Boombox Serenade

Film-Music Moment of the Day: George Ratliff's Joshua (2007)

Fans of Vera Farmiga really need to check out Joshua (2007), a psychological thriller that blends sociopathy and sibling rivalry in a Freudian cocktail so potent that after the film ended, it started a semi-heated debate in our house about what antisocial personality disorder actually is.

Farmiga plays Joshua's mom, Abby Cairn, who begins a prolonged and virtuosic mental unraveling almost from the moment the film begins. Sam Rockwell plays her husband, Brad, a likable but subtly smug Wall Street type too content with his life to notice the first several rounds of its progressive implosion. 

In one brilliant sequence, Brad's walking home from work, ear buds in and singing along to the sweetly upbeat "See the World" by Gomez. He's still jamming good naturedly along as he steps through the door of their Manhattan apartment at which point Abby rushes abruptly up to him, looking miserable and clutching their crying newborn. We can't hear what she's saying because Ratliff keeps the music turned up (Brad's earbuds are still in), but her despair is all the more apparent against the feel-good Starbucks rock. The contrast highlights what different days these two people are having -- how differently they see the world at this point. A great little touch.

For another film that explores escalating childhood sadism and uses music brilliantly, see Lynn Ramsay's brilliant We Need to Talk About Kevin.

The Ten Best Film-Music Moments of 2011 aka The Fifth Annual Lloyd Awards!

Hi there, home slices! Welcome to the fifth annual Lloyd Awards! Each year, Boombox Serenade bestows this award on directors who used real music in original and powerful ways in their films. By "real music," I mean music that wasn't written explicitly for the film in which it appears, but music that has a life and context outside of that film. As usual, we start at the bottom and work our way up to number one. 

Lloyd #10 goes to Director David Fincher for the "Orinoco Flow" sequence in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Ok, so he may have borrowed a little too heavily from American Psycho when he put Enya in the middle of this film's murderous climax, but he did it so well. He's David Fincher, after all -- a Jedi of the ironic film-music moment. Last year, Fincher won a Lloyd for the "Baby You're a Rich Man" scene in The Social Network and another for his use of "Hurdy Gurdy Man" in the 2008 film Zodiac, making him the only three-time Lloyd winner. (He probably brags about this all the time.)

Lloyd #9 goes to Director Jason Reitman for the "Mavis Rewinds the Tape" sequence in Young Adult. Mavis, 37, is driving back to her hometown in a misguided attempt to win back her now married high school boyfriend. As she drives, she keeps rewinding "The Concept" by Teenage Fanclub, belting out quasi-sensitive lyrics like, "I didn't want to hurt you, oh yeah." Presumably this was their song back in the day and the Reitman's repetition of it is a clever stroke of character development -- one of many signs Mavis is unwilling to move forward in life.

Lloyd #8 goes to Director Sean Durkin for the "Marcy's Song" sequence in Martha Marcy May Marlene. When the manipulative leader of Martha's new "community" sings a song about her in front of the entire group, it subtly but definitively wins her over. The song is actually by Jackson Frank, an obscure 1960's folk singer who only released one album, but the obsessive lyrics are perfect for the quietly sinister tone of the film and John Hawkes' performance is riveting.

Lloyd #7 goes to Director Bennett Miller for the "Casey Sings" sequences in Moneyball. Last year was the first time a set of film-music moments won a Lloyd (Sofia Coppola's Somewhere) and this year another such Lloyd goes Moneyball. The first bookend is when Billy Beane takes his daughter to a guitar store where she plays him 'The Show,' a sweet, girly song that might not have been as memorable had it not been meaningfully reprised. Just before the end of the film, Bean is restlessly driving his truck, listening to a CD his daughter made for him and Casey's voice floats into the scene with "The Show" once again. (The irony of the chaw-chewing Bean listening to such pretty music is a nice touch.) Later when we learn he has declined a generous job offer in Boston we're allowed to infer the song was a subtle influence in that direction -- a musical reminder of their father-daughter moment. The actual song was written by an Australian songwriter named Lenka.

Lloyd #6 goes to Director Simon Curtis for the "Colin watches Marilyn in the bathtub" sequence in My Week With Marilyn. Marilyn's in the bathtub, languidly sponging herself and singing "I Found a Dream" in dulcet, contented tones. Marilyn's way of singing in this moment is more loose and natural than her on screen style but has just enough panache to make us wonder if she's aware her young admirer, Colin Clark, is watching from just beyond the doorway. Is Marilyn rehearsing or performing here? Is she truly unguarded or just emulating that? Michelle Williams plays it all with a deliciously maddening, Mona Lisa like inscrutability. All of her choices in this film, in fact, communicate how blurry the line between Marilyn's private self and public persona had become and Williams' ability to add and subtract layers of identity on a moment's notice is nothing short of virtuosic. "I Found a Dream", by the way, was written by Richard Addinsell, who penned it for The Prince and The Showgirl, the film on which Clark was serving as an assistant director when he met Monroe.

Lloyd #5 goes to Director Miranda July for the "Sophie's Laptop Dance" sequence in The Future. Sophie in profile...Sophie wearing an improbable collar and doing a strange, stiff little dance to the willfully synthetic beats of Beach House. "Jack of all trades, master of none. Cry all the time, cause I'm not having fun." It's difficult to watch her struggle with the humiliation of self-imposed artistic failure, but this moment is an existential success even if she's not aware of it...a Fabergé egg of a moment. A tiny foothold in the void.

Lloyd #4 goes to Director Alexander Payne for the "Matt King Runs toward the Truth" sequence in The Descendants.  Alexander Payne can find the humor and pathos in even the darkest moments and there's something so touching about the one just after Matt King learns his comatose wife has been having an affair. His beach shoes smack absurdly on the pavement as he hustles down the street toward his friends' house where he's hoping to learn the name of the other man. For this sequence, Payne selects not the tense, dramatic music that almost any other director would have but the easygoing "Wai O Ke Aniani" by Gabby Pahinui -- a gentle meditation on the mountain water of a particular ridge in the Moanalua Valley. It's a perfect example of how choosing unexpected music can make a scene weirdly unforgettable. It's also one of the many moments in which Payne allies his protagonist with place and suggests ancestral ties can cushion the blows life inevitably deals. There's a type of traditional Hawaiian song called a “mele pana," which means "song of place," and this year I think Alexander Payne made a film of place in part through one of the warmest, most soulful soundtracks I've heard in a long time. 

Lloyd #3 goes to Director Derek Cianfrance for the "You Always Hurt the One You Love" sequence in Blue Valentine. There's something so fresh yet completely timeless about the tableau of a slightly scruffy couple courting one another in the doorway of a closed New York formal wear shop. Dean strums an out-of-tune ukelele and Cindy does a halting shuffle ball change, her apple red sweater popping against a backdrop of cheap pastel prom dresses. Before he starts the song, Dean informs her he has to sing it "goofy," and that is mostly how Dean himself seems then -- sweet and goofy -- his darker qualities only foreshadowed by the song at this point. Blue Valentine has the fateful quality asynchronous timelines can sometimes impart and the ukelele tap dance is just one end of its love-hate mobius strip. At the other is the violent, drunken, and not entirely consensual sex Cindy has with Dean in the shower of a space-themed hotel room in Eastern Pennsylvania, a room Dean likens to the “inside of a robot’s vagina." It really captured the depair.

Lloyd #2 goes to Director Nicolas Winding Refn for the "Oh My Love" sequence in Drive. The dream-like, 80's inflected soundtrack to Drive was ridiculously brilliant and gorgeous, but the real stand-out film music moment owes itself to a song that couldn't have been more different from the rest of the soundtrack -- a reverent, Streisand-esque ballad of hope borrowed from a 1971 Italian film called Goodbye Uncle Tom. Its soft strains begin as the Driver is caressing the cheek of a friend who has just been murdered by the mob, then build to a climax as the Driver finds the man who ordered the hit, t-bones his car over a bluff, then unceremoniously drowns him in the Pacific ocean. A profoundly unexpected choice, "Oh My Love," gives this procession of images an oddly holy quality, as if the driver is purifying himself somehow, and like the brilliant "Soul Holiday" sequence from Lee Daniels' Precious, the song seems at first a bitterly ironic commentary on how bad things have become, only to morph into an exalted manifesto for the future. It is a feat of a sequence.

Lloyd #1 goes to Director Lars Von Trier for the Tristan and Isolde prologue to Melancholia.  The epic scale of this seven plus minute prologue somehow doesn't eclipse an exacting sense of detail and texture throughout. Yes, there are planets colliding, but there are also two perfect rips in the knees of Justine's jeans. Deep, black footprints in a lush golf course green. A boy slowly stripping knotty bark from a branch. Delicate tendrils of electricity dancing on Justine's fingertips. The extreme slow motion makes it seem as if each scene is still playing out somewhere, each still gracefully blooming. Von Trier has said he had some of the scenes edited to same pace as the music. "It's kind of like a music video that way," he said. "It's supposed to be vulgar." But is it vulgar when a master designer makes clothing to fit perfectly a particular body? The man often says outlandish things, but this film is darkly majestic, elegant, and eternal.

