Word: fritzes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that wants to be a funny social commentary -- the press kit hopefully evokes the names of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges -- is shot in the impersonal expressionist manner that was literally foreign to these American masters, a style that was favored by glum and self-important German directors like Fritz Lang...
...tale into the story of a young girl's Christmas fantasy that would inspire Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov to stage it for the Maryinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1892. Act One opens in the Silberhaus home where the family eagerly awaits party guests, and Clara and Fritz eagerly await the accompanying presents. Their mysterious and magical godfather, Dr. Drosselmeyer (Laszlo Berdo) enters once all the guests have arrived with a number of surprises that delight the children on stage and off--a scarf turns into a bird, the clock magically obeys his hands, Harlequin and Columbine wind...
...this bourgeois Christmas Eve gathering, social dancing -- the children and their parents together -- fosters this gentle civilizing process. Later the young protagonist Marie (Jessica Lynn Cohen) has a dream touched off by her naughty kid brother Fritz, who breaks her favorite new toy, a nutcracker. The dream starts as a nightmare: the family's Christmas tree grows to alarming proportions; huge mice scuttle threateningly around her until they are conquered by a newly potent nutcracker (Culkin), who is then transformed into an angelic, pink-suited prince. Thereafter the dream becomes a cotton-candy fantasy as the prince escorts Marie...
...familiar score and choreography tell the story of young Marie, celebrating Christmas with her parents, her brother Fritz and a houseful of guests, when her mysterious godfather arrives with magical gifts and a charming nephew. Marie is enchanted by his present of a nutcracker shaped as a toy soldier, and by his nephew. That night she dreams of a battle of mutinous mice, won by the nephew in the guise of a life-size nutcracker. Marie and the Nutcracker are then carried off to the land of the Sugar Plum Fairy, where they are entertained by dancers of every country...
Jessica Lynn Cohen is charming as Marie, and Peter Reznick is perfectly pesky as her little brother Fritz. And Mr. Culkin? He holds his own, perhaps thanks to his days as a student at the School of American Ballet, B.H.A. (Before "Home Alone"). However, he's not the most attractive little boy onstage, nor the best dancer, and other than being Macaulay Culkin, it's hard to understand why he's there. It's hard to understand why any of the movie is here, because so little of it is new or innovative. If the real ballet is inaccessible, this...