Apr. 09, 2003 - 11:41 pm
my mom suggested this one back a few months ago and i didn't get a chance to watch it the last time i checked it out from the library. and i'm doing a couple of makeups this week, so this one got thrown in. i think i had seen this one at some point in middle school for a music history class, but i had of course forgotten most of it. anyway, it was nominated for quite a few Oscars, including Best Picture. yeah, they were big on musicals in the 60s.
this is a Broadway musical that made it to the screen in adapted form of course. it's about a travelling salesman around the 1920s who stops in a town in Iowa in order to sell instruments and uniforms to the townspeople in the guise of creating a town boys' band for them. he's really a conman and doesn't know how to even read music, much less how to play it. there's some romance with the town librarian. and tons of musical numbers. the rest is obvious. guess the plot. yeah, you guessed right.
i found that many of the musical numbers in this were good times for some mental drifting. i thought about many different topics of discussion while watching this film, but i found it hard to focus on the film itself. it was so obvious and unnecessary that i pay attention to the screen it was just insane. i found that when i did pay attention, i began to get lost in the film. not that it was that enthralling. i think it sort of put me into a trance of some sort. i stopped the film for a 10 minute bathroom break and began asking myself what had been happening in my mind for the past half hour before that. i guess the movie turned me into a meat popsicle (see The Fifth Element (1997)) when i really got into it. something like that anyway.
it was well constructed though. i could tell that much. there were no major flaws in it in that respect. and it was quite a visually attractive film. that keeps me from giving it an extremely low rating anyway.
oh, in separate news i finally updated my other diary w/ some info about the convention, so you select few should check that out.