And there you have it! The intensely subjective Lloyd Awards, brought to you by Boombox Serenade. See you next year!

The Fourth Annual Lloyd Awards

Well hello, and welcome to my Lloyd Awards. Each year, Boombox Serenade bestows this award on the directors who use real music in original and/or powerful ways in their films. When I say "real music," I mean music that was not written for the film, but was first introduced to the world in some way other than the movies, usually as a label-backed album release.

I don't mean to be flippant. There have, of course, been many great scores and songs written explicitly for film. Some of my favorite original songs include "On the Road Again," "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera Sera)" and "Tender is the Night." Other greats include the "Theme from Shaft," "Nobody Does It Better," "Streets of Philadelphia," "Unchained Melody," "Lose Yourself," "Last Dance," and "They Can't Take That Away From Me." 

And yet, when you ask people what their favorite music moment in film is, the answer you get often goes something like this: "Oh, that scene in Office Space where they destroy the fax machine to the hardcore rap track." Or like this: "That scene in The Big Lebowski when Juhn Turturro licked the bowling ball to the Gipsy Kings' cover of 'Hotel California'" Or, like this: That part where the buildings explode at the very end of Fight Club with The Pixies' "Where Is My Mind."

In other words, it seems the truly memorable moments in film-music history seem to belong not to score nor to original songs composed for the film, but to music that first had a life and a context outside cinema. Why is that?

In some cases it's because of the tasty irony that can only arise when there's some friction between sound an image -- a friction that an artist would rarely choose to introduce if he or she was hired to write something directly to the scene. If Mike Judge had asked the Geto Boys to write some music specifically for Office Space, for instance, they probably wouldn't have come up with lyrics like, "Back up in your ass with the resurrection is the group harder than an erection." Nope. Probably not.

In other cases, the greatness comes from the perfect accord between image and sound. When Willard creeps up on Kurtz and assassinates him to The Doors' "The End" in Apocalypse Now, it's difficult to imagine any other music for that scene. Francis Ford Coppola loves bringing in (and riffing on) the works of other epic poets like Jim Morrison and T.S. Eliot. He's just not interested in the false continuity of a world in which he's had some hand in creating every element.

Enough nattering. Let's get on to this years' winners. As usual, we start at the bottom of the list and work our way up to the years' #1 film-music moment.

Lloyd #7 goes to Director Julian Jarrod for the "A Certain Smile" sequence in Red Riding Trilogy: Part I: 1974. Not many people in the U.S. caught this excellent adaptation of David Peace's The Red Riding Quartet, about the Yorkshire Ripper case, and it's a shame. Julian Jarrold's (Brideshead Revisited) contribution was easily the strongest of the three installations. One of the most memorable moments is when he sends his plucky young investigative journalist, Eddy Dunford, to visit a woman named Marjorie Dawson in the institution where she lives. A nurse quickly figures out Eddy isn't her nephew, as he's claimed, and calls in a couple of Yorkshire's finest to nightstick him in the knees (the corruption and brutality of Yorkshire cops is a major theme throughout this trilogy). To distract herself from the smackdown, the fragile Majorie turns up the radio on her nightstand and suddenly, Johnny Mathis' velvety voice overtakes the scene. As Eddy is unceremoniously dragged down a long hallway Mathis croons, "A certain smile, a certain face, can lead an unsuspecting heart on a merry chase..." It's twisted and wonderful. 

Lloyd #6 goes to John Cameron Mitchell for the "The Higher Road" sequence in the official trailer for Rabbit Hole. Somewhere around the 1:20 mark of this exquisite trailer, the cello gives way to the tumbledown groove of Broken Bells' "Higher Road," and the whole thing becomes strangely exalted with a world weary James Mercer advising you to "let loss be your guide." Before the film had even been released, John Cameron Mitchell showed his ability to imbue heavy subject matter with a tender, even holy quality that made you want to meet that couple and bear witness to their loss. Instead of choosing music that was merely sad, Mitchell picked something more complex and mysterious. It's a song that somehow captures the horror of transition after a tragedy...the inexorable sundowning of your old life. This is the second trailer to win a Lloyd Award. The first went to Spike Jonze and Arcade FIre for the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are.

Lloyd #5 goes to Director Danny Boyle for the "Lovely Day" sequence in 127 Hours. Earlier when I was talking about what makes a film-music memorable, I mentioned that real music can introduce irony in a way that score has a hard time doing. A downright flawless specimen of this is furnished by Mister Danny Boyle this year, who puts a little Bill Withers on the turntable as the sun comes up on mountain climber Aron Ralson's third straight day of being pinned by a boulder to a narrow crevasse in Robbers Roost, Utah. At first this seems like the dryest possible choice of an Englishman, but as much as Boyle is commenting wryly on the plight of the hero, he's also using the sequence to show the very real loveliness of the Utah landscape. A brilliant beverage montage, too, is an early look at Aron Ralston's inner life, which gains sway as the film progresses. This is Danny Boyle's second Lloyd Award. His first was for the "Paper Planes" sequence in Slumdog Millionaire.

Lloyd #4 goes to Directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington for the "Touch Me" sequence in Restrepo. After a brutal firefight in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan (often called "one of the deadliest places on Earth"), the remaining soldiers of B Company return to their makeshift outpost on a barren hillside in this feature-length documentary about war. They've recently seen members of their unit die right in front of their eyes, so the last thing you'd expect is for a spontaneous dance party to break out, let alone to some vintage 80's mall pop, and yet, that's exactly what happens. In the midst of ditch digging and weight lifting, of the soliders puts a euro-disco remix of Samantha Fox's "Touch Me," and suddenly a clump of burly soldiers are bouncing excitedly to the chorus, "Touch me, touch me, I want to feel your body /Your heartbeat next to mine." The moment might have seemed like some kind of psychotic break if it weren't so obviously an expression of relief and the kind of urgent bonding people sometimes need to do after having survived something deadly. Samantha Fox's bubbly voice justaposed with the wintry Afghan countryside is haunting and bizarre.

Lloyd #3 goes to director David O. Russell for the "Here I Go Again" sequence in The Fighter. It's the end of the film...the big title fight in London. Welterweight Micky Ward waits in the wings with his older half-brother and trainer,  Dicky Ecklund, who has only recently kicked a nasty crack cocaine habit. It's a loaded moment. So much struggle has gone into it, on both sides. Micky has had to work like a fiend to regain his career. Dicky's fight has been to break his addiction and win back his brother's trust. The brothers bow their heads together. Micky's entrance music starts to play, "Here I Go Again," by Whitesnake. Dicky starts to sing it softly and Micky joins him. They step into the crowd together and make their way toward the ring. At this point, most directors would have transitioned to just the Whitesnake, mixing the bombast of the hair metal with the din of the crowd.  Instead, David O. Russell lets us hear that the brothers are still quietly singing together, all the way up to the ring. The intimacy of that private duet is what makes it so moving. This is song as ritual and shield. We feel the fierceness of the brotherly love and understand the victory this walk represents for each of them before the first bell even rings.

Lloyd #2 goes to Director David Fincher for the "Baby You're a Rich Man" scene in The Social Network. Proving that a director need not necessarily use the latest indie hit to capture the zeitgeist, Fincher turns the final moments of his film over to John Lennon, who asks, "How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?" as Mark Zuckerberg reloads his browser again and again, waiting for an ex-girlfriend to accept his friend request. As the camera pushes in close on Zuckerberg's face, we realize that he's implicating us every bit as much as his protagonist -- our impatience, our declining social skills, our burgeoning preference for ersatz connections over real ones.

Lloyd #1 Goes to Director Sofia Coppola for the "My Hero" sequence in Somewhere. On paper, this moment doesn't sound as if it'll go down as one of the filmmakers' most memorable, but it absolutely will: Johnny Marco, famous actor, drifts off to sleep while identical twins pole dance in his Chateau Marmont suite. Most directors wouldn't have dreamed of using a song like the gruff, platonic "My Hero" by the Foo Fighters for this scene, but it's the kind of oddly literal selection the dancers themselves might have made to go with their candystriping costumes. The way this elaborate, muscular track emanates thinly from a cheap boombox really captures the ennui, as does the twins' junior varsity choreography with its perfunctory jiggling of butt cheeks. There's no attempt to portray anything as complex as seduction here. Mystery is at a minimum, as if tanning bed bulbs and hydrogen peroxide had long since burned away all their Freudian darkness. The real centerpiece of this scene, though, is Johnny Marco's bored expression as he watches the twins dance. Coppola lets her camera linger on his face, grafting our gaze to his.The shot lasts so long, in fact, that we don't just witness his slow-motion decision to let sleep prevail over horniness, we actually experience the pleasure and the vacuousness of his life. A few scenes later, Marco is sitting in the stands of an ice skating rink, reading text messages while his eleven year old daughter, Cleo, receives a private lesson. When she performs run-through, Marco's attention shifts from his phone to his daughter's performance. Once again, he is watching a dance, but this time he's captivated. The juxtaposition of the two scenes is unmistakable. Cleo's innocence seems all the more luminous next to the false innocence of the twins. Johnny's choices are cast a new light and we wonder whether he feels strange about his womanizing now that he sees his own daughter ramping up to womanhood. In this way Coppola is now crafting meta-moments with a touch that seems ever lighter; she has a gift for arranging and slowly rotating things in a way that reveals their complexity.

