Singin' In The Rain

[bonanzataz]

Best fucking movie musical ever!

Funny thing about me is, I hate stage musicals, but I loved filmed musicals. Every one, I just can't resist them. They're too much fun! Thougths?

[xerxes]

you're a paradox

[bonanzataz]

por-quoi?

[Ghostboy]

This is definitely my favorite musical (and I do love film musicals, for the record). It's just so infectiously joyful. And damn funny. You can tell Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen were having so much fun coming up with this stuff...

I think PTA's Paper Bag video was greatly influenced by some of the shots in this.

[bonanzataz]

my favorite part is when Donald O'Connor is singing "Make Em Laugh" and he flips off the walls. I want to make a movie musical where nothing sad happens and it's there to showcase talent and make people happy. I really like how there's no trick editing and you can see these guys are really doing all this shit. It's fucking awesome.

[Duck Sauce]

Donald O'Connor flipping was unexpected. It really makes you think that back then, you had to actually be talented to be a star. You had to be able to do it all, not just grace the covers of magazines.

[mogwai]

check this ww golf gti commercial featuring that famous scene:

link

[Ravi]

I love this film too.    The dancing, the comedy, the music, its all so amazing.

[MacGuffin]

check this ww golf gti commercial featuring that famous scene:

link

Breakin' in the 'Rain'
An ad firm turned Gene Kelly's classic splash dance into a hip-hop workout for VW, and it's been driving Web fans wild ever since. Source: Los Angeles Times

Kenny Kong, a 22-year-old undergrad who gives break dancing lessons to fellow UC Berkeley students, clicked open a forwarded link to a new Volkswagen commercial — the one popping up on plenty of hip-hop blogs and other Web threads these past few weeks.

"A friend sent me the same link last week," he said, as he watched the opening shot of Gene Kelly humming a few bars to himself during a rain shower on an empty street. But Kong still digs it.

"I started busting up the first time I saw this part," he said when, suddenly, the "Singin' in the Rain" melody grinds to an out-of-gas halt, the drip-drops of a dance remix drop, and Kelly's classic gait takes on a can't-stop body-rock that's one for the ages.

Yes, Kong knows it's just another slick, computer-generated car ad, just another Madison Avenue love letter to Hollywood Boulevard that's so far off the cultural references of his own street cred that he's never heard of Gene Kelly or his 1952 MGM musical. No matter.

"It's tight," Kong said while imitating some of Kelly's moves with his own Jell-O-jointed arms. "It's real tight."

That kind of approval from young, clued and coveted consumers like Kong has been a pleasant surprise for Volkswagen — but underscores just how radically the advertising marketplace is being remade by the Internet and so-called viral video.

Volkswagen U.K. had commissioned the commercial unveiling the new GTI Golf for British outlets, where it premiered in late January. It's rare for one market's TV ad to air in a different country because of cultural nuances and other complications such as licensing fees, so a U.S. broadcast wasn't even considered, said Annouchka Behrmann, speaking for DDB London, the advertising agency that masterminded the commercial.

But in the end, it was precisely the commercial's inaccessibility to U.S. airwaves, along with its youth-connected creativity, that unexpectedly played into Volkswagen's hands by also playing into youth marketing's zeitgeist moment: young people's rejection of traditional media and the advent of alternative advertising.

In many instances, "alternative" has become synonymous with the Internet, where viral videos — be it a Bush-bashing animation or a regular multimillion-dollar car commercial — can easily cruise at today's broadband speeds.

"The hip-hop and break-dancing community is more connected to the Internet than anything else right now, so I guess that's the best way to reach me," Kong agreed. "Other than that, you'll have to use word-of-mouth."

That's why forwarded Internet content from friends is so effective. It combines a dynamic, ever-changing medium with an old, trusted one.

AdCritic.com editor Jim Hanas, whose subscription service tracks the most popular commercials seen among professionals in the ad industry, said that the spot stayed on the site's daily Top 10 list for an unusual number of days.

