What have I heard, seen, done during the past week or so that had some musical connection? On New Year's Eve we watched two separate chunks of films on TCM channel, "That's Entertainment # I", and "That's Entertainment # III" - book-ending our other movie viewing that evening, until it was time to raise a glass to 2019. Those shows are such good value - patchworks of old musical movies of the MGM variety. Lots of dancing and spectacle rather than any concentration on purely vocal numbers. The dancing was, of course, perfection. Personally, though, when it comes to movie musicals I prefer the Rogers and Hammerstein types: Oklahoma - of course, Carousel, Show Boat, Kismet, The Student Prince - those kinds of musicals.
We watched a couple of movies with a musical heart during the week: The Jazz Ambassadors, and Lifted, available on Netflix or Amazon Prime - memory fails as to which. The Jazz Ambassadors is an interesting documentary; also been shown on PBS at some point in the past.
The Cold War and Civil Rights collide in this remarkable story of music, diplomacy and race. Beginning in 1955, when America asked its greatest jazz artists to travel the world as cultural ambassadors, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and their mixed-race band members, faced a painful dilemma: how could they represent a country that still practiced Jim Crow segregation?
[From IMDb]
Lifted is a movie from 2011, and not our usual fare - it has a blend of 'flag-waver' and Christian-themed story-line. Anyway, we'd started so decided to finish! I didn't hate it, didn't love it. It's the story of a young boy who entered a singing competition hoping to win some money to help with family finances; his father, a reservist, had been called to service in Afghanistan. The boy's mother was a drug addict. Acting was okay, singing was okay, and the story did take a surprisingly odd turn.
