I hate The Greatest Showman more every moment

so before I get really mean I just want to say that I love musicals and especially movie musicals and I was really happy that a musical came out that wasn't a jukebox musical wasn't based on anything not even like a book like fully original with that said the greatest showmen is such a bizarre viewing experience there are so many storytelling choices that don't go anywhere or don't make any sense it's just a movie where nothing happens and no one really learns anything and there are no characters a man starts a circus that's it if you're not really hype to see a movie about a man starting a circus whose eventual legacy is financial ruin and public disgrace then you're in for a rough ride this movie is just a series of very weird and confusing choices and I have made a numbered list weird thing number one I honestly don't understand why this movies about PT Barnum's so much has changed about his life story that it might as well be any other man and given how Barnum is remembered today it should have been any other man just a fictional man who starts a fictional circus with no historical baggage so the opening scene is Hugh Jackman his PT Barnum and he's at a successful night at his beautiful circus and the opening song is like this edgy knock off Fall Out Boy song and this musical number your first impression cold open is what leads me to weird thing number two weird thing number two is that all the animals in this circus or CGI probably to save money but also to draw your mind away from all those stories you've heard about how Barnum and Bailey Circus abused its animal performers so obviously the elephants and the Lions are CGI but also the circus horses or CGI like they're just white horses you have outdoor shots on like the set of a city street and there will be real horses pulling the carriages but inside the circus it is CGI horses and they do not look good they're all gummy and rubbery and in the opening sequence you have this edgy Fall Out Boy's and while the drum is like beating the horses are stomping in time to the drumbeat this was my first impression of the movie because this song is the first scene seeing this honestly I was like I was here for it those horses are into this goth song they're so fake I was like I was ready to enjoy the movie more than I've ever enjoyed any movie in my life and unfortunately it was all downhill from there okay bizarre thing number three is a million dreams this is the second song in the movie and I just wanted to make the whole song its own bullet point I actually think it has a really nice melody but this song is like the flashback song showing us Barnum's childhood this childhood is essentially that he was poor and suffered and was in love with a rich girl and wanted to start a circus this song does that thing that musicals will do where it's not like a full reprieve but there will be a lull in the music and you'll have like a dialogue break and then the music will start again and like I said it's commonplace but it does it like four times I clocked it on my rewatch and this song spends eleven minutes of runtime in this movie it reached a point where I started to wonder if this song would just be the rest of the movie like this is a musical with two songs the opening song and a million dream the best part about this whole song is the part where ten-year-old child PT Barnum fast forwards to adult Hugh Jackman PT Barnum because there are no intermediary stages you just have young child and adult man Hugh Jackman so there's a scene where PT Barnum's Love has graduated school because they've just reached adulthood and PT Barnum goes up to her house to ask for her hand in marriage and it's Hugh Jackman like he brings the doorbell and it's it's like 50-year old Hugh Jackman like hello sir I'm just a humble 25 year old shoe-shiner here to ask for your daughter's hand I looked it up and he's only 9 years younger than the actor playing his father-in-law so he and his love run away to the city to pursue their dreams and now the song it's still dreamz it picks up and they start doing this beautiful choreography with like lifts and jumps and high kicks and I guess Hugh Jackman and Michelle Williams either couldn't do the choreography or didn't have time to learn it because suddenly there's a lot of fog and a lot of distant shots hanging sheets on clotheslines you're seeing every part of these characters except their faces dancing this beautiful choreography I mean zendaya was in this and they made her do most of the trapeze stuff if I was her I'd be mad number four the freaks first of all I feel mean referring to the ensemble cast as the freaks but PT Barnum did it and the movie said he was a great guy so the freaks were treated very strangely by this story let's look at the bearded lady first PT Barnum is directed toward her by some random Mae on the street that's like I know where you can find a freak he goes inside like a factory a textiles mill maybe it's a laundry house but my point is that those hanging sheets of obscurity are back and PT Barnum finds the bearded lady by following this very loud very beautiful singing like it's a musical but