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So, I’ve re-thought the whole “Lists page” thing. Perhaps once I’ve really composed that many lists, then it’ll seem more appropriate to gather them all together on their own page. On top of that, my second list is of my favorite movies, which presents me with a two-part dilemma: 1) I can’t bring myself to just list movie titles without writing anything about why I love them so much, and 2) this being the age of YouTube, I can’t resist including choice clips from the films. Chalk it up to the “because it’s there” syndrome.

You’ll notice that I’m listing them in alphabetical order – no way am I going to get hierarchical with this set of movies. It could only lead to hurt feelings between them, and we don’t want that. Thus, we’ll start with the letter “A”:

Bob Fosse’s masterpiece isn’t merely a self-portrait: it’s a self-referendum, so revealing that it feels like an act of penance. One imagines that by surviving for another eight years after the film’s release, Fosse surprised himself. All That Jazz is fraught with an confessional urgency, as though his eventual death of a heart attack at age 60 were actually right around the corner – or indeed, already past. The film establishes a netherworld meeting between Fosse alter ego Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) and a dulcet-voiced Angel of Death (Jessica Lange), and from there refers back to Gideon’s earthly life of deeds and misdeeds.

In this clip, Joe Gideon’s latest movie has just flopped disastrously at its first screening, so his girlfriend (Ann Reinking) and his daughter (real-life daughter Nicole FosseErzsebet Foldi) have put together a dance number to cheer him up. Notice the subsequent montage of Joe’s “getting ready in the morning” routine, which we’ve seen earlier in the film once or twice – but this time the cracks are showing, particularly in Joe’s rendition of his formerly jaunty motto “It’s showtime, folks!”

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Bob Fosse’s early triumphs (The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, etc) contained little of the somber cynicism would characterize his mature works (Cabaret, Pippin, Lenny, et al.). Significantly, it is the opening number of Fosse’s 1975 show Chicago – the cheeky vaudevillian tale of nihilism and murder – that is echoed in this film’s title. The “jazz” of Fosse parlance doesn’t simply refer to the so-named genre of American music, but rather to a broader type of expressive distortion. Jazz is the spiky prism through which the plain nature of things is twisted and refracted. Throughout the Fosse oeuvre, “jazz” is used variously as a euphemism for sex, greed, dance, music, alcohol, drugs, and so on. Jazz is everything fun, naughty and a bit dangerous, the stuff we all like a little more than we’re willing to admit. All of us, that is, except for Bob Fosse, who was perfectly willing to admit just how jazzy he was.