Boombox Serenade

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 Case for Karen O's Academy Award

Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O and ambient pioneer Brian Eno both wrote scores for major film releases in 2009, but a few weeks ago Rolling Stone that broke the story that neither would be eligible to win a Best Original Score Oscar at this year's Academy Awards. That's because the Academy rulebook currently disqualifies a score if it's "diluted" by the use of preexisting music, "diminished in impact" by the predominant use of songs, or is assembled from the music of more than one composer. 

It could have been either the song caveat or the bit about more than one composer that disqualified Karen O's score for Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are. There's some singing in the score and she did collaborate with Bradford Cox of Deerhunter while writing it, as well as Nick Zinner and Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Well known film composer Carter Burwell participated too, but his presence wasn't likely the problem. He was credited and the rulebook makes provisions for "two composers functioning as equal collaborators." 

Brian Eno isn't eligible for his score for Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones because he didn't file the relevant paperwork to have the Academy consider it, but even if he had, it would probably still be disqualified, since it uses portions of his earlier work. The same thing happened to Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood a few years ago. Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood was widely considered brilliant, but contained some preexisting work including a bit of his 2006 track "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" as well as some Arvo Pärt and Johannes Brahms compositions. That same year, Nick Cave was just plain overlooked by the Academy for his score to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It was eligible, but never nominated.

It's interesting that these innovative, culturally relevant artists are so regularly being disqualified and excluded from one of the most prominent award ceremonies in the world. It makes you wonder if the Oscar rulebook is written in such a way that predisposes the category to the phenomenon.

After all, touring, album-releasing artists bring a different perspective to score than the work-for-hire composers. The quality of what they do depends, in part, on heavy collaboration and an ability to riff on their own work and the culture at large. Their tendency to bring in more of the world is something the Academy sees as muddying the waters, but can actually lead to a more interesting, potent score—all the more so for the healthy friction between image and sound that a fully individuated pop artist naturally creates. It's also worth pausing to consider what rare fluency and talent it takes for an artist like Karen O to make the leap from albums to film score. After all, how many traditional film composers could write something that could land them top billing at Coachella?

Not to mention, it's possible that scores are being subjected to a bit of a double standard here. Spike Jonze hired Jim Henson's folks to create the monsters in Where The Wild Things Are, so his work was assembled from the work of more than one artist, but it wouldn't be ineligible for the Best Film category because of it. Why should score be any different?

In any case, there's no doubt that whatever collaborations took place, Karen O's score is distinctly her own. It's full of her dark exuberance and edgy tenderness. Her wildness and vulnerability. Her whoop and croon.

Plus, she and Brian Eno are in good company. In 1961, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn composed music for Martin Ritt's film Paris Blues and were nominated for an Academy Award for it, but several pieces of the score were actually jazz standards that Ellington had recorded several decades before, such as "Take the A Train" and 'Mood Indigo." Later the Academy would change the rules to their existing form, which would have disqualified Ellington and Strayhorn from being nominated at the time.

It might be time for the Academy to revisit the rules once again, because right now it seems diminished for being incapable of acknowledging Karen O's work. Instead of disqualifying artists like her for collaborating with other musicians, including songs, or drawing on past creations, it should make more room for them. The greater glory of movies would likely be served.

On The "Distracted Listener"

Digital music's impact was very well assessed by Jon Pareles in the New York Times yesterday...a satisfying backward glance at just how much the landscape has changed in the last decade, and how artists and fans alike are feeling about it all. I do take issue, however, with one of Pareles' observations:

"Instead of waiting for royalties to trickle in from sales, musicians were happy to get paid upfront for licensing their music to advertisers and to TV and movie soundtracks. A distracted listener was better than none at all."

Is such a listener necessarily distracted? Welcome to the future, friend, where the kids can multitask like emmer-effers, where music and images go together like Thomas Mars and Sofia Coppola, and where it's possible for soundtracks to spawn sum-greater-than-parts type moments on screens both big and nano.

Even if you're not willing to swallow the brave new world argument, consider that to characterize such a listener as "distracted" is to imply that twenty years ago we were somehow always hyper-focused while listening to music and never did so while driving, having sex, or cleaning the house. 

In truth, our very lives became music videos long before the advent of MTV, and I'd be willing to bet that most musicians wouldn't have it any other way. Would David Byrne mind, for instance, that I wasn't giving my full attention to "Psycho Killer" the first time I heard it because I happened to be making out with someone, or would he smile, knowing that his song achieved a more vivid, visceral status of memory because of that experience?

