BEFORE: I don't think it's stopped raining in NYC for three days now - the roof was leaking at the theater yesterday during my 13-hour shift, and today I finally had a day off for the first time in six - seven? - days, and what happens, but water started leaking in through our upstairs windows, and then came flooding into our basement, for the first time in two years. The rain is very crafty, it clearly wanted to distract us by leaking in the windows, so we wouldn't have eyes on the basement.
It's my fault, really - I didn't have time this spring yet to get out in the backyard and trim back all the vines and weeds, and when I do that, I usually also clear the leaves out of the basement stairs, where the drain is. So when I saw water in the basement, then I had to go outside IN THE RAIN and clear the drain just so water would stop coming in the back door, and then I had to scoop leaves out with a dustpan, and THEN we had to do an hour or so of bailing and mopping in the basement. Now the dehumidifier is hard at work getting rid of the last of the water, this would only be bad if I stored all my books in a room in the basement, I'm sure some of them have been damaged by our occasional floods, but I never have time to go through all the books and find out. Most of my books are up on shelves in that room, but I have so many that some live in bags and boxes on the floor. Someday soon I'm going to have to get rid of a bunch of water-damaged paperbacks, I think.
I just KNOW I'm going to regret watching this documentary - I'm just trying to clear it off my list here, but I'm not really a big fan of Idina Menzel, so really, I'm not sure WHY I'm watching it, just because it fits here? Sure, there's the added benefit of it helping me line up my Mother's Day films JUST right - but I bet that after this film I'll wish I'd dropped it and taken a night off. Let's wait and see, though.
George Clooney carries over from "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You". This is the LAST movie for April, so here's my format breakdown for the month:
11 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Amsterdam, Equilibrium, Final Portrait, Paul Apostle of Christ, McEnroe, Sheryl, Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, Attica, Where's My Roy Cohn?, Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You
9 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Thoroughbreds, The Promise, The Book Thief, Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, Hoop Dreams, What's My Name: Muhammad Ali, Say Hey Willie Mays!, Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over, The Mystery of D.B. Cooper
1 watched on Netflix: What Happened Miss Simone?
4 watched on Amazon Prime: The Northman, Radioactive, Val, Venus and Serena
2 watched on Hulu: Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, The Queen of Versailles
2 watched on Hulu: Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, The Queen of Versailles
1 watched on YouTube: Citizen Ashe
1 watched on Disney+: Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?
1 watched on Disney+: Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?
1 watched on HBO MAX: When We Were Kings
30 TOTAL
THE PLOT: Idina Menzel's path to realize a lifelong dream: headlining a concert at Madison Square Garden in her hometown of New York City.
AFTER: Yeah, it turns out my first instinct was correct - I would have been a lot happier if I had not watched it. I could just NOT post the review, and you'd never know, but I feel that's very dishonest. This is one of the most self-obsessed, self-indulgent pieces of crap I've ever watched. Sure, I realize that I've advised all celebrities to get involved with the documentaries being made about them, but let me clarify, not to this extent. This is 90 minutes of Idina Menzel explaining to us all where Idina Menzel grew up, every movie she's ever been in and why, how she feels about the songwriting process, etc. Everything you never needed to know about Idina Menzel, and more, brought to you by Idina Menzel herself, weighing in again and again on the topic of Idina Menzel.
Oh, sure, there's concert footage - this was designed as a mixture of concert footage and documentary - but if you came expecting a full concert, you're bound to be disappointed, because they keep interrupting the songs with more hot info about Idina Menzel. Alternatively, if you came here for the hard-hitting, informative doc about Idina Menzel, then you're also bound to be disappointed, because they keep interrupting THAT with a bunch of concert footage.
Look, I'll admit that I'm fascinated by the logistics of rock bands when they go on tour - do concert promoters have a set path that they like to schedule the bands on, like an ordered list of venues that they keep booking again and again in THAT ORDER, and if so, what is it? Like, if you miss seeing your favorite band in Philadelphia, can you most likely catch them two days later in Trenton, NJ? And if it's not the same path every time, does that mean that for every tour that, say, the Stones go on, somebody has to calculate the most logical way to move both the band AND the trucks of equipment, costumes and instruments across the country? Because that sounds like an incredible feat for someone to accomplish on every tour, I mean you can fly Mick and Keith to the next venue, but don't the amps and guitars have to go by truck? So the next gig has to be either really close, or if not, it has to be scheduled three days after the last one, to allow the trucks to drive the distance in-between. See, this is the stuff that I want to learn about in a documentary - whenever I see a band's itinerary on a t-shirt I wonder why they set it up THAT way - why play a gig in Detroit and then have the next one in Miami, how does that work? Are there two sets of trucks with gear roaming around the country, or just one?
