Movie Reviews: East Side Story, Stomp Out Loud
Friday, 17 March 2006 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daTonight's movie theme was: "all-dancing, all-singing, attractive young men and women wearing overalls."
Of the two, the Stomp movie is easier to review, since I bet you've already heard of Stomp. I won't lie, the dancers were great eye-candy, especially if you happen to like watching well-muscled men and women dance. They had the multi-ethnic, multi-racial, grunge aesthetic down for sure. The scenes were all set in New York City, 2/3 outdoors, 1/3 on stage. The length, 50 minutes, was just about ideal; another 30 minutes and I expect I would've cut it short. My favourite scene was a two-minute piece set in a messy industrial kitchen, shot in a single frenetic unbroken take, featuring a screaming chef, twirling knives, shattering plates, and a guy furiously chipping ice out of a freezer. Did I mention it was frenetic? Yeah.
East Side Story is tougher to describe. It's a documentary of Soviet and eastern block Communist musicals.
The tone is ironic, but not sneering. (My favourite quote: "[It is said] the history of film was the history of boys photographing girls. But Stalin had another fantasy: boys photographing tractors.") followed by clips of the wonderfully titled "Tractor Drivers" (USSR, 1939).
The story basically started as Stalin decided he wanted more films like his favourite musical, "Volga Volga" (1938), which seems to be a spirited operetta about getting sent down the river. Pretty soon the USSR, and later E. Germany, realize their citizens were sneaking peeks at Western musicals, so the battle was on to create homebrew musicals, with awful equipment and little to work from.
One of the major themes of this documentary was the incongruity of writing musicals about how wonderful life would be, alongside the grimness of the real world. And yet everyone agreed they wanted them- except the intelligencia, who typically despised their falseness.
"The musicals were made in various periods of optimism. and when the hopes failed, the musicals failed with them, at the time when they would've been needed the most."
Ah, so many factories with pirouetting women and men in coveralls. After all, there was an important socialist message, the right of a woman to make her own living (see "My Wife Wants to Sing", 1958, East Germany). And the glory of hard work. A final question is asked: "Who knows how things could have turned out if Socialism had just been more fun?"
I found a fairly large collection of news articles about this documentary, though I couldn't find sources for any of the musicals themselves. Sigh.
Both of these were from the downtown library branch btw.
Of the two, the Stomp movie is easier to review, since I bet you've already heard of Stomp. I won't lie, the dancers were great eye-candy, especially if you happen to like watching well-muscled men and women dance. They had the multi-ethnic, multi-racial, grunge aesthetic down for sure. The scenes were all set in New York City, 2/3 outdoors, 1/3 on stage. The length, 50 minutes, was just about ideal; another 30 minutes and I expect I would've cut it short. My favourite scene was a two-minute piece set in a messy industrial kitchen, shot in a single frenetic unbroken take, featuring a screaming chef, twirling knives, shattering plates, and a guy furiously chipping ice out of a freezer. Did I mention it was frenetic? Yeah.
East Side Story is tougher to describe. It's a documentary of Soviet and eastern block Communist musicals.
The tone is ironic, but not sneering. (My favourite quote: "[It is said] the history of film was the history of boys photographing girls. But Stalin had another fantasy: boys photographing tractors.") followed by clips of the wonderfully titled "Tractor Drivers" (USSR, 1939).
The story basically started as Stalin decided he wanted more films like his favourite musical, "Volga Volga" (1938), which seems to be a spirited operetta about getting sent down the river. Pretty soon the USSR, and later E. Germany, realize their citizens were sneaking peeks at Western musicals, so the battle was on to create homebrew musicals, with awful equipment and little to work from.
One of the major themes of this documentary was the incongruity of writing musicals about how wonderful life would be, alongside the grimness of the real world. And yet everyone agreed they wanted them- except the intelligencia, who typically despised their falseness.
"The musicals were made in various periods of optimism. and when the hopes failed, the musicals failed with them, at the time when they would've been needed the most."
Ah, so many factories with pirouetting women and men in coveralls. After all, there was an important socialist message, the right of a woman to make her own living (see "My Wife Wants to Sing", 1958, East Germany). And the glory of hard work. A final question is asked: "Who knows how things could have turned out if Socialism had just been more fun?"
I found a fairly large collection of news articles about this documentary, though I couldn't find sources for any of the musicals themselves. Sigh.
Both of these were from the downtown library branch btw.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: Wednesday, 22 March 2006 02:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 22 March 2006 04:12 am (UTC);)