Honorable Mention Lloyd goes to Director Meghan Eckman for the end credit sequence, "Welcome to the CPL" from The Parking Lot Movie. The Lloyds proper only go to film moments featuring music that wasn't written explicitly for the film, but every now and then Lloyd must tip his boombox to an original song, like this hilarious track at the end of The Parking Lot Movie, a documentary about frustrated parking lot attendants in Charlottesville, Virginia, who are forced, daily, to deal with presumptious, BMW-driving dickheads and the drunk, spoiled University of Virginia undergrads who don't have to work in a parking lot to make ends meet. The line "God will hand us the sword of justice," alone, would have been enough to attract this blog's attention, but working in such existential inquiry as, "Do you park the lot or does the lot park you?" rate a prestigious Lloyd Award, no question. 

And there you have it! The intensely subjective Lloyd Awards, brought to you by Boombox Serenade and Hint of Id Perfume. See you next year!

Film-Music Moment of the Week: The Fighters Approach The Ring

It's the end of the film...the big title fight in London. Welterweight "Irish" Micky Ward waits in the wings with his older half-brother and trainer, Dick "Dicky" Ecklund, who has only recently kicked a nasty crack cocaine habit.

It's a loaded moment. So much struggle has gone into it, on both sides. Micky has had to work like a fiend to regain his boxing career. Dicky's fight has been to break his addiction and win back his brother's trust.

The brothers bow their heads toward one another, touch foreheads. Micky's entrance music starts to play, "Here I Go Again," by Whitesnake. Dicky starts to sing it softly.

Here I go again on my own
Going down the only road I've ever known
Like a drifter, I was born to walk alone
And I've made up my mind
I ain't wasting no more time

Earlier in the film, there's a scene in which Dicky's mom catches him in a crack den and in the middle of the ensuing argument, Dicky starts singing the Bee Gee's "I Started a Joke" to her. It's clear he knows it's her favorite and sure enough, she joins in despite herself. This scene shows Dicky still has charisma to burn despite years of dissapation and that he uses it both to soothe and manipulate those around him. Later, when he gets sober, Dicky's force of personality becomes that much more dazzling. We watch him rescue lost confidences and form seemingly impossible alliances.

Back in the hallway before the fight, Micky joins him in singing. The rest of the world falls away and the brothers are together again, ready for the fight. They step out into the crowd together and make their way toward the ring.

At this point, most directors would have transitioned to just the Whitesnake, mixing the bombast of the hair metal with the din of the crowd.  Instead, David O. Russell lets us hear that the brothers are still quietly singing together, for the entire duration of their walk up to the ring. The intimacy and unexpectedness of that private duet is what makes it so moving. This is song as ritual and shield. We feel the fierceness of the brotherly love and understand the victory this walk represents for each of them, before the first bell rings.

 

Knock Me Over with a Feather: The Subtle Power of Sofia Coppola

On paper, the film-music moment of the week doesn't sound all that brilliant, or as if it'll go down as one of the filmmakers' most memorable, but it is and it will: Johnny Marco (played by Stephen Dorff), newly famous actor, drifts off to sleep while identical twins pole dance in his Chateau Marmont suite.

It isn't just what Sofia Coppola shows you that makes this moment so great. It's what she shows you compared to what almost every other director would have shown you, given the same material.

Most directors, for instance, wouldn't have dreamed of using a song like the gruff, platonic "My Hero" by the Foo Fighters as the music for a pole dance, but it's the kind of oddly literal selection the dancers themselves might have made to go with the candystriping theme of their routine. Recently on Fresh Air Coppola said she found the choice "funny": "I thought [it]was funny -- them in their candystripers performing to 'My Hero' as he's broken his arm." She also told Pitchfork she wanted to move away from a soundtrack mentality and instead "wanted the characters to really be listening to music."

There's something about the twins' style of dancing that really captures the ennui. This is not the gravity-defying pole dancing of Cirque du Soleil or even amateur night at the strip club. There are no Pussycat Doll athletics. No attempt to portray anything as complex as seduction. Instead, there's some junior varsity choreography and perfunctory jiggling of butt cheeks. Mystery is at a minimum, as if tanning bed bulbs and hydrogen peroxide had long since burned away all the twins' Freudian darkness. 

Richard Beggs is Sofia Coppola's longtime sound designer (her dad uses him too) and the squeaking of the twins' hands on their portable poles is a very Beggsian touch. His work is always a thoughtful mix of the authentic and the poetic, and there's something about the prominence of that squeaking that makes me think he included it as more than just a realistic detail. It gives the twins some humanity.  It calls attention to their hands. They're working. That sound makes it harder to objectify them, even though they're inviting us to do just that.

The real centerpiece of this scene, though, is Johnny Marco's bored expression as he watches the twins dance. Coppola confidently lets her camera linger on his face, grafting our gaze onto his so we can not only witness his slow-motion decision to let sleep prevail over horniness, we can actually feel the pleasure and the vacuousness of his life. In that calm, neutral way of hers, Sofia regards his face as he slips into oblivion.

(There goes her hero.)

A few scenes later, Marco is sitting alone in the stands of an ice skating rink, reading text messages while his eleven year old daughter, Cleo (played by Elle Fanning), receives a private lesson. When she performs run-through (to Gwen Stefani's "Cool"), Marco's attention gradually shifts from his cell phone to his daughter's movements on the ice. Once again, he is watching a dance, but this time he's captivated.

The juxtaposition of the two scenes is unmistakable. Cleo's innocence seems all the more luminous next to the false innocence of the twins; her beauty is devoid of all calculation or insistence. Wordlessly, Coppola conveys that Johnny is realizing how much his daughter has changed, matured while he wasn't looking. His choices are cast a new light and we wonder whether his womanizing lifestyle suddenly feels strange now that he can see that his daughter is ramping up to womanhood herself. In this way Coppola seems now to be crafting meta-moments ander touch seems ever lighter; she has a gift for arranging and slowly rotating things in a way that reveals their loveliness and complexity.

Legendary editor Walter Murch has said there are two kinds of filmmakers : the "black box" filmmaker and the "snowflake" sort. Black box filmmakers worship structure and prefer to make decisions in advance. They control every nuance of the film down to the smallest detail and interpret all meaning on behalf of the viewer ahead of time. Snowflake directors, by contrast, make films in order to see what will happen in front of the camera, allowing meaning to emerge from the singularity of the moments they record.  With its loosely structured, ephemeral scenes, Somewhere is proof of Coppola's mastery of the snowflake style; this film gathers weight and form as chapters accumulate, like snowfall, and at this point, the same can be said of Sofia's entire career to date as well.

Here's hoping it snows again soon.

 

 

 

 

Film Music Moment of the Week: Where The Streets Have No Name

In some long-ago episode of ER, Doug Ross gets some help from a young doctor, Harper Tracy, in caring for a four-year-old AIDS patient. Later she asks him, "What do you do after a day like today?" Ross replies, "I tend to drink, but I'm not a very good role model." The next day it's revealed that Harper went home with Ross and slept with him. When confessing to her boyfriend, she explains that she was in need of comfort and that somehow, only a person who'd also experienced that same shift could have provided it. 

In Pete Weir's quietly brilliant character study, Fearless (1994), Max Klein (played by Jeff Bridges) requires a similar kind of succor. After surviving an airplane crash, he finds himself drawn to a fellow passenger—Carla—whose two year old son died in the wreckage. When he first meets her, she's is inconsolable. A shard. "He hurt me forever," she says of God, to whom she would have turned for solace in any other circumstance. Her family is considering institutionalizing Carla because she won't leave her bed, let alone her home. The only person who can coax her out every now and then is Max, who describes himself  as "a ghost" but who has entered that strange post-traumatic state in which everything is more vivid and immediate. To his loved ones, Max seems aloof and unreachable since the crash, but Max himself feels dazzled, awake, immortal.

In one pivotal scene, Carla confesses to Max that when the plane first began to touch down in the corn field, she let go of her son. She is bawling as she admits this and says she feels responsible for his death. When Max says to her, "There's no way you could have held onto your baby," Carla covers her ears and begins yelling the Hail Mary, as if the guilt is her only remaining tie to her son and must therefore be protected. The immensity of Carla's despair unfurls before our eyes.

