The story of two singers/prostitutes that dream of a big house, 160kg former opera diva/wife of an ex-minister of Agriculture that was kidnapped, a police captain with a tapeworm, a rock band that want to become famous, an ex-police captain with a chiken egg under his armpit and many others intresting persons…Read More »
Parisian tailor Maurice Courtelin (Maurice Chevalier) goes to the chateau of the Duke d’Artelines (C. Aubrey Smith) to collect a debt owed by a spendthrift nephew, the Viscount Gilbert de Varèze (Charlie Ruggles), Maurice passes as a Count and interacts with other members of the household, including the nervous bookworm the Count de Savignac (Charles Butterworth) and the near-nymphomaniac Countess Valentine (Myrna Loy). But he falls madly in love with Princess Jeanette (Jeanette MacDonald) and slowly wins her to his side. Now, how does Maurice explain to her that he’s nothing but a tailor?Read More »
AMG: Shanghai Blues combines romantic comedy, slapstick, music, and several classic coincidences (a favorite ploy of director and writer Tsui Hark to tell the story of a man (Kenny Bee) and a female dancer (Sylvia Chang) who meet under a Shanghai bridge in 1937 as they seek shelter from the Japanese bombing of the city. They are immediately drawn to each other and make a pact to meet under the bridge again when the war has ended. But their plans are thwarted and ten years later, the man gets an apartment in Shanghai (where he works as a musician, songwriter, and clown) unaware that the dancer — for whom he has been searching — is his downstairs neighbor. Meanwhile, a young, bubbly woman makes friends with the dancer at the club where she performs and inadvertently causes a considerable mix-up that at first looks fated to keep the star-crossed lovers apart.Read More »
Wael Shawky presents his epic video trilogy that recounts the history of The Crusades from an Arab perspective. Inspired by The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Lebanese historian Amin Maalouf, Shawky’s videos chart the numerous European campaigns to the Holy Land, starting from the early Crusades from 1096–1099 A.D. that are depicted in CABARET CRUSADES: THE HORROR SHOW FILES (2010) and the First and Second Crusades from 1099–1145 A.D. in CABARET CRUSADES: THE PATH TO CAIRO (2012).Read More »
Lady Sings the Blues, like many enjoyable biopics, has little to do with presenting fact and everything to do with presenting the essence of a life. It has been both rightly and unfairly reviled by passionate fans of Holiday’s music as being highly fictionalized—and so it is, just as Amadeus, Funny Girl, and St. Louis Blues also use seeds of fact to grow fanciful tales of their respective subjects’ lives. It is also true that Diana Ross has little in common with Billie Holiday; their singing styles are markedly different, and Ross is far too slender and beautiful to believably imitate Holiday; to her credit, she does not try.Read More »
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Based on an unknown Schönberg opera from 1929, From Today Until Tomorrow explores one night in a not-quite loveless marriage. A husband and wife return from a party where she has flirted with another man, while he has cast an appraising eye toward an attractive, fashionably dressed acquaintance of his wife’s. Though each dreams, briefly, of leaving the marriage for the excitement and mystery of a new lover, in the end they decide stability and comfort are more important than the fleeting thrill of new romance. Read More »
A woman whose past is scorned by nearly everyone around her meets a man who’d love her regardlessly- if only everyone else would allow them to.Read More »
Bandleader Kay Kyser takes his troupe of nutty musicians, goofball comics and pretty girl singers on a tour around the world to entertain the troops during World War II.Read More »
The first true Finnish movie musical, released in 1940 by Suomen Filmiteollisuus (“SF” for short, hence the title), though some would grant this honor to Suomi-Filmi’s Meidän poikamme merellä (“Our Boys at Sea”, 1933), a film showcasing the Finnish navy as well as the singing talents of composer Georg Malmstén. The songs for SF Parade were also composed by Malmstén, who appears in a small role, but the true stars of the film are Tauno Palo and Ansa Ikonen, already well-known from romantic comedies of the ’30s such as Everybody’s Love and Substitute Wife. They would go on to star in the studio’s next musical and one of the most popular Finnish films of all time, The Vagabond’s Waltz of 1941.Read More »