All That Jazz

[mutinyco]

All That Jazz came out on DVD yesterday. This is required viewing. Not only do I challenge everybody at this site, but I don't believe there's a working filmmaker today who's capable of making a film like this.

[Sigur Rós]

How to do 'the jazz hands'

[SoNowThen]

I'm gonna blind buy this.
Lenny is one of my favorite movies, so I trust Fosse.

[bigperm]

A few friends and myself watched it last night. It is one of my personal favorites and all though there is a lot to say about it, I think the editing is top notch and great. Possibly an overlooked aspect of it, but it is unique to some degree. Great movie!

[Gold Trumpet]

8 1/2 remade. Goes through the artistic and heart crisis of Fosse and naturally, given its influences, repeats many of the same themes of 8 1/2. Its a noble movie, but cannot live up to or surpass the genius of 8 1/2 and soon enough, it gets repititive a little on saying the same things and trying to make up with it on inspired filmmaking. 8 1/2 is inspired filmmaking at its best and All That Jazz loses its battle because it doesn't push its story deeper instead.

~rougerum

[Vile5]

8 1/2 remade.

maybe an american 8 1/2?
anyway i liked it

[mutinyco]

As usual, we disagree. Yes, it has an 8 1/2 element to it, but it goes a lot deeper than Fellini ever did. I always thought the conclusion of 8 1/2 -- and I'm saying this feeling it's probably one of the 3 best I've ever seen -- was pretty weak. Watching All That Jazz again on DVD last night dispelled any reservations I ever had. The thing is a masterpiece and stands on its own. It was 20 years ahead of its time. It's influenced everything from David Fincher's videos to the movie of Chicago. It also holds its own against 2 other masterpieces from 1979 -- Apocalypse Now and Manhattan.

[Gold Trumpet]

How'd you think the ending was weak? In my mind, the intention was to be weak, but a cop out ending like Adaptation that only spoke for author not being able to actually write a purposeful ending because of his own confusion. The ending to All That Jazz, a 10 minute or so variety program of song and dance celebrating the man's death was just a repeat of "Yea, he's going to die" being the repeated message in the lyrics and symbolism of the dance. A musical moment (dated in its 70s bonanza of fashion) that ended, punctually enough, with him going to the great beyond and dying. 8 1/2 was of pure ambiguilty in giving thought to how the artist's fate would turn out even as life was crumbling; All That Jazz was just a glitzy farewell to his life.

~rougerum

[mutinyco]

I didn't like Adaptation, so I won't bother with it. I thought the finale of All That Jazz was jaw-droppingly brilliant. Yeah, a song and dance celebrating his death. Rock on! That's so far beyond comprehension -- so far beyond bad taste that it defies anything you could throw at it. Having Ben Vereen singing the Everley Brothers and changing the lyrics to reflect Gideon's (Fosse's) situation is flat out brilliant. Fosse was creating a song and dance out of his own death! 8 1/2 ended with Guido rediscovering his inspiration. It had a whimsical ending. The only connection the 2 films have is that they're both about male artists dealing with their sexuality and art in a time of crisis. They don't look alike or feel alike. A more reasonable juxtaposition might be Woody Allen's Stardust Memories which even imitated the basic look of 8 1/2. Jazz is the real deal.

[Gold Trumpet]

I wasn't asking if you liked Adaptation or not, but Adaptation and 8 1/2 had similiar endings. You may have seen a whimsical ending of Guido rediscovering his own inspiration, but I saw an ending purely on ambiguilty of Guido trying to hide from all his real life pressures and creating something out of fantasy and out of the fantastic that was maybe soothing for him in thought at that given moment of distress, but wasn't going to solve any problems. The question brought up in the movie, during when all his problems seemed to hit him hard, that was he going to change and was his airy promises and sorrow for his wife true? Or were they as hollow and stylistic as the misconceived stories he was harboring though out the movie that essentially was crap.

Your assessment of the ending for All That Jazz is just a hyped of way of saying "I love it!" without really explaining why.

~rougerum

[mutinyco]

That was Guido's solution to everything: escape into imagination. Only there could he make things right. Only there could his wife forgive and accept him for who he was -- though in real life she must have because he and Messina stayed together. But ultimately, for all its style and structure 8 1/2 is really pretty shallow. It deals with Fellini's life, but offers little or no conclusions regarding the episodes. It's about a big time director undergoing a crisis, not much more.

All That Jazz was about a man who treats everybody and everything like shit except his work. The episodes add up to portray a man who is completely unrepentant about his life. Fosse made it nearly a decade before his real death and was straight up saying at the time that he was on the path to destruction and didn't care. He was going to smoke, drink, fuck and work himself into the ground regardless of who he hurt in the process. It's a much more naked and revealing film. It's dealing with a far more interesting subject -- mortality in relation to a man's work. He was right. His work has lived on.

The ending was brilliant because of its audacity. Fosse was interpreting his death through his work in both choreography and film. He was predating himself. He was showing his girlfriend moving on. His wife left with his legacy. His daughter awkwardly growing up with budding sexuality. He was showing catastrophe as celebration. Joe needed the biggest fuck of all -- death. That's what Jessica Lange was. She was the most beautiful, the sexiest bitch he could imagine. The whole film is a flirtation with her beauty. He finally gives in at the end. And the whole thing is done without an ounce of sentimentailty. Gideon, dispite being a brilliant artist and being loved by many, is nothing more than another corpse in a body bag at the end.

[Gold Trumpet]

The reason I do accept 8 1/2 as shallow but with more depth than All That Jazz is because of the context to how All That Jazz is shown, a context that makes All That Jazz inferior drama. The ending, as cute as the idea may be, is reptitive and long winded when it didn't need to be. The kid and girlfriend coming into their own song and dance only makes things heavier as they spell out his problems and weaknesses. Its gimme drama without much ambiguilty. An idea destroyed by how blunt everything is seen in the career of an artist, a man who is suppose to work with blurring the edges. All That Jazz never achieves a perfection of identifying the problem without spelling out.

Fellini's great success is that he works the film in the superficial because it is the identity of the problem of the filmmaker. He achieves the fantastic in dramatizing the pressure felt by the modern day artist without trying to punctuate much of anything. A film by Fellini later in life, Satyricon, does work with superficiality without much else and feels like a work done by Guido in his daze. 8 1/2, though, speaks about superficiality in great depth.

~rougerum

[mutinyco]

Your response makes no rational sense. Jazz doesn't work because it's deep, but without ambiguity -- whereas 8 1/8 is great because it's superficial, but ambiguous? That's plain dumb.

I'd say the only person who would disavow this film's accuracy and make comments as you have would be a critic, not an actual artist. Considering that you use a quote from a critic as your signature, not an artist, that makes perfect sense. You just don't get it.

As I said, I'd probably rank 8 1/2 as #3 of my all-time favorites. But I'd damn-well include Jazz in my top 10. Even Kubrick was once quoted as suggesting Jazz might be the best film ever made.

[cowboykurtis]

bought it yesterday -- after watching it again i went out and blind bought some knee high leather boots -- my toes are twinking as we speak.

[Ravi]

My dad has the soundtrack LP and I've always been intrigued by the pictures on the back.  I just requested it from the library, which has the DVD on order.