For a moment, it seems as if Max will be physically ill. "Ah shit," he says as he backs away from his car unsteadily. Then he sees something off in the distance and looks hopeful. He guides the still sobbing Carla into the back of his car and buckles her seat belt. He places a large toolbox in her arms and commands her to hold onto it. "This is your baby," he says. "I want you to pretend this is your baby." The soft, gleaming strains of an organ fade into the scene. "This is your chance to hold on tight," he says. "To save him. Ok?" She agrees, and seems a fraction calmer. She clutches the toolbox. As Max fires up the engine of his car, a crystalline guitar line joins the organ and the song becomes unmistakable. "Hold on!" he yells. "Tight as you can!" The song gains momentum as Max accelerates down a darkened city street. "Pray to God to give you the strength to save your baby!" he says. A cement wall is coming into view. Max is driving straight toward it. "Holy Mary, Mother of God," Carla screams from the back seat. "Now and in the hour of our death," replies Max. He crashes into the wall. The final shot of this sequence is a close-up of the toolbox, splayed out in front of the car after hurtling through the windshield.

The particular U2 song Weir chooses to use in this scene is perfect. As Max speeds up, the sparkling, looped riff of it quickens from trot to canter. When the bass kicks in and the song breaks into full gallop, you can see that Max and Carla are lighting out for the territories together—sprinting away from some already rarefied expanse of human psyche toward a place where smashing a car into a cement wall not only makes sense, it's the only way things will get any better. And sure enough, when we see Carla again she is better. She knows beyond the shadow of a doubt there is no way she could have held onto her son. She feels overwhelming gratitude to Max for having proven this to her.

Fearless was based on a novel of the same name by Rafael Yglasias, and if you've ever read Doctor Neruda's Cure for Evil, you already knew that Yglasias is a skilled cartographer of some pretty remote quarters of the human experience. Bridges, too, seems impossibly wise. He conveys an exact quality of consciousness after a brush with peril—from the grandiosity for having survived to the radiant compassion felt toward fellow survivors. There's a psychologist in this film who represents the desire to eradicate trauma and a lawyer who represents the desire to capitalize on it, but Max shows us something infinitely more mysterious: the holy, transcendent state trauma can sometimes induce as well as the inherently transitory nature of that state. How Max saves Carla and returns to the corporeal world are acts of heroism more subtle than the rescue of his fellow passengers in the beginning of the film, but nonetheless triumphant. He gets back on the map, but with a starry look in his eye that marks him as having been to the place where the streets have no name.

The Third Annual Lloyd Awards

With the Oscars behind us and the second quarter of the new year beginning, it's the perfect time to burden you with one last top ten list for 2009. Below are the most outstanding film-music moments of the year, as dictated by Boombox Serenade where we've just never been interested in score, and instead favor directors who know how to use real music (yep, I said it) in original and powerful ways. As usual, we start with the tenth best moment and build up to number one.

Lloyd #10 goes to Director Alan Ball, Music Supervisor Gary Calamar, and  Sammy Kershaw for the "Louisiana Hot Sauce" sequence in True Blood. Surprise! After the death of his girlfriend, perpetually horny Bon Temps resident Jason Stackhouse got religion this season, but even grief and God weren't enough to make him keep it in his pants. Soon he was lusting after a powerful preachers' wife, proving that Jason is perhaps one of the best-written, most lovable fuck-ups of all time. There's one scene in which Ball and Calamar have a particularly good time torturing Jason. They put God Barbie in a tight gingham shirt, then have her fetch beer and grill up some barbecue for the fellas. It's not long before Jason is seeing her in soft focus and slo-mo while she licks her fingers and tosses her big hair around to "Louisana Hot Sauce" by Kershaw. Like the entire show, it's a sequence that manages to be sexy, smart, southern, and hilariously funny.

Lloyd #9 goes to Director Paul Saltzman and Vitamin C for the "The Graduation Song" sequence in Prom Night in Mississippi. Teenagers can always be counted upon to fill their world with music, so there are a bunch of great film-music moments in Paul Saltzman's documentary about the first racially integrated high school prom in Charleston, Mississippi—filmed just a handful of months before Barack Obama was elected president. The best of these takes place at the end of the prom itself. As the hour grows late, no one drifts away to hotel rooms or parties. The vibe stays up, the dance floor stays packed, and at one point is filled to its edges with grinning students dancing to the bittersweet groove of "Graduation Song  (Friends Forever)" by Vitamin C, who sounds more like a fourth member TLC than a blond pop chanteuse. A looping sample of the Pachelbel Canon glides wistfully behind neo-soul inflected vocals..an array of nuances sandwiched into one song, and perfect for the moment. The lyrics are reflective, sentimental...typical of words spoken around graduation, but in this case they also speak to the pivotal nature of the night, and the bond these students share for having made history together.

Lloyd #8 goes to Director Robert Kenner, Music Supervisor Amine Ramer, Bruce Springsteen, and  Woodie Guthrie for the "This Land is Your Land" sequence in Food Inc. Robert Kenner's powerful documentary on the U.S. food industry, Food Inc., is made all the more powerful by the epilogue to the film, set to Bruce Springsteen's live version of "This Land is Your Land" by Woody  Guthrie. In 1940 Guthrie wrote the song in response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," which he considered to be unrealistic and complacent, so it's the perfect choice for a documentary that strips away the marketing lies of the food industry and makes a direct appeal to the audience. The instrumentation on the song is minimal, which makes the sequence even more immediate and personal.

Lloyd #7 goes to Director Alan Ball, Music Supervisor Gary Calamar, Sister Gertrude Morgan, and King Britt for the "New World In My View" sequence in True Blood. The "New World in My View" episode of True Blood contains a moment that had everyone talking. As Bill strides toward the villa of the vampire queen, an irresistible and mysterious song fades in and like the vampires themselves, contains elements of the ancient and modern. Warbly vocals seem to come from somewhere out of time, sung by New Orleans preacher named Sister Gertrude Morgan. In her swampy, bony voice you can hear the very origins of rock and roll. Behind that voice is an electronic arrangement by King Britt, a Philadelphia DJ who remixed Morgan's recordings and turned them into an album called King Britt Presents: Sister Gertrude Morgan. His contribution is some sleek, aquatic sounding music—unlikely sonic couture for a restless bride of Christ. It shouldn't work at all really—this old Delta priestess wandering into a Tangerine Dream track—but it does. It's a hugely portentous moment, one that makes way for a pivotal new character and suggests an even larger turning of tides.

Lloyd #6 goes to director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and The Spinners for the "One of a Kind Love Affair " sequence in Soul Power. In late September 1974 a historic music festival took place in Kinshasa, Zaire where thirty one acts performed—17 from Africa and 14 from the U.S.—including the Detroit based band The Spinners, who transfixed a stadium full of 80,000 Africans when they took the stage with their hit, "One of a Kind Love Affair." The New York Times quoted Zaire 74's producer as saying "Our purpose was to document the history of the beat. We want to...help blacks in America, strangers in a strange land, to grasp the strand of the motherland—the musical beat." In this sense, The Spinners' performance is particularly stunning. By 1974 their music was a lush blend of doo wop and the Philly-style soul that was becoming popular in the U.S., and to hear that satiny sound in an African context is a revelation—a living map of black music's breadth and scope...its journey.

Lloyd #5 goes to Directors Spike Jonze and Arcade Fire for the "Wake Up" trailer for Where The Wild Things Are. The first-ever trailer to win a prestigious (*cough*) Lloyd Award, this movie preview made everyone who saw it sit up and take notice—all without any voice-over or snippets of dialogue. Arcade Fire's "Wake Up" set a sweeping, even epic tone for Spike Jonze's unsanitized interpretation of the children's book by Maurice Sendak—revealing the downcast palette of browns and grays that scandalized studio executives when they first saw it. More like a music video than a trailer, this piece stands on its own and is full of the big, unruly emotions that define the film. It lets you know that if you watch this movie, you'll be reliving the glory and the terror of that time in your childhood when you realized home could no longer fully contain you, and that you'd have to venture out into the wider, much wilder world.

Lloyd #4 Goes to Director Sacha Gervasi, and Anvil for the finale sequence in Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Talk abut payoff. For most of this documentary, the graying members of Canadian metal band Anvil are still trying to make the dream happen, but the prospect of success seems dimmer every day. As they struggle to book gigs and get paid their sense of frustration is palpable, but so is the determination that has kept them together since 1973. When they finally book a bigger show in Japan (where they hear they have a cult following) the band nervously wonders whether anyone will show up. Then they take the stage to find themselves in front a venue full of thousands of adoring fans. The feel-good movie of the year. Since the release of this documentary, Anvil gone on to open for big acts like AC/DC and has played several big festivals.

