Dance | SpoutBlog

Cyd Charisse Dies at 86

June 17, 2008 – 10:39 pm

Why didn’t Cyd Charisse––who died in Los Angeles on Tuesday at the age of 86––ever fully become the Ginger Rogers to Gene Kelly’s Fred Astaire? To compare Charisse directly to Rogers would be unfair; the former was an athletic show-stopper who regularly held down solos seemingly designed to draw attention to their own difficulty, while [...]

By Karina Longworth | Posted in Classics, Music, Obits, Uncategorized | Comments (4)

Fred Astaire’s Smooth Criminal Collapses Space Time Continuum

May 30, 2008 – 11:03 am

Dance mashups have a way of making fifty years of history seem meaningless.

By Karina Longworth | Posted in Classics, Video | Comments (1)

Trade Roughage 12/27/07

December 27, 2007 – 8:00 am

Why the studios have no immediate incentive to end the strike. Plus: Will Smith doesn’t really sympathize with Hitler, silly!

By Karina Longworth | Posted in Hollywood, Music, Obits, Video | Comments (0)

Making Busby Berkeley Sick

December 14, 2007 – 2:30 pm

In my first week as a SpoutBlogger, I linked to Kevin Lee’s video essay on Dario Argento’s Inferno. Twelve weeks later (putting us at last weekend), I met Kevin for the first time in Real Life, and he told me that the next installment of his project has going to investigate one of my favorite [...]

By Karina Longworth | Posted in Classics, Music, Video | Comments (0)

Fossethon. Clip of the Day.

September 25, 2007 – 8:58 am

“He made three great musicals and two of them, Cabaret and All That Jazz, effectively retrofitted the musical for a generation skeptical of artifice, incorporating techniques from the European New Wave and even neorealism. He didn’t only do it first. He did it better than just about anyone, and, despite is fame, he remains under-appreciated [...]

By Karina Longworth | Posted in Clip of the Day, Community, Music | Comments (2)