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Thanks again to Bobby Campbell for the above graphic
As you may remember if your memory stretches back a few months, I have launched an effort to watch some of the various movies that Robert Anton Wilson included in his list of his 100 favorite movies. So far, we've done The Maltese Falcon and Intolerance, and All That Jazz was next. (Click on the "RAW movie club" label on this post for previous installments.)
I apologize for taking so long to get to All That Jazz. I try to only schedule movies that can be watched for free, and after my wife agreed to watch the movie with me, I discovered that it had been temporarily removed by Tubi, the free movie website and app. They did bring it back, and I finally watched it (or rather rewatched it after several decades).
My ex wife loved the movie, as I discovered when I watched it with her decades ago (she liked the catch phrase, "Don't bullshit a bullshitter"), but my wife was more resistant to its charms, calling it "stupid," and declined to finish watching it with me. But I liked the movie. It was directed by Bob Fosse and apparently is at least semi-autobiographical. The viewer realizes that the Fosse character, played by Roy Scheider, is seriously ill after suffering a heart attack and is looking back on his life. I won't go further into the plot. See this Wikipedia article for background. Fosse himself died of a heart attack.
Did any of y'all watch the movie? Did you like it?
Speaking of "blog projects," I will post a schedule Monday for the previously announced Moby Dick reading group. I will also soon announce the next RAW movie club movie.
4 comments:
I REALLY enjoyed All That Jazz! I had a neat experience where I was going to watch it while I worked on art for this past Maybe Day, specifically for Oz's great piece "The 23 Enigma and the Western Lands," (https://oz-mix.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-23-enigima-western-lands-by-william.html) and just as the movie is kicking in Oz's article invokes a very alluring description of All That Jazz as a Bardo movie! I decided then to watch the movie with my full attention, instead of peripherally, so thanks to Oz for the literal heads up :)))
I probably shouldn't be so surprised that a gifted actor can play different characters, but I was indeed impressed with how categorically different Roy Scheider's performance as Joe Gideon was as compared to his Chief Brody from Jaws.
It has now been a few months since I watched the film, but i was very impressed by the choregraphies (and I usually do not care much for musicals or songs & dances type of films), as well as the editing, the latter efficiently translating into cinematic terms the idea of time as being non-linear.
We back then had a small exchange about the film in Oz Fritz' post comments that Bobby linked to above. Oz also brought out Beetlejuice in the discussion. A Beetlejuice sequel has since hit the cinemas, but I have not seen it yet.
I have a feeling that All That Jazz has many layers and deserve a close study.
I watched All that Jazz in early July and enjoyed it a great deal. The territory of death seemed very experiential to me, anxiously so due to my health. An Urgent Care doc thought I might have deep vein thrombosis (a blood clot) which can be fatal if it moves up to the heart. I was waiting for an ultrasound test and was told if I experienced shortness of breath and/or chest pains that I should immediately go to the ER. Heart disease runs in the family, my father died from it at age 58. To make a long story a little shorter, the movie had me strongly contemplating my own death, not in the abstract. There were a few evenings where I'd be feeling weird and seriously considering going to the ER – one of those being after watching All That Jazz. I'd literally be consulting Tarot cards because I really didn't want to go, but I also didn't want to die. The cards always told me my mind was playing tricks on me. I never went, the ultrasound came up negative - no blood clot. Seriously considering one's own material mortality to the point of experiencing some simulation/sensation or feeling of death seems a useful preparation for one's Greater Feast.
When I was writing the 23 Enigma essay Bobby references (thanks for posting the link!) I was trying to recall films with Bardo instruction. All That Jazz came to mind because Tom had brought it up here. It all comes around. We watched the new Beetlejuice film day before yesterday – the evening of the Day of the Dead and enjoyed it a lot. I don't know if it has the same bardo training value as the original, I'd have to see it a few more times, but a lot of it does take place in the bardo, there appears quite a lot of crossing over. One fun tidbit – the actor who played Charles Deetz in the original didn't return because he'd been busted for soliciting child porn. The character is in the sequel and it's interesting the way they deal with him given that background. Some of the lines directed at the character, and his situation, could also been seen as comments on that actor's fall from grace.
I love that film. It seems to represent Fosse staging "Chicago" and editing "Lenny". One can see the film a descendant of Fellini's "8 1/2".
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