The Illusion of Depth

Even Depression, it seems, must come to an end. I may have been bouncing back and forth between Busby Berkeley and Step Up for the last month of so, but all of that has been part of the larger series of Depression/Comedy that we've been exploring since January. The Busby Berkeley "musicals" of the 1930s were a direct product of that era, but I hope it has become obvious to everyone by now just how much the "Step Up" franchise owes to the Busby Berkeley model. While many film-makers over the decades have tried (with sporadic success) to emulate the "look" of a Busby Berkeley dance routine... ...the Step Up films have followed the tone, the structure and even specific plot-points of the earlier films.  And they have been wildly popular and successful with audiences. Whatever one thinks of the music, the acting, or the complexities(!) of the plots, these films appear to have met a need with modern audiences. The response to them has been dramatic and u...

Those of you who have been following the films I have been showing over the past month or so will know that I have been exploring the parallels between the 1930s Busby Berkeley musicals and the modern "Step Up" franchise. But this has all been part of the larger "umbrella" series of Depression/Comedy that I have been running since the New Year. As is (hopefully!) clear by now, the Busby Berkeley musicals were not simply "musicals produced during the Depression", they were emphatically products of the Depression. The Fred & Ginger musicals had aimed for pure escapism. Their stories took place in opulent, Art-Deco re-imaginings of exotic locations around the world...  …where all the men wore top hat and tails, while all the women wore lavish, improbable gowns (which occasionally caused their dance partners much grief, but that's another story).  Fred Astaire grumbled about those damn feathers for the next fifty years. Watching many of those RKO Fred...

Mischa Richter; 1980 In 2017, Disney Studios released Olaf's Frozen Adventure , a 21-minute animated film that centred on a beloved supporting character from their 2013 film Frozen (which had become -and remains- one of the most successful Disney films of all time). The new short film was released in cinemas as a "curtain-raiser" to another animated film ( Coco ) and the reaction from movie-goers was angry and loud. Audiences were "unhappy" (translation: they posted abusive rants on Twitter) that they were being forced to sit through 21 minutes of singing-snowman before being allowed to watch the film they had actually paid for. Theatres were compelled to post warning messages about the length of the Prologue and some cinemas junked the short film altogether. The consensus seemed to be that audiences had come to the cinema to see one film, and one film only. Asking them to sit through anything beyond that was just a kettle of fish too far. My 8-year old nephew, ...

Let's talk 3D for a moment. Hollywood has experimented with 3-Dimensional film-making on at least three separate occasions in its history. The first of those was in 1953.  Comin' at ya! In the face of multiple existential threats to its livelihood, the industry had grasped at every straw it could find in an effort to entice jaded audiences back into the cinemas. 3D was one of those straws. Unfortunately, the 3D filming techniques of the 50s were complicated and expensive (two words that movie producers never like) and film-makers quickly settled on simpler methods of overwhelming their audiences.  So 3D faded into cinematic obscurity for a few decades, only to be revived again in the mid 1980s. A teenaged Meg Ryan (playing the bad girl) is about to discover why they call them "Slasher" movies... The 3D Craze of the 1980s was even shorter-lived than its 50s forebear. This was the era of the big-budget blockbuster franchise, and movie studios began to notice that audien...