Channel Awesome
Musical lovers Brad and Sarah check out the new film The Greatest Showman!
Tagged with: brad jones midnight screenings movies the greatest showman
About thecinemasnob
Other Posts By the Author:
3 comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
What makes P. T. Barnum a reprehensible asshole is not minstrel shows or freak shows. He knowingly and repeatedly made money off frauds, lies, and false advertising. It was wrong then when he did it and his peers that were engaged in it were wrong too. Racial and social views change, but dishonestly is a timeless sin.
The Nutcracker movie you’re referring to is called The Nutcracker: The Untold Story (2010), a long-time forty year passion project of the rather world-famous former Soviet Russian film director Andrei Konchalovsky whose the brother of Russian Federation’s sometimes great filmmaker and Cinema Minister Nikita Mikhalkov but you probably don’t know him or both of them, starring Dakota Fanning’s little sister Elle as Mary the heroine, Nathan Lane as Uncle Albert “Not Really Einstein but could be,” John Turturro as the Rat-King white-haired Andy Warhol-like Nazi Symbolist, some kid actor named Charlie Rowe as the Nutcracker/Human Boy Prince, Julia or Yuliya Aleksandrovna Vysotskaya (She’s a famous cooking-show host in Russia not an actress who mostly improvises Italian dish recipes, I know, I’ve seen Russian TV) as the Sugar-Plum Fairy and Mary’s mediocre opera singing mother, Vysotskaya is also married to the director of this film, who’s old enough to be her father or uncle, Andrei Mikhalkov Konchalovsky (born 1937, she was born in 1973, but that’s fine for movie artistic peoples to do that, plus he obviously allowed her to keep her maiden name and patronymic or middle passed down from the father which all Russians or Eastern Slavic peoples have, especially in their own countries, for example I should be called Mikhail Yurievich Palatnik since my dad’s name is Yuri, and some other actors like Richard Grant as the stern father.
This Nutcracker uses songs or rather half-songs because they are not even nearly at half-length lyrics written by Tim Rice of Disney’s Aladdin (both animated and live-musical as well as Beauty and the Beast Broadway musical, The Lion King, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita fame set to the greatest Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s music written for the ballet of that exact German fairy-tale by E.T.A Hoffman written earlier in the 19th century, and two other Tchaikovsky’s works: Symphony No.5, some movement, Symphony No.6 the “Pathetique” in B-minor third movement Allegro Molto Vivace, and his very famous Piano Concerto No.1 also in B-Minor, Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso – Allegro con spirito, but just the world-famous first part to a triumphant over evil children’s chorus with flowers in hand that just pops the hell out of nowhere in the climax of the film, yeah the Nazi Symbol Rats just run away and scatter forever down the sewer along with the main villains who still live at the end. But you see Konchalovsky wanted the story told closer to E.T.A Hoffman’s (1776-1822) vision than Tchaikovsky’s (1840-1893) one-act story-plot part and second-act celebration with no plot anymore Suite part Anyway the 1993 George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker starring Macaulay Culkin is an actual filmed ballet performance from the New York City Ballet inspired and directed according to George Balanchine’s choreography instructions from the 1930’s, yeah he was a Georgian-Russian-American choreographer who was born in 1904 and died in 1983, go research him on Wikipedia and all of them, narrated by Kevin Kline in 1993. Yeah I know I’m a know-it-all, plus I own those two versions, the first one is kind of my annual guilty pleasure DVD.