Word: waltzing
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...LAST WALTZ Directed by Martin Scorsese...
...Last Waltz is a rock-concert movie−no more, no less−that could be the best such film ever made. The reasons for its success are simple. Director Martin Scorsese had the good fortune to record a remarkable concert, The Band's final outing at San Francisco's Winterland in 1976, and he had the good sense to record it with care. For once we are spared sloppy home-movie camera work and endless shots of the blissed-out fans: Scorsese and his team of cinematographers use film to enhance the music rather than smother...
Steve Baloff, Billy Bradshaw, and freshman Jim Keyte hurled in the first game, a 9-2 waltz for the Crimson. Keyte, the lefthanded flamethrower from California, looked strong in his northern debut, dispatching B.U. in the top of the seventh to preserve...
Sondheim's gorgeous all-waltz score is his most openly emotional, but it is not heard here to maximum effect. Some of the best numbers (e.g., The Miller's Son) have been dropped, others have been reworked, and most of the rest (notably Taylor's Send in the Clowns) are ineptly performed. The only song that retains its full stage power is A Weekend in the Country, in which music and lyrics merge ingeniously to sum up at least five of the story's subplots and seven of its characters at once. Even in the context...
Worse are the lapses that occur in the course of the action. Sellon, for example, mispronounces the word "elan" as "uh-lan." And one of the funnier lines in the play--Wyke's remark of his wife, "She couldn't get Johann Strauss to waltz"--comes out, "She couldn't get Johann Strauss to waltz." That means, I suppose, that she couldn't get Johann Bach to waltz, either. Moreover, any self-respecting mystery buff can tell you that a "mashie-niblick," that jolly skull-splitter, is a five-iron; Bloomfield ludicrously brandishes a driver. All this may sound like...