Lloyd #3 goes to Director Robert Siegel, Music Supervisor Gabe Hilfer, as well as musicians Larry Collins, Alex Harvey, and Tanya Tucker for the "Delta Dawn" sequence in Big Fan. Big Fan is a brilliant character study of a single-minded sports fan named Paul Aufiero who willingly rejects the world in favor of his one true love: the New York Giants. After being beaten up by his favorite player one night, Aufiero deals with the humiliation by tracking down a fan of his team's arch rival and unloading a paint gun on him. His flight from the scene is accompanied by the very last song you'd expect to hear: Tanya Tucker's rendition of "Delta Dawn."  "Delta Dawn what's that flower you've got on? Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?" The sound is lilting and tender, but the lyrics paint a chilling portrait of a person who takes up residence in empty obsession for the rest of her days.

Lloyd #2 goes to Director Lee Daniels, Music Supervisor Lynn Fainchtein, and Sounds of Blackness for the "Soul Holiday" sequence in Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire. This sequence is so carefully and artfully crafted that it transcends our usual definition of "film-music moment" and becomes an actual storytelling element in and of itself—woven into the very fabric of the film through careful interlacing of action and sound. We are talking, of course, about the climactic scene in which Precious' abusive mom pushes Precious down a flight of stairs while she is cradling her newborn son. Sometime during this bone chilling series of events, the early strains of a gospel song called "Soul Holiday" are folded into the action. "Time to celebrate," it begins, "our love for one another," a bitterly ironic choice at this moment, but as she ventures blindly out into the night—operating on pure instinct to protect her child—Precious sees a choir practicing in a church and has a brief fantasy of singing with them. As "Soul Holiday" grows louder over top the scene, we realize this is our protagonist's pivotal moment and the song is the anthem of her Herculean feat: walking out on the monster who was ruining her life. The fact that it's a Christmas song implies bravery on par with the biblical Mary and the "holiday" reference may also refer to a coping strategy common to victims of abuse: an ability to flee their own bodies for brief periods of time. It is a brilliant, deeply layered sequence—one so perfect that it's hard to imagine it any other way, and especially with any other music.

Lloyd #1 goes to Director Quentin Tarantino, Music Supervisor Mary Ramos, and David Bowie for the "Cat People (Putting Out The Fire)" sequence in Inglorious Basterds. Historians say that Operation Barbarossa was when Axis luck began to change for the worse, but maybe it was actually when Shoshanna Dreyfus reached through the hole in space-time that Tarantino made and gleefully murdered several hundred high ranking Nazi officials by setting them on fire. The montage in which she prepares herself to do so is the real film-music takeaway from the movie, and of course Tarantino unblinkingly joins the ranks of the very few directors (like Robert Altman and Sofia Coppola) brave and talented enough to use contemporary music in a period piece. In fact, Tarantino knows exactly what to do with David Bowie's ominous, opulent voice, placing it at the very heart of his film like a jewel while lavishing some old-school camera work on his heroine. It's one of the most visually bold sequences in a visually bold movie, and somehow the music helps sear it on your retina forever.

And there you have it! The intensely subjective Lloyd Awards, brought to you by Boombox Serenade. See you next year!

The Two Outrageously Strong Film-Music Moments in Lee Daniels' "Precious"

With all the ink that's been spilled on "Precious," there still hasn't been enough said about the way Lee Daniels uses music in this film, so I'll start the conversation simply by saying how beautifully bold he is about using non-score music as emotional content in his work—just totally fearless about turning up the volume on music and really letting it take over for a good stretch of time. If that doesn't sound like a particularly impressive filmmaking skill to you, note how few directors can truly do it. The garden variety ones can often be recognized by how timid they are with licensed tracks, venturing out only with sorry little snippets—teaspoons of feeling they dribble into a scene like they're dropping a name.

And then there's Mister Lee Daniels, with his great big bounding heart, who sees and feels it all and who uses music like a lantern designed to help us, the viewer, see our way clear of the cavernous despair that permeates this story. In a film filled with outrageously strong film-music moments, there are two particular stand-outs.

Number One. For the moment when Precious approaches Harlem's Hotel Theresa where her new alternative school is located, Daniels kicks in with a wide-eyed doe of a track called "Did You Ever Hear a Dream Talking?" written by Harry Revel and Mack Gordon. The song was popularized by Bing Crosby in the 1933 and Sunny Gale's version, used here, is even bouncier than the original. The fact that this upbeat, sugary number appears so unexpectedly in the midst of a soundtrack dominated by R&B, hip hop, and gospel artists is what makes it a sophisticated choice. Precious looks timidly up at the floor where her new school is located while Gale's impossibly cheerful voice asks, "Did you ever see a dream walking? Well, I did!" It really pops.

Number Two. (spoiler alert!) The second stand-out film-music moment is the best possible kind: one that has been so carefully and artfully crafted that it transcends even my usual definition of "film-music moment" and becomes an actual storytelling element in and of itself—woven into the very fabric of the film through careful interlacing of action and sound. I am talking, of course, about the climactic scene in which Precious' mother deliberately pushes Precious down a flight of stairs while she is cradling her newborn infant son, then throws a TV down after them. Sometime during this bone chilling series of events, the strains of "Soul Holiday"—a gospel Christmas song of all things—are folded into the action. "Time to celebrate," it begins, "our love for one another," a bitterly ironic choice at this point in the story, but as she ventures blindly out into the night, operating on pure instinct to protect her child, Precious sees a gospel choir practicing in a church and has a brief fantasy of singing with them. As "Soul Holiday" grows louder and more joyous over top the scene, we realize this is our protagonist's pivotal moment and that this song is the anthem of her Herculean feat: walking out on the abusive monster who was running (and ruining) her life. The fact that it's a Christmas song implies sacrifice and bravery on par with the biblical Mary and Daniels' choice may also refer to a coping strategy common to victims of abuse: an ability to flee their own bodies for brief periods of time to escape the harrowing reality of what's being done to them. The fantasy of practicing with that gospel choir is the visual symbol of Precious' decision to make a better life for herself. It is a brilliant, deeply layered sequence—one so perfect that it's hard to imagine it any other way, and especially with any other music. (I believe the version of the song that's used in the film is by the group Sounds of Blackness. <--YouTube link. )

Daniels has said that he really loves working with musicians—there were three prominent ones cast in roles in this film—and clearly he has a special feeling for music as a cinematic element on par with script, cast, photography, and everything else. I'd love to listen to his favorite records with him and hear him talk about why he loves them. Not many people, particularly filmmakers, think as deeply about music as he does. 

Life Made Resonant in Tom Ford's Poetic Feature Debut "A Single Man"

Readers of this blog know that I tend to focus on the film-music moments created by non-score (album released) music, but every now and then I hear a score so beautiful or memorable that I can't help myself. This time it's from Tom Ford's lyrical feature film debut, "A Single Man," which I caught last night at MoMA. Resonant strings by Polish composer Abel Korzeniowski added untold layers of depth and feeling to this intensely graceful character study—an adaptation of a Christopher Isherwood novel about a British college professor (played by Colin Firth) struggling to find meaning in his life after the death of his long-time partner (played by Matthew Goode). Newly minted Director Tom Ford is fearless about including long pauses in this film, but isn't afraid to turn up the volume on the score and really let it take over at times too. The willingness and/or ability to go so deeply in these two different directions is rare. The other nice thing about this score is that it doesn't try to follow track the action of the film precisely, but is a presence in its own right: rich, sad, and lucid. 

For me, there were two stand out film-music moments:

The first introduces Julianne Moore's character, Charley, a beautiful but isolated divorcee living next door to the professor, for whom she carries a longtime torch. By the time you really meet Charley in the film, you already know she's been drinking for hours, so the scene is quite literally loaded with both comic and tragic possibilities from the very beginning. Who is she and just what does she mean to George? The first shot is an extreme close-up of one of her eyes (eyes are a recurring theme throughout), magnified a thousand times in a make-up mirror as she applies heavy arcs of liquid liner. Some wan French pop plays over top the scene and as the angle of the shot widens, we see that Charley is sitting at her vanity, immersed in an a series of elaborate beauty rituals in anticipation of her best friend's arrival. The single exaggerated eye is a perfect way to introduce this lonely and lovely character, and the music (wish I'd caught the exact name of the artist and track) adds a stroke of atmospheric genius. Charley is a doll in a box...a pretty sarcophagus, sparkling from deep within her tomb. She even looks a little dessicated.

A big tip of the hat to Ford, Moore, and Music Supervisor Julia Michels for that moment. (Plus the wig designer - wow!)

