A number of our bloggingfriends have picked up the Alphabetical Favorites meme. The idea is that you list 26 favorite movies, one for each letter of the alphabet. Some people are adding comments, but I think it’s more interesting to just toss the titles out there, to see how they fit together within a single list and how they match up to other lists. Also, it’s been a hell of a week and I’m exhausted. I will say this: after not being able to think of a single movie beginning with the letter “J” that I enjoy more than Joe Versus the Volcano, I noticed that several commenters at the House Next Door had slotted the same film in the same face. So much for Todd McCarthy’s contention in his Doubt review that John Patrick Shanley’s first directorial effort was “misguided.”
It hasn’t been terribly uncommon since the late ’60s for musicians to get behind the camera, whether for a straight concert film, a tour documentary or some kind of silly narrative focused on themselves and their bands. Jerry Garcia co-directed The Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa co-directed 200 Motels, The Beatles collectively co-directed The Magical Mystery Tourand separately John, Paul and Ringo has each taken the helm on a film project, some more artsy (John and Yoko’s cinematic collaborations, like Up Your Legs Forever) or less self-focused (Ringo’s Marc Bolan doc, Born to Boogie) than others.
Now it’s a little more common for musicians to become directors of fictional films that aren’t so reflexive. Many don’t even have anything to do with music at all. And many are so awful that it’s safe to say the filmmaker should stick to music making. This week, IFC releases the directorial debut of Madonna (Filth and Wisdom), and Beastie Boy Adam Yauch has a new basketball documentary (Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot) hitting stores, so we’d like to celebrate by looking at some other musicians who turned filmmaker, for better or worse.
We haven’t done an installment of The Micro Five in a couple of weeks, so let me give you a refresher: the basic idea is not to create a definitive (read: totally subjective) Top Five list, but to pick a super-specific topic and examine how five films handled it differently. You can read previous installments here, here, here and here.
This time out, we’re looking at musical numbers of the 80s. The Hollywood musical is thought in some quarters to have lost its way in the late 70s/early 80s (although recent reappraisals have been kinder to the era that produced curiosities like One From the Heart.) Still, the influence of MTV on all aspects of 80s culture (but especially youth culture) by the end of the decade led to an normalization of song and dance scenes (but especially dance scenes) in non-musicals. See my take on five numbers involving John Hughes, Spike Lee and Christopher Walken, after the jump.
God, I miss the heyday of Prince. But this is not about me: I offer you this clip of the day, from Purple Rain–in which Prince breakdances, vogues and licks his lips at his girl in the crowd, all the while lipsyncing “I Would Die 4 U” whilst wearing high-waisted leather pants and the puffiest man-blouse I’ve ever seen–in honor of Jeffrey Wells. Today on Hollywood Elsewhere, Wells challenged any critic who disagrees with him to a deathmatch. Sort of.
I would like to challenge any film critic or blogger who strongly disagrees with me about the excellence of In the Valley of Elah (particularly in the snobby-ass, Paul Haggis-hating, nyah-nyah manner in which Slant’s Ed Gonzalez has recently expressed himself) to a bare-knuckles, John L. Sullivan-styled fist fight. I really and truly would be willing to bleed and get bruised and maybe knocked down over this. I know what I know and right is right, and I for one would be willing to stand up and go to the mat to defend my cinematic principles.
Now, at this point, you’re thinking, “Alright! Critic on critic violence!” And then, “So why’d Karina match this blurb up with a Prince video? Has she lost it? Let’s see some shirtless Brad Pitt!!! “
Hold your horses. Check out Wells’ very next paragraph:
If I wasn’t such a wuss, I mean. Saying I’d “like” to challenge an Elah hater to a fist fight doesn’t mean I’m doing that. My knuckles would get all swollen and I wouldn’t be able to type for a few days, and then where would I be? I haven’t been in a fight since the seventh grade.
So obviously, he’s not really willing to go to the mat for Haggis at all. I’m not doubting Wells’ Elah love; in fact, I admire his deliberate use of masculine posturing as misdirection. It makes his puffy man-bloused statement of passion seem all the more sincere by comparison.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
A number of our 
