Word: broadway
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...plot and performances, the movie is ordinary at best; at times during the film, you'll be stranded in perplexity. But in the way it looks and sounds, it's a tonic to two senses. No surprise here, since Taymor has lavished her extravagant theatrical imagination on Broadway musicals (The Lion King), operas (The Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera) and movies (a gory, oneiric Titus - Shakespeare as a splatter film - and the more pedestrian Frida). And the arranger-producers of the 33 songs include T Bone Burnett, who turned the old-timey country music of O Brother, Where...
...movie has torrents of words and goes heavy on macho posturing; at times it suggests a ragged off-off-Broadway play. And De Palma is not going for subtlety here: Flake, the craziest of the squad members, has a Confederate flag for his bedspread - he's a lunatic Reb. But Redacted pretty successfully sustains a dual level of hysteria (in its content) and disinterest (in its film-long framing devices). It's an amazingly vigorous work for a filmmaker who turns 67 on Sept. 11, and his strongest cinematic and political statement at least since Casualties of War, his Vietnam...
...Half-human, half-bat, he was discovered in a West Virginia cave, and proved so popular that the writers had him escape custody every now and then and go on a new adventure. In the excellent musical version, which starred Devin May and had a long off-Broadway run, he is a practically a Christ figure, sacrificed and venerated: "Hold me, Bat Boy, / Touch me, Bat Boy, / Help me through the night." He's a metaphor for humanity's fascination-repulsion with the bizarre, which was right up WWN's back street...
...original production in the '70s, and back then it seemed a pretty lame attempt to cash in on the still relatively new vogue for '50s nostalgia. Today, after a hundred clunkier send-ups of the period (we're twice as many years removed from Grease, which opened on Broadway in 1972, as the original show was from the doo-wop era it poked fun at), the show has the purity of an archetype, and even a few serious points to make about the adolescent pressure to conform, the glamour of the outcast, and the conflict between authenticity and "cool." Even...
...coming up with a neater distillation of how girls and guys at a certain age view the opposite sex, all in words of one syllable. You try building a Broadway show around two amateur stars and coming up with something as effortlessly enjoyable as this...