The other stand-out film-music moment is the scene in which George, goes for an unexpected swim at night with an intensely handsome student who has become infatuated with him. It's the culmination of George's recent brushes with life as something other than a dull and colorless exercise in numbed-out grief. All day he's been having little flashes of a fuller, more vibrant existence, and when he finds himself swimming in the Pacific on a dare, his senses are overtaken and he feels the sharp beauty of life for the first time in ages. The Korzeniowski score in this moment reaches a peak and takes the viewer directly into the heart of the feeling, which is exhilarating--full of beauty and danger, past and future, everything and nothing. It indirectly calls to mind another of the season's most poignant films-- "Where The Wild Things Are"--when Max sets out to locate something fresh and wild in life, only to have nature herself remind him: Remember, I am bigger than you. I can revive but also destroy you.

Formal and beautiful, "A Single Man" is studded with jewel-like performances, most notably that of Colin Firth, whose reserve is betrayed by immensely expressive eyes. Julianne Moore is perfect as Charley and brings a rare blend of worldliness and vulnerability to the role. Intelligence too.

During post Q&A the question of whether or not Tom Ford is a "visualist" was raised and she commented, "If there is no meaning in the composition, I don't want to be there." Ford's own answer to that was to pronounce that "style without substance is useless," after which he emphasized the importance of Isherwood's story and said it was the first purely artistic endeavor of his career to interpret it. 

Additional score in "A Single Man" was written by Shgeru Umebayashi.

Film-Music Moment of the Day: Wintour's Touch

"What you touch you don't feel
Do not know what you steal
Destroy everything you touch today
Please destroy me this way."  —Ladytron, Witching Hour (2005)

Well, R.J. Cutler came out with guns blazing for this, his first theater release in some time. Within minutes The September Issue launches into New York Fashion Week footage while Ladytron's darkly glamorous "Destroy Everything You Touch" plays through a flashbulb-spangled montage in which Candy Patts Price describes Anna Wintour as the Pope of fashion and Andre Leon Talley bemoans a "famine of beauty" for the season. In stark contrast to these loud, glorious eccentrics is the preternaturally composed Anna Wintour observing and absorbing the runway shows, wearing her trademark fur and sunglasses. The Ladytron track was made for it.

Enter Grace Coddington, American Vogue's creative director, who serves as creative counterpoint to Wintour's withering eye. The Galliano-loving Grace is everything that Wintour is not: animated, romantic, accepting of physical imperfections, celebrity averse. Cutler captures several of her shoots, each more fantastic than the last and culminating in a Paris couture assignment that elicited gasps from the people sitting next to me. It was beyond gorgeous—impossibly exquisite concoctions, fantasies of color. This is the sequence in which it becomes clear that Grace is an outright magician, and also where my respect for Wintour grew because of the sheer nerve it would take to pare back such peerless work. Wintour is an editor, after all, and her job is defined largely by a manifest not to create, but to discard and delete. Many are saying that Grace emerges as the unexpected star of The September Issue, but my impression is that Anna knew exactly what she was doing throughout, keeping quarter where she always has: above the fray.

This is not to say that there aren't moments of insight into Wintour's personality. She radiates adoration for her children and lights up when describing London in the early 60's, citing the birth control pill and the end of the class system as the reasons behind the social energy of the time. With a twinkle in her eye she observes,"You'd have had to be wearing an Irving Penn sack on your head not to know there was something going on." She also overtly acknowledges that Coddington is a genius, and understands that her own is of a very different nature. When asked what her strength is, she replies, "My decisiveness," a word that has its roots in the old French verb "cædere" meaning, "to cut."

In the end, what is so striking about this documentary is how perfectly it captures the creative process, largely as a manifestation of the healthy friction between two opposites, Grace and Anna. It also benefits hugely from Cutler's unwillingness to waste time manufacturing a kinder, gentler Anna Wintour; instead he celebrates her cool detachment and opacity as key strengths of this formidable editor.

He did a good job with the music in the film too, although he should have been more willing to turn up the volume at times and allow it to take over the scene for awhile. With such rich visual material, I would have liked for there to be at least a few passages allowed to be pure sound and image events. As it was, Cutler seemed afraid to stray from the talking heads for too long, and is a bit reticent with the music as a result. He had some great tracks though, no doubt thanks to some help from Music Supervisor Margaret Yen (Juno, The Hangover, Passion of the Christ). We'll definitely be checking out his future work.

Film-Music Moment of the Day: The Peyote Song at the Center of Barry Levinson's "Sleepers" (1996)

 

Thanks to the San Francisco Film Society I recently had the pleasure of sitting at the feet of master sound designer Richard Beggs for an evening. He talked about his work with directors like Alfonso Cuaron, Spike Jonze, and Sofia Coppola, and showed a few clips of some of his best known films. We sat rapt at the famous opening montage of Apocalypse Now and he explained how Francis Ford Coppola was fascinated with the role technology played in the Vietnam War and how this affected his own approach to the soundtrack, like his idea to use a Moog to create the sound of a helicopter blade and a house fly, instead of more natural or "believable" sources.

(Later I'd learn that Apocalypse Now was in fact the first film to grant the title of "Sound Designer" to anyone (Walter Murch in this case). It was the first time that much tangible creative authority was given over to the person in charge of the soundtrack. Beggs was a sound recordist on that film, the very first of his career—a fact he described as "sort of a distorting experience.")

One of the most affecting clips Beggs showed was from Barry Levinson's 1996 film, Sleepers, about a group of boys who endure sexual abuse at a state detention center in upstate New York. The clip depicted the moment when John Reilly (played by Ron Eldard) is hanging out at a bar some twenty years later and suddenly spots one of the guards who abused him (played by Kevin Bacon). At this point the action morphs into slow motion and sounds become heightened. Richard pointed out that you can hear the sound of a pull chain clinking against a lightbulb throughout this interlude—an acoustic detail taken from memories of the basement room where the guards would take the boys to rape them. It's the perfect example of Beggs' detailed, almost Freudian approach to sound design, one—he says—that is not meant to be perceived on a conscious level.

The music too grows louder in this pivotal moment, moving from an anonymous wash of bar rock to a more conspicuous presence. The song is a near-hit of the 1960's called "Witchi Tai To" by a short-lived group called Everything is Everything, fronted by jazz fusion pioneer Jim Pepper. Pepper was of Kaw and Creek heritage, and "Witchi Tai To" is a traditional peyote song—one typically performed during the ceremonial taking of peyote—and it has a mystical, meditative quality that is oddly perfect for this scene; its ceremonial sound casts a powerful spell, making it a heightened and strangely hallowed moment. When Reilly goes into the bathroom to collect himself Levinson and Beggs ratchet things up a notch further. As Reilly stares into the mirror, the music moves from heightened source to full soundtrack—a relentless loop laid over his entire consciousness—the repetition of its central chant like the memories that have been abruptly dragged to the fore.

It's a three step treatment of one song that reflects the subjective experience of the character without ever pandering to it. Instead of the tense strings we'd get from most score composers, we get a lilting, jazz inflected blessing.

Water spirit feelings
Springin' round my head
Makes me feel glad
That I'm not dead

Richard Beggs shared a wealth of other fascinating stuff that night, and I'll definitely be writing about it more over the coming weeks. In the meantime, give Sleepers another look now that more than ten years have gone by since it was made. And don't forget to listen for the lightbulb chain.

Film Music Moment of the Day: Bill Compton Approaches the Vampire Queen

Well, Gary Calamar and Alan Ball have done it again. The "New World in My View" episode of True Blood contains a moment that has everyone talking, and it comes at the very end. By that point the town of Bon Temps is in real peril with Maryann's minions plunging ever deeper into violent Bacchanalian trance, and Bill has set out to seek help from unseen vampire queen. As he strides toward her villa, the irresistible and mysterious song "New World In My View" fades in (from which the episode gets its name). It's hugely portentous—a moment that not only makes way for a pivotal new character, but suggests an even larger turning of tides.

Like the vampires themselves, the song is both ancient and au courant. Warbly vocals are sung by an old time New Orleans preacher named Sister Gertrude Morgan (who recorded in the early 1970's) and in her swampy, bony voice you can hear the very origins of rock and roll. Behind it is an electronic arrangement by King Britt, a DJ from Philadelphia who in 2005 remixed Morgan's recordings and turned them into an album he called King Britt Presents: Sister Gertrude Morgan. His own contribution on this particular track is some sleek, aquatic sounding music--unlikely sonic couture for a restless bride of Christ.

I got the new world in my view
On my journey I pursue
I said I'm running, running for the city
I got the new world in my view

Morgan's utterances are more like sermons or incantations than songs, so they don't really follow a strict rhythm. They are not sampled, but allowed simply to co-exist with King Britt's gleaming swells of sound, and they're less integrated into the overall texture of the music than say Vera Hall's voice was on Moby's "Natural Blues." It shouldn't work at all really—this old Delta priestess wandering into a Tangerine Dream track to preach the gospel—but it does. Oh, it does. It builds and builds, revealing the larger architecture of Morgan's music—the method in her madness—adding urgency and power to her words. She is absolutely brimming with mission.