Was I distracted?

Purists have characterized the average listener as distracted since the advent of recorded sound itself, but music—live and recorded alike—has always been enjoyed by humans while in the throes of various other activities. So, while listening to music is, of course, a sublime practice on its own, music can also heighten and make memorable a thousand other phenomena, including visual art. This is no comprise, either for the director or the musician. On the contrary, it's often transcendental.

Some artists leverage this natural rapport in astounding ways. David Lynch has taken his exploration of image and sound to such potent extremes that he has now gone fully through the looking glass, collaborating on entire albums' worth of music with the indie set. Beck, the grandson of visual artist Al Hansen, used the morphing, spectral animations of Jeremy Blake on his Sea Change tour as accompaniment to the music. When I saw that show, I remember feeling overcome with the confluence of beauty unfolding all around me.

Was I distracted? 

And, if you're talking about trusted curators of music like Wes Anderson, Alexandra Patsavas, or—I'm not afraid to say it—iPod ads, I would argue that not only is the listener not distracted, he is exceptionally sensitive and attuned to the music being played.

Even in less hip and skillful hands, however, an image no more detracts from a sound than one note in a chord detracts from another. In this sense we are not distracted listeners, but newly dazzled, capacious ones—ever more willing to appreciate multiple experiences and artworks the same time, ever more able to interpret how those layers resonate and create meaningful friction between one another.

Can you handle the data? I think you can.

Our Annual List of Alt-Christmas Radio Stations on the Interwebs

Well, we don't know what to tell Virginia about the fact that our favorite Internet radio station of punk rock Christmas music has disappeared this year, but there's still plenty of non-traditional and off-the-beaten-track holiday music out there. Enjoy!

1. Xmas in Frisko. One of San Francisco's finest exports, SomaFM continues to specialize in bringing us the most deliciously eccentric holiday music out there. A recent session yielded "Christmas Wrap" by Two Live Jews, "Twas The Night Before Jesus" by Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and "Santa Claus Is A Black Man" by The Teddy Vann Production Company. Special.

2. Radio Neige Folle. "Neige folle" means "fresh snow" (or literally, "crazy snow") and this radio station features gorgeous old French-language Christmas music from 1915 through the years. A really nice change of pace when Bono has invoked the clanging chimes of doom one too many times, and as an added bonus, you can hear the pop and hiss of old vinyl on many of this station's selections.

3. The Holiday Sub-Channels at Accuradio. There's an entire channel here called "Wait They Made a Christmas Album?" and it's a great choice (currently playing The Flaming Lips) as is the Reggae Christmas channel, the Non-Standard Christmas channel, and Smooth Hanukkah. Something for everyone really.

4. Dysfunctional Christmas. The folks at Slacker.com may have made baby Jesus cry with this one, but they made us do the opposite of cry. You'll need to create a free account to listen, but it's well worth it.

5. Prisoners of Technology. Some enterprising DJ has taken it upon himself to add jingle bells to every electro-pop track out there and is playing them now through December 25th. And if you've never heard "Love Will Tear Us Apart" with jingle bells, you really should.

6. Lagniappe Christmas. Highly eclectic holiday music from the Big Easy, where they spike their carols with Bourbon Street style and serve up the occasional cheeseball of rock too, such as AC/DC's, "I Want a Mistress for Christmas."

7. Holiday Hip Hop. This is a shared station on Pandora where you'll hear "Santa Baby" like you've never heard it before, including a wish list that has "jobs in the ghetto" as one of its top requests.

8. 181 FM's Christmas Swing. Skip right over "Christmas Power" and the other schlock and head straight for "Christmas Swing," a holly jolly line-up of vintage tracks from the 20's, 30's and 40's. Lots of stuff you've never heard before.

9. Cracked Christmas. Specializing in "comedy Christmas songs," Cracked plays feel-good tracks like Weird Al Yankovic's "The Night Santa Went Crazy." "Well, the workshop is gone now, he decided to bomb it. Everywhere you'll find pieces of Cupid and Comet. And he tied up his helpers, and he held the elves hostage. And he ground up poor Rudolph into reindeer sausage." Nuff said.

10. Smoky Mountain Christmas. Home spun and hickory smoked Christmas music from bands with names like "Clarke Family and the Pine Street Musicians" and "Larry Sparks & The Lonesome Ramblers." Totally authentic and tumbledown pretty. Note, you may have to do the free registration thing to listen.  

