Recently Saw The Greatest Showman Movie

The Greatest Showman, starring Hugh Jackman as American history's "greatest showman" P.T. Barnum, is a musical taking excerpts and people from that figure's illustrious life in the mid-to-late 1800s, simplifying things considerably and ignoring others...culminating in a sympathetic portrayal of Barnum as a good-natured and ambitious family man who gets sidetracked by that ambition.  The dancing and songs look and sound more like they belong in High School Musical, in which Zac Efron, who's plays Barnum's associate, also starred (and danced).  If you are seriously into movies like Hairspray and High School Musical, I think you'll really like The Greatest Showman for the same general kind of dancing here...unfortunately, that genre never has sat too well with me...

Fortunately, my usually almost-allergic reaction to seeing the kind of choreography reminiscent of Michael Jackson's Thriller video, with everyone moving their arms and legs in sync and en masse, isn't all that The Greatest Showman is about.  For one, it does touch upon the events of Barnum's life...including his recruitment of "freaks" for his museum (a controversial matter with today's extreme political correctness as it is), the visit...along with "Tom Thumb"...to then-young Queen Victoria in England, the promotion and touring of Swedish singing star Jerry Lind, and the burning down of his New York headquarters, to name a few.  Also, I picked up very clearly that the "bad guys" in this movie tended to belong to one of two groups: the elitist snobs who were excessively conscious of their own "place" in society and the intolerant, uneducated rabble, who seemed to think that their main purpose in life was to angrily go around in mobs holding torches and railing and fighting against people not like themselves.  The protagonists, of course, were normal, reasonable people like ourselves in 2018, and with the same enlightened contemporary views on class, gender, and race...I doubt that the real historical folks were so PC back then...

I liked The Greatest Showman for the compelling characterization that Hugh Jackman gave to his protagonist, and the acting of Efron, Michelle Williams, and Zendaya in supporting roles was excellent.  I brushed aside the historical inaccuracies and treated it as a compelling, personal story...maybe others would enjoy it more if they did the same...