The MoFo Musicals Countdown - Preliminary Thread

Never seen the '68 special. Loved the crawfish duet as well.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION...

For those who don't like Musicals with an upper-case M but like music, here are a bunch of my favorite movies about musicians and bands, be they Biopics or fictional, in alphabetical order...

Almost Famous (2000)
Amadeus (1984)
Begin Again (2013)
Bird (1988)
The Blues Brothers (1980)
Bound for Glory (1976)
CODA (2021)
The Commitments (1991)
Crazy Heart (2009)
Flora & Son (2023)
Frank (2014)
A Hard Day's Night (1964)
Hearts Beat Loud (2018)
Honeydripper (2007)
Honkytonk Man (1982)
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982)
Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989)
A Night at the Opera (1935)
Once (2007)
The Rose (1979)
Round Midnight (1986)
School of Rock (2003)
Sing Street (2016)
Songwriter (1984)
A Star is Born (2018)
Sweet & Lowdown (1999)
That Thing You Do! (1996)
The Thing Called Love (1993)
This is Spın̈al Tap (1984)
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)
Wild Rose (2018)
Whiplash (2014)
Yesterday (2019)

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
The Age of Aquarius
Aquarius! Aquarius!

*ahem*

Sorry about that. I may be prone to randomly burying out in songs throughout this countdown. Carry on. *

That's a lock for me.

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"Population don't imitate art, population imitate bad television." W.A.
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." M.T.

We simply can't ignore the fact that The Brave Little Toaster needs to make this list.

yes, that needs to be top 50. that’s the stuff of nightmares

Good luck. It's failed to make it onto every countdown it's been eligible so far. I certainly won't be voting for it.

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It’s just a jump to the left….

Half the films mentioned in here I wouldn't consider musicals but I'm not Thursday Next. We'll see.

The group watch thread is now up. Everyone is encouraged to join!

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IMDb
Letterboxd

I WON'T be joining.


But I guess I'll share 'Henry Danger: The Musical', 'Moana', 'Hamilton'..

A few eligibility questions


I'm not going to be able to answer every individual eligibility question, because I haven't seen every film. If you've seen it, you're in a better position than me to know whether or not it's a musical!

I'll always refer back to the definitions in the first post. I don't want to be too prescriptive on what is/isn't allowed as this is a community list and I don't want compiling a list to be onerous. But this is a musicals list, not a 'music' list. Being tagged music somewhere or being about a band is not enough to class a film as a musical unless there is also a significant element of singing in the movie.

Music does not necessarily have to advance the plot, although that is a common feature of musicals, there are plenty of musicals where all the songs are set pieces/ on stage performances (e.g. Cabaret).

Saturday Night Fever is not a musical. Nor are any other films where there is a famous soundtrack but the characters don't actually sing, or any film which has subsequently been turned into a stage musical but is not, itself, a musical (e.g. Billy Elliot, Kinky Boots). Dancing, while an element of many musicals, is not a requirement and not something which makes a movie eligible if there is no singing.

Short films is an interesting question. There are no requirements on length as such, but there should be more than one song. Music videos are not eligible (although that would make an interesting countdown idea for when we've run out of other ideas...)

TLDR there has to be a lot of singing.

Surprised we haven't gone straight in with Mall Cop: The Musical.

I won't join either. I can quickly think of only two musicals I've liked, Dancer in the Dark and Repo! The Genetic Opera. There is also a third, but it's not eligible here; the Once More with Feeling episode of Buffy.

I am not interested in watching musicals, but I'll probably keep my eye on this thread.

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One of my all-time favorite Musicals...and technically there is no "singing" in it as every song is lip-synched. But if anyone thinks it is not a Musical, you do not understand the form.

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Pennies from Heaven
Directed by Herbert Ross
Screenplay by Dennis Potter
Cinematography by Gordon Willis
CAST: Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, Jessica Harper,
Vernel Bagneris, John McMartin, and Christopher Walken
1981, approximately 108 minutes

In 1981, Steve Martin took an artistic risk which might have drastically changed his then-new screen image and Herbert Ross tried to reinvent the Musical for a new, post-modern sensibility. The film was Pennies from Heaven, and it was a box-office flop. A few critics sang its praises, including Pauline Kael, but by and large it was dismissed. I think it is a brilliant movie that was so far ahead of its time, and still lies mostly undiscovered.



British television writer and novelist Dennis Potter ("The Singing Detective") had a long, successful career starting in the 1960s in the UK, and one of his biggest accomplishments was the 1978 BBC mini-series "Pennies from Heaven", starring Bob Hoskins. It tells the story of a sheet-music salesman in 1930s Britain who dreams of living out the lyrics of the songs he peddles. These rich fantasies are contrasted sharply with the darkness of his real life. Potter pared down and adapted his own eight-hour teleplay into a film screenplay, shifting the setting to Depression-era Chicago, which caught the attention of Herbert Ross, who had been on quite a roll in the 1970s, helming such projects as The Goodbye Girl, The Sunshine Boys, The Last of Sheila, The Turning Point, California Suite, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and Play it Again, Sam. Steve Martin, fresh from mega success as a stand-up comic playing to rock-and-roll-size crowds and distilling that wild and crazy persona first to the small screen on "Saturday Night Live" and his own specials, and then into The Jerk (1979), signed on to play the dark and complicated lead. Broadway star Bernadette Peters, who was Martin's co-star in The Jerk and at the time his real-life paramour, and Jessica Harper (Phantom of the Paradise, Suspiria, My Favorite Year) would co-star, with Christopher Walken in film-stealing support.

