Musical Saturday: All that jaz[1979]

I don’t know about you, but I usually have certain expectations about movies, especially if they are classics or if I heard they are very good.

Whenever I thought of All that jazz, I was sure I was going to get a lot of dancing, music, Broadway style performances and maybe a little romance to keep the story going. I imagined a happy, entertaing movie. Was it? Not at all.

Don’t get me wrong, the best parts of it involved dancing and the fact that Roy Scheider perfectly interprets the character, being charismatic and loveable, but it has so many flaws.

There are so many subtleties that the story and the director wants to put in, and the bad thing is you can easily tell which are them...a great movie doesn’t let you see that. Sometimes it gets confusing (the hospital scenes), but in the end I understood what he was trying to say, I just didn’t like the way he did it. The creator had so many ideas and he just didn’t know how to put it all together in a flowing, interesting way...it was a mess.

Now I know it is based on Bob Fosse’s life and it really is an interesting story, but for me it just didn’t do any justice to it. Maybe because I’m european and I probably don’t get the whole Broadway-American feel to it (although I usually like it). I’ve seen so many reviews saying it is the best musical of all time....I must beg to differ; they probably haven’t seen Singin’ in the rain or Chicago or An American in Paris.

It may be a classic and if you are a movie buff, you will find certain great points in it, but I wasn’t very impressed by it...I really had to use my patience to get through all of it!

p.s If you are a dancer or like the art of it, please do watch it, if only for the dancing parts...everything is wonderful in that aspect: the choreography, the people, the slow, sexy way they move their body...it is a pleasure to watch!