Happy Holidays from Boombox Serenade!

aworldofhelp.com

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.

Recession Impacts Music Licensing

The "lightning in a bottle" phenomenon of Twilight: New Moon notwithstanding, music budgets have been declining right along with the economy, says the L.A. Times. Apparently it's putting a damper on the uptick in publishing revenue that major labels have been enjoying in recent years, even as their CD sales plummeted.

While this isn't necessarily the most earth-shattering news given the overall state of things, there are few interesting nuances for industry folks, such as the alleged resurgence of step-licenses (which I would still recommend avoiding in most cases) and the increasing popularity of big, one-stop-shopping deals in which studios rely on one production house to meet all or most of their music needs. A recent example of this might be NBC's recent deal with Bon Jovi, which allows them to draw freely and frequently from Bon Jovi's upcoming release, The Circle, across "multiple NBC brands and platforms."

My view is that these sorts of deals don't usually mean good things for television and film, because the moment that a business deal starts to take precedence over the fit of the music is the moment the quality of the show or the film starts to decline. Truly buzzy soundtracks are almost never created this way, let alone authentic, resonant moments of storytelling. Viewers are surprisingly sensitive to uninspired, business-driven soundtrack choices and will use them to make split-second and entirely unconscious decisions that a show or a film is lame. For these reasons and more, studios should think again before skimping on music budgets or forming catch-all deals, which are in essence a form of product placement. 

Silver linings though: the recession means that music licensing continues to be a buyers' market right now, which is great news for filmmakers working with smaller budgets. It's possible to get some good deals in this market, so don't assume you won't be able to afford that license. Approach the labels and ask.

Peter Greenaway's canvas swells, with "present-tense live cinema," set to music

As a big fan of cinema as pure image-sound experience, I'm thrilled that visual master Peter Greenaway squandered a puff-piece opportunity with New York Magazine to harsh on our ever-diminishing ability to appreciate films this way. He's just released a documentary called Rembrandt's J'Accuse. It's an analysis of Rembrandt's painting The Night Watch and tasks itself with locating and explaining the painting's hidden meanings, calling attention to our own visual illiteracy in the process. Something tells me that Greenaway's "essay-like" approach to documentary will be more visually lyrical than the wildest dream sequences of garden variety directors. 

Also great to hear that he's been VJ-ing lately too: 

"[W]e’ve fragmented a huge amount of imagery into thousands of loops, taken from the original Tulse Luper Suitcases, some of them no more than a couple of seconds. And we’ve put together a project which is music-driven, in association with D.J.'s... [a]nd I have these touch screens where I can push and pull these images onto as many big projection screens as I can: 33 screens is our record. What I’m trying to find is a present-tense live cinema, which is non-narrative and multi-screen. I don’t want to concentrate anymore on the single screen, which is far too small a canvas these days. I’m also interested in the cinema that’s never the same. Even Casablanca eventually becomes disappointing because it never changes. But we now have the technology to change it every night."

While I must roll my eyes a bit at the Casablanca comment (and disagree with the statement that it never changes), I also admit that I would consider selling my eye teeth to see Greenaway practice his art live, although I'd probably immediately start obsessing about how much better my set of music would be for him. Geekdom. It's really quite different from Zen Buddhism.

Is Dino Risi's "Il Sorpasso" the First-Ever Pop Music Soundtrack?

If you've seen Gary Leva's 2007 documentary, Fog City Mavericks, you may have heard a few people in it assert that George Lucas' 1973 film, American Graffiti, had the first ever pop music soundtrack. But while American Graffiti was among the earlier films to take that route, it wasn't the first. Not by a long shot.  

All throughout the sixties, in fact, directors were moving toward a more pop oriented approach. Bruce Conner's 1962 short, COSMIC RAY—featuring atomic bomb newsreel mixed with original footage—was set to Ray Charles' "What'd I Say," and was a significant early step away from the old Irving Berlin sensibility about music in film.  Many consider COSMIC RAY, in fact, to be the first real music video, an attribution that Conners himself denies, saying that if he's the father of the genre then he'd like a "paternity test." Whether he's responsible for MTV or not though, he was definitely exhibiting a new willingness to use album-released tracks by real, label-backed musicians as an atmospheric element on par with visual composition, lighting, score, and other, cinematic elements. His work also leveraged the subculture's growing suspicion of traditional American vernacular in