I have two moderately hard-and-fast rules when it comes picking movies: no musicals, and no spoofs. I’ve developed these rules after years of being a miserable git who complains about things, and they’re usually followed for the safety of everyone involved. I’m just not geared to enjoy either of those genres, so it’s safer to avoid them.
Last Friday, while visiting the local video store, I broke said rules three times. The first to pick up Cabaret and The Producers, the second to pick up Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
To their credit, none of those films was the worst thing I watched this week (that was a film called Blue State, which made me profoundly irritated and left me wondering if a film that was theoretically about being part of the American left was perhaps funded by conservatives gleefully trying to make lefties look idiotic and redundant); yet all three reminded me that I really shouldn’t watch musicals or films that built their commedy around spoofing other films.
Walk Hard actually managed to be funny for about six consecutive minutes, largely due to cameo’s by people playing the Beatles; Cabaret was actually pretty watchable, but I’d happily have traded most of the plot for a story revolving around the MC at the club who proved more engaging than any of the leads; and The Producers just isn’t my thing – the sole moment I actually developed an interest in the film was when the crazy German was on-screen and a brief re-wind of the DVD in order to work out whether I had, in fact, just seen John Barrowman as a dancing Nazi (I had).
In order, I’d probably choose to re-watch Cabaret first, The Producers second, and the others not at all.
