Setsuled's Journal

I've got a lovely bunch of Altoids . . .

Ginger Altoids! I love ginger things . . . yeah . . .

I watched Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, and Peter Lorre in Silk Stockings, the musical, 1957 remake of Ninotchka, with songs by Cole Porter. It was pretty good. Not much of the witty dialogue the older one had, but the dance numbers kind of made up for it. Cyd Charisse seemed to be doing a straight Greta Garbo impression (Garbo played Ninotchka in the original film), but that was kind of cute.

The climactic dance sequence, centring on Astaire, was not as good as I wanted it to be. This film suffers from kind of the same thing The Band Wagon suffers from--it focuses too much on the nature of musicals and their relevancy to modern audiences. The final number, "Ritz, Rock, and Roll," was too broadly a "Hey, it'd be neat to have this fusion thing!" If they wanted to do that, they ought to've simply done it instead of singing about it. It needed to be a love song anyway.

I did kind of like the song they did about Cinemascope, Technicolour, and Stereophonic Sound. But my favourite scene was Cyd Charisse dancing with the titular stockings; it catered to the pervert in me.