Pennies from Heaven is the musical as psychotic episode. The numbers, often elaborate set pieces, replicating the styles if not the scenes of some classic cinema Musicals, and of which Busby Berkeley himself would have been proud, are delusions that have absolutely zero to do with reality. The usual conceit of the Musical is that the song interludes further the plot and/or give voice to internal emotions of the characters. But not here. Martin's character Arthur is a bizarre and almost irredeemably amoral man, who creates a pretend morality in the music he loves and envisions. He claims, certainly to himself and by extension the audience, to be a pure romantic dreamer trying to honestly make his way in the world, but his selfish and hurtful actions tell otherwise. It's a rather brilliant concept, and to me works even better as a movie than as a TV project (though make no mistake, the BBC version is also spectacular and a must-see). Many of the film's references are to the otherworlds created by movie magic, worlds that millions flocked to during the Depression in order to delude themselves into a fantasy for part of an afternoon or evening. As Fred Astaire was floating across screens in top hat and tails, much of the audience was wondering if they could find steady work, or keep the tenuous hold on their income and possessions. So in one of Heaven's best sequences when Martin and Peters actually enter Follow the Fleet (1936), the Astaire & Rogers classic, the circle is complete, and Arthur's fantasy blends with the larger societal fantasy.



Another stylistic risk/choice the film makes, carrying over from what was done in the TV version, is to have the actors lip-synch to the existing period tracks, rather than re-record them with these actors. Obviously stage star Peters could have done just about anything they asked, vocally, but this added layer of artifice is intentional, both making some of the song choices seem that much odder and funnier, being mouthed by the protagonists, and also not pretending these fantasies are to be taken in simple genre terms, but almost as if they were being done in front of a mirror in your attic, when nobody was home to catch you.



The look of the film is fantastic, with two basic palettes: the glitz of Hollywood and the dim of Edward Hopper. Several of his paintings are brought to life, including his most iconic, "Nighthawks". Gordon Willis, who was one of the most respected and imitated cinematographers of his era, having lensed The Godfather series for Coppola and Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men before becoming Woody Allen's go-to collaborator on Annie Hall, Manhattan, Interiors, Stardust Memories, Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo and on and on, creates some stunning tableaus and homages.




Steve Martin has had an incredibly successful and quite diverse career in film, and while he eventually worked his way into some darker and sometimes intentionally comedy-free projects a couple decades later, it was probably too early and too bizarre a project for his fanbase to accept at the time, en masse. How might his career trajectory had changed if Pennies from Heaven wound up with multiple, high-profile Oscar nominations like Picture and Director? We'll never know.



This scene, in the next YouTube link, is a perfect example of what the film does. Christopher Walken only has one scene, really. At a particularly low point for the Peters character, she wanders into a bar on the bad side of town. The resident pimp, Walken, approaches her, buys her a drink, and offers her a job, on her back. It is tense and frightening, a cruel fate for this character who did nothing but trust the wrong man. And then, right when things look bleakest, Walken breaks into the Cole Porter tune "Let's Misbehave" by Irving Aaronson and His Commanders...



Dark and ironic eye-candy, this is Herbert Ross' masterpiece in my book, waiting to be rediscovered.



https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=1047762#post1047762

Shame, those are two good musicals and Repo! probably needs all the votes it can get!


I love the Buffy musical episode but it's not a movie, so unfortunately not eligible.

These are the Musicals that placed on previous MoFo Lists, mostly the decade and all-time lists, but also some of the genre lists. Chronologically...

The Blue Angel (1930)
42nd Street (1933)
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)
Footlight Parade (1933)
Top Hat (1935)
A Night at the Opera (1935)
Swing Time (1936)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Pinocchio (1940)
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
Easter Parade (1948)
Cinderella (1950)
Alice in Wonderland (1951)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Oklahoma! (1955)
Lady and the Tramp (1955)
West Side Story (1961)
The Music Man (1962)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
My Fair Lady (1964)
Mary Poppins (1964)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
The Sound of Music (1965)
Oliver! (1968)
Yellow Submarine (1968)
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Cabaret (1972)
Charlotte's Web (1973)
Nashville (1975)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Grease (1978)
The Muppet Movie (1979)
The Blues Brothers (1980)
Amadeus (1984)
This is Spın̈al Tap (1984)
The Little Mermaid (1989)
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Aladdin (1992)
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
The Lion King (1994)
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (1999)
Dancer in the Dark (2000)
Almost Famous (2000)
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
Once (2007)
Frozen (2013)
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
La La Land (2016)


The Musicals that have won the Oscar for Best Picture....

The Broadway Melody (1929)
The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
Going My Way (1944)
An American in Paris (1951)
Gigi (1958)
West Side Story (1961)
My Fair Lady (1964)
The Sound of Music (1965)
Oliver! (1968)
Chicago (2003)
CODA (2021)

I don’t see Charlotte’s Web on there. It was 57 on the animation countdown.