For his 1995 cult hit Welcome to the Dollhouse, Todd Solondz created a fictional band, "The Quadratics" and in their first big number they absolutely murder the Rolling Stones' "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" in a kind of frenetic klezmer meltdown. Meanwhile the clarinet player's little sister is totally grooving on it, leaping and pirouetting around the driveway. It's the kind of fractured exuberance that runs all throughout Solondz's work.
By the way, Solondz's new film, Forgiveness, is in post-production and is said to be a companion piece to Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse. It stars Allison Janney, Ally Sheedy, Paul Reubens, and Charlotte Rampling among others. Yes please.
A few months back I caught a live performance of new music by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips (of Luna) set to thirteen of Andy Warhol's most mesmerizing Screen Tests, a series of black and white film portraits he shot between 1964 and 1966 using a stationary 16mm Bolex camera.
Warhol would film these two minute portraits whenever a visitor to the Factory seemed to him to have "star quality." He captured over 500 tests in two years, and this collection highlights thirteen of the most compelling and well known, most of which went almost entirely unseen until
after Warhol's death in 1987.
Many of Warhol's subjects had already attained a certain level of notoriety at the time of filming, but even his anonymous subjects are totally captivating on screen; watching them feels at once like a deeply intimate act and intensely aesthetic experience. Warhol would often light his subjects from one side, creating a Greek statue-like effect across their faces, creating them somewhere between individual and icon. For me the most compelling of these is the screen test of a man named Richard Rheem, whose expression stays relentlessly neutral for the entire duration, a feat against which the rest of the subjects' reactions must be compared and which makes you realize that when Warhol said "screen test," he meant it.
Warhol filmed the screen tests at 24 frames per second but slowed them down to 16
frames per second for playback, a quality that makes Dean &
Britta's languorous music a particularly good match and demonstrates the power of film to reveal character, for each subject's slowed down gestures and microexpressions seem to reveal his or her thoughts. Nico seems the most conscious of the camera's powers. She meets its gaze only fleetingly and is unable to refrain from moving through a model's catalog of poses, while Edie Sedgwick stares directly into the lens, displaying a fascinating mix of vulnerability and worldliness. Many of the subjects rely on little rituals and props to carry them through. Paul America chews gum. Lou Reed drinks a Coke. Jane Holzer brushes her teeth. Ingrid Superstar compulsively touches her nose. Only a few of us are able, it seems, to sit still for this kind of scrutiny.
The Andy Warhol Museum and Plexifilm recently released a DVD version of the films set to Dean & Britta's original songs (as well as a few covers). The title is borrowed from Warhol's original anthology of early screen tests, called "The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys." The music is gorgeous and the DVD packaging is fancy-- slipcovered and hardbound. It's also available on iTunes.
A couple of years ago, I wrote at length about how David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE was proof that his relationship to music was deepening rather profoundly, but even then I could not have imagined "Dark Night of the Soul," the darkly gorgeous album recently released in collaboration with musical visionary Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse) and Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse).
The album was supposed to have been released with this book of photographs by Lynch, which would have served as a visual accompaniment to the music, but some typical label bullshit from EMI is holding up an official release. You can nevertheless hear the album in its entirety on the NPR site, right here, and it's been reverse engineered so that it's possible to download the individual MP3 files directly. (The album has also appeared on torrent, we hear).
My personal favorite is "Jaykub" featuring Jason Lytle, but I also love "Star Eyes" and the atmospheric title track, "Dark Night of the Soul" is a perfect little postcard from the edge...a wonderfully psych-surf sounding Vic Chesnutt and Burton's lilting loops. Other contributors include a dream team-like array of artists including the
Flaming Lips, Frank Black, Nina Persson (of The Cardigans), and Iggy Pop, yet little traces of Lynch's signature sound design remain a constant throughout the album. The quietly manic radio waves in Mark Linkous' "Daddy's Gone," for instance, are exactly the kind of touch Lynch would use to add tension to a scene and "Insane Lullaby" brings to mind the dense and demonic "Walkin' on the Sky" from INLAND EMPIRE: thick, unhinged rhythms slathered atop James Mercer's tenor like so much cadmium on canvas. It's all further evidence of Lynch's continued influence on music, as
well as how thoroughly he means to explore the relationship between
image and sound. Highly recommended.
