SUN., 5-21
(times ET)
9:45
pm
A Chorus Line (1985)
1h 53m | Musical | TV-14
A Broadway show director puts his singers and dancers through a gruelling audition process...
Director
Richard Attenborough
Cast
Michael Douglas, Alyson Reed, Michael Blevins, Yamil Borges, Jan Gan Boyd, and Audrey Landers,
"When Richard Attenborough directed A Chorus Line (1985), starring Michael Douglas, he was taking on a legendary property. The story of dancers desperate to win spots in a chorus line began as a Broadway show that opened at the Shubert Theater on July 25, 1975. Directed and choreographed by Michael Bennett, the play featured music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Edward Kleban.
It was a smash hit with audiences and critics, earning twelve Tony Award nominations and nine wins. The play ran for 6,137 performances, making it the longest-running Broadway show until Cats. It also won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. ....
Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times that it was "a fizzless adaptation by Richard Attenborough that misses the whole point of the Broadway show -- i.e. the dancing and the dancers. Instead, the dancers become a limp Greek chorus for the dead love affair between a choreographer, Zach (a pre-Gordon Gekko Michael Douglas) and his old flame, Cassie (Alyson Reed) the star dancer."
Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times disagreed. He understood that Attenborough's film "may not please purists who want a film record of what they saw on stage, but this is one of the most intelligent and compelling movie musicals in a long time - and the most grown up, since it isn't limited, as so many contemporary musicals are, to the celebration of the survival qualities of geriatric actresses." .......
see:
https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/70884/a ... Id=1135254
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The Color of Pomegranates (1969)
1h 19m | Biography
film is a poetic treatment of the life of 18th-century Armenian poet and troubadour Sayat-Nova.
Director
Sergei Paradjanov
Cast
Sofiko Chiaureli, Sergei Paradjanov, Melkon Alekyan , Suren Shakhbaz...
".....is a biography of the Armenian ashug Sayat-Nova (King of Song) that attempts to reveal the poet's life visually and poetically rather than literally. The film is presented with little dialogue using active tableaux which depict the poet's life in chapters: Childhood, Youth, Prince's Court (where he falls in love with a tsarina), The Monastery, The Dream, Old Age, The Angel of Death and Death.[6] There are sounds and music and occasional singing but dialogue is rare.[8] Each chapter is indicated by a title card and framed through both Sergei Parajanov's imagination and Sayat Nova's poems.
Actress Sofiko Chiaureli notably plays six roles in the film, both male and female....
It has appeared in many polls as one of the greatest films ever made[4][5] and was hailed as revolutionary by Mikhail Vartanov. The film is now regarded as a landmark in film history.....
French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard said, “In the temple of cinema there are images, light and reality. Sergei Paradjanov was the master of that temple…”
Film critic Gilbert Adair argued that "although in both style and content it gives us the impression, somehow, of predating the invention of the cinema, no historian of the medium who ignores The Color of Pomegranates can ever be taken seriously."[6]
The work ranked 84th in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the world's greatest films[24] and appeared in another list of the greatest films by Time Out........
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Pomegranates