2022 Chita Rivera Awards Nominees Announced

by Nathaniel R

The Chita Rivera Awards took time off due to COVID but they're back with a grab bag mix of the 2020 and 2022 Tony seasons and the 2021 movie year  The awards are named after Broadway's high kicking living legend, and they honor choreographers of shows and individual dancers. They also honor movies that involve dancing (though not individual dancers) though weirdly not tv shows! Here are their movie nominations this year...

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Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

by Nathaniel R

Jane Powell is no Julie Andrews but she does take a spin on a hilltop while singing in MGM's "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers"

Our film title this week on Hit Me With Your Best Shot is Seven Brides for Seven Brothers which is streaming on HBOMax. We knew we'd need to chase The Godfather with something lighter so we opted for a musical. So saddle up, and ride into this absurdly problematic but bouncy and colorful comedy after the jump...

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Doc Corner: Three new dance documentaries

By Glenn Dunks

Dance is such a physical art. It is a beautiful medium, of course, but one that doesn’t always allow for great documentaries about it. Watching it can be a divine experience (Wim Wenders’ Pina, for instance), but to get into the nuts and bolts of the craft is difficult. A trio of new documentaries highlight these strengths and weaknesses. All three put their focus on black dancers, and all have strong queer themes as they navigate a creative space emerging through the pain of racism and the AIDS epidemic. Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters by Rosalynde LeBlanc and Tom Hurwitz, Jamila Wignot’s Ailey, and Firestarter — The Story of Bangarra by Wayne Blair and Nel Minchin each highlight the bodies and the stories. But it’s the former about the iconic titular choreographer and one of his most famous works that best captures the athleticism, the drama and the intimacy of dance...

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Review: "In the Heights" sets the bar high for modern movie musicals

by Nathaniel R

A young man stares out of his bodega window, his favourite block coming alive in the reflection. This shot of Usnavi, our leading man and guide into the film version of Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights is already beloved and with good reason. It gives you character (this man is something of a dreamer, caught between two places), world-building (the vibrant Latinx community of Washington Heights) and joyful genre specificity (the musical). It's not even the first clever moment in the movie at that, but something In the Heights builds up in its ever-escalating opening number after already providing you with gorgeous aerial shots romanticizing NYC as 'a city made of music', sounds from hoses, traffic, manhole covers, and alarm clocks as musical accompaniment, and introducing us to most of the main characters.

Above all else this visual beat as well as the larger song sequence that contains it, instills immediate confidence that the creative team, especially director Jon M. Chu (of Crazy Rich Asians fame) understand the oft-forgotten cinematic language of the film musical...

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Showbiz History: Shirley & Bill, Julianne & Eddie, Slumdog & Oscars

6 random things that happened on this day, February 22nd in showbiz history...

1921 Fellini's muse Giulietta Masina (Nights of Cabiria, La Strada) is born in San Giorgia di Plano, Italy. But more on her tonight for her Centennial.

1935 The Little Colonel opens in theaters. The movie featured the first interracial dance in an American movie in the famous staircase tap dance scene between tiny Shirley Temple and trailblazing entertainer Bill Robinson. The innocuous scene was somehow controversial (the 1930s, natch) and was reportedly cut out of the movie when it played in the South...

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