Easter Parade
Director: Charles Walters
Year Released: 1948
Rating: 2.0
Typical musical fantasy so utterly garish and detached from any kind of reality (just like Irving Berlin's other 'sci-fi musicals') that watching it is a lot like window shopping down 5th Avenue instead of working in the shops, dealing with the sometimes obnoxious customers and enduring the 9-to-5 slow-kill of life itself. This might be fine for those that prefer their musicals to be always playing it safe and shameless in their desire to be crowd pleasing - and who doesn't want to see Fred Astaire dance and hear Judy Garland sing? - but I go for those that are either funnier (How to Succeed in Business...) or more tragic (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) or zippier (An American in Paris). With a genre this fickle, you could say it becomes a personal thing.