"I can see why the commercial has been so popular," he said, noting a car commercial trend that includes a recent Mustang ad featuring the late Steve McQueen in his "Bullitt" role.

Hanas also said the ad has a great heritage message for a tag line — "The Original, Updated" — which mirrors the cultural attitude that can also be heard in the commercial's dance track.

"We wanted [the ad] to be a bit of a surprise when the new elements happened, hence starting the track exactly like the original," said Neil Claxton, one-half of the British electronic music act Mint Royale, who updated "Singin' in the Rain" with a decidedly break-beat kick.

Getting the rights to remix an institutionalized on-screen wonderland didn't come easily.

"We did have long negotiations with Turner Movies, the Gene Kelly Trust, EMI [Music] and Warner Bros. to make this," Behrmann said. She said Volkswagen's payment amount for the licenses was "significant."

The hardest part, according to Behrmann, was persuading Kelly's widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, to sign on.

"We ended up writing her a really nice letter," Behrmann says. "We wrote how we thought Gene Kelly was a very forward-thinking dancer during his time, and if he were dancing today, perhaps this is what his dancing would look like."

Kelly's widow eventually approved the concept, the final art (the set was re-created at Shepperton Studios in the U.K.) and even the break-dancing and popping moves, performed by three dancers: L.A.'s David "Elsewhere" Bernal and Crumbs and the U.K.'s Jay Walker.

Each dance sequence retraces Kelly's exact path in the movie, so that the digital mapping of Kelly's face could work in each frame of the commercial. A few times a prosthetic mask of Kelly's face was used for the wider shots, but most of the time the dancers who filled in the new moves "were actually wearing goggles," Behrmann said.

The interest in the commercial has spurred Volkswagen U.K. to launch an interactive version of the spot, complete with behind-the-scenes footage, on its website this month.

Hanas said the organic spread of the Volkswagen spot was key to its phenomenon — and nearly impossible to reproduce on demand.

"Marketers are looking to create content that behaves like something that gets passed around organically on the Internet," Hanas said. "That's hard to do."

Hard to do for marketers, easier for everyone else.

Case in point: Volkswagen's Internet success with this GTI commercial comes just a month after the company put in considerable effort insisting it had nothing to do with a spec spot (a commercial created strictly for a director's demo reel) that was forwarded again and again with lightning speed.

Created by the British directing team Lee and Dan, the spot featured a suicide bomber detonating a bomb inside a Volkswagen Polo — a car so strong that, as the punch line suggests, it contains the explosion, which kills only the bomber.

As advertisers try to tame the unpredictable currents of the Internet for their own use, expect Kong's ilk to mature just as fast, spotting those marketing techniques from miles away.

Fortunately for advertisers, sometimes these young consumers spot it and still like it.

A few days later, via e-mail, Kong offers this breakdown on the ad: "In other commercials, like the recent Coca-Cola commercial, they use hip-hop — whether it be music with scratching or B-boys busting power moves — just for the sake of having it there. But in this commercial they use it as a metaphor for their car: remixing the original. It has a greater purpose within the commercial."

Savvy stuff, but what did he think about the car?

"I don't know," he said later on his cellphone. "I actually didn't get a good look at the car."

[matt35mm]

check this ww golf gti commercial featuring that famous scene:

link

That's.  Huh.  I still don't know quite what to think about that commercial.  I had to watch it a couple of times and I'm still pretty impressed with the special effects.  I guess it's a bit of gimmick, but damn, what a gimmick.

[MacGuffin]

AFI Likes "Singin' in the Rain"

Those list-loving folks at the American Film Institute are hap-hap-happy again.

Singin' in the Rain, the 1952 MGM tuner codirected by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly and starring Kelly alongside Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds, tops the list of 25 greatest movie musicals unveiled by the AFI Sunday.

Although it wasn't recognized as such at the time--it failed to snag an Oscar nomination for Best Picture or even the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy-- Singin' in the Rain has become one of Hollywood's most adored films. The behind-the-scenes story of the transition from silent pictures to talkies edged out the more-decorated West Side Story, which received the Oscar for Best Picture in 1961.

