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clyde

The Greatest Showman

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I just saw The Greatest Showman. I'm struck by how much I disliked it while feeling empathetic with the decisions made in the movie's making (I haven't read anything about the production, I'm just talking about what I see in its presentation). Something felt wrong. It made me like La La Land less.

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Well, this is what I hear from a lot of friends, but is it that surprising? The Great Showman sucks. It has horrible songs that all sound to me like they came straight out of Getty Music. The story is unnervingly saccharine and never probes the depths of the characters or the interesting angles in the setting. I was facepalming constantly in the cinema. I had a horrible time.

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Is the shallowness of the characters an acting problem or a writing problem? I don't have the tools to figure out why I dislike it so much; if I describe any part of the movie to myself, it sounds like something I would love.

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To me, a musical needs to have a sort of rousing quality. Exploring a story in song rather than lines of dialogue means you can delve into character's inner psyches, their wants and desires, in a much more direct and possibly potent way. So, above all else, the songs need to be a great. And, I'll admit, I have gotten used to a certain musical sound that, for me, just works. The works of Alan Menken, Tim Rice, etc. For The Greatest Showman to try to update that to modern music was a big gamble, one that I certainly don't think worked out.

 

If the movie had had great songs, I would've forgiven it almost anything. Now there was nothing to cover up all the other parts where it failed. The boring story that doesn't take enough chances, for one. I've pushed most of the plot out of my head again, as uninteresting as it was, but I recall thinking that it would've been ballsy if Barnum had actually cheated on his wife, and how he dealt with that. Also, the simplicity of having a team of freaks (and one spectacularly beautiful woman whose deformity was that she was spectacularly beautiful, I guess?) being all pretty OK people, going up against random angry hoodlums in the street just didn't cut it.

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