I read recently that Alan Ball lets Gary Calamar do whatever he wants with the music on True Blood—absolute carte blanche—and if that's true, I'd love to know more about what their process is like...how they work together to come up with moments like this one because it's loaded. Well done fellas.

Film-Music Moment of the Day: Dance Dance Evolution (or) Take That, Achy Breaky Heart

 
Teenagers can always be counted upon to fill their world with music, so there are a bunch of great little film-music moments in Paul Saltzman's Prom Night in Mississippi, a documentary about the first racially integrated high school prom in Charleston, Mississippi—filmed in June 2008, just a handful of months before Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States. One that really caught my attention took place at the prom itself, where early in the night students are shown enthusiastically line dancing to "Cupid Shuffle" by Bryson Bernard (better known simply as Cupid). The track's hookiness is, of course, the main thing getting people out on the floor, but there's a cross-cultural draw too, and it's worth examining.

Line dancing has been hugely popular in country-western circles for going on 30 years now and its roots hearken back to some rather lily-white European folk traditions, so you have to consider what a bold move it was for a young R&B singer from Lafayette, Louisiana to use it as a concept for a crunky little bounce track. "My philosophy is, there's so much standard R&B going on, it's always a good idea to have a different vibe," said Bernard of his 2007 album Time for a Change, which he describes as a blend of several Deep South influences. "Cupid Shuffle" became a big hit and Internet sensation, with hundreds of people posting YouTube videos of themselves dancing to it. In fact, "Cupid Shuffle" helped to set the Guinness Record for the world's largest line dance in 2007 when 17,000 Atlantans danced to it at the Ebony Black Family Reunion Tour. A year later at the first ever integrated prom in a small Mississippi town, it effortlessly brought a group of black and white classmates out onto the dance floor together for the first time.

And it really was the first time. One of the recurring comments the students make is how odd it is for them to have spent so many years together in classrooms, but barely to have hung out socially—a fact they attribute almost entirely to their parents' attitudes versus their own. Such attitudes start to become more apparent when you realize there's only one interracial couple featured in this documentary, and they report they're the only one in town. When a small faction of parents decide to protest the integrated prom by throwing an alternative "whites only" prom for a few dozen of their begrudging sons and daughters, it really sinks in just how much racism has been allowed to shape this community—one where 70 percent of the high school students are black. (The "whites only" prom organizers take pains to hide their identities and prevent the event from being recorded, but second hand accounts make it clear the event was small and lackluster). 

A few weeks later at the big, lavish integrated prom (spearheaded and paid for by Morgan Freeman), the seniors seem extremely happy and excited to be there. As the hour grows late, no one drifts away to hotel rooms or parties. The vibe stays up, the dance floor stays packed, and at one point is filled to its edges with grinning students dancing to the bittersweet groove of "Graduation Song  (Friends Forever)" by Vitamin C, who sounds more like a fourth member TLC in this track than a blond pop chanteuse. A looping sample of the Pachelbel Canon glides wistfully behind her hip hop and neo-soul inflected singing..a nice little array of nuances sandwiched into one song. Somewhere else in the United States that night, Barack Obama may have been finishing up a stump speech in his preferred manner: by blasting the twangy country song by Brooks and Dunn, "Only in America."

Truly.

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For another outstanding documentary on modern segregation, check out Margaret Brown's The Order of Myths, about the two entirely separate Mardi Gras celebrations—one white, one black—that happen in Mobile, Alabama. 

Film-Music Moment of the Day: The Lone Man Ponders Nothingness

"Sometimes the reflection is far more present than the thing being reflected," says one of the Lone Man's contacts in Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control, and in fact one of the pleasures of this film is seeing Spain through the eyes of legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who is taken, magpie-like, by every glass wall and glittering window in Madrid.

Another is contemplating the inscrutable Lone Man (played by Isaach De Bankolé), whose carefully controlled expression is a study in contrasts: handsome and ugly, modern and ancient, violent and pacific. His face is downright fascinating, in fact, the particular lines of it are like a conversation that never ends—sometimes willfully flat, other times all fullness and curving contours, but most often at some unfathomable point in between. 

The third, but not the least pleasure of Limits is watching all of the above while giant buckets of golden sound are poured lavishly on top of you like aromatic water at a Japanese bathhouse. This is the drone rock of bands like Boris, Sunn O))), and Earth, and the feedback afterglow of it is a kind of audio analogue to Christopher Doyles' reflections: more present than the notes that generated it. After all, this is a Jarmusch film, so its relationship to music is anything but casual. Violins and guitars appear as symbolic props throughout, like they were plucked out of a Juan Gris painting. One of the most memorable moments is when the Lone Man happens upon a rehearsal in a small nightclub where he watches some ardent Flamenco. One character says he believes that musical instruments retain every note that has ever been played on them and that these notes resonate within them forever like a kind of sonic karma. For an assassin like the Lone Man, the implications of such a statement are clear.

I once heard a Mark Rothko painting. I turned a corner at the San Francisco MoMA, and I heard a single, unified sound radiating from Rothko's No. 14 like a hundred monks humming the same note. One of the final scenes in The Limits of Control is like this. The Lone Man sits in front of a white-on-white Arte Povera piece; the luminous din of drone rock is all around him. The nothingness of the painting, the rising tide of sound...it all comes together in a moment of abstract resonance that vibrates clean off the screen. The end of the film, in fact, is full of such emptiness—blank walls, blank canvases, blank slips of paper. Does the Lone Man experience this abstraction as a relief from what he has done, or a consequence of it? Is this the freedom of the afterlife or the simple oblivion of death? With nothing left to control, the world seems drained of content or maybe it's just a break between acts, like the gap between songs on an album. "The best films are like dreams you're never really sure you had," says one of the Lone Man's contacts in an earlier exchange, and it's clear that Jarmusch isn't about to decipher this one for you. You have to use your imagination. 

On Not Forgetting About Him: Recounting John Hughes' Most Memorable Film-Music Moments

Music tends to be pivotal in most coming-of-age stories, but one need only see such recent weak sauce as Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist to realize what a particular gift Mister John Hughes had with it. He even titled his films after songs: "Sixteen Candles" (by The Crests), "Pretty in Pink" (by The Psychedelic Furs, a song that directly inspired Hughes to write the film), "Some Kind of Wonderful" (by Grand Funk Railroad). He wasn't afraid to use music by relative unknowns in his films and in a 1999 interview said, "I just used what I was listening to at the time, bands I liked." Hughes was also one of the first directors to acknowledge the growing popularity of rap among white teenagers in the 1989 film Uncle Buck.

It was definitely during the halcyon Brat Pack years, however, in which Hughes created his most memorable film-music moments. From Ferris' parade-float-lip-sync to "Danke Schoen" and "Twist and Shout" to a tortured Samantha watching Jake Ryan dance with another girl to Spandau Ballet's "True" in Sixteen Candles, Hughes wrote music into the very fabric of his scripts and was never afraid to let it take over a scene. He also wasn't above using it for the occasional cheesy laugh like breaking into the Twilight Zone theme when Samantha's grandparents move into her room, or throwing in a dash of Peter Gunn for a panning shot of the nerds at the school dance.

Boombox Serenade took a quick FaceBook poll: "What's your Favorite John Hughes film-music moment?" and here's what we got: 

• "I think it ends up being Duckie doing the most amazing Otis Redding 'Try A Little Tenderness' tribute [in Pretty in Pink]. He is everything anyone should love in a man: silly, passionate, nerdy. He really sells it and it perfectly communicates how much he loves Andie with his entire soul."
• "In Ferris Bueller's Day Off, it's the scene where Sloan and Ferris are saying goodbye to each other after getting back home from their adventures, right before Ferris looks at his watch and says "I have to go!" They kiss, and he hauls ass home.  Sloan says to herself 'He's going to marry me.' It's all done to the song the 'Edge Of Forever' by The Dream Academy. Perfect."
• "'Oh Yeah' by Yello is perfect for the first time Ferris & Cameron pick up the Ferrari."
• "The scene when 'If You Were Here' by the Thompson Twins begins playing just as Sam sees Jake waiting for her in the church parking lot at the end of Sixteen Candles gets to me every time."
• "I've got to go with the 'If You Were Here' scene in Sixteen Candles too. When Samantha Baker Davis Jr. walks out of the church and Jake gives her that, 'yeah you' head tilt thing next to the Porsche. Brilliant."
• "The Dream Academy's cover of 'Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want' in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, when Cameron is staring at the Seurat painting. His eyes are so haunting. It's like he's dissolving in front of you."
• "The scene in She's Having A Baby where she's just about to have her baby and Kate Bush's 'Woman's Work' comes on. Tear jerker!"
• "I think the song is called 'We Are Not Alone' by Karla DeVito and its really awful, but it's from the dancing scene in The Breakfast Club. It's when Ally Sheedy falls down, face-first on the floor at the end. I love it, I can't help it."
• "Ferris running like crazy to get home before his parents do to General Public's 'Taking the Day Off.'"
• "Well of course of course OMD's 'If You Leave' at the end of Pretty in Pink is one of the all-time highlights of brat pack cinema."
• "Through all the movies and the music, it is hard to get away from the power of the Simple Minds ["Don't You Forget About Me"] in Breakfast Club, but if I had to pick, I would go with Lick the Tin's cover of 'Can't Help Falling in Love with You' from Some Kind of Wonderful."
• "Planes, Trains and Automobiles: John Candy doing Ray Charles' 'Mess Around.' Best air sax on film."

