Word: cabareting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Fosse--in bringing Cabaret to the screen--has done well to sacrifice none of these innovations. The core of his film is still the cabaret numbers themselves, played out on a cramped, cluttered stage given depth and dimension only by Geoffrey Unsworth's cleverly stark lighting effects. Throughout, Fosse's own particular wit as a choreographer of decadence--his "Rich Man's Frug" was one of the best things in his earlier staging of Sweet Charity--serves to summon up a wealth of period references--the tinkly, jarring music of Kurt Weill, the angular, fantastic interiors of Dr. Caligari...
...editing that holds the film together though. Its best moment, in my mind, occurs as Minnelli and York kiss and begin to make love while the camera threatens to fade into the phoney discreteness of a rain-soaked window. Suddenly, the rain becomes the smokey white light of the cabaret and Miss Minnelli's head returns to view as she begins to sing "Maybe This Time," a lovely Judy Garland type song that meshes perfectly with the previous scene. In achieving a balanced counterpoint between movie "reality" and movie "artifice," Cabaret saves itself from the cloying theatricality that mars most...
...SINCE, by its own self-admission. Cabaret "is more than a musical," consideration must be paid to the themes the film develops, matters in which the movie is not at all convincing. Going from Isherwood's first-person narration to the camera's more omniscient eye. Cabaret promises to give us a more complete, balanced view of its characters. By restricting its musical numbers to the cabaret setting, it clears the board for increased attention to the relatively straightforward plot that occurs in between the songs. As a result, one ends up demanding more of an intellectual hard-headedness from...
...stage, Cabaret seemed such a seemless musical web that you didn't stop to sort out the explanations it threw at you so self-confidently; its intelligence was one of style and atmosphere rather than of intellectual argument. On film, the vision is more focused, less intimidating and also less impressive. For example, the film has traded in the subplot of the German landlady for a far less interesting romance between a Jewish girl, daughter of a Berlin department store owner, and her would-be suitor. The affair is as boring as it is trite, and, if it weren...
...CABARET excepts its audience to have such stock responses to decadence and Nazism that it never really bothers to pin down the exact relationship between the two. At moments, it suggests that a general disgust with the moral latitude of thirties Germany drove the middle classes into Hitler's protective arms. Elsewhere, it would appear that the vicarious thrills provided by the cabaret entertainments were identical to the satisfaction some Germans took in the brutal performances of the Nazis. And there is also the intimation that the cabaret was merely the soporific decoy that permitted the Third Reich to rise...