Well, finally watched it at long last. My reaction has been pretty much summed up by Nancy and several of the others in this thread. It was amusing, engaging, I stayed with it to the end, but . . .

I too liked the little side-bits best, the LP covers (that "Sunny Side Up" one!!!) and - as Don points out - the song lyrics, which were hilarious but subtle. You really did need to listen carefully to catch them (sort of like in The Simpsons when they show a quick flash of Rev. Lovejoy's church marquee advertisements, or Marge's magazine covers). Way, way too easy to miss. And when that's the best part of the whole show . . .

(Hmmm, both paragraphs above end with " . . ." - that says something right there about my reaction.) I would like to hear the whole TV concert, but I'm not tempted to buy the DVD just for that. Extras sound interesting too, but ditto. There just isn't enough force in the original to persuade me to spend the dosh.

The main problem for me was that it didn't generate sufficient momentum to MOVE it in any direction. The only real "story" centres on the will-they/won't-they saga of Mitch & Micky, and yes, I did get interested enough to care about what happened to them. They provided the film's only real forward drive, and herein lies my problem. Mitch was just too broad a satire to ever come alive for me, and - though it shouldn't matter in a movie that is itself satire - it does. Perhaps if the humour and a whole parade of other interesting distractions were flying thick and fast, one would never notice. But they weren't, and I did. Satire has to amuse and interest, and I found Mitch boring and one-note and vaguely unpleasant, not helped by his   e x t r e m e l y   s l o w   speech. You wait forever for every sentence, and when it finally comes out, it's a non-event, like a joke with no punchline. I could not for the life of me see what charisma he held for Micky, who was clearly still in thrall to him (or her vision of him). But it takes two for this dynamic to work - and her character did, but his didn't. It was like listening to one half of a duet. Apart from the clever song lyrics and album covers, this was the main ballast of the film. I don't know how much of it was acting and how much was the monotone way the Mitch part had been written, but he was just too one-dimensional to carry the weight put on him by the script and the other characters. Micky - as usual, one suspects - was left in a void.

The best "serious" part of the whole thing for me was when they were in the dressing room before the show, and the camera is behind them so we only see their faces reflected in the two mirrors. Each of them is carefully boxed off and isolated from the other by framed lights, and all the things they are not able to say to one another become painfully evident in the void that separates them. They're both trapped in little boxes and they will go on being trapped, he in an 8x10 hospital room and she in a marriage to a fool and a diminishing trail of background-music-only gigs.

But such moments were few and far between, and if I couldn't have constant comedy then I wanted more engaging drama, but by and large didn't get it. Too much simply bordered on slapstick without the pratfalls and pies in the face.

Don't know whether I should admit this or not, but [gulp] I really quite liked one of the songs (the neuftet obviously liked it too, enough to rip it off). It was a perfectly-done, absolutely convincing pastiche that I'm SURE I heard on the radio 45 years ago ;-)   That's the sign of good parody, when you can almost "remember" it. I'm referring to the travelling-song-by-people-who-hadn't-been-anywhere (great description, weelittledrummer) complete with pretentious lyric about the train from hell, or whatever it was. My 12-year-old-self would have probably bought the record.

So: Three stars out of a possible five for the movie. But - on the other hand - it has sure generated some great Mudcat posts!