My wife Cindy, who was bat mitzvahed at age 12 and whose education thus left off where the New Testament began, tells me that what this movie really needs is a plot summary. This is not a spoiler: you're supposed to know the story, and maybe you don't. The people piling off the tour bus at the beginning, and back on it at the end, are Jesus's disciples and camp followers. The tall, black, very gifted soul singer/ dancer you first see is Carl Anderson playing Judas. You'll recognize Jesus; the Hispanic-looking girl next to him (Yvonne Elliman) is Mary Magdalene, prostitute and Jesus's girlfriend.
The white guys with tall hats and extremely deep singing voices (except one with a freakily high voice) are Jewish church leaders deciding what to do about this super-popular rebel Jesus guy. The clean-shaven dark-haired skinny guy with a weirdly thoughtful smile who first challenges Jesus's credentials directly is Pontius Pilate (Barry Dennen), the high officer charged, moderately against his will, with executing Jesus. The decadently pudgy mincing guy in yellow sunglasses and a six-inch layer of sweat is King Herod, who gets to order Pilate to do anything Herod wants. The guy with the whip who whips Jesus 39 times is just the guy hired to whip people; I assume he gets paid minimum wage.
The movie is, entirely, a musical: there is no dialogue that isn't part of the songs, although three or four spoken lines punctuate certain songs within the confines of the rhythm. Tim Rice's lyrical conceit -- and if it seems familiar now, his musical is how it _became_ familiar -- is that Judas was the true hero of Christ's band, acting on conscience and in devotion to Jesus.
Jesus is portrayed as an admirable good-deed-doer who got in way too deep when he started claiming to be the son of God (regardless of whether He was or not). His situation reminds me of that faced by David Cassidy of the Partridge Family, another guy who decided on not much evidence that he'd like to be a star, and then lost control. David never intended that teenage girls would, at concert after concert, be so eager for his nearness that they'd claw, bite, and trample each other (occasionally to death) for the privilege. On one occasion a girl who'd come backstage grabbed a hold of some underwear he'd changed out of, which made her creepily ecstatic, and three more girls beat her into a bloody pulp trying to seize the underwear for themselves.
David himself? He retreated into his hotel rooms, staring rigidly at the walls for hours. Eventually he granted a front-page interview with Rolling Stone where he denounced his fans as stupid and gullible, denounced his managers as soulless and cruel, and insisted on his true destiny, as a real man, to R O C K in the USA. With what consequence? None! Girls kept clambering after him, his rock album stiffed, and he turned to drugs to escape. Finally his close associate Judas realized, with horror, that the out-of-control excitement in David's wake was sure to rouse the oppression of the state and lead them all to be wiped out before anyone had been truly enlightened, indeed just as David himself was becoming a public joke, and that the only solution -- however heartbreaking -- was to turn David's location over to the state's executioners now, before the self-destruction was complete.
Judas didn't even want the 30 pieces of silver; but as the priests point out, "you might as well take it... think of the charities you could give it to". Can't argue with that.
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It's not necessarily the movie per se that I'm giving five stars to, but it's hard to rent a Broadway musical cast and crew for $1.99, and the movie is worth some comments. On the plus side: the dancers of both sexes are lithe, athletic, well-enough choreographed in an extremely 1970's way, and shown without especially restrictive clothing. The lighting director is excellent; there's a particularly powerful scene towards the end, with Jesus starting to interrogate God on the whyfores of his fate, where the way his hair bounces ghostily and his teeth and eyes gleam bone-white amidst a dark purple ambience that more than makes up for the guy (Ted Neeley) actually playing Jesus.
The haircuts, in general, make a surprisingly strong case for the 1970's as a good-hair decade (I do own vinyl albums with band photos of Kansas and Starcastle, so I also know the strong case against). Most of the actors are good, though I think they're from theatre backgrounds: they don't play to the quieter focus of the camera.
And if Ted Neeley is a completely inept Jesus, there's a sense in which that's sorta profound. It's a hard role to play, because Jesus's charisma has been assembled over three busy years that have exhausted him. We see people worshipping a guy who wishes they'd go away; of course it's a challenge to seem believably worshipable.