Rounding out the top 10: The Wizard of Oz (1939); The Sound of Music (1965); Cabaret (1972); Mary Poppins (1964); A Star Is Born (1954); My Fair Lady (1964); An American in Paris (1951); and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).

Judy Garland was the most represented female star on the list, landing a trio of musicals in the Top 10 (The Wizard of Oz, A Star Is Born and Meet Me in St. Louis), edging out Julie Andrews (The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins).

On the guy side, Kelly had three films make the cut, Singin', An American in Paris and On The Town (number 19), while hoofing rival Fred Astaire scored with Top Hat (1935) at 15 and The Band Wagon (1953) at 17. His Top Hat costar and frequent leading lady Ginger Rogers also had two films on the list--she was among the ensemble in 1933's 42nd Street, which ranked at 13.

The movie musical has regularly been pronounced dead since its heyday in the '50s and '60s, but a half-dozen of AFI's Top 25 came after 1970.

Bob Fosse was responsible for three of them: Cabaret, 2002's Oscar-winning Chicago, based on the Fosse-choreographed stage musical, and 1979's All That Jazz at 14.

Meanwhile, 1978's Grease was the word at 20, while Beauty and the Beast was the only 'toon to make the rundown. The Disney classic, which was later adapted into a hit Broadway show, is the only animated feature to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award; it ranked 22nd on the AFI list.

Finally, Baz Luhrmann's epic 2001 tragicomedy Moulin Rouge! came in at 25. For better or worse, the musical, showcasing the vocal talents of Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, sparked a renewed interest in the musical genre, paving the way for the big-screen versions of Chicago, The Producers, Rent and the forthcoming Hairspray and Sweeney Todd, among others.

The latest AFI list was winnowed down by a jury of 500 directors, screenwriters, actors, editors, composers, critics and historians solicited by the prestigious nonprofit organization dedicated to celebrating and preserving cinema. Voters were asked to submit their choices from a ballot of 250 nominated films and were allowed to write in any movies they felt were slighted.

The honorees were revealed in a one-night-only special presentation Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl, during which director John Mauceri and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra performed excerpts of the winning musicals accompanied by projections of scenes of some of those films' most iconic moments.

The Greatest Movie Musicals list is considered a sidebar to AFI's 100 Years. . . series, which was started eight years ago and has included such programs as AFI's 100 Stars, 100 Laughs, 100 Thrills, 100 Passions, and 100 Songs among others.

Here's the complete list of the AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals:


1. Singin' in the Rain, (1952), MGM
2. West Side Story, (1961), United Artists
3. The Wizard of Oz, (1939), MGM
4. The Sound of Music, (1965), 20th Century Fox
5. Cabaret, (1972), Allied Artists
6. Mary Poppins, (1964), Disney
7. A Star Is Born, (1954), Warner Bros.
8. My Fair Lady, (1964), Warner Bros.
9. An American In Paris, (1951), MGM
10. Meet Me in St. Louis, (1944), MGM
11. The King and I, (1956), 20th Century Fox
12. Chicago, (2002), Miramax
13. 42nd Street, (1933), Warner Bros.
14. All That Jazz, (2002), Miramax
15. Top Hat, (1935), RKO
16. Funny Girl, (1968), Columbia
17. The Band Wagon, (1953), MGM
18. Yankee Doodle Dandy, (1942), Warner Bros.
19. On the Town, (1949), MiraMGM
20. Grease, (1978), Paramount
21. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, (1954), MGM
22. Beauty and the Beast, (1991), Disney
23. Guys and Dolls, (1955), MGM
24. Show Boat, (1936), Universal
25. Moulin Rouge!, (2001), 20th Century Fox

[pete]

as soon as I saw the title, I knew moulin rouge is going to be the last one on the list--it's a shitty movie but I knew the AFI would genuflect it as an attempt to seem relevant.  I'd like to see some marx brother movies in there.  or bollywood movies.  or that michael jackson movie "are you scared yet".