Film-Music Moment of the Day: The Spinners Take the Stage at Zaire 74

In late September 1974 a historic three day music festival took place in Kinshasa, Zaire and Soul Power is the hyper-vibrant, soul-drenched account of that event. Thirty one acts participated in the festival—17 from Africa and 14 from the U.S. and elsewhere—and this documentary features a double fistful of the very best, including the moment when the Detroit based band The Spinners took the stage to perform "One of a Kind Love Affair" to a stadium audience of 80,000 Africans.

The Zaire 74 festival was conceived by South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and American record producer Stewart Levine. It was supposed to be a promotional vehicle for Rumble in the Jungle, the heavyweight fight between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman, but when an injury forced Foreman to postpone the fight by several weeks, the festival's intended audience of international tourists evaporated. Event producers Lloyd Price and Don King made the bold choice to go forward with the event and while final ticket sale numbers fell short of expectations due to the delayed fight, Zaire 74 was declared a resounding success in its promotion of racial and cultural solidarity between African American and African people.

The New York Times quoted Price as saying "Our purpose was to document the history of the beat. We want to...help blacks in America, strangers in a strange land, to grasp the strand of the motherland—the musical beat." In this sense, The Spinners' performance is particularly stunning. By 1974 their music was a lush blend of doo wop and the Philly-style soul that was becoming popular, and to hear that satiny sound in an African context is a revelation—a living map of black music's breadth and scope...its journey. Even the group's choreography seems to speak volumes, the quick darting movements and graceful side-leaps contain echoes of traditional African dance, but distant ones; there's disco, Motown, gospel and a dozen other influences in there—the cultural nuances layered like geological strata. The word "summit" is often applied to dry-as-dust gatherings of academics and officials, but Zaire 74 was a summit in the true sense of the word; it was an acme, a crest, a crown.

It's difficult to pick other highlights from Soul Power, because there are so many. Miriam Makeba radiated joy and tenacity as she sang the unforgettable "Click Song," a traditional South African tune sung in the Xhosa language. Tabu Ley Rochereau's dancers were hotter than Georgia asphalt, and the billowing ruffles of Celia Cruz's dress could make the Pope want to salsa dance. Bill Withers was polished and powerful in a solo acoustic performance. He recounted being asked if he was planning on bringing back any souvenirs from Africa and said, "What I want to bring back is the feeling." In fact, given how keenly felt the performances are throughout this documentary, it's a little surprising that James Browns' big finale seems just a touch phoned-in at the end, but his music was all about the prolonged groove—a deep funk trance state—so it may have just been difficult to capture in concert clips.

Overall what comes through in Soul Power is a deep sense of resonance and excitement among performers and concert-goers alike. Some of the best moments in the documentary are the spontaneous performances that break out all over the place—the improvised jam sessions on the flight to Zaire, a sing-along with the greeters on the runway, the random live performances that spring up all around May Stadium. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte deserves a lot of credit for rescuing this footage from the cutting room floor of the 1996 documentary When We Were Kings and seeing it through a long and no doubt arduous production process. He's preserved an important piece of cultural history and cast new light on an event of resounding significance. 

Film Music Moment of the Day: Psychotic Break Dance

Though at least one half horror film, the most disturbing parts of Adrian Lyne's 1990 masterpiece Jacob's Ladder are not his hallucinatory visions of blind, mutilated surgeons or freakishly contorted executioners. The real horror in this film comes from the post-Vietnam era sense of numbness and grief, expressed in a clinically depressed palette of browns and grays, and in the ringing absence of a golden haired child who has died by accident—the son of war veteran Jacob Singer and a symbol of an entire generation's lost innocence.

Lyne uses a party scene for the onset of Jacob's real free-fall into madness, a poppin' dance floor sequence in which folks are grooving hard to James Brown's brilliant "My Thang," a searing, relentless track from his 1974 album, Hell. The script describes the dancers in this way: "Their movements are loose and getting looser," a parallel to Jacob's increasingly slack grasp on reality. The smoke in the room erases detail from the faces of the people around him. His girlfriend (played by the absurdly sexy Elizabeth Pena) is pressuring Jacob to dance, despite his reluctance to do so.

Suddenly the music seems overly insistent, and the scene grows uncomfortable. The dance floor is too hectic; the dancers are gyrating too hard. In the shadows Jacob glimpses a woman squatting and urinating on the carpet. In shock he turns away only to catch sight of a man whose head seems to twist and vibrate at such speed that it loses all definition. Jacob screams, but his friends just laugh. His girlfriend Jezzie guides his hand inside her dress, where he feels alien, bony protrusions. He jerks away in surprise and his glasses are knocked from his face. When he puts them back on, she's in an erotic embrace with another dancer whom he cannot entirely see, but who has tentacles that appear to be penetrating her from behind while she writhes in delight.

Meanwhile the music is so funky, so mercilessly driving that you can almost smell the speed in James Brown's sweat as it soaks through his denim jumpsuit. It brings to the fore what's truly grotesque about the people at this party: an overly adulterated, deeply dosed sense of fun—one that barely conceals their weariness, cynicism, and sorrow. It's worth noting that the cover of James Brown's Hell is a kind of modern version of the "damnation" panel of 15th century triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch*, that terrifying depiction of life in purgatory: bird-headed monsters feasting on human beings, a sow wearing the veil of a nun, naked men impaled on mandolins. The Hell cover features, among other things, a wounded war veteran, a junkie shooting up, and man with a gun to his head. Lyne too has created his own Bosch-like vision, invoking all the dread and denial of a time when people were hell-bent on keeping the party going, but ideologically adrift and helpless to prevent intrusive memories of war. 

*Thanks to the interestment.co.uk blog for its "Album Covers Analyzed" feature.

Film Music Moment of the Day: The Coronation of Marie Antoinette

Displaying exquisite sensitivity to its grandly sweeping melody, Sofia Coppola creates a masterful film-music moment by setting Marie's post-coronation procession to "Plainsong" by The Cure—cutting into and out of the tableau in a confident, decidedly postmodern way. Coppola has said that she wanted to explore both the similarities and differences between life at Versailles and the way we live today, and accomplished this through juxtaposition of rich period imagery and emotive, contemporary music—showing us how immediate the feelings of an 18th century queen could be, and how regal rock.

Film Music Moment of the Day: Johnny Meets Billie in Michael Mann's Public Enemies

Resplendent with rich lines, textures, and sounds, Michael Mann's Public Enemies is a feast for the senses, and at the center of this feast is the gaze John Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp) lavishes upon Billie Frechette (played by Marianne Cotillard)--one that more than lives up to the real life Frechette's description:

"There was something in those eyes that I will never forget. They were piercing and electric, yet there was an amused carefree twinkle in them too. They met my eyes and held me hypnotized for an instant."

Depp absolutely nails that characterization and gives us a Dillinger so transfixed by Freschette that he allows himself to be led out onto a dance floor shortly after meeting her, despite not knowing how to dance. There they're enveloped by an especially velvety rendition of "Bye Bye Blackbird" by Diana Krall, and it's one of the many moments in the film that draws you right into the action, making the moment seem both immediate and iconic.

Mann has never been afraid to let music take over a scene, and in Public Enemies does so with his usual panache. Another standout is Otis Taylors' "Ten Million Slaves" as a backdrop for the scene in which Melvin Purvis (played by Christian Bale) pursues and guns down bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd. Mann rounds out the soundtrack with a little Billie Holiday and Blind Willie Johnson, and even if Coen-esque moments of greatness are never quite achieved via the music, Mann--like Dillinger himself--has style to burn, and has given us a memorable portrait of a charismatic criminal.

Film Music Moment of the Day: Food Inc.

Robert Kenner's powerful documentary on the U.S. food industry, Food Inc., is made all the more powerful by the epilogue to the film, set to Bruce Springsteen's live version of "This Land is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie. Guthrie wrote it in 1940 in response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," which he considered unrealistic and complacent, so it's the perfect choice for a documentary that strips away the pastoral marketing lies of the food industry to make a very direct appeal to audience members to change our incredibly screwed up food system. The instrumentation on the song is minimal, which makes this entreaty even more immediate and personal. Very, very effective.

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.

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. 

Film-Music Moment of the Day: Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse

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.

Cameron Crowe Names His Top Ten Film-Music Moments

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.