I'm not usually one for musicals, whether it's on stage or film. Not that I have anything against it, hell I've acted in several stage productions myself. I just don't like watching it.

In most of your classic musicals and their movie versions, like Fiddler on the Roof or Anything Goes, it seems like the plot comes to a grinding halt so everyone can sing and dance about some minute plot point for five minutes. Contemporary musical films fall well-short of the entertainment mark, too, but for different reasons. You have movies adapted from musicals adapted from non-musical movies (Mel Brooks, I'm looking in your direction). We also get god-awful cinematic still-births like Moulin Rouge, where the filmmakers were so lazy they just shoehorned modern pop songs into the mouths of Ewan MacGreggor, Nicole Kidman and (ugh) John Leguizamo. Don't even get me started on Disney, Aladdin, and all those shitty Elton John and Billy Joel songs.

Occasionally, Trey Parker and Matt Stone make the rare musical that entertains me, like Cannibal! or the South Park movie. Also, I've heard Evil Dead: The Musical is pretty good (anything with an audience "Splatter Zone" that's not a Galagher show gets my approval). But even I stopped laughing at the "When I Was On Top of You" scene in Cannibal! and started fast-forwarding through it after a couple of viewings (although the "Fudge, Packer?" tag at the end still cracks me up). Trey Parker is an admitted fan of musicals, and songs like that and "Up There" from South Park are intended more as a parody of classic musical cliches, especially those of the aforementioned House o' Mouse. It's that scene, about halfway through, where a character sings a tender ballad about how great life would be if only they can get that girl, climb that mountain, or have their flaws magically corrected. Well, duh! Who's life wouldn't be better! "You mean Beast doesn't want to be a beast? He wants to be a normal guy so Belle will give up the booty? Thank god that teapot and candelabra spent three hours singing about it, or I never would have figured that out!"

I'm an impatient and busy man. I'm not waiting around forever to find out what the hell is going on with Lost, or if Jack Bauer will do whatever it is he does when he's not torturing someone. I'm definately not sitting through twenty minutes of plot with two hours of singing crammed into it like an overstuffed beanbag chair.