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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Movie Listings
The Film File
The movie version of the hit Broadway musical "Hairspray" is perfectly pleasant--I smiled to myself all the way through it--but it's not as exhilarating as the show. For a subject like this--old dance crazes and pop styles--what matters is not so much the actual past but how we feel about it, and onstage David Rockwell's sets and William Ivey Long's costumes distilled our nostalgia for the candied years between Elvis's early work and the arrival of the Beatles. Set in 1962, "Hairspray," whose first incarnation was John Waters's deadpan camp movie from 1988, celebrates a time when teen-agers, as a distinct consumer group with their own culture, were a fairly recent invention. The stage musical crystallized the euphoria of that period as naively eager commerce and irony-free fantasy; when the chubby young heroine, Tracy Turnblad, awoke in bed and sang "Good Morning, Baltimore," she was surrounded by a pink shag carpet dotted with hair-spray cans and 45s, and the bouffant-and-beehive nuttiness of her world was buoyed by affection. The movie is a lovefest, too, but, this time, when Tracy (Nikki Blonsky) awakes, she jumps onto the streets of Baltimore and passes vermin, a drunk, and a creep. Later, she joins a civil-rights march that has a confrontation with the police. Many people love movies because they make sensuous contact with the...
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