Boombox Serenade

Film-Music Moments of the Day: "Valley of the Dolls" (1967) and "Hamlet 2" (2008)

For those of you who already know and love the camp classic Valley of the Dolls, you know how difficult it can be to pick a favorite scene, so jam-packed is it with gems. There's the one in which Neely O'Hara (played by Patty Duke) makes her Shatner-esque singing debut, another where she rips the wig off Helen Lawson's head, and of course her incredible back alley breakdown. (Act Patty! Act!)

But my all-time favorite scene from this film is the amazing performance of an Andre Previn song called "Come Live With Me" in which Tony Scotti delivers lyrics about the transient nature of love in such a brassy, inappropriately loungey way that every ounce of feeling in the rather sad song is drowned out by his oily sheen, eclipsed by the glare of his red sharkskin suit. It's kind of like watching Robert Goulet sing an Elliott Smith song, or perhaps a Broadway musical turned into a snuff film.

Later the song is reprised by Duke and Scotti during Neely's stay in a sanatorium, where she's sobering up from the titular "dolls"--the uppers and downers on which she's become dependent. Inexplicably, the lobby of this institution is more nightclub than nut house, complete with a piano player, drummer, and saxophonist (all mental hospitals have house bands silly), and Neely--who may have given up the pills but who cannot, will not kick her addiction to the spotlight--nostalgically sings the tune her old pal once performed with such charisma and style.

Little does she know that Tony is slumped in the back of the room, the perfectly tanned victim of Parkinson's Disease. Hearing his old hit momentarily revives his disease ravaged mind and he joins in, wheeling over to Neely from a shadowy corner. He sings rather softly this time, but eventually can't help spreading in some of the ol' Brylcream cheese...a little of that "fly me to the moon" panache that goes so well with lines like "love is the flower that lives for an hour then whithers and dies."

After Valley of the Dolls, I decided to keep the laughs coming with Hamlet 2, in which failed actor turned teacher Dana Marschz (played by the hysterically funny Steve Coogan) writes a sequel to the Shakespearian tragedy in order to save the high school drama program from budget cuts. Marschz is presented as a fool: a guy who occasionally wears caftans, talks too much about his abusive father, and giggles like a schoolgirl upon meeting his favorite actress. His play is deeply ridiculous, a musical acid trip in which Hamlet and Jesus use a time machine to save Gertrude and Ophelia, but to his students who are at that age when irony is at ebb tide, it's a challenging and dramatic work, and it comes to life in their hands. At the outset the musical numbers are funny in an offensive kind of way, then genuinely catchy, and then... strangely moving.

Marschz convinces the deeply adorable Tucson Gay Men's Choir to provide backing music for the play, and in its final sequence they softly begin singing a Bernie Taupin lyric, "When I think of those east end lights, muggy nights, curtains drawn in the little room downstairs." Jesus turns to Hamlet and says, "You must forgive your father the abuse you suffered," then, "you have my cell number, right?" A woman's voice joins in the singing as Hamlet and Laertes fight with plastic light sabers in front of a beautifully stark castle interior.  ("Sweet freedom whispered in my ear.") The harmonies grow more complex and Hamlet saves his mother from drinking poison. Ophelia spins gracefully, alone in front of projected ocean waves as the chorus cascades, "someone saved, someone saved, someone saved my life tonight...". The play, in other words, has become absolutely filled with pathos, its themes of suicide and revenge suddenly poignant and its depictions of madness, lyrical. After he administers CPR to Ophelia, Hamlet proposes to her.

"As ridiculous as the play is," said actress Epiphany Sellars, "it actually works in a weird way and I have this sense of real pride of what we have done." Co-writer Pam Brady said "A lot of the stuff was a surprise. The stuff that we thought was like a super joke ended up feeling meaningful and deep. We were really surprised by that and we were trying to act like it was designed that way."

She's exactly right. Ask me why the long suffering characters in Valley of the Dolls made me cackle while Hamlet 2 moved me to tears, and I'm not sure I could explain.  All I know is that yesterday a drama made me laugh, a comedy made me cry, and the spreadsheet got done. I'm awarding Pam Brady and Andrew Fleming an overdue Lloyd Award for creating one of the best film-music moments of 2008. 

I Don't Want to Cheer in Your Yard: The Surreal Intro to "The Savages" (2007)

The first scene in Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (2007) features a tanned and merry squad of elderly cheerleaders in electric blue uniforms doing a slow motion routine to Peggy Lee's rendition of “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard" in front of some tall topiaries. The languid, breathy way Lee sings this children's song is every bit as odd as seeing a bunch of seniors dressed up like teenagers, and somehow it evokes the disturbingly eternal sunshine of Sun City, Arizona long before the camera pans away to its mortifyingly blue skies.

