Kiss of the Spiderwoman (2025)

I’m really not sure why they made this Kiss of the Spider Woman. There's already a novel and a film and a musical. Did we really need this movie musical?

Jennifer Lopez is fabulous and perfect for this part, so no shade at all to JLo's magnificence. I adore her. 

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 but not in a way where it can affect anyone), and especially “The Day after That”, one of the most emotionally impactful songs Kander and Ebb ever wrote. 

Even "She's a Woman" is ruined because it takes place in the movie within the movie instead of being a song that Molina sings. He sings it "in character". It makes no sense, and so it has no emotional impact.

This musical cuts itself off at the knees because it forces all the songs to be diegetic. They 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. It pretends the real world doesn't have music. The real world is supposed to be "real", "gritty", "serious". But this doesn't work either because 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. 

I loved Jennifer Lopez in “Where You Are”. It’s the only good number in this movie. The rest of this… I have no idea why they bothered if they weren’t going to do the songs. We already have a movie version of Kiss of the Spider Woman; it came out forty years ago, and it's much better than this.

Bugsy Malone (1976)

Bugsy Malone is decidely weird. I was super into the whole child-actors-playing-mobsters thing. It's really fun. What I think I don't understand is the lipsynching. The kids don't actually sing their own numbers but instead are dubbed by adult singers. It's a gimmick, and one sort of gets used to it, I suppose, but I am not sure why it was happening. Jodie Foster is amazing. She's so much better than everyone else in this movie, but honestly the whole thing is super cute.

Also, a kid wants to be a tap-dancer and tells us this in act one, and so I predicted we'd get to see him tap the house down in act three, but no dice. For some reason he has a number about wanting to be a dancer early in this film but then never actually does it. This is perhaps Bugsy Malone's main flaw.

The Magic Flute (1975)

Trollflöjten is a simultaneously weird and breathtaking Magic Flute. It feels totally un-Bergman, but there are also some gorgeous moments, particularly the quiet scenes off-stage between acts one and two. The costumes are also very cool, and the art direction is lovely.

Heavy on the Opera, Light on the Phantom

It's very very odd, but it is important to note that although Phantom of the Opera is frequently classified as a horror film, and although the eponymous phantom is played by the invisible man himself, Claude Rains, this is not a horror movie at all.

People are murdered, sure, and that chandelier drops from the ceiling. Phantom is occasionally thrilling, but not a bit of it is horrifying, in fact much of it is quite whimsical.  

Phantom of the Opera is, to my distinct surprise, actually a musical, just as Andrew Lloyd Webber would make it. To be clearer about it, Phantom is actually one of the last in a craze of opera films that were all the rage in the early 1930s through to the end of the decade when Maurice Chevalier, Nelson Eddy, and Jeanette MacDonald were big box-office draws. (I'm thinking of Victor Schertzinger's movies The Mikado and One Night of Love, as well as the Eddy–MacDonald pictures in which they were always paired, Maytime, Naughty Marietta, The Merry Widow, One Hour with You, Sweethearts, etc.)

Fake opera Amour et Gloire invented for the film

But it isn't just that it is filled with musical numbers – all of them operatic, incidentally, and part of the shows at the opera – this film is also filled with light comedy. Nelson Eddy plays Anatole, a tenor in love with Christine, the diva at the film's center, but Edgar Barrier plays Raoul, another of her lovers. Christine cannot decide between them, and we are not supposed to be able to do so either (although Eddy was a big star and Barrier was not, so you do the math). The film has these two men walking into doors at the same time and trying various acts of one-upsmanship with Christine. They team up in the end to attempt her rescue, and the film takes neither of these men seriously as they try to win her heart.

Phantom does take murder seriously enough, I suppose, but the whole thing is filmed in bright, bright technicolor, and there is hardly any darkness in the movie. The dark content of this movie all happens before the phantom becomes the phantom and begins terrorizing the Opéra Garnier in Paris. In fact, once the Phantom does start killing people, a minor character (the stage manager) has a running gag where he jokes about the phantom having a long nose and a red beard.

In any case, the whole thing is very strange, and (what's more) did not help me understand what happens in the Webber musical. I was secretly hoping that those characters' motivations would somehow become clear to me after watching this Arthur Lubin movie, but I am afraid I learned nothing.

Blurred Lines

Maybe I'm deaf. Or maybe I'm blind. Maybe I'm going out of my mind.

But "Blurred Lines", a song that I've been digging for a while now, is pretty much exactly the same song as Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack".

I know that Adorno said that all pop music is just recycled from previous pop music. And I'm not complaining. I liked "SexyBack" a lot in 2006 and I like Robin Thicke's version of it now. What I was thinking about today, though, is all of the backlash surrounding Robin Thicke's song and how sexist it is. I find discussions about things like this fascinating because for some reason people are like actually up in arms about this song and how it is misogynist and objectifies women.

So I went back to the video for "SexyBack" and found these two images:

The plot of Timberlake's video is some kind of spy/James-Bond thing, and it involves this lovely woman wearing very little (with, however, a well-placed pearl necklace) looking around a hotel room for something. There is literally no logical reason that this woman is not wearing more clothes.
And then there is this image:

There is some kind of public lesbian sex club in the video. Justin walks through the halls of this well-lit sex club (where women don't have sex, really, but just sort of make out with one another and look sexy). There are lots of delightful shots of women in various seductive poses and in various states of undress.

The reason I point this out is to ask, well, how is the Thicke/T.I./Pharrell video any different?

Leaving aside the question of how sexist these songs and videos are (and they are sexist), I am mostly just wondering why this video gets everyone so mad.

And I am not saying that we shouldn't talk more about how sexist pop music is, and the real-world damage done to the bodies of actual women who attempt to conform to these sexist images. I'm not saying that we oughtn't to criticize the way the music industry supports and promotes the notions of men as the keepers of sexual pleasure and women as objects who need constant sexual satisfaction. And I am certainly not saying oh just shut up and dance. But let's talk about this more. Point out the sexism in pop music more. Point out the sexism in our legal system more. Because if we are focusing only on how sexist Robin Thicke is, we are allowing ourselves to be distracted, when this sexism permeates popular music in general and our society as a whole.

Spillin' Tea

The title of this blog (tea to pour) comes from slang for sharing gossip. Among gay Southerners, pouring tea means dishing the dirt or telling tales about other people. Sometimes a bit of good gossip is described as hot, as in:

Girl, this tea is hot, you better sit down.

And sometimes people who can't keep their mouths shut when they ought to know better are referred to as spilling, as in:

That old queen was spilling the tea all over until I dragged her onto the lanai and told her to shut it.

All of this as a (gay) prelude to this song, in which tea gets two shouts-out if you're listening. I know I don't normally post music (because, frankly, I am never up to date), but this is just too good.

New Obsession

The guy who says he doesn't really dig music in the way other people do (i.e. me) is currently obsessed with one James Blake and his album James Blake. The above song is not on the album; it's a cover of Joni Mitchell's immortal "A Case of You". I am in love.