#95 - Star!

I have made it abundantly clear in the past that I am not very fond of musicals. Rather than babble on about it again, I'll go a different route. This route is one where I say that even though I don't like the genre, I know top notch talent when I see it, and everybody knows that Julie Andrews is top notch talent. I love Mary Poppins and can deal with most of The Sound of Music, but let me tell you, I think her performance in this movie is better than the both of those. And those are classics!! This movie is over three hours long and she is on screen for a vast majority of it, and there was no moment where I felt that what she was doing was out of place, overdone, or that irritating, which in my mind is easy to do with musicals. Can you say segue?

Here's where I once again redefine what a musical is in my mind. Rather, I will explain to you why this movie is not a musical, and therefore led to my better enjoyment of it. To me, a musical is when you have a story where the characters break out into song at seemingly random, yet predictable moments. Look everybody, we are having a sleepover and I am imagining that I am Sandra Dee.....let's sing about it!! Why does Star! not fit into this category? Because it's a biopic about a stage performer. Julie Andrews plays stage legend Gertrude Lawrence and every song that she sings in this movie is a performance. You can't have a movie about Johnny Cash without music, but that doesn't mean the movie is a musical. The same rule applies here. If the movie is about a singer or band, that singer or band has to perform in the movie, but since that activity is the natural action of a singer or band, then the movie is not a musical. I'm sorry, but farmers in Oklahoma don't dance around and sing in the corn fields. By the way, that's a new rule I just came up with so if Fosberg and Chubbs could draft that up and fax it over, I could take a look at it and make it official.

The question I had about this movie was why it wasn't more popular considering the performance by Andrews. I mean, when it all comes down to it, I only thought the movie was okay. Andrews was great and Daniel Massey as Noel Coward was a tremendously entertaining foil. But why hadn't I heard of it before? I perused the net and found a summary on some site by some dude(I don't remember the details) and he seemed to think it was because the character was dependent on a relationship with a man for true happiness and this didn't sit well with the women's lib movement in the late 60's. Uhm...how can I put this...WRONG. Way to put a modern spin on something and not really watch what was there. Let's not forget that she was seeking a deep interpersonal relationship with anyone. Let's not forget that she tried to have a relationship with her daughter and that didn't work out. Sure, a lot of time was spent on her relationships with a handful of guys, but he search for a meaningful relationship was only the focus of the latter part of the movie and was clearly the result of having spent her life searching for the limelight and focusing on her own fame, only to find that she had little to show for it in the way of true friendship. I think I found the real culprit for the lack of success of this movie by reading the blockbuster.com synopsis. It says that this movie was marketed as the follow up to The Sound of Music. Oh marketing guys, why do you set yourself up for failure by trying to pull something like that? When you take a movie that is legendary and try to attach something that is completely unrelated to it, there is no way that you can possibly meet the expectations that you have established. No matter how good this movie is/was/may have been, people must have gone in thinking they were going to see something like The Sound of Music, and that is not what Star! is. Screwed up by crappy marketing. Good thing Hollywood has learned from their mistakes....ahem....