(Image Property of Disney)
Sports talk radio is hardly a one-trick pony. Most of your sports broadcast personalities have quite varied interests, everything from movies to weaving to bagpipe restoration. After all, sports can actually lose their luster after a while if all you do for weeks at a time is watch sports for work.
I know the casual sports fan probably doesn’t believe me when I say that, but try spending four years in sports journalism where you feel like all you do is watch sports. It turns a leisurely activity into a chore.
So when I was still with 960 The Ref, Athens sports talk radio, we would often find ourselves talking about things other than sports. The most frequent subject of distraction was, of course, movies.
One particular day we ended up spending about 20 minutes previewing the upcoming Academy Awards just because February is one of the deadest months for sports ever once the Super Bowl ends. Thus, we talked about the Oscars.
This was just a couple years ago, and we all remember how that ceremony ended up, when Bonnie and Clyde botched the results. In the end, Moonlight won Best Picture, beating out LaLaLand which had the most “Georgia sports moment” to occur to a movie.
Well I was convinced that LaLaLand was going to win Best Picture. I just knew it was, for multiple reasons. First, that was in the middle of a stretch where movies like The Artist and Argo were winning Best Picture awards. While one is about an out-of-date actor trying to stay relevant, and the other doesn’t feature Ben Affleck, they do have one key thing in common.
These movies made Hollywood, and the art of making movies, look extra important.
Just look at them. Aren’t they delightful? (Image Courtesy of Lionsgate Publicity)
Throw in recent Best Picture winners like Birdman and Spotlight and I just knew that the movie that made journalists or actors or anyone in the world of working Hollywood look important was going to win.
Most importantly, though, I thought LaLaLand was delightful.
I even went so far as to say that on air. I said that LaLaLand was delightful. On a sports talk radio show. You can hear Chris Brame reference my comment at the 15:30 mark in this clip.
For the next several months, I would continue to catch flack from Brame for that remark, and perhaps deservedly so. But I stand by it.
Mostly because I’m right. LaLaLand is a delightful movie, it is technically excellent, and the performances from both Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are superbly memorable. After all, Stone did win Best Actress in a Leading Role for her part in this film, so clearly she did something right.
Now I haven’t seen Moonlight, so I can’t definitively say which movie should have won, but I can say that LaLaLand was and is…well…delightful.
That being said, they almost took the easy way out. You see, musicals have an easy button when it comes to reaching the audience on an emotional level. And while every movie has designs on using music to its advantage, just look at the phenomenal A Quiet Place that came out this past spring, musicals can just throw music at us without having to hide it for maximum effect.
When a scared coed walks into an abandoned campground in a low-budget 80s horror film, the dissonant sounds of whining violins and slow, steady brass hums serve to (sometimes) subtly build the tension and horror to an ultimate moment. In a musical, someone can just spend three minutes on an expertly choreographed dance number explaining how frightened they are.
That’s not to say that making a musical is easy. Far from it. The man hours and the moving parts and the choreography and the stress of hoping that you didn’t just hire Pierce Brosnan to sing…these are all things that can tank a musical if you aren’t prepared for them.
My wife and I went to see Mary Poppins Returns last week, and I will confess that it is, similarly, a delightful musical. As for specific criticisms, I have a few. The BMX stunt show in the middle was oddly placed and looked like something out of a bad 90s version of Mary Poppins, and it did annoy me to an nth degree that each of the songs, just about, was a callback to the original Mary Poppins.
There’s a new song with a mass of indecipherable gobbledygook. Can’t imagine what that one is supposed to remind us of. There’s a new song that makes the work of a dirty, ill-respected member of English society look like fun.
Look at that smug face and her little smirk. She’s practically daring me to remember anyone else as Mary Poppins. (Image property of Disney)
The problem is that none of these analogues are quite as good as the original. Mind you, they’re all mostly good to pretty great songs, but asking them to compare to the historic likes of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” or “Chim Chimney” or the one about sugar and medicine is just not fair.
Similarly, Emily Blunt’s performance in the titular returning role is quite splendid. It’s different than the original, of course, and that’s probably for the best, but a critical eye will occasionally be caught distracted by the fact that this Mary Poppins doesn’t quite feel familiar. None of that is to diminish the praise she deserves, it’s just to point out the unfortunate task she had of following up one of the most cherished film roles in history.
Now, I mostly hated Meryl Streep’s song and her role in the movie. It was just annoying. But that was probably the one part that was truly obnoxious to me.
That being said, how odd is it that Meryl Streep is the weak point in any movie? I mean, this is uncharted territory here, isn’t it?
There is one new song that really caught me off guard, and that’s the somewhat bawdry “A Cover is Not the Book.” Again, I’m not complaining about it since I did really enjoy the song, but I was immensely surprised at the suggestive nature of the song.