also in the world of the movie the bearded lady is a beautiful singer like in real life and she just does gospel riffs at work constantly I guess so Barnum finds her and he can only see her eyes over this hanging sheet of laundry and she's like don't look at me I'm hideous but her eyes which you can see have these wonderfully applied false eyelashes like well she's still made an effort when she got up this morning he moves the sheet and she's she's got full beard just the biggest beard ever you're kind of like well gosh if she hates the beard so much trimming or shaving the beard are very real options like no shame that you're a bearded lady and if you're gonna own it then own it but if it's seriously making you that upset and your alternative is to hide your face behind a sheet all the time then you could just shave your beard I understand that it's a bummer to be a lady with stubble but it's a world of difference from having an 8 inch long beard and then we have General Tom Thumb and he's a dwarf and PT Barnum's like if you join my freakshow circus no one's gonna point and laugh at you they're gonna cheer except he's literally putting him in a freak show and in the circus teens later you do see the audience pointing and laughing but like Tom Thumb is okay with it so I guess it's fine they have two Asian men there and they don't get dialogue or FaceTime and I guess they're supposed to be the Siamese twins they are not twins they don't really look like each other I think like one is Japanese and one is Korean and they only kind of look like they're conjoined like they're always standing next to each other but just kind of shoulder to shoulder to be honest they only ever look like two unrelated Asian men standing close to each other I know that the conjoined twin demographic is extremely small but I would imagine that Siamese twin is considered like a derogatory term for conjoined twins these days it's at least kind of racially insensitive it's just like the elephant in the room is that the movie really wanted to include the Siamese twins but they were afraid to include the Siamese twins can I say elephant in the room when I'm talking about a circus movie like was that confusing did you take me literally there is an elephant in the room it's CGI it looks horrible give some background freaks you have the world's heaviest man tall Irish man dog-boy albino with dreadlocks and then you have zendaya and her brother and she's just like a hot lady that does trapeze even though every other featured character who's in the circus is a freak and then you just have zendaya and she's like other because she's black and you know it's like the olden days but it is kind of uncomfortable to see her lumped in with people with actual medical deformities when she's just a beautiful black woman I also really like husband and her brother show up to apply for a job and they're like no one's gonna want to put us on the stage we do trapeze and you're like first of all you're not really selling yourself very well at this job interview but secondly how do you just casually pick the trapeze how can you be like an amateur trapeze or you can't really like practice at home I think everyone that does the trapeze learned it at the circus that they worked at the freaks are supposed to have this collective arc of like learning to love themselves but there isn't really any progression to it it's just a point a and point B situation they have like three different musical numbers that start with I'm afraid to be seen and end with I love myself and you don't really see what's changed their mind other than the fact that they're singing a song and dancing which do they know they're doing that and they'll just arbitrarily move back and forth between these two extremes just depending upon when the audience needs to be inspired I guess you never see them like coming together as a unit or honing their skills or practicing for the circus or anything because all of the actual circus shows are metaphorically represented in the meta-narrative by these big musical dance numbers and I assume that's not what the actual circus show is it's just a representation of that event because that would be like a really lame circus I didn't come here to watch an albino breakdance I'm here to see a man hit a lion with a chair okay or whatever you do with this okay the weirdest scene for the freaks is when they get kicked out of this high society party okay so one of the freaks says we've been rejected our whole lives even by our parents but for some reason the bearded lady says that lion and like you didn't have a beard when you were a baby why don't have the conjoined twins say that line cuz they're not allowed to speak I forgot anyway the bearded lady goes from we've been rejected our whole lives and we just got kicked out of a party - we gotta love who we are and not be afraid and I'm gonna dance through the streets there's nothing to explain her change of heart or what has empowered her the biggest thing I can say about a lot of these songs is that they don't feel like they're conveying story beats they feel like they're dictating them I guess I feel triumphant now because this is the