On 19 Feb 2007, at 11:55 AM, Mark D Lew wrote:
I think you give the movie way too much credit. It's not
"deliberately ahistorical" as part of any artistic message. It's
ahistorical because they wanted to make a movie out of a hit
musical, but at the same time they wanted to showcase their
superstars in the contemporary style of music they could do best.
The title song and the final duet did indeed become the chart-
toppers they were intended to be, but the director of the movie
hated them both precisely because they were so inappropriate to the
1950s theme. The others were added at the insistence of Olivia
Newton-John's producer (for hers) and John Travolta (for his).
If filtering the 1950s setting through a 1970s sensibility is a
purpose of the film, it's only a post-hoc attempt to make virtue of
necessity, sort of like turning Olivia Newton-John's character into
an Australian exchange student as a way to explain her unremovable
accent.
All of that is certainly true. It's just that I think that this
attempt to make a virtue of necessity is one of the more interesting
things about the movie, which otherwise doesn't do much for me.
You might be on less shaky ground complaining about the
anachronistic music in a show like "Dream Girls," where there
doesn't seem to be any reason at all for the music to sound so
totally unlike Motown.
To the contrary, I like Dream Girls. Unlike Grease's, the score
for Dream Girls isn't built around the idea of music that matches
the era of its setting. That's probably why, unlike the Grease
movie, the recent Dream Girls movie was able to stay quite true to
the stage show. Whenever a musical is made into a movie, there are
always some changes and adaptations, but I can't think of any
others that completely turn the score upside-down like Grease does.
I'm afraid I disagree. I mean, you're correct that Dream Girls isn't
built around the idea of music that matches the specific time and
place of its setting, but for a musical ostensibly about the rise and
fall of Motown, I see that as a serious shortcoming. The music in
Dream Girls is not only just as ahistorical as Grease (there is no
real attempt to capture the sound of the Supremes or Motown), it also
completely fails to indicate the passage of time. The songs from Act
I (set in 1962) aren't appreciably different in style from the songs
from Act II (set in the early 1970's) -- it's all generic,
undistinguished "early 1970's disco-soul." This bugs me far more than
the anachronistic songs in Grease -- perhaps because I have much more
affection for 1960's Motown than 1950's teenybopper stuff.
Cheers,
- Darcy
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[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Brooklyn, NY
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