Kiss of the Spider Woman redux

I’m really not sure why Bill Condon and company made this. Jennifer Lopez is fabulous and perfect for this part, but why bother doing the musical version of Kiss of the Spider Woman if you’re going to cut most of the songs that have emotional impact? There is just no point to a Kiss of the Spider Woman movie without “Over the Wall”, “You Could Never Shame Me”, “Dear One” (which is included in a tiny way), and especially “The Day after That”, one of the most emotionally impactful songs Kander and Ebb ever wrote. 

This movie musical cuts itself off at the knees because it forces all the songs to be diegetic. In other words, the songs can only be there if they exist in the fantasy/musical world. The most recent Color Purple had a similar issue. It’s just so stupid. This conceit even ruins "She's a Woman" (obviously my favorite song in the musical), because in this film, it's not song by Molina himself but is sung by his avatar in the fake-ass movie he's describing. (Never mind that this song would make no actual sense in that movie.)

What’s worse is that there is only a minimally marked contrast between the art direction for the real world sequences and the art direction for the movie-musical sequences. So it isn’t as if one feels real and the other is marked as artificial. The “real world” in this Spider Woman still looks like a musical. Which means that this little rule about songs needing to be diegetic à la Chicago doesn't even matter.

I loved Jennifer Lopez in “Where You Are”. She comes out in full Chita Rivera drag, with the white tuxedo jacket, and she just looks incredible. It’s the only good number in this movie. 

The rest of this movie… I just am not sure why they bothered if they weren’t going to do the songs.