to live off her accumulated wealth, ending in a disastrous embezzlement charge where he’d rather plead guilty than create negative publicity that might derail her career.  Streisand is magnificent in this film, as is much of the restored art direction where the eye-popping colors jump off the screen.  Her modernized, bringing the curtain down rendition of “My Man” My man - Barbra Streisand - YouTube (2:38), the only song in the production to be shot on film live, is reminiscent of Garland’s off the charts power and stage showmanship, star qualities that we haven’t seen in nearly half a century since the release of this film.