Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Chosen by me as Paul Williams has turned up in things such as Community and Baby Driver and I thought I should give this a whirl.
A pantomine, over-the-top silly bit of nonsense. And great for it.
It's not a long film but it still spends perhaps a little too much time with the dully annoying Winslow leach before he becomes the Phantom (the allusion to Leroux is obvious but thrown into the mix are faust, frankenstein and the monkees).
Nobody here has what could even be close to a natural acting style, which fits the on the nose satire of media and slams against the record industry but mean any emotional resonance is lost in the signal to noise ratio.
The songs are not bad but only The Hell of It has an immediate iconic power.
Very much a proto-De Palma movie with an overt reference to Hitchcock, some split screen, heightened sense of reality and a lack of care to character logic.
Maybe too culty for mainstream enjoyment but a fun, unusual film that should tickle a very specific audience.
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