part the movie where the triumphant song goes number five Jenny Lind Jenny Lind is the most confusing and horrible part of the movie so in real life Jenny Lind is an extremely famous accomplished Swedish opera singer and she was known for being kind of a phenomenon but one big part of her image was that she was philanthropist she donated all of her wealth to charities she was a very virtuous person and she was kind of like Sweden sweetheart I guess and she was hosted on an American tour by PT Barnum which she ended early and amicably but it was because she was uncomfortable with how much he commercialized the whole thing he was auctioning tickets and stuff like that so Jenny Lind in the movie PT Barnum is at a party and he sees Jenny Lind and he's like who's that and immediately you're he's gonna cheat on his wife alarms are going off he's sort of awkwardly flirts with her she seems like she's into it and then he signs her for the tour without ever having heard her sing and then we flash forward in time to her first big performance it's weird because the night of the performance PT Barnum is like I hope she can sing and you're like okay in real life I think it's true that he didn't hear her sing before he signed her but in this are we to assume that there were no like rehearsals in this venue and in the time between booking her and actually having the performance he still has not heard her sing and I was like oh okay the point of that contrivance is that she actually can't sing that's why they went out of their way to establish that the bearded lady can sing Jenny Lind is gonna be unable to perform and then it's gonna be like who's gonna sing for this sold-out crowd and then the bearded lady's gonna come out she's gonna sing her this is real this is me song and then Jenny Lin comes out and starts singing and I'm like oh never mind I guess they do care about being historically accurate so Jenny Lind sings a pop ballad and that's weird because Jenny Lind is an opera singer they've been telling us through the whole scene that she's an accomplished opera singer but this is a very modern like Christina Aguilera type thing but you're like okay this song that I'm hearing is happening in the meta-narrative in musicals when characters sing you understand they're not actually singing but it's kind of weird cuz in the real narrative she is actually singing so it's weird that we're not just hearing the song that she's singing in the narrative she's onstage singing opera but in the meta-narrative that we're seeing she's onstage singing a modern pop song so that's odd but what's really odd is that at this point the movie just stops cold for us to hear like a four minute performance by a character that we've just met and don't know and visually she's doing nothing more interesting than standing on a stage and singing the song in every now and then it cuts back to the audience the crowd loves her and I don't even get the point of us hearing her sing at all they could have just cut past that scene I was trying to make sense of this and I was like okay that must be a pop singer like I don't recognize her face but I'm gonna leave the theater and I'm gonna find out that she had like two number-one singles this past year and she's a famous singer and this was like a cameo an opportunity to hear a famous singer do a nice pop song that showcases her beautiful voice instead when I went home I looked it up and the lady they cast isn't even singing the song they just hired a professional like session singer to do the vocals and that's like 50% of jenny lind screen time like why didn't the singer just just be in the movie and it gets worse it turns out that in this movie the role of the Jenny Lind character is that she's a wicked seductress here to tempt Hugh Jackman away from his freaks and his family while they're on tour she makes a pass at him and then Barnum rejects her and she calls off the tour in a jealous rage and at the conclusion of her final performance she summons him on stage to thank him and then grabs him and forcibly kisses him specifically out of spite in like a bid to ruin his mare sure his reputation or something this movie is so weird in so many ways so when Jenny Lind kisses Barnum they make a big point of having a bunch of people with cameras in the front row and then the press is taking pictures of her kissing him we see these big old-timey flashbulbs going off to convey this fact and then when the newspaper comes out we see the front page and it's an artist's rendition it's a sketch of PT Barnum kissing Jenny Lind like what the what was the point of this movie so weird I don't even know why the Jenny Lind character was in this the only explanation that makes sense is that the writers had some kind of weird grudge and wanted to perform a mean-spirited character assassination against a woman who died in 1887 number 6 for the songs I already said how pleased I was that this musical is not a jukebox musical because I hate those but here's the thing this movie it feels like it's a jukebox musical all of these songs feel like they're written to be playable on the radio like the people writing them were too self-conscious to just unabashedly