Other contributers to "Dark Night of the Soul" include Jason Lytle of Grandaddy,
Super Furry Animals, Susanne Vega, and Julian Casablancas of The Strokes.
(video: Jarmusch discussing past collaborations w/ Neil Young and RZA)
I haven't had a chance to see Jarmusch's neo-noir The Limits of Control yet, but it's already ranking as one of the most interesting soundtracks this year, what with its "power ambient" sensibility. This time around Jarmusch is taking more of a licensed/various artists approach (click here for the full soundtrack listing on the Playlist blog), and his sense of adventure is still very much in tact.
Jarmusch has said that when when he starts writing scripts he'll listen to music that "kick start" his imagination, and if that was true with Control, then it was tickled to life by some truly unlikely muses. How Japanese sludge rock trio Boris, a for instance, could have given rise to a film Betsy Sharkey described as a series of "sun-saturated French impressionist paintings" is of an un-small amount of interest. How could tracks by drone doom pioneers Earth have any business in a film with a globe trotting, cappuccino swilling protagonist who is, according to Roger Ebert, "handsome, exotic, cool, impenetrable, hip, mysterious, quiet, coiled, enigmatic, passive, stoic and hungry?" Maybe the music will just loom in dark irony or slide sideways into post-modern Bond-ness of it all.
In any case, I really like the idea of this guy ordering his foamy coffee beverages to the tune of "Omens and Portents." I mean, most directors would have chosen some generic Buddha Bar dross or unobtrusive Spanish guitar for this subject matter. I love that Jarmusch is gloriously unwilling to pad his images in such car commercial fare, and instead lights out for the territories. It may or may not all hang together, but in a year dominated by the schlocky backwash of the 2007 writers' strike, I would take even a failed experiment over a seamless rehash. And I'm not worried. With fellow seekers Christopher Doyle, Bill Murray, and Tilda Swinton involved, I am, in fact, not even going to bother to read the reviews before seeing it.
Showing a keen sense of pop and rock's rightful place in cinema, Cameron Crowe shares his favorite film-music moments
with Empire Magazine. This is highly recommended reading whether you're
a filmmaker or simply wanting to breathe life into your Netflix queue.
"A great movie doesn't need music to exist, and a wonderful song is
already a perfect movie in your imagination. But sometimes the marriage
works, and the result is an explosion, a memorable body rush that
enhances both and rocks your soul along the way."
What makes a particular film-music moment stand out for Crowe? Here are a few worthy snippets:
"The song is the opening brush stroke on a masterpiece...years later, just hearing [it] brings back the experience of the entire movie." (on John Schlesinger's use of Harry Nillson's "Everybody's Talking" in the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy).
"The version is immaculate, and the words and song plays largely on the listeners faces." (on Pedro Almodóvar's use of Tomas Mendez's song "'Cucurrucucu Paloma" in the 2002 film Talk to Her.
"When it was over and lights came up, not a person budged. Like all
great movies that create an environment, Once is a world you want to
stay in. And the piano store scene...is that
rarest thing in movies: the moment a couple falls in love, caught on
film in real time." (on John Carney's use of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova's 'Falling Slowly' in the 2006 film Once.)
"...[B]ut this is perhaps his best song usage ever. [It] kicks off
Harold and Maude with spare perfection...We meet Harold and he's about to hang himself...and the combination of this song and that scene makes for a
soul-scratching introduction." (on Hal Ashby's use of Cat Stevens' "Don't Be Shy" in the 1971 film, Harold and Maude.)
And while there are two mentions of score among his picks, it's worth noting that one is a score written by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits (for his score to 1983's Local Hero). The other ("Tubular Bells" by Mike Oldfiel from The Exorcist) was so eerily catchy that it actually found its way onto the pop charts after the release of the film--a rarity in instrumental score. These choices speak to a heightened awareness in Crowe's sense of film music; even his favorite scores are unusually relevant and/or connected to pop culture at large.
