The MoFo Musicals Countdown - Preliminary Thread

You must have a really strong ballot in the works if a 8/10 movie won't make it. I seen where you said you watched 350 musicals... impressive...I don't know how many I've watched???

Love Calamity Jane and most likely will be making my ballot. It was my nomination in the first Western HoF we ever did (it didn't win). BTW I like your new avatar. I have to find me a musical themed avatar to get into the spirit of things.

Agreed. I hope people won't be shoehorning music movies for their ballots. Seems each genre countdown there's a tendency to do that.

Now, kinda realised that Flashdance (1983) is not for this countdown.

__________________
"Population don't imitate art, population imitate bad television." W.A.
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." M.T.

Man. I wanna play but this is complicated for me.
I have particular feelings about musicals.
Like, for me, a jukebox-musical couldn't really make this list because it is inherently weaker than any musical with original music.
Do the actors actually have to burst into song? Is a movie a Musical when it has a lot of music in it but it's all diegetic?
How does an animated musical scale versus a live-action musical (yes, that really matters to me because of the dance and choreography and costumes and sets, etc.)? Can I really compare The Little Mermaid to Cabaret?
Do Muppet Movie musicals count and if so, at how many cents on the dollar versus one with live singers/dancers/etc?
How many songs does a movie have to have to qualify? Streets Of Fire, for example, has only a few songs and they are all performed by bands in the film, but those bands are also characters in the film, so...?

These are my thoughts.
I have already started compiling a list. FWIW, so far, no jukebox-musicals, no animated, no muppets, no diegetic music... and no Streets Of Fire.

By the way, I did see the definition in the first post but most of my head-scratching still applies.

Wait tell we do the Top 100 Cleavage Countdown

I definitely have my own personal ideas of what is or isn't a musical (and I'm much stricter in my definition of it than I am with most other genres) but that said, what I always find most interesting about these Hall's is watching the total fruitlessness of trying to agree on a definition of anything. It's always going to be too wide or too narrow for someone. Which is why the solution for me has always been to just remove the guiderails and let the people voting dictate what counts. If no one else agrees, than it's not likely going to appear on the final list anyways, and if a lot of people agree, and a questionable one ranks, even highly...than doesn't that say something about what a musical is? That's something interesting, even if I personally think the inclusion might be totally stupid.



Now I wouldn't for the life of me consider Saturday Night Fever a musical....but if it showed on a greatest musical list, while I would have my personal disagreements, just the act of it showing on the list in the first place says something. Maybe it's appearance would be completely based on the ignorance of everyone else, or maybe it would show that people just view how the music functions in that movie in a different way than me and I am the one left out in the cold. But that in itself is what generates discussion, which I would hope to think is the important part of any of this. Ultimately, who really cares about the list or the rankings. It's what the list and the rankings mean in regards to what a musical is. Or what we value in a movie in general.

Personally, I agree with all that for selecting musicals for my own ballot. I'll add, I won't include music bios. I hope you will participate as I've enjoyed reading your thoughtful balanced post...and we need support for these countdowns to keep them viable.

When we did the Western Countdown a friend, gbgoodies said she didn't like westerns BUT she watched a bunch of them in prep for the countdown. She found that westerns are very diversified in style and story and so discovered a number of westerns that she loved. I'd suggest doing that and diving in and discovering the musical genre, you might end up finding some new favorites that way.

Also, since everyone has their own ideas on what counts as a musical, trying to decide on uniform rules on what's allowed and what's not allowed will just lead to endless discourse and I doubt we'd all come to an understanding by the end of it. I think not having restrictions and having everyone agree not to have meltdowns if they find a film out of place in the final rankings is really the way to go for these lists. It's not a huge deal to me though, in all fairness. I mean, if the restrictions prevent me from voting for a film I really like, then so be it. Just shrug it off and move on.

__________________
IMDb
Letterboxd

I'm not a fan of removing countdown guidelines and letting people vote for whatever they feel matches the countdown's theme. Sounds like anarchy. IMO that would result in a crap list. For many of us, making a coherent list is as important as the 'party fun' aspect of the reveal.

If I had not insisted on two noir countdowns (classic and neo noir) but instead had said go ahead and vote for whatever you think is noir, what would've been generated by that would've been a hodge-podge list of crime films. Thus burying the chances of all those great classic noirs of ever making the list.