Mr. Miranda looks more at home in bright purple than Mary Poppins does, that’s for sure. (Image property of Disney)
Innuendo-laden cabaret is hardly what one expects from a proper lady such as Mary Poppins, but the song did give Blunt several great moments to highlight her excellent voice. When she drops down into a husky tenor that is so categorically necessary for a song like this one, it sounds the right kind of raw.
And that’s really the key to Mary Poppins Returns, as it is with any musical. It has to be “the right kind of…” something. See, Mary Poppins Returns is an exceptionally silly movie. It is silly and predictable. However, it is the right kind of silly and predictable. Most of the time.
Like I said earlier, I found the impromptu BMX show during “Kick a Little Light Fantastic” to be a strange choice, but most of the silliness was perfect for this movie. And the predictability was exactly what you wanted to see. You obviously know that the good guys are going to win in a movie like this. You know there will be some ridiculous plot point to turn things around at the last moment.
What matters in those cases is story economy. Can the writers put enough breadcrumbs along the way for us to see the ending, or at least for the ending to make sense once we get there?
I don’t say this to clap myself on the back, but at one point very early in the movie I leaned over and told my wife exactly how it was going to end. And I was right.
What’s more, I’m glad I was right. Musicals like Mary Poppins Returns have to tread so carefully on that line between bad silly and fun silly. Between boring predictable and satisfying predictable.
And that’s largely what makes a movie like this one, or like LaLaLand, so risky. If you teeter too far over to one side or the other, you have wasted millions of dollars. If you hit it just right, though, then you’ve created a piece of art that will connect with people through the visual story as well as the orchestrated story. And when you do that with a musical, that generally means you’ve written some songs that will, in one way or another, become part of the cultural lexicon for years to come.
As much as it annoys me to do so, think about the two big songs from Frozen, “Do You Wanna Build a Snowman?” and “Let It Go.” Those songs have escaped the boundaries of the movie and just exist out in the world now. They’re everywhere!
I doubt that any of the songs from Mary Poppins Returns will really have the same type of impact, but they could prove me wrong yet.
When it comes to the ever-delightful LaLaLand, they bucked the trend by being much more unpredictable. Mind you, the first 95% of the movie follows exactly the path you would expect. There’s even a musical number at the end showing you the ending we thought we would see, but that’s not reality.
Instead of being the right kind of predictable, it was the right kind of challenging. I would argue that’s rare for what was an otherwise light-hearted and flighty musical with moments of severity and struggle, but it all fit together well. The story worked, the actors worked, and people were singing “City of Stars” all spring after this movie came out.
Personally, I prefer the song Stone sang in her audition, but that’s whatever.
But even dramatic musicals are more powerful because of their chosen medium. Consider the stories behind both The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. While both are derived from books, the musicals have largely overshadowed those mediums.
Wait. So you don’t get your hair back in death? That’s upsetting. (Image property of Universal Pictures)
How many of you were able to sit through “Les Mis” without at least considering a few tears? The redemptive, yet ultimately heart-breaking story of Jean Valjean is immensely human. The way he rises from squalor to become a wealthy man, but also a good man, provides an icon for what humanity can strive to be. And then he dies. (Spoiler)
And in “Phantom,” the horror of a disfigured auteur who kidnaps a beautiful ingenue and holds her prisoner is amplified by the powerful score. Having exhausted all of my French words, I will add that the music from the Phantom’s perspective actually forces you to empathize with the character a little and understand his plight.
Film theory is full of stories on how the dichotomy between the “final girl” and the monster in horror movies makes us empathize with the monster. I see their point, but I don’t agree. Even if it is true, no horror film makes that empathy work like The Phantom of the Opera does.
Musicals are a great risk because success is harder to come by, I think, than with a simpler spoken narrative. That is if we measure success by how well the story connects with the audience, and that really should be the measure of success for any piece of visual, written, or auditory art. Musicals can slip in any one of a thousand places and lose the audience much more easily than a regular narrative can. However, when they get it right, musicals have a much higher ceiling for success than the average narrative.
Now I can’t sing. I love to sing, but I’m not a very gifted musician. I love to act, though, and I wish I’d been able to do something in musical theatre. Unfortunately, the lead actors also kinda have to be the lead singers, and…well…just look at Pierce Brosnan again. Having a legitimate singing voice is necessary.
But after seeing Mary Poppins Returns with my wife last week, I’ve been singing musical show tunes almost non-stop. In the car, I’ve been running the soundtracks to the Emmy Rossum and Gerard Butler (yeah, I know) Phantom of the Opera, followed by the incredible Psych: The Musical episode. With my 15-month old son last night, I just kept singing Disney songs and even a few from the original Mary Poppins as well as I can remember them.
Simply put, I’ve been wanting to recapture that feeling of seeing a great musical. I’ve been wanting to relive the beauty, the wonder, and yes, even the delight.