Well, I went to see it and left early, the movie is unbearable. Like you said, there's nothing unfolding, it's just sledgehammering the same idea again and again. What came to mind watching the film is it felt like a musical equivalent of Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
A good version of a drama musical would be the movie Distant Voices, Still Lives. This I would highly recommend.
I'll watch the movie tomorrow so I don't have anything yet on the movie itself, but I want to say I loved the episode and I think you make a super important point about improvisation and lazyness in the screenwriting. I don't know about the film schools in the United States, but here because of French Cinema and Quebec's "cinema vérité", the few courses I took emphasized super loose, spontaneous writing, as well as improvised blocking of shots. The thing though, like jazz, people who can do that successfully have a combination of a huge mental library of visual ideas, strong concepts to explore, rehearsal time, ideas with editing, etc. I think the difficulty of doing that well is not emphasized enough and there's a strong trend right now in Hollywood cinema to pass unthoughtfulness for spontaneity or authenticity, or whatever.
The whole improv thing was something that was really bothersome to me when I took cinema courses. I really liked the freshness of a movie like Pierrot le fou and I was shocked that the lines were "improvised" or written on the spot and that nothing was storyboarded. But the thing is, some stuff that feels "off the cuff" is in fact Godard subtly dissing Hegel or riffing on Flaubert, which of course was not mentioned by the professor. And Godard worked with a great cinematographer and was extremely well versed in painting, so of course he could "improvise".
Same thing with directors like David Cronenberg and Nicolas Winding Refn who don't storyboard, etc. They work with incredible cinematographers and have super clear overall artistic vision so they can allow for some looser approach. But even if they try more experimental things with narrative structure and visuals, they have a certain framework to work with. And sometimes it works okay for lesser movies that are a little bit rough around the edges and not particularly well strung together. But to take lazy writing as an "artistic" starting point is misguided I think, it's kind of a dead end.
Well, I went to see it and left early, the movie is unbearable. Like you said, there's nothing unfolding, it's just sledgehammering the same idea again and again. What came to mind watching the film is it felt like a musical equivalent of Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
A good version of a drama musical would be the movie Distant Voices, Still Lives. This I would highly recommend.
I'll watch the movie tomorrow so I don't have anything yet on the movie itself, but I want to say I loved the episode and I think you make a super important point about improvisation and lazyness in the screenwriting. I don't know about the film schools in the United States, but here because of French Cinema and Quebec's "cinema vérité", the few courses I took emphasized super loose, spontaneous writing, as well as improvised blocking of shots. The thing though, like jazz, people who can do that successfully have a combination of a huge mental library of visual ideas, strong concepts to explore, rehearsal time, ideas with editing, etc. I think the difficulty of doing that well is not emphasized enough and there's a strong trend right now in Hollywood cinema to pass unthoughtfulness for spontaneity or authenticity, or whatever.
The whole improv thing was something that was really bothersome to me when I took cinema courses. I really liked the freshness of a movie like Pierrot le fou and I was shocked that the lines were "improvised" or written on the spot and that nothing was storyboarded. But the thing is, some stuff that feels "off the cuff" is in fact Godard subtly dissing Hegel or riffing on Flaubert, which of course was not mentioned by the professor. And Godard worked with a great cinematographer and was extremely well versed in painting, so of course he could "improvise".
Same thing with directors like David Cronenberg and Nicolas Winding Refn who don't storyboard, etc. They work with incredible cinematographers and have super clear overall artistic vision so they can allow for some looser approach. But even if they try more experimental things with narrative structure and visuals, they have a certain framework to work with. And sometimes it works okay for lesser movies that are a little bit rough around the edges and not particularly well strung together. But to take lazy writing as an "artistic" starting point is misguided I think, it's kind of a dead end.