After watching Gigi (it will be reviewed later), I was not that interested in watching another musical with Leslie Caron, but the real star of the movie is Gene Kelly. His acting is great. I'd never seen him in anything before, and he is an amazing dancer and singer (though his little booty shakes while wearing tight pants in the ballet finale were unintentionally hilarious).
 |
| Gene Kelly shimmying. |
Kelly plays Jerry Mulligan, an American living in Paris and trying to eke out a living as an artist: "Back home everyone said I didn't have any talent. They might be saying the same thing over here but it sounds better in French." He is friends with a droll pianist played by Oscar Levant, who is amazing on the piano and has an amusingly dry sense of humor that reminds me a little of Humphrey Bogart.Jerry befriends a French singer, and then promptly falls in love with his girlfriend, Lise, played by Leslie Caron. He pursues her to the point of being stalkerish until she finally agrees to go on a date with him. To be fair to Jerry, he doesn't know Lise is in a relationship, and she doesn't offer up the information.
 |
| Lise and Jerry. |
The movie ends with a 16 minute ballet (I can think of a better way tospend half a million dollars), which did not appeal to me at all, not being a ballet aficionado. Amelia loved it, and tried to imitate Gene Kelly, with wonderful results (see video below).
My least favorite part involves Jerry's sponsor, a wealthy woman helping his career mostly because she is attracted to him and seems lonely. I felt sad for her character. I actually preferred her to Lise (Leslie Caron just doesn't thrill me -she feels like a poor man's Audrey Hepburn.), but of course he was never going to end up with her.
I've had I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise stuck in my head ever since.
This was like a fruity dance salad with the main guy doing so many fruity dances and ending the movie with a 45 hour long fruity dance number that cost around a billion dollars.
ReplyDeleteThat was an important speech, Tyler, and it needed to be made. Might I suggest, however, that the rest of this discourse is continued by those with brains larger than a grape?
ReplyDelete(Thank you, Red Dwarf, for providing me with the words so dearly needed.)
Any movie that makes Amelia do such dance is a success!
ReplyDelete