Two great movies you could watch over and over again and not miss a beat.
My Fair Lady – 4 Stars (Excellent)
The 1964 musical My Fair Lady is one of the greatest movies ever made, earning 12 Oscar nominations and winning 8 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director (George Cukor), and Best Actor (Rex Harrison) among the top awards.
Only Mary Poppins (with 5 Oscars) and Chicago (with 6 Oscars) have had more nominations (13) than My Fair Lady, and only West Side Story has more Oscars (10) with 11 nominations. Cabaret won 8 Oscars with 10 nominations. Exceptional company to say the least. My personal favorites also include Camelot and Fiddler on the Roof.
My Fair Lady finds a phonetics teacher, Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), who makes a bet that he can take an illiterate, uneducated flower girl from the wrong side of town and turn her into a sophisticated lady, and he does so by correcting her speech. , grammar, demeanor, bearing and charm to create a perfect lady for London society.
My Fair Lady is a must see with some of the best lyrics and music ever written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. This Lerner and Loewe Broadway musical would be made into a film with Audrey Hepburn as the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle opposite Rex Harrison.
As the Professor gloats over his triumphant victory, his perfect lady leaves him, leaving the Professor baffled by his ingratitude. In the end, he realizes his feelings for Eliza, and she tentatively returns, a happy ending that was not part of George Bernard Shaw’s original play Pygmalion.
The Broadway play My Fair Lady opened in 1956 in New York with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in the role of Eliza Doolittle, and ran for 2,717 performances, a Broadway record at the time.
With a great heritage and Rex Harrison in the film (he won the Oscar for Best Actor), this is a really great movie with a wonderful score and great acting that gives us an absolutely moving story.
Watch My Fair Lady with your children at home and give them a wonderful introduction to growing and nurturing in the process. One of the great tragedies of our time is the scarcity of musicals; thank God for the arrival of Chicago in 2002.
The Phantom of the Opera – 4 Stars (Excellent)
The premiere of The Phantom of the Opera in 2004 was such an exciting event, that it brought this great work to the cinema so that millions could see the excellence of this masterpiece, which garnered only 3 nominations and no Oscars at the Academy Awards. It doesn’t matter.
Perhaps the previous success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical composition of The Phantom of the Opera, based on Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera, was too successful to earn the film version much acclaim.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical opened in London in 1986 and in New York in 1988 and still stands today as the longest-running Broadway musical of all time. It has become the highest-grossing entertainment event of all time, selling 80 million tickets and generating a worldwide gross of $3.3 billion, surpassing the highest-grossing film of all time, Titanic, by $1.3 billion.
This Phantom of the Opera movie has it all: plot, plot, excellent script, excellent presentation and even better music and lyrics.
A cast of unknowns was used; there’s no headlining, but the female lead (Emmy Rossum as Christine) is attractive and, much more important, an operatic singer who can actually sing without having her voice dubbed.
Some critics criticized this movie because the bad guy (Gerard Butler as The Ghost Who Lives Beneath the Opera House) isn’t ugly enough. With this mindset, the actress who wins the next female lead Oscar will have to have a perfect body and a perfect face to win. Sometimes common sense prevails, otherwise Meryl Streep would never have garnered 12 nominations and two Oscars.
This Phantom isn’t perfect, but it’s very well made, and the music couldn’t be better. There are so many great songs (as with all great musicals); and I loved Emmy Rossum’s voice. Watch this movie when you can, you’ll be better for the experience.
Copyright © 2006 Ed Bagley