But when this doc gets to this part, moving Idina Menzel around on tour, suddenly I'm a lot less interested. As Idina Menzel explains, she doesn't always travel around with the gear and the costumes, and presumably, the rest of her band. Yup, she gets to fly (first-class, probably) to the next gig while I'm guessing the musicians have to ride on the tour bus. That hardly seems fair - why can't she ride in the bus with her fellow bandmates, is she too good for that? Why can't she explain THAT part? Oh, sure, you can imagine that maybe she has to cover more ground, fly back and forth to NYC and L.A. to do press interviews, and then catch up with the band in Detroit for the next performance - but come on, you're just covering up for her. More likely she feels she's too famous to travel to the next gig by bus.
But she does explain that going out on tour means playing a bunch of different venues, and did you know that each one is different? Each arena has a different number of seats, and therefore it's a different experience, with different lighting, different acoustics and so she's got to do a rehearsal in each one! Come on, guys, why couldn't we standardize all of the arenas and concert halls across the country to make things easier for Idina Menzel? Some people just have no consideration.
Also, Idina Menzel explains that Idina Menzel really misses her husband and son, who stay in L.A. while she's out on the road. This is the son from her first marriage to Taye Diggs, (who she co-starred in "Rent" with, but that's a whole other explanation...) and sure, she misses a soccer game here and there, but remember, everybody, parenting is HARD, especially when you have to go out on tour. Well, Idina, at this point you kind of have to make a choice, really, you can be an overprotective parent who's there for her son and makes pancakes every morning, or you can go out on the road and make money touring. You simply can't do both. Well, you can, but obviously that means more plane trips back and forth - because really, it's all about YOU, isn't it? Congratulations, you made sure that your staff scheduled a break in the tour for two days so you could fly back to L.A. and take your son trick-or-treating. By all means, nominate yourself for "Mother of the Year".
Idina also wants us to know that trying to have another baby is hard and inconvenient, especially when IVF treatments conflict with those pesky tour dates. And also, mass shootings are bad, she didn't work for about 7 years after "Rent" came out, and why oh why didn't anybody buy her first record album? Come on, people, what's wrong with you? Don't you realize that it contained a song that was, at one point, the SIXTH fastest song rising in airplay across the country?
Give me a god-damned break. You don't mind if I skip over the obligatory performance of "Let it Go" from "Frozen", do you? Sure, it was an empowering song for moody little girls everywhere, but maybe it was a bit TOO empowering? But never forget what this film is really about - Idina Menzel having a dream, for a very long time, to perform at Madison Square Garden. Umm, that's not really in her "hometown" if she grew up in Syosset, Long Island, a fair distance from Manhattan. I'm sure they would have let her play at Jones Beach Amphitheater, or the Long Island Coliseum, all she had to do was ask. Nope, it's MSG or bust - so the whole cross-country (and back to NY, then to L.A. and back to NY again...) is documented here as the "Road to Madison Square Garden" - I guess she had to workshop everything in the smaller towns before even trying to fill up the Garden.
This was in 2018, and she went out on tour with Josh Groban's Bridges tour, she was the opening act for him in Atlanta, Nashville, Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh and then NYC. So was the dream to PLAY Madison Square Garden, or to HEADLINE at Madison Square Garden, because those are two different things - I guess you take what you can get, right?
Sorry, I've got to burst a bubble here, because the way this film is laid out, we see Idina going from city to city, and the concert footage is worked in sequentially, which seems to imply that one song was maybe performed in Dallas, the next one in Phoenix, and so on. But on Wikipedia, it says that this special only features concert footage from MSG in New York. This makes sense, it's much cheaper to film ONE concert instead of eight, or one song in each of eight different venues. But with the editing, this is very misleading, it's meant to feel as if the camera crew followed her around to ALL the concerts, nay nay, they only filmed at ONE.
I'll give credit here for only ONE song that I really enjoyed, that was a cover of "I Melt With You", the Modern English song, which Idina did as part of her concert set. That's a great song, it's right in my vocal range and it would be my go-to karaoke song if I had one. I like the way the song got re-worked for her, but other than that, there just wasn't much here for me to enjoy. Well, you pay your money, you take your chances and at least you get to cross another film off the list.
Also starring Idina Menzel (last seen in "Tick, Tick...Boom!"), Josh Groban (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Aaron Lohr, Cara Mentzel,
with archive footage of Bea Arthur (also carrying over from "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Kristen Bell (last seen in "When in Rome"), Kristin Chenoweth (last seen in "Hit ad Run"), James Corden (last seen in "Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed"), Taye Diggs (last seen in "Equilibrium"), Jimmy Fallon (last seen in "Val"), Josh Gad (last seen in "Artemis Fowl"), Jonathan Groff (last seen in "The Matrix Resurrections"), Jonathan Larson (also last seen in "Tick, Tick...Boom!"), Anthony Rapp (ditto), Jesse L. Martin, Norah O'Donnell (last seen in "Irresistible"), Chazz Palminteri (last seen in "Narrowsburg"), Billy Porter (last seen in "Like a Boss"), Questlove (last heard in "Soul"), Adam Sandler (last seen in "Sheryl"), Stephen Schwartz, Taylor Swift (last seen in "Amsterdam"), John Travolta (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Barbara Walters (last seen in "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Renee Zellweger (last seen in "The Whole Truth")
RATING: 3 out of 10 costume changes
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