Soundtracking: "All That Jazz"

by Chris Feil

These days we don’t get many musicals brave enough to buck genre comforts and form as Bob Fosse’s autobiographical All That Jazz. The director/choreographer transplants himself onto Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), a highly regarded and sexually cruel master of the stage on his way to untimely demise. It’s a masterpiece to shame other masterpieces.

There’s a reason that the film isn’t remembered for its songs - musical pleasantry is low on his priorities, as the film is an uncompromising character study of the visionary creator’s weakest impulses...

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The Furniture: All That Jazz and the Creative Erotics of Scaffolding

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail. Here's Daniel Walber ...

All That Jazz (1979) is the only Palme d’Or winner to have won the Oscar for Best Production Design. I do not have an explanation for that. Luck of the draw, really. But, as we await the prizes at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, this odd piece of trivia is an excellent excuse to take a closer look at Bob Fosse’s masterpiece.

There are actually a few odd things about the film’s Oscar record. It’s not only a rare Oscar-winning remake, but a remake of another production design nominee: Federico Fellini’s 8½. The four designers who took home the prize for All That Jazz include not only production designer Philip Rosenberg and art directors Gary Brink and Edward Stewart but also Tony Walton, who was credited as “fantasy designer.”

The “fantasies” in question are a big part of what connects All That Jazz with its predecessor...

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The New Norm of the Picture / Director Split

Chris here. Now that the Oscar closing shock has worn off (oh, wait it still hasn’t) let’s take a second to discuss the growing frequency of the Best Picture / Director split. This is now the fourth time in five years two different films have taken home the two biggest prizes - with 25% of all instances occurring in the past decade. Has a Best Picture / Director split become an Oscar new normal?

But the recent prevalence of the split might be more symptomatic of an Academy more bent on spreading the wealth. In fact, La La Land ties Fury Road as the most awarded film since Gravity - also rewarded on the Director side of the equation... 

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George Sidney Centennial: "Kiss Me Kate"

by Tim Brayton

Our centennial tribute to MGM mainstay George Sidney continues with the director's 1953 musical Kiss Me Kate, and such a curious beast it is. Adapted with a slightly free hand from Cole Porter's hit 1948 musical, it's a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew that's also a backstage comedy about the staging of a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew, in which the actors playing Kate and Petruchio are recently feuding exes.

Don't let the plot worry you, though. Since this is a 1950s MGM musical the focus is obviously one one thing first and foremost, and that's big, heaving SPECTACLE.

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The Mad Six

Glenn here helping out with the post-ceremony rush. The highlight of last night’s Oscars was surely the six wins for Mad Max: Fury Road. That haul solidified its place as not just one of the most successful Oscar titles of all time, but no doubt the strangest, too.

We may all say that most people were predicting at least four of five of those, but the path to those six wins has been rather extraordinary in the truest definition of that word. Who among us a year ago truly could have predicted that we would be here a year later celebrating six Oscars to a movie about a renegade road warrior, an amputee heroine, and a group of sex slaves rising up against an evil warlord in a post-apocalyptic future with the aide of a gang of elderly motorcycle ladies? While we can be disappointed – very disappointed – that they didn’t add a seventh for George Miller’s direction, any movie winning six golden statues is not only a rarity, but a moment to be extremely proud of so hats off to the team behind Max. It won as many awards as the last two best picture winners combined and it doubled the amount of awards of the next highest winner (The Revenant) on its big night. You done good, Max! May more films like you spring forth from your imposing shadow.

Mad Max: Fury Road joins some fine company, with only 26 films having ever won more awards. 26 over 88 years ! More impressive still, is that Miller’s post-apocalyptic action spectacle is a member of an even smaller collective of only five films to have won half a dozen golden statues without a Best Picture prize to go with them. It’s an interesting quintet to say the least.

The five classics after the jump...

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