Cruel Charity

For all those who think that Bob Fosse is such a genius please watch this 500pd of horse dung that I wasted my evening watching. I had never seen it, and since I recently saw "All That Jazz" which is also seriously flawed and finally minor I thought I would give him the benefit of the doubt. Amazing that he went on to make a few other movies after this disaster. The guy simply had no sense of how to make a movie, and the musical numbers are just horrible especially the dumb hippie dippy one with the unbearable sammy davis jr. Poor Shirley McLaine who also went into a deep decline after this and took her many years to recover from it. To think that they raped the great Fellini film to come up with this garbage. Unclean unclean. As for Cabaret I saw the original broadway production when I was around 15 and it was stunning even with some questionable casting, so Fosse  had much better material to work with than sweet charity and it is certainly well done and very entertaining. I can appreciate his dancing and his style but I pretty much found "all that Jazz" also lacking and very self indulgent also quite naive and simple minded when trying to deal with "the big themes" of life.  I also had problems with the casting, Ann Reinking may be a great broadway dancer, but she's downright scary looking when viewed close-up, ditto for Leland Palmer, neither of which went on to movie glory.