I have two brothers who are jazz musicians and they and their musician friends loved this movie. They thought the bad lyrics were hilarious. There are amateur musicians who record in the same studios the professionals use, and most of them are very nice people. The professional musicians like them and get along with them, but their songs are not good. We can't be geniuses at everything.
And I'll mention this. Some years ago, Natalie Portman railed against Woody Allen:
“I don’t think that’s what the conversation should be about. I think it should be about: Why didn’t Elaine May make a movie every year? Why didn’t Nora Ephron make a movie every year?"
She was right that there should be more women filmmakers, but Woody Allen makes a movie a year because his sister goes to Europe and raises money year after year. He apparently stays within his budget. Elaine May, on the other hand, made Ishtar for $55 million, nearly $150 million today, far more than Woody Allen's ever spent, and this was, as Warren Beatty put it, a gift to her to give her a chance to show what she could do as a director. He was grateful to her for the work she put into re-writing a couple of his movies, Heaven Can Wait and Reds. She also did a re-write on Hoffman's movie, Tootsie.
Two painfully bad singer-songwriters (Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman) travel to north African to perform and find the country crawling with CIA on the verge of revolution. With Charles Grodin. It wasn't great but it wasn't nearly as bad as people made it out to be at the time. It was attacked for being so expensive which, Beatty argued, shouldn't be the audience's concern.
Available on The Criterion Channel.
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