I’m heading out a bit early for the weekend (yes, the Week in Review is on its way), but before I go I want to give a shout out to some of TCM’s Summer Under the Stars programming coming up this weekend. Across Saturday and Sunday, they’re saluting the two greatest male musical stars of all time, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. I’m a sucker for certain of the Astaire/Rogers films (primarily Swing Time, and probably mostly because I think there’s something interesting about the fact that Fred is essentially a gambling cad who spends the entire movie flirting with Ginger but won’t seal the deal because he has a frumpy fiancee at home), but I’m really more into Gene Kelly.

Among the films screening on Sunday that I’d recommend: the Best Picture winning An American in Paris, directed by Vincente Minnelli and scored to Gershwin; It’s Always Fair Weather, which is essentially the Mad Men of mid-century musicals; and Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the last film Busby Berkeley directed without choreographing. Ball Game is more of a curiosity than anything else; rumor has it, Berkeley was too far in the bottle at that point in his career to really take control, and Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s credits for choreography.

The numbers aren’t “good”, exactly, but intriguingly off. Like the one above, where Kelly and Frank Sinatra sing a song where they tell a number of increasingly unlikely brags about making out with girls on the road and then never calling them. The chorus: thanks to Sinatra leading leading her on and leaving the next day, they sing triumphantly, “the sweetest gal at Vassar’s in the cold, cold ground.” Later, Kelly sings about how he “had to go” when he learned that one paramour was “just 11.” Of course, the cads eventually get their comeupance when they meet Esther Williams and Betty Garrett, but the movie’s a little more interesting in these WTF? moments.

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 the latter’s dance career revolved around the uneviable task of making Fred Astaire’s choreography seem spontaneous and easy. And Charisse also made movies with Astaire––The Band Wagon and Silk Stockings offered two of her biggest roles––but her chemistry with the big baller of ballroom and tap dance was virtually nonexistant. The impossibly leggy, mildly exotic, confident almost to the point of camp Charisse added counterpoint nuance to Kelly’s weird barrel-chested blue-collar ballet. It never felt like it was a perfect pairing, and that was maybe what was exciting about it: as a partner and as a choreographer, Kelly knew how to use and play off their incongruities.

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The above clip, a mashup for scenes from The Bandwagon and Daddy Long Legs set to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal,” is just the latest in a long line of mashups, through which Fred Astaire magically dances from the 1930s, 40s and 50s into the 80s, 90s and beyond. There’s “Fred Astaire’s Billy Jean“, “Fred Astaire Hip Hop,” “Fred Astaire Brings SexyBack,” “Fred Astaire Is Bringing SexyBack,” and surely more I’ve yet to come across.

Although each clip has its nice moments of intertexual collage (I especially like the way the same footage from Royal Wedding is recycled to different ends: in “Billy Jean,” set to the line, “The kid is not my son,” it’s a contemplation of paternity; in “Brings SexyBack,” it’s a placeholder for seduction) “Smooth Criminal” really draws attention to this way this method of mashup makes the entirety of filmed dance history seem less like a timeline than a series of arrows pointing back to the same point. For all of their ability to tap into and inspire the zeitgeist of their respective heydays, dancers like Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake resemble Astaire more than anything else in their contemporary cultures. For whatever reason, the iconography of the solo male dancer is always looking back, as if there’s nothing new do with the male body set to music that Fred Astaire hadn’t thought of.

This theory does give short shrift to Gene Kelly, who had a distinct style and presence that was not chiefly Astairean, but for whatever reason, the evidence suggests he’s been less influential on pop stars of the future. Maybe it’s because, compared to someone like Timberlake, he was built like a boxer, and with the exception of Singin’ in the Rain, his characters were often (gasp!) working class, or at least certainly not the blinged-out party crashers that Astaire tended to play, which make his images so compatible with lines like “VIP, drinks on me,” never mind lyrics that equate seduction to some kind of surreptitious crime. Does Gene Kelly have an analgous modern pop star? And if so, where’s that mashup?

• Chris Thilk points to Mark Bell’s take on that “asinine piece that appeared in The Hollywood Reporter that seems to hang the failure of independent movies on their inability to get a major newspaper reviewer.” Says Bell: “I know that an audience exists for indie film; I am a part of that audience. I don’t think that audience is waiting or needing to be pandered to by the print promotion and corporation whores anymore, though.”
• In a recent New York Times column, Maureen Dowd made an offhanded analogy comparing George W. Bush to the late Gene Kelly. Kelly’s widow was not amused. “To suggest that “George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly” represents not only an implausible transformation but a considerable slight,” fumes Patricia Ward Kelly at the Huffington Post. “If Gene were in a grave, he would have turned over in it.”
• Sean Nelson, star of Lynn Shelton’s SXSW Competition entry My Effortless Brilliance (see review here) blogged his festival experience for The Stranger.  “Though there are several competitions—narrative, documentary, short, etc.—within the festival, the atmosphere among the artists is 100 percent noncompetitive. Even when you’re all drunk.” Via GreenCine Daily.

I saw the new Hairspray yesterday. I don’t want to blow my wad just yet, as I’ll be talking about it with Stu VanAirsdale next week on ReelerTV, but here are a few preliminary thoughts:

1) The John Waters original version of Hairspray appears to be up on YouTube in its entirety, and I’ve embedded one of my favorite chunks above. Penny and Tracy are making out with their new boyfriends in a rat-infested alley. A drunken hobo ambles by, and that’s romantic; Tracy’s mom drives down the alley looking for her daughter, and it’s time to run. Seeking shelter, the kids stumble into a beatnik lair, and stumble right out again when shit gets too weird. It’s the perfect encapsulation of Waters’ nuanced vision of the young vs. old/class vs. race/culture vs. subculture paradigm, and it’s miles beyond anything this new version has up its sleeve. Spoiler alert: the new Hairspray doesn’t even have beatniks.

2) That Zac Efron kid is amazing. He’s the new Gene Kelly. I can’t wait for him to get old and play the dashing American in a postmodern French homage to his earlier successes. At least then maybe my creepy old lady crush will seem a little bit more age appropriate.

3) Not once, in a hundred years of cinema, has a fat suit actually been funny. Prove me wrong and I’ll give you $100.***

***Reward only realizable if you can get me to admit defeat.