let them be about circuses and freak shows and stuff this movie has 9 original songs and I played them all back and listen to the lyrics to figure out which ones could not be divorced from the context of the musical and and it was two of them the song the greatest show is about going to a show and enjoying it although not specifically a circus that one only kind of counts but I'm giving it a point to be generous the song the other side is the most specific song it is PT Barnum negotiating with the Zac Efron character to try to get him to sponsor his circus and the back-and-forth dialogue between them plays out in song it's very much like a musically song I thought that was the best musical sequence in the movie because it was actually a song progressing the plot instead of the plot halting for a musical interlude all the other songs found like radio playable pop songs with extremely safe abstract lyrics the other 7 songs in the movie are about wanting to run away with somebody living it up wanting more in life loving yourself being in love with somebody you can't have being betrayed by your partner and living it up while loving yourself and a lot of the lyrics are noticeably bad and anachronistic there's one song come alive which in the movie I guess it's about Barnum saying that his circus is great but if you listen to the lyrics they're just about living large and taking risks and that song has the lyric like a zombie in a maze you know like people said in Victorian times the songs even sound like they're lifted from popular artists like I already said the opening song sounds like Fall Out Boy the big Oscar bait song this is me sounds like something pink would sing like in that era after she started having kids and singing about optimism the finale song sounds like Mumford & Sons or worse Phillip Phillips when I heard the Jenny Lind song I was like man this song reminds me of that TV show that was about a fake Marilyn Monroe musical that TV show smash you know in that show Marilyn Monroe was always singing those big pop ballads about Fame and reaching for the top and always wanting more this song's even about that and then I got home and I found out that the guys that wrote all the songs for smash wrote the songs for the greatest showmen I kind of wonder if that song was like a b-side they didn't have a chance to use in the show you know just pull that one out of the archives and blow the dust off number 7 PT Barnum is not a character this is like the final nail in the coffin for me like what skill does PT Barnum possess where we should be rooting for him like is he especially charismatic no because when he was first trying to market his museum he was failing hard at that until his actual product improved and then it was doing the work for him is he a genius no most of his ideas come from happenstance I feel like a lot of those movies where they show someone getting ideas do this like you can't just think of an idea with your brain you have to see it in your sightline like they just had that movie of Charles Dickens writing a Christmas carol and of course you can't just have the idea of Scrooge he has to see old man with a crazy top hat and go a top hat by Jove I'll put that in my story that's not what he talks like as far as I know there's this wonderfully baffling moment in a million dreams where he's a little boy starving on the street and he's huddled in an alley and a hand comes down and it gives him an apple and he's like an apple and he looks up and the person handing him the Apple she's a freak remember that's Barnum's word not mine she has some kind of physical deformity you're like oh this really unlikely happenstance will give him an affinity for freaks and later inspire him to start a freak show but that's not what happened later as an adult he happens to see a dwarf in the bank when he's applying for a loan and that still doesn't give him the idea for the Freak Show his first business venture is a Museum of weird things and that does horribly the Freak Show thing ends up being his young daughters idea so I don't know why they had the scene with the Apple since it didn't influence his ideas later in life at all he doesn't even have the idea to call his show a circus like a mean critic calls it a circus and he goes I like that word like can this man do anything for himself and I mean he's not a shrewd businessman either you have this whole montage of him selling out freak shows night after night and then it's later revealed that he's somehow still horribly in debt like he never paid off his startup loan for the freak show and then you have Jenny Lind and she's selling out her goal to her he's making Bank off that but then his circus burns down and he's like there's nothing I can do I have nothing and you're like where'd you put your money old man you don't really see him bonding or interacting with the freaks after he initially hires them if anything the extent of their interactions is like one of them is hiding behind the curtain and they're like I can't go out there burn him off for some super lethargic advice like no they're gonna love you and listen to them I'm cheering or something there's no real