Musical

Short meditative documentary about the iconic Eiane Radigue who is now 90 years old.Read More »

Plot: Talkie Era musicals were usually all-star revues or tales of backstage heartache and triumph. Golden Dawn – based on a 184-performance, 1927 operetta co-created by Oscar Hammerstein II – ambitiously breaks free of those musical confines to expand the genre’s cinematic reach. Set in World War I-era Africa, it tells the tale of Dawn, a tribal woman in love with a British soldier but chosen to be the sacrificial bride of a god. Stage sensation Vivienne Segal (perhaps best known for starring opposite Gene Kelly in 1940 Broadway’s Pal Joey) portrays Dawn. The film was originally shot and released entirely in color (another example of the production team’s ambitiousness), but color prints have unfortunately long been lost.Read More »

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A new chief of a “Culture House” is planning to hold a terribly boring New Year concert. A group of young amateur actors are doing their best to liven up the concert.Read More »

Synopsis:
Yelena (Mariya Strelkova), a well-off would-be singer who can’t carry a tune, mistakes shepherd Kostya Potekhin (Leonid Utyosov) for a famous Italian conductor of a jazz orchestra and invites him to an elegant party held in her house. He plays his pan flute, which attracts the herd of animals from his kolkhoz to the dining tables. Yelena’s servant Anyuta (Lyubov Orlova) falls for Kostya. But Kostya is attracted to Yelena, and when she turns him down following the discovery of his real identity, he is very upset. He leaves for the city to try himself as a professional musician and finds himself in many comical situations. Eventually he joins a jazz band consisting of young “jolly fellows”. Read More »

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Scripted by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, It’s Always Fair Weather (1955) revisits On the Town (1949), but with a satirical, revisionist bite. In this send-up of musical and post-war optimism, the dreams of Army buddies Kelly, Dan Dailey, and Michael Kidd all fall apart, and their ten-year reunion is a “frost”; Dailey’s bitter song “Situation-wise” takes aim at the stultifying effect of the quintessentially 1950s life of an advertising executive. Even though the trio finally bonds over a disastrous TV appearance, Fair Weather takes further aim at television’s plastic insincerity and technical poverty. Read More »

Four female cons who have formed a band in prison get a chance to play at a police ball outside the walls. They take the chance to escape. Being on the run from the law they even make it to sell their music and become famous outlaws.

The film stars Katja Riemann, Jasmin Tabatabai, Nicolette Krebitz and Jutta Hoffmann. Both the film and soundtrack album were commercially successful in Germany, but Bandits grossed less than $25,000 in the United States. Much of the soundtrack was written and performed by the actresses themselves. The soundtrack reached number one in the German album charts.Read More »

Amazon reviews:
There are two films here. The first, ‘Conducting Mahler,’ features long segments showing several eminent Mahler conductors — Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Muti, Riccardo Chailly, Bernard Haitink and Simon Rattle — rehearsing the likes of the Royal Concertgebouw, the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, in long, lovely passages from all the Mahler symphonies (plus some of ‘Das Lied von der Erde’) interspersed with interviews (with the noted music writer, Donald Mitchell) with all five of the conductors. Not only is the music-making first class, but the insights that the conductors bring to the process, both in their conducting and in their thoughts about Mahler and his music, are exceedingly stimulating. Read More »

Film star Ted Crosley, fed up with movie life, quits pictures to enroll in Midland College, much to the horror of his manager Sam Lewis and his stooge-friend Willie Gumbatz. Ted wishes to enroll in school under an assumed name but Sam, hoping to nip his school plans in the bud, tips off the press and school. En route, Ted has met and fallen in love with Jean Worthington, daughter of Dean Worthington who is counting on Ted’s enrollment to save his job. Ted, as the hero of many college and football movies, is given a royal welcome when he arrives. In an effort to make the Midland football team a bigger draw and pay off the stadium debt, Ted is put on the varsity team, where, his exploits don’t match those he had on screen, and he is actually a liability. He soon incurs the enmity of Biff Gordon, the school’s football hero and Ted’s rival for Jean.Read More »

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Featuring a legendary ensemble from the classic age of Egyptian Cinema, starring Naguib El-Rihani, who’s probably had the most influence on theatre and comedy in the Middle East even close to a century from his death, with only eight films in production before an untimely death during filming Ghazl al-banat. The beautiful Jewish singer, Layla Murad, Youssef Wahby, and the musical prodigy of Mohamed Abdel-Wahab, the most celebrated composer of the time. A heartwarming comedy from a bygone era.Read More »