Soundtrack Cliche: "What a Wonderful World"

Greetings Filmmakers,

Louis Armstrong here, writing to you from beyond the grave to ask very kindly—for the love of God and his baby boy Jesus—would you please stop using the song "What a Wonderful World" in your pictures?! Must have been in a hundred flicks by now. Meet Joe Black, Freaky Friday, Michael, Finding Forrester, Grumpy Old Men, Harold & Kumar, Son of the Mask, 50 First Dates...What a Girl Wants?! The list reads like a damn film festival on the Island of Extra Chromosomes!

What's that you say? Oh, you're going to use it ironically! Well that's only been done a couple dozen times: Dr. Strangelove,  Bowling for Columbine, Good Morning Vietnam, Twelve Monkeys, W., Madagascar... The word "ironic" means unexpected, friend. Look it up.

I know, I know. The Ramones covered it. And Willie Nelson. And the Flaming Lips. But so did a four year old on America's Got Talent, mkay?  So did a bunch of white folks on Clash of the sonofabitching Choirs!

Give it the kiss off friend! Go bother that nice Bobby McFerrin fella for awhile!

Trees of Green yadda,
Satchmo

Soundtrack of the Day: Gary Hustwit's "Helvetica"

For his beautifully shot 2007 documentary about the world's most ubiquitous typeface, Gary Hustwit cleverly assembled a soundtrack that just like the controversial font, rides the line between modern minimalist genius and wallpaperish anonymity. Ther soundtrack includes microhouse from Motohiro Nakashima, subtly mathy jazz from Sam Prekop, pretty little loops from Four Tet, and the world's calmest indie rock by The Album Leaf, among others.

It all adds up to a spare, cerebral mood that fits perfectly with the subject matter, and it's evidence that even on a film budget in the "low six figures," as Hustwit put it, you absolutely can craft a first rate soundtrack. In fact, taken in combination with the composition of his shots, I'd argue that his music is what propels this documentary well beyond talking-heads-territory and makes it an cinematic experience in its own right. Hustwit's best known film is the Wilco documentary I'm Trying to Break Your Heart, so it's clear that the guy has great taste in music.

Film-Music Moment of the Day: Theo Visits the Crimson King

In 1969, English prog-rock outfit King Crimson captured a bleaker side of post-psychedelic rock, with their debut album In the Court of the Crimson King (an observation by King Crimson) and 37 years later its darkly majestic finale found a perfect home in Alfonso Cuarón's dystopian thriller, Children of Men, based on a P.D. James novel of the same name.

The song (easily King Crimson's best known) is introduced as the story's protagonist, the cynical Theo, is traveling to visit his well connected cousin, Nigel, who has been hoarding several of the world's remaining artistic masterpieces in a post-industrial mansion called the Ark of the Arts. Nigel sends a driver to pick up his cousin and for the duration of the ride "The Court of The Crimson King" seems to drift in and out of the car, conjuring up its sinister medieval tableau of yellow jesters and fire witches. You can never quite tell where the music is coming from in the scene; it hovers between source and something larger, filling the entire sequence with uneasy portent...Theo seems to hear it at times, or perhaps not. It's a great lead-in to a grand but moribund display of cultural treasures that have lost their meaning in a world without a future. 

Click here to hear the song in all its nine minute long glory on iMeem.

Trivia: for the above shot of Theo's approach to the Ark of the Arts, special effects house Double Negative created a composite shot by pasting a bridge over the M3 roadway in Surrey, directly in front of the Battersea Power Station. The front drive is modeled on the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern art gallery, which is housed in a renovated power station. 

Soundtrack of the Day: Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

I absolutely love it when filmmakers are brave enough to put contemporary music in period pieces, like when Katja von Garnier put R&B and soul in Iron Jawed Angels, her film about the suffragettes, or when Sofia Coppola put a bunch of rock and pop in Marie Antoinette. And where most directors would have chosen folksy score for a film about a frontier brothel, Robert Altman instead used three spare and downcast songs by a brilliant young songwriter named Leonard Cohen, who had put out his second album a few years prior.

The most memorable of the three is Cohen's "The Stranger Song." It opens the film and introduces McCabe (played by Warren Beatty) as the newly arrived stranger to the small town of Presbyterian Church, Washington. Although the song has the sound of a ballad, it also subverts the form with new lyrical structures and a loose, modern feeling--the perfect choice for Altman, who was always natural but never traditional in his style.

Lyrically, "The Stranger Song" rivals the likes of Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower" in its capacity to fascinate, though it deals in intimacies rather than archetypes...complex relationships between individuals and the ways in which individuals are both open and mysterious to one another. It's a folded poker hand of a poem that hides as much as it reveals.

"But now another stranger seems
to want you to ignore his dreams
as though they were the burden of some other
O you've seen that man before
his golden arm dispatching cards
but now it's rusted from the elbows to the finger
And he wants to trade the game he plays for shelter
Yes he wants to trade the game he knows for shelter."

The other two Cohen tracks in McCabe are "Winter Lady" and "Sisters of Mercy," and all three are from the 1968 album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. Interestingly, Cohen himself apparently didn't care much for McCabe & Mrs. Miller at first, but ended up loving it upon repeat viewings.