Word: wax
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Then there are her shoes. All dancers are meticulous about their slippers, so Gelsey is fanatic. A toe shoe is a rigid object. To get one of her 50 pairs in shape, she brushes Fabulon floor wax into the shoe to make it even harder. Since hard shoes make noise, she next pounds the stiffness out with a tinsmith's hammer. Then she sews on ribbons and bits of elastic. Done? Almost. Just before a performance she pulls the shoes on over socks, brushes them with fast-drying alcohol and removes the socks. Putting the shoes back on, she says...
American Hot Wax purports to be the saga of this modern cultural genesis, and in some ways it adequately serves this function. However, the movie re-creates the '50s and the upheaval that begat rock and roll with a disturbingly developed sense of ficto-history, portraying as true and factual that which is romanticized and basically false...
...short, Alan Freed was not the angel with a damaged wing that American Hot Wax shows us. The payola affair is mentioned briefly in one scene, but Freed's relationship to it is fudged. The movie ends with an ominous subtitle epilogue which informs us that Freed was indicted and died "penniless" shortly thereafter. This is a truth which is distorted by its context. The real Freed was indeed a Messiah of rock and roll, but not for its own sake alone. He had lots to gain. The treatment of Freed points up the main feature of this movie...
American Hot Wax is a B-movie masquerading as an A-movie. The amount of hype which has swelled up around this basically insignificant flick far outdistances the film's actual merit. Because it fictionalizes and defuses the larger social issues of the Golden Age of Rock and Roll, it loses all pretense of commenting upon them. It is in the end a flawed bit of light entertainment...
...someone ever does write a script that does justice to the birth of the rock culture, Floyd Mutrux may be the man to direct it. This erratic film maker at times creates exhilarating order out of American Hot Wax's chaos. There is one infectious sequence in a sound studio where a record producer (played by real-life Record Producer Richard Perry) flamboyantly reshapes a lame rock song into a hit; there's also a surprisingly touch ing scene in which the president of the Buddy Holly Fan Club (well acted by Moosie Drier, 13) tells Freed...