I’ve just been to see Hairspray – a cinematic version of a Broadway Smash – well I don’t know if it was a box office smash but it won lots of awards. It’s a musical set in Baltimore in 1962 about rock and roll and a plump girl who takes a rock and roll show by storm with her energy. It’s all against the backdrop of the great leap forward in civil rights for blacks.
It isn’t the kind of thing that I’d normally go out of my way to see – I went and saw it as a ‘family’ film. I thought it was bloody fantastic. It’s a kind of fantasy of social action and social progress at a time when basic justice broke through against what Martin Luther King called (if I’ve got the quote right) the sweltering heat of injustice.
I totally loved it.
And here’s a bit of YouTube of what I presume was the Broadway production.
Worth it just to go to see the most beautiful woman in the history of the human race -Michelle Pfeiffer….
She’s very good in it I reckon. She looks good too – no doubt about it. Though I once read an interview with her in which she said that she didn’t think she looked too good and that she thought she looked like a duck. I can see what she means. IMHO she never looked better than in Dangerous Liaisons! But then I’m a bit of a sucker for that kind of gear!
“Though I once read an interview with her in which she said that she didnt think she looked too good”
She’s insincere, and a liar……. :-)
Here’s the science to prove it:
There was a study done of the faces of beautiful women, quantifying the ratio of the width of the mouth to the width of the nose, attempting to find the perfect proportions for the perfect face of feminine beauty (the ratio turns out to be something like 1.7). The movie star with the most perfect proportions for feminine facial beauty, based on this measure, turns out to be Michelle Pfeiffer.
Doesn’t prove she’s insincere. Beautiful women thinking they’re not. I think there are quite a few around JC.
She looked pretty stunning in Lady Hawke!!!
I hear this new one is very good but you should also see the John Waters original. He wrote it, directed the film in the 80s, then it went to Broadway, then they remade it. I love that film.
I too liked Michelle Pfeiffer but as for the film, I hated it. It was too noisy, had the wrong kind of music for me and Travolta was an absolute bore. Perhaps I am an old square or I was not in the mood but my friends all hated it too. If you want to see terrific movie go to see Lucky Miles or As it was in Heaven. Although the subject matter was unpleasant, I also liked This is England and Jammed. Byt Hairspray – yuk!
Thanks Fred,
I might have even seen Hairspray in the same cinema as you – the new multiplex in Canberra. And it was definitely too loud. John Travolta was a bit odd I’ll grant you, but I liked him. I was quite moved by the story – fantastical as it was.
And thanks for the other tips.
Yes, Amanda, I have an emotional attachment to the John Waters original, which I saw many times, so I’d feel I was betraying its memory by seeing the remake. How could I hope for anyone to top Sonny Bono and Debbie Harry playing Amber’s parents, or Pia Zadora as a beatnik chick, and Ricky Lake’s first glorious sashay onto Corny Collins’ dancefloor to do The Maddison, and the host of other John Waters regulars, including Divine, making up the rest of the cast. Magical stuff, that had me dancing out of the cinema each time I saw it: although, I recall in 1988 a Hoyts cinema strike when I was sorely tempted to cross a picket line in order to take a friend along to their first (and probably my fourth or fifth) viewing. Luckily solidarity prevailed: that, after all, seemed to be the way to stay true to the message of the film