Movie: Reefer Madness: The Musical
Apr. 26th, 2009 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amediaRecommended by so many Tin Man fans that we just had to see it!
The disc extras included a complete copy of the original Reefer Madness, so we watched it again. The quality was MUCH better than on the other disc; it moved continuously, not in jerky fits and starts, and the sound matched the action. The soundtrack was also much clearer and we were able to understand all the dialogue, including many portions that we had missed earlier.
Then we watched the musical. Lots of energy, well very cast - Alan Cumming was especially good and seemed to be enjoying himself enormously in all ten roles. And there was another Tin Man connection! Kevin McNulty - DG's robodad - played the Mayor. Great dance numbers. The moral about intolerance - linking anti-drug propaganda to anti-Communist, anti-minority, anti-immigration, and other such attitudes - was interesting.
One very odd thing about the movie was that they made the hero and heroine both Catholic, and did a couple of numbers based on that premise. This doesn't parody anything in the original (which was produced by a "small church group" - presumably not Catholic - and makes no reference to Catholicism or indeed any religion) and it didn't even fit with the modern message of tolerance, since the stereotypical anti-communist anti-minority anti-immigrant population of the 1930's would also have been anti-Catholic and unlikely to sympathize with Catholic characters. I think the reason is pretty obvious: Catholics have a lot more entertaining iconography to make fun of, and do they ever! I actually found Mary's song in the church (in which she complains that transubstantiation doesn't take place when her boyfriend's not there) more offensive than Jesus' cabaret act in the "Club Celestial." The latter was very clever - "The cherubim say you gotta/trust the man with the stigmata" - and funny in an uncomfortable sort of way; I suspect that Catholics find it amusing the way you sometimes catch Catholics singing along with Tom Lehrer's Vatican Rag.
[Catholic trivia - they forgot to set the church up according to pre-Vatican II protocols; the altar was in the wrong place.]
Other than that reservation, I enjoyed the movie quite a lot: the song about Romeo and Juliet was an absolute riot, the references back to the original movie were frequent and clever, and the "Grass Roots" making-of documentary was quite informative (plus we got to hear Alan Cumming speaking in his own accent).
Marijuana trivia: we watched this movie about a week ago, unknowingly very close to "4/20," which turns out to be a sort of pot holiday in the U.S. I learned that while googling to figure out why the number 420 featured so prominently in the movie (it's Mae's house address, for example, and it's the only number on the hymn board in the church).
The disc extras included a complete copy of the original Reefer Madness, so we watched it again. The quality was MUCH better than on the other disc; it moved continuously, not in jerky fits and starts, and the sound matched the action. The soundtrack was also much clearer and we were able to understand all the dialogue, including many portions that we had missed earlier.
Then we watched the musical. Lots of energy, well very cast - Alan Cumming was especially good and seemed to be enjoying himself enormously in all ten roles. And there was another Tin Man connection! Kevin McNulty - DG's robodad - played the Mayor. Great dance numbers. The moral about intolerance - linking anti-drug propaganda to anti-Communist, anti-minority, anti-immigration, and other such attitudes - was interesting.
One very odd thing about the movie was that they made the hero and heroine both Catholic, and did a couple of numbers based on that premise. This doesn't parody anything in the original (which was produced by a "small church group" - presumably not Catholic - and makes no reference to Catholicism or indeed any religion) and it didn't even fit with the modern message of tolerance, since the stereotypical anti-communist anti-minority anti-immigrant population of the 1930's would also have been anti-Catholic and unlikely to sympathize with Catholic characters. I think the reason is pretty obvious: Catholics have a lot more entertaining iconography to make fun of, and do they ever! I actually found Mary's song in the church (in which she complains that transubstantiation doesn't take place when her boyfriend's not there) more offensive than Jesus' cabaret act in the "Club Celestial." The latter was very clever - "The cherubim say you gotta/trust the man with the stigmata" - and funny in an uncomfortable sort of way; I suspect that Catholics find it amusing the way you sometimes catch Catholics singing along with Tom Lehrer's Vatican Rag.
[Catholic trivia - they forgot to set the church up according to pre-Vatican II protocols; the altar was in the wrong place.]
Other than that reservation, I enjoyed the movie quite a lot: the song about Romeo and Juliet was an absolute riot, the references back to the original movie were frequent and clever, and the "Grass Roots" making-of documentary was quite informative (plus we got to hear Alan Cumming speaking in his own accent).
Marijuana trivia: we watched this movie about a week ago, unknowingly very close to "4/20," which turns out to be a sort of pot holiday in the U.S. I learned that while googling to figure out why the number 420 featured so prominently in the movie (it's Mae's house address, for example, and it's the only number on the hymn board in the church).
