Let's Make Hollywood Declare 2007 The Year Without a Musical Montage

It’s almost the end of the year and that means resolutions and new beginnings and getting off to a fresh start. Therefore, I am hereby calling upon Hollywood to mandate that 2007 be The Year Without a Musical Montage. Yes, I am placing an open letter to producers, writers, directors and Nora Ephron to give us an entire year in which no movie shortcuts character or plot development by relying on a musical montage. (And especially no montage set to Walking on Sunshine; there’s a song that has more than outlived its usefulness. Am I right? Well? Am I?)

The musical montage is a relatively recent thing for the movies, pretty much becoming a staple during the 1960s. You see, before that decade, writers and directors had this crazy idea of actually using all 90 to 160 minutes of a movie to tell the story or delve into characterization. Back then, it could take ten to fifteen minutes for a romantic relationship to go from first meeting to consummation (off camera, of course) to boredom; today’s screenplays are written by people who learned about character development from the writers of Three’s Company and Dynasty instead of Dickens and Tolstoy, and as a result they don’t have the slightest idea how to create dialogue that is interesting enough to take us on that journey. The result? A three minute music video that is supposed to pass for plot development and characterization.