relationship built up between them and he drops them like a ton of bricks as soon as he signs Jenny Lind and he has a more legitimate act there's a scene where they're like some evil thugs and they're they're trying to beat up the freaks PT Barnum pokes his head out the side door and he's like hey don't beat my freaks that's about it I suppose does he'd get out of him he seems like he's attracted to Jenny Lind when you first see him and like at least that would be something to go off of for his character but then he turns her down he's not even interesting enough to actually cheat on his wife he's just slimy enough to think about it and until he rejects Jenny you don't know what he's gonna do and when he rejects her you don't know why he did that cuz you don't know anything about him he just goes through every scene with the same bland and decipherable smirk on his face the main critic character goes your show is all fake and you think PT Barnum is gonna be like what the hell are you talking about the movie hasn't shown anything fake in my show I got a real bearded lady I got a real dwarf I got two real Asian men might be conjoined but instead he just that same half smirk and he's like well if people are entertained who's to say what's real and what's not like that's nice but the movie hasn't shown us any fake act so this doesn't make any sense dies but the movie acts like he just had the last word and his comeback was great so good for him you guys know PT Barnum is dead right like you can give him some relatable flaws he's not gonna like drive to your house number 8 the love story this movie had a love story and it feels unfair to even call it a be plot they have Zac Efron and zendaya and love but they don't really have any like dialogue between them and they don't acknowledge that that's a thing that's going on until the movies already like halfway over and at that point you don't really know anything about zendaya other than that she does the trapeze this story is so weird and how it's approached like they're in love I guess they fell in love off-camera okay but because they're different races Zac Efron is afraid to commit to an actual relationship with her cuz he's like embarrassed to be seen with her the zendaya is upset because he's being hot and cold and it's insulting that he won't want to be with her but then zendaya takes part in that group dance number about loving yourself and being who you are and she dances angrily like toward Zac Efron and he sees it and he has a change of heart or I mean again he does cuz the next time they have a scene together he's like I don't care what society thinks I want to be with you because now zendaya is the one with reservations and it feels pretty understandable she feels uncomfortable knowing that if she allows him to be with her she's like letting him ruin his life and lose his inheritance and they get all these uncomfortable stares everywhere they go and she has to be afraid of like actual violence because that's the time period they're in but then he sings a romantic song to her about I want to be with you and what are you afraid of why are you holding back and and I'm just like I I get why she's holding back it's reasonable but then the narrative punishes then daya for her wariness over this they straight up punished her by having Zac Effron almost die in a fire so she has to sit penitent weeping at his bedside regretting that she didn't love him when she had the chance and she was wrong to care what people thought and you're like huh she's Ana marginalized racial group I think deciding not to care what people think is maybe a luxury she doesn't have the whole fire scene was really funny because there was this contrived sequence of like character a being like where's character B and running into the fire then character B runs out of the fire like where's character a and then character C has to run in to save them and you're treated to a shot of Hugh Jackman actually bridle carrying Zac Efron out of the burning building that's all I really wanted but that's pretty much the only nice thing I can say about that number 9 none of these characters are actually characters and this story has no story ok here are the characters who have any flaws at all Jenny Lind who is an evil seductress the nameless racist mob who set fire to the theatre Zac Efron who's temporarily ashamed of his girlfriend because his parents are racist and zendaya who is cruel and superficial for not wanting to date a white man in 1852 everybody else in the story is perfect and talented and they sing anthems about being themselves I already said PT Barnum was a poor choice for an upbeat pop music 'el I mean he was basically just a pretty awful guy and if you really show all of his flaws no one's gonna want to see a story about him anymore but you could always handpick like a few to give him some kind of depth you have a lot to choose from just decide which ones you want to acknowledge and tackle within the narrative or imagine if they've reframed this story and made the freaks the main characters or even just one of them and their particular relationship with Barnum his real-life relationship with General Tom Thumb was