Funny Lady (1975)

  This is the sequel to Funny Girl, the Fanny Brice biopic.  

After her disastrous relationship with Nick (Omar Sharif) ends, Fanny Brice (Barbara Streisand) just wants to throw herself into her work.  Unfortunately, Ziegfield's is closing and finding a new show is difficult.  A new impresario, songwriter, club owner, and general entertainment polymath named Billy Rose (James Caan) wants to design an entire show around Fanny but personality-wise, they are oil and water.  As always, success comes at a price.

This is also a musical, but the songs aren't nearly as good.  Partly because Caan isn't a singer.  Streisand could have carried the entire movie but it would have been nice to have her duet with someone who could match her.  Costumes are top-notch and there are some very lovely sets and shows-within-a-show, especially the synchronized swimmers but this definitely feels like a lesser entry.

It's not currently available on any services, except to rent or buy.  Dust off your VPN, I'd say, rather than pay actual dollars for this.

In other news, I watched the miniseries Escape at Dannemora, about two prisoners serving life sentences who escaped from a prison in upstate New York after seducing a worker in the textile sweatshop.  It's a monumentally depressing series and an indictment of the for-profit prison system in general.  But it is competently told with excellent performances from Paul Dano, Benicio del Toro, and Patricia Arquette.  Currently streaming on Paramount+.

I tried to watch Melvin at Dinner, an independent film directed by Bob Odenkirk, but it was so fucking boring I couldn't make it more than 30 minutes.  I also DNF'd an Australian film from 2007 called Vigilante.  It is Margot Robbie's debut, but everything else about it is terrible.  And I made it about one and a half episodes into Club de Cuervos, one of Netflix's first "original" shows but I was not in the mood to suffer through the amount of misogyny required of a Mexican soccer show.  Ted Lasso it ain't.