The only time I think a no guidelines countdown works is for something like comedy (which we did do that way) and if we ever do romance. Thursday Next has chosen well with her guidelines, I think they will work just fine for the countdown.

Verdicts on these? They're the ones not tagged musical on imdb but tagged music that might qualify for the countdown and my list: Nashville 1975, The Music Room 1958, This Is Spinal Tap 1984, Inside Llewyn Davis 2013, The Red Shoes 1948, I'm Not There 2007, The Harder They Come 1972, Amadeus 1984, Almost Famous 2000, The Producers 1967, The Blue Angel 1930, A Woman Is a Woman 1961, Bound for Glory 1976, O Brother, Where Art Thou? 2000, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story 2007. EDIT: Very strange I'm not able to list things in a post anymore it just defaults to a paragraph.

__________________
"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

They have to sing. But it can be on a stage. It doesn't have to be random songs in the middle of conversations or whatever.

I would say no, especially not if the characters aren't singing.

I don't know if you can, but I can. The Little Mermaid > Cabaret. See?

They had damn well better because I'm planning to vote for one, but I see no reason why singing animated characters would count but singing puppets wouldn't.

Obviously this is going to be up to your discretion and Thursday has already said she's not going to weigh in on eligibility for every movie because she hasn't seen all of them. The way I'm handling it is this:

1. Do the characters sing throughout the film or is it just one or two instances of singing?
2. How important is music to the story?

For example, I'm considering A Mighty Wind because there is singing throughout - by most of the characters - and because the music is integral to the film's story. The is no story without it and the songs in the movie were even created for it. On the other hand, I'm not considering The Bodyguard because although one of the main characters is a pop star, much of the music is television footage of her singing rather than her actually singing in the scenes (though there are several instances of that as well). Also there's only one other named character that sings in the movie and she only sings once. As to the importance of the music, if you replaced the pop star with any other type of major celebrity the story would still work so it's not really that important.

__________________

I'm up to 363 musicals seen based on imdb's classifications. The oldest musical I have seen is 1927's The Jazz Singer and the newest is This Is Me... Now from this year. The shortest feature musical I have seen is Pardon Us (1931), which is 54 minutes long. The longest is Fiddler on the Roof, which is 3 hours and 1 minute. The highest rated is The Lion King with an imdb rating of 8.5 and the lowest rated is Cats with a 2.8 rating on imdb. There are fifty musicals that I rate a 9 or higher, so half of them won't make my ballot.

This is a great way to discover some excellent musicals...Nothing to buy, no commitments. Check it out and broaden your musical movie pallet: https://www.movieforums.com/communit...ad.php?t=70376

So does that mean films like The Doors, Rocketman, and Bohemian Rhapsody are eligible? I didn't think so but I'm no expert.

I agree with you and I don't think a lot of questionable choices will really impact it anyways. I could be wrong though.

The way I see it, Spinal Tap, O Brother, The Blue Angel, Almost Famous, Walk Hard, Bound for Glory, Nashville, and Llewyn Davis are not musicals. I've seen most of the others but don't remember well enough to have an opinion. Maybe I'm wrong.

I haven’t seen The Doors since I was a teenager and haven’t seen the others at all, but this is what Thursday said when I asked about similar movies:

So I’m going to assume yes and vote accordingly. You vote how you want.

I think only Rocketman of these, meets the strong requirements, clearly specified by the host.

In addition Amadeus is out for sure, according to the rules.

Just read through the thread. It looks the movies I "listed" qualify. Good stuff!

I think anarchy is a bit of an extreme word for the possibility that someone might nominate Spinal Tap for a musical list. I doubt many are going to honestly submit Salo or photographs of their toenails as their greatest musicals of all time. That would be closer to the anarchy you are talking about.



But hey, do what you like. To each their own. But I don't think it's giving the posters here a whole lot of credit that they can't choose for themselves what they believe a musical is. I honestly doubt that this list would even be really that substantially different. Maybe a handful of unexpected titles, maybe a different placing for everything. But it would be a more honest barometer about what people here actually think and like.



No offence, but I think a lot of people would say even with the guide lines it still ended up being a hodge podge of crime films. Not that I'm levelling that as a complaint, I think they were fine lists. But there were still quite a few controversial picks.

Not in the Film Noir that I hosted. I didn't follow the Neo Noir very closely, so can't say, as I was busy doing the Film Noir countdown and didn't have much free time.