genuinely really interesting like he you saw him as a kid he recruited in he was lying about his age to try to make his smallness seem even weirder he set him up with a female dwarf and he commodified that too he's he sold tickets and he was inviting the public to like speculate about their sexual relationship and laugh at the idea that dwarves could have that he got a dwarf who hated Tom Thumb and I think actually like punched him in the face one time to be the best man just because he was another dwarf and Barnum thought it would look funnier if they were all short and he called it the fairy wedding like oh look they're so small but on the other hand for Tom Thumb his real name was Charles Charles knew Barnum for most of his life and he did end up becoming highly respected not just as like a freak show component but as an actor and a performer this was really by virtue of his own natural talent and kind of in spite of the way Barnum marketed him but the way he saw it Barnum was this benefactor and this man who gave him a wonderful opportunity he became extremely wealthy and he considered Barnum such a friend that he even like bailed him out one of the many times that Barnum was flat broke because he was always responsible with his money so to Charles it was like yeah that's my lifelong friend in the movie Tom Thumb has like six or seven lines and the one with the most personality is when he calls Queen Victoria sweetheart I was like comic relief again the thing is people's relationships can be complex and we as Outsiders might be like that was a really bad relationship but to the people inside of it it can seem different and there are like nuances to it eg Barnum might have looked at Charles an attraction for his shows or an object that he could market his relationships with the freaks in his freak show some of whom were literally slaves that he literally owned was a little more like the relationship people have with their pets than like a healthy human relationship between equals and he generally treated them very poorly but he also travelled with them and probably knew them really well and some of these people were used to poor treatment even from their families they might have really felt like he made their lives better I would imagine they were kind of constantly torn between wanting to see the best and this colleague that they had and that they've known forever and realizing on some level the way he regarded them as less than human like the circus and the financial independence it afforded them was liberating but the show itself was cruel and demeaning I don't know that sounds like a situation that would result in a lot of complex emotions like maybe that you could explore through song but instead this movie just treats the freaks as a collective entity and they're just like girl power born this way whatever just knockoffs of every empowering anthem that's been on the radio in the last five years and instead of any kind of nuanced story they're just learning the same lesson over and over about loving yourself and not letting people belittle you even when you're actively letting an able-bodied man sell tickets to rich people so they can come and gawk at your weird deformities PT Barnum is an inspiring genius who loves fancy and imagination he's a family man and the selfless liberator of free and in the last 10 minutes of the movie he's like let's put the circus in a tent and it's the first original idea we've literally seen him have in the entire movie it doesn't help that that weird lopsided half smirk is actually the default expression Hugh Jackman has for this entire film just the slanted open mouths smirk my best guess for this face is it's not a character choice it's just that Hugh Jackman really loves being in musicals and he can't help but smile and he doesn't realize his face is doing that seriously if you did a drinking game with this movie and the only rule was to drink every time his face looks like this you would get very drunk and you wouldn't need any other rules number 10 this movie ends with PT Barnum going to reconcile with his family and he goes there by riding a big CGI elephant through the streets this movie is so dumb you this movie seriously had so many characters you guys I didn't even know what to cover you know infinity was gonna have like 87 superheroes and everyone's preemptively making fun of it like oh they're gonna have like 40 seconds of screen time each that's what it felt like this movie was dealing with like the critic who's writing about his show in the paper is supposed to be a character Hugh Jackman's daughter has the subplot about learning ballet and the other girls make fun of her and say she's a clown girl that smells like peanuts and it never comes back like oh my god why did it get so much screen time when you go to see infinity war load up on your phone like the soundtrack of one of the seasons of Glee and make believe that you've never heard of any of the superheroes before and it'll basically be like you saw this movie

Channel: Jenny Nicholson

Views: 2,084,027

Keywords:

Id: 4vHt-yRR_bM

Length: 32min 31sec (1951 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 22 2018