It would be easier to list movies that you DO like than to do a catalog of stinkers, but ranking on movies is a lot more fun, I guess.

I've got to disagree about "Songcatcher." I thought it was very well done—especially compared to the catastrophe that it could have been. Although the story was fictional, it was based on real people doing things that were actually done back in the early days of "songcatching" in the southern mountains. The actors were really dedicated to doing a good job on it and singing as authentically as they could.

Case in point:   Emmy Rossum, who played Deladis Slocumb, the young girl. She was fourteen when she made the movie. Prior to that, she had been a member of the Metropolitan Opera children's chorus (singing in six different languages in twenty operas). She listened carefully to field recordings of folk music to learn how to sing the songs for the movie. She is "all growed up" now, and recentliy has sung Christine in the movie adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Phantom of the Opera," picked from dozens of auditioners by Webber himself, and for which she received a Golden Globe award.

And Pat Carroll, who played Viney Butler. She also studied the singing style on field recordings. And she was sufficiently dedicated to giving her part in the movie an authentic touch that, due to have a tooth replaced by a dental surgeon, she postponed the procedure until she finished shooting the movie, to leave a pretty authentic looking gap in her teeth—dentists not being readily available in the mountains, and when one is, his main tools are generally a shot of whiskey and a pair of pliers.

I was very impressed by the singing (among other things, Iris Dement, looking anything but glamorous and singing "Pretty Saro") and by the attention to detail. Including Lili Penleric's goof—rejecting the songs collected and written down by Alice Kincaid because they hadn't been collected "scientifically." In short, Alice Kincaid wrote down what she heard, not what she thought the notes should have been. Cecil J. Sharp definitely did not make that kind of mistake. He wrote down what he heard, not automatically assuming, as previous collectors had, that because the singers were not formally trained, they occasionally sang wrong notes. Sharp discovered that many of the songs and ballads were being sung in modes rather than modern scale structure.

Speaking of Sharp, when Lily, Deladis, and Tom Bledsoe were leaving, going down the road, and met the Englishman on his way up (obviously the Cecil Sharp figure), I felt that the actor playing the role was a bit too much of a "Pip pip and tally-ho!" stereotype.

And rather than adding to the movie, I felt that the somewhat unbelievable romance that developed between Lily and Tom, and the Lesbian relationship between Lili's sister and her co-worker, verged a bit on distracting from the main point of the movie. Discovering and collecting the songs. But then, that's the part I was interested in.

I am in total agreement with Little Hawk about "Avatar." My wife and I got it on DVD from NetFlix and watched it on my laptop computer. 17" HD screen. No 3D. The movie worked just fine. As Little Hawk said.

I grew up on movie musicals. And musical movies. "A Song to Remember" (biopic about Chopin), "Song of Scheherazade" (biopic about Rimsky-Korsakov), "Phantom of the Opera" (with Claude Rains as the Phantom—and Nelson Eddy, proving that he wasn't just a pretty face, that sucker could really sing), along with "The Desert Song," "Oklahoma," "South Pacific," "My Fair Lady," "West Side Story," and on and on.

And a movie I wish they had put on DVD, but so far, they haven't: "Tonight We Sing," a biopic about impresario Sol Hurok. It have everybody in it.

One movie they did put on DVD that is one of the most spectacularly beautiful movies, both visually and musically, that was ever made is the 1951 filming of "The Tales of Hoffmann," the opera by Jacques Offenbach. This is not just a filming of a stage production. They really go whole hog with this one. In addition to the singing, they have the services of English ballerina Moira Shearer as one of the lead characters, Stella. With all that talent oozing out everywhere, they made full use of it.

Here, for your enjoyment and amazement, is a clip from the movie. A bit of backstage by-play, then it goes into the "Enchanted Dragonfly" ballet:    Dragonfly.

Don Firth