With the imminent video release Moulin Rougue, movie critics are going to once again declare the movie musical dead so that this new one can revive it. The truth is, movie musicals keep coming out. Shocking, isn't it? Musicals are not dead, but undoubtedly they aren't as popular and pervasive as they once were.

I think one of the main reasons for the recent -- and by that I mean in the last 30 years or so -- decline in the movie musical is simply that today's movie-goers expect a certain level of reality in their films. And realistically, people don't just break out into song in the middle of the day. In some ways a watershed moment for this transition came when The Godfather beat Cabaret for the best picture Oscar, although Cabaret won pretty much all the rest that year. Musicals still outnumber comedies in that category.

Also bringing up musicals and The Godfather allows me to remind everyone that there was a movie made of Guys & Dolls starring Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra. Guess which one had the primarily speaking/non-singing role? Here's a hint: it wasn't the right one.

But I digress. How do contemporary filmmakers -- who have either a desire to harness the emotional power of music or a childhood nostalgia for the musicals of yore -- incorporate musical numbers into their movies without breaking the illusion of reality that modern cinema must now adhere to?

Some movies decide to ignore the new rules altogether. For example, Disney's Newsies. You don't even remember that one, do ya? Modern audiences aren't willing to accept that kind of stylized reality anymore. Not that Arnold Schwartzenegger movies or porn are any more likely to happen in real life, but there are certain kinds of realism that people don't accept anymore.

Take a look at New York, New York. It's a brilliant example of how the over-the-top-to-the-rafters-and-into-the-cheap-seats style of theatrical acting that Liza Minelli does and does not blend with equally bombastic, but more screen-sized, subtle histrionics of Robert DeNiro. And Scorsese does skirt the whole gritty realism vs. musical numbers question by making his characters musicians, so there's damn good reason why they break out into song. It's their job. It's what they do. But are movies like The Commitments really musicals? Not really.

Some movies like the aforementioned Moulin Rouge just decide to dump reality altogether and go for that deliberate willful inaccuracy of, say, A Knight's Tale, using that idea of "If we admit up front that this isn't real. we can do whatever we want." Meanwhile, Evita was passed off on the public as nothing more than a hour and half long Madonna video. Audiences didn't bite on a large scale. Koyaansquatsi might not be an art-house movie these days. In fact the relative failure of Fantasia during its original release may be, in fact, much more in tune with these times. (Animated classical videos? No force-fed over-expectations of romance? This is the only Disney movie I can stomach.)

Of course, another way of melding antiquated musical and modern movie is to go the route of James L. Brooks' I'll Do Anything starring Nick Nolte, Albert Brooks, and Julie Kavner. How'd he do it? He cut out the songs. Unfortunately this movie has dropped into obscurity, so the chances of a director's cut DVD featuring the songs written by the likes of Sinead O'Connor and the artist sometimes known as Prince are slim. If you want to catch a glimpse of this odd fish, you need to rent Danny Aiello's The Player knock-off called The Pickle. In the previews you can see a hint of what I'll Do Anything looked like before Jim Brooks chickened out and de-musicalized it.

There have been a few successful marriages of these two sensibilities lately, though. Woody Allen's Everybody Says I Love You postulates that, yes, all of us do on occasion break into song (usually when we're alone in the car with the radio blasting) -- we just don't sound very good. As such, he had various Hollywood stars provide their own wobbly vocals to the occasional songs. A nice touch (and you though Julia Roberts couldn't act.) It helps. But still, where are all the instruments coming from? And how did Goldie Hawn learn to fly?

Dancer In The Dark (read the excellent review by Caitlin Lyon) answers that question. While I've always kinda liked Bjork, I've never been a big fan of the industrial-techno instrumentation she traditionally uses. However in the context of this musical it makes perfect sense. The songs are built on the repetitive sounds of the factory she works in, allowing the musical numbers to grow naturally out of the reality presented. The whole movie is seen through Selma's deluded and failing eyes, which explains not only the random musical numbers but the incorrect assumption about the American legal system and illogical oppressive need for self-martyrdom on her part. That's just the way she sees the world -- not how it really is.

In essence, the movie musical isn't really dead, so we can stop calling it dead every time a new one is released. It's just time for a re-imagining of how to combine today's expectations with a man simply singing in the rain.