Two feet... They're not as easy as I thought they'd be, Master.

Puss in Boots (1988)

Chosen by me from netflix because Christopher Walken is awesome. 

There was some recent moaning about the two leads in LaLa Land not being good song and dance people. I like that movie a lot (and may cover it here soon) and actually really like that Gosling is not the best at, you know, the musical bits (I think Emma Stone is perfectly good). Romance and Cigarettes is another musical I really like with less than talented performers (also, as it happens, featuring the Walkmeister). There's something about throwing yourself so fully into a thing that you dont mind how bad you look that appeals to me. It's endearing.

I dont sing or dance. At all. I can't even sing happy birthday to people. It's an issue and I hate it about myself. Once I went to a club with some friends (a very rare occurrence) and one of them, that I just assumed would be good at dancing, was just terrible. But it didnt matter, he had fun, people respond to that. I have a perpetual rod rammed so far up my backside you can see it if I yawn. 

Christopher Walken is my friend at the club.

It doesn't matter that his singing is pretty awful, that his dancing is not much better. He is having an absolute blast and it almost carries the movie.

Unfortunately it's let down by a couple of things - no-one else is all that great either (Jason Connery has a dubbed singing voice - Nick Curtis - and it's still bad, why bother getting someone else to do it then?) except the astonishingly beautiful Carmela Marner and that the songs are generally pretty dull.

One, a double duet split over two locations is pretty witty though not especially interesting tune wise and anytime Walken throws himself into a song you can't help but be pulled along with it.

I'm not too knowledgeable with the Puss in Boots story, so dont know how this differs, but just as I was finding it iffy using deception to get someone to marry you, Connery comes clean to Marner and she is instrumental in pushing him forwards with his lies to get what she wants (even if that thing is just a man) which whilst not exactly a strong feminist stance is at least giving her some agency. 

And she gets the funniest bit of business in the film, when she fake feints and tries to shoo Connery away in the confusion.

A bit too bland and a shade too long to be a lost classic children's film but fun in parts and worth seeing for Walken's sheer delight in playing a musical cat.