Music & Romance Collection: Shout / Captain Corelli’s Mandolin / Connie and Carla / The Man Who Cried / The Caveman’s Valentine / Madame Sousatzka
What We Thought:
From Mill Creek Entertainment comes Music & Romance Collection: Shout / Captain Corelli’s Mandolin / Connie and Carla / The Man Who Cried / The Caveman’s Valentine / Madame Sousatzka. Of the films, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is probably the most well known. I’ll be honest, I don’t think I had even heard of some of these never mind had seen them previously. Each film has names and faces you’ll recognize at least.
Shout stars John Travolta as a music teacher who introduces rock & roll to boys during the 1950s. I probably hadn’t seen it in 30 years and it has a young Heather Graham as the headmaster’s daughter. It also stars Jamie Walters who was in the TV show The Heights and Beverly Hills 90210. It’s a bit corny by today’s standards, but I actually thought Travolta was solid compared to his work nowadays.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin stars Nicolas Cage, Penelope Cruz and Christian Bale (who I didn’t remember was in it) and is set on an island during the time of World War II. Cage plays Corelli who soon falls for Cruz’s character when her husband (Bale) sets off for the war. Cage and his Italian troops aren’t welcomed at first, but he falls for the people and culture. It’s kind of a hot mess and I probably hadn’t seen it in 20 years.
Connie and Carla stars Nia Vardalos, Toni Collette, and David Duchovny. Vardalos and Collette become drag queens despite already being female. Their show gains popularity and they almost get exposed as women. Vardalos also wrote the film.
The Man Who Cried stars Christina Ricci, Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp, Harry Dean Stanton and John Turturro. Ricci is a young Russian Jewish woman who ends up in England after her father moves to the States. She then moves to France to sing. Her life in Paris is going well until she is found out to be Jewish during World War II.
The Caveman’s Valentine stars Samuel L. Jackson as a former prodigy who now lives in a cave and suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. A body is discovered outside his cave and is written off as an accident, but Jackson is told it’s murder and tries to prove it. It is all over the map tonally and I had never even heard of it.
Last we have Madame Sousatzka which stars Shirley MacLaine as a music teacher of a young Bengali immigrant in London. MacLaine won a Golden Globe for her performance in a movie we’ve seen a thousand times before.
The Nerds Templar 