From musicals to band-related movies
“Have you seen the Mamma Mia! movie?” a female friend asks me recently.
“The one with Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan etcetera? Nope. Why do you ask?”
“Well, I’m hoping to see it these days. But still haven’t got the chance…”
“You like it, huh? Well, one thing I know is that the movie based on a stage musical developed from the ABBA songs. Right?”
“Yep. And that’s what I like about it the most: the music!”
And perhaps, my friend is quite right. The movie does sound really interesting with all the music in it, especially with songs like Dancing Queen, Chiquitita, I Have a Dream, or Mamma Mia itself. Ask millions of ABBA lovers for more reference on that.
Yet MM is just one of hundreds other titles in musical movies/films genre, which has started to gain its popularity from the 1920s era. Some of the other popular titles include Moulin Rouge, Chicago, Grease, Annie, Mary Poppins, Oliver!, The Wizard of Oz and so on, which are eventually considered the best or favourite musical movies of all time. There’s also a list of “50 favourite movies” on the IMDb site, but with a lot of Indian titles in. While from last year, at least people would remember Hairspray and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
However, for me – to put a personal perspective – it’s the other more specific kind of movies in this genre, which are probably more of interest. It is the band-related movies, which in a blogger’s favourite list on Blog Critics contains a few movies such as This is Spinal Tap, That Thing You Do, and Almost Famous. A music discussion board on e-Music Post provides more titles for this movie group, including Walk The Line, Rockstar, School Of Rock, The Doors, The Wall, Bandwagon, Airheads and so on.
Well, personally, I think last year’s Music and Lyrics is not bad as well – if it can be considered as part of ‘the group’. And of course, I still remember Garage Days, a movie about one Sydney’s band struggling for its target with all the relationship’s problem.
Then, maybe just for another more information, I recall in Indonesia we have also had a couple of titles on this topic – with a different level of quality of course – such as D’Bijis, and Garasi (also means “garage”), a fictional-story movie but played by a real newly-formed band with the same name.
