Top Ten Tuesday (November 15, 2016)

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Visit the hosting blog to see lots of other lists.

Today's topic is a movie freebie, and I chose to list my 10 favourite musicals and music movies.

I love musicals, especially the song and dance kind, but I also love a good music movie. The difference between a music movie and a musical is that while the former contains music that’s integral to the plot, it is presented in a realistic manner, i.e. with musicians performing, while in a musical people are liable to burst into song (and often dance as well) at the drop of a hat and no-one blinks an eye. In fact the spectators often join in. I am only including fiction, i.e. no documentaries or concert movies.

I think I’ll start my list with one of my all time favorite movies:

The Commitments. Music movie. To me, this is the ultimate “let’s get a band together” movie, and one of the things that makes it so good is that it could have happened. Familiar songs: Just about every song.

Með allt á hreinu. Music movie. This is an Icelandic cult film about two rival bands, one all female and one all male, battling it out in the small live music market in Iceland. It was made in the eighties, but nearly all of the music is still frequently heard on Icelandic radio, and several catchphrases from it are still used, even by people who have never seen the film.

The Band Wagon. The ultimate backstage musical with a theatre setting. A has-been Hollywood hoofer played by Fred Astaire is paired with a prima ballerina played by Cyd Charisse. Many good song and dance numbers ensue, both in a stage setting and as fantasy scenes. Most famous song: That’s Entertainment.

Singin’ in the Rain. Another brilliant backstage musical, this time with a movie industry setting, that mixes stage-produced music scenes with fantasy scenes. Stars Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds as the love-birds, Donald O’Connor as the best friend, and Jean Hagen as the villainess (stealing every scene she’s in). Familiar songs: Singin’ in the Rain, Good Morning, Make ‘em Laugh.

Gigi. A rather wonderful musical based on a questionable story. Leslie Caron is luminescent as the titular character. Familiar songs: Gigi, It’s a bore.

Guys and Dolls. Musical starring Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons as one pair of love-birds and Frank Sinatra and Vivian Blaine as another. Familiar song: Luck be a Lady.

High Society. Musical. Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm star in a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story. Most famous song: True Love.

Yellow Submarine. The classic Beatles album as a surrealistic, psychedelic, mostly animated movie.

The Nightmare Before Christmas. Great story and wonderful characters and you can watch it as a cheery Halloween movie or as a dark Christmas movie.

Fantasia. Wonderfully imagined and animated scenes set to famous pieces of classical music.

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme

Reading in Reykjavík

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