To a larger degree, though, he's just an incredibly crummy actor.
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What I'm absolutely, unhesistantly giving five stars and any spare stars you have lying around to is the music (and its singers). Andrew Lloyd-Webber has written some pretentious, unremittingly earnest music that I don't like at all, I admit this; and I can tell you that the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack got loathing reviews, and I can tell you why you might agree. You might believe that subtlety and understatement are the essence of all good music (which reminds me I should review Veda Hille's You Do Not Live in This World Alone sometime); in that case you will hate this soundtrack. You might believe that it is all good music's job to be absorptive, trancelike, or at least seductive (I should post my review of Lockgroove's Sleeping in the Elephant Fog too); J.C.S. will annoy you. You might believe, with Robert Christgau and early-days Lester Bangs, that there's no use to any music you can't render perfectly while drunk. In that case I doubt you and I have anything to talk about at all.
What I will say, nonetheless, is that Lloyd-Webber's music on Jesus Christ Superstar is as Objectively great as I'm willing to declare anything to be. It is expressionist music, corraling many genres -- early British church music, symphonies, funk, soul, vaudeville, ragtime, disco, bastardized hints of Middle Eastern music, progressive-rock and heavy rock -- and centuries' worth of compositional tactics into a tight demonstration of how to use music and melody to express mood. On some level it's probably almost intentionally instructional: Tim and Andrew's prior musical, the pretty-good Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, was in fact a music-school project in which he was assigned the creation of songs in a dozen or so chosen genres. But, regardless:
-- J.C.S. is where I first learned to write songs in non-4/4 time signatures, an amazingly rare habit (Pavement and Whitney Houston and Metallica use the same four beats). On the one hand, "the Temple" shows how a 7/8 time signature, by rushing ahead while our bodies automatically wait for the 8th beat, can sound claustrophobic, urgent. See also Jesus's questioning of His (invisible/inaudible) father, which is in eight beats but, with syncopation and a 3-3-2 division of beats, sounds tremolous and unsure -- strong 4/4 chords settle Jesus's resolve, and again Neeley needs all the help he can get.
On the other hand, I think "Everything's Alright" is one of the most perfect soft-rock songs ever written (not that I have a zillion nominees), and it just happens to flow in 5/4 time. I've come to believe that most songwriters cut their songs into 4/4 even when the melodies obviously want to be something else.
-- J.C.S. borrows, I think from Wagner's Ring Cycle, the apparently awful notion of giving several characters their own theme melodies. He then demonstrates, to the sure pride of Webber's old instructors, how to blend the resulting mixes, and how to orchestrate so that roughly the same melody can sound exuberant here, frightened there; or devotional here (Elliman's hit song "I Don't Know How to Love Him", avoiding sappiness by the combination of a beautifully ambitious melody and an arrangement oddly featuring piccolo and muted military drums) and abandoned there (Anderson's blasted version towards the end, which was not only too depressed for radio but, with the altered lyrics and outside the movie context, would sound too necrophiliac as well).
-- On a more basic level, J.C.S. is as useful a guide to the (western, melody-intensive) genres of music as a Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra is as a sonic demonstration of which instruments sound like what. Webber has no radical ideas about the relative emotional effects of tubas vs. string sections vs. ragtime piano vs. Emerson-Lake-Palmer mellotrons or "21st Century Schizoid Man"-ish guitar. Instead, he demonstrates why all the cliches about how the different musics work have truth, and how those truths can feel exactly right.
-- And finally, for my tastes, it's nice to know that melodies can be as ambitious as, say, "the Star-Spangled Banner" without being as ungainly or fascist-sounding as, say, "the Star-Spangled Banner". I love pop songs, I love pop melodies, I like Weezer just fine, but Weezer don't exploit a tenth of the range that the human voice and well-tempered scales can allow. Few writers do; Webber is among the best of them. Give him a good story, and allow him (as Rice and later T.S. Eliot did) to use a sense of humor, and he's about as good as hyper-expressionism gets.
This dazzling interpretation of the hit Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber rock opera tells the story of Christ s (Ted Neeley) final weeks in a bold and epi...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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