Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Like the jazz it depicts, "Kansas City" comes across as an effortless delight guided by an underlying discipline. This fine work lives and breathes before our eyes in the hands of master director Robert Altman, who uses the film less as a conventionally plot-driven vehicle than as a slow Sunday ride through whatever catches his fancy. The result is a movie that succeeds on many levels: as a historical snapshot of a vibrant city, as a tragic dual portrait of two women from different walks of life, even just as a scrapbook of moments, riding on jazz rhythms...
...addition to the touching relationship that develops between Blondie and Carolyn, Altman (who co-wrote the story) presents lingering buffer shots of Seldom's jazz players at the Hey-Hey Club; an amusing ballot-stuffing sequence, headed by the ubiquitous Steve Buscemi as Blondie's sister's main squeeze; and even an odd story line about a young jazz musician and the pregnant 14-year-old he befriends. Rounding off the historical side are various pleasant touches: one political makes a mistake about a friend's wife ("Oh, Bess is Truman's wife!"); Blondie takes Mrs. Stilton...
...course, Altman only spends as much time on the actors in the drama as he does on what many might think the real star of the film: the musicians and their music. In one stunning, rollicking sequence, two jazz musicians duel away: the camera rushes from one to the other, then to both, and finally, plainly, gives up and lets us listen. And the eyes of the jazz musicians alone hold another entire movie with-in the movie. The music functions as a kind of running commentary on the movie: horns roar and seem to laugh cynically as one event...
Some Commusicals did fit the stolid stereotype--Mikhail and Judit shouting, "Let's harvest the beet crop right here!"--but many have an enduring buoyancy. Grigori Alexandrov's pioneering The Jolly Fellows (1934) percolates with jaunty jazz, Cubist compositions and a Dietrichish blond in a party hat. The amazing Midnight Revue (G.D.R., 1962) is a comically cynical parable about the difficulty of making a musical when your producer is not Arthur Freed but a pack of philistine bureaucrats. We can't approve your film, the apparatchiks sing...
PLATTERS Vinyl is thriving in the digital age. Who buys LPs? Among others, jazz aficionados who want vinyl reissues and club DJs who still spin...