“Life is the wire, everything else is just waiting”
Criterion has released the restored and beautiful version of All That Jazz. The colors, the skin tones, the atmosphere is perfectly and beautifully presented. For a 40 year old film the 3 channel DTS sound is very clear and dynamic. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and the technical aspects of the disc are outstanding.
This is an unusual musical movie. In it Bob Fosse, the director, displays his own life and predicts his own death. And he paints a picture of show business that is cynical, cruel, selfish, self-destructing and enormously appealing.
I enjoy seeing the movie a second time, more than the first because you learn who the people are and what they are doing. Oh, you know that the spectacular performance of Roy Scheider is there to duplicate the director, Bob Fosse. But Jessica Lange is beautiful, mysterious and dangerous, and someone who Fosse, here named Joe Gideon, had been courting all of his life.
“Do you think Stanley Kubrick ever gets depressed?”
The movie is a genuine and also a fantasy, with realism enhanced by fantasy, often in dance. Gideon (Fosse) is man who smoked too much, drank too much, took too many drugs to often and never worked to maintain a relationship. You like him and maybe feel sorry for him, but you never really root for him. This movie was made in 1979 and, almost a decade later, Fosse died of the same ailment that befalls Joe Gideon in this film.
Upon seeing the movie after his death, the penultimate scene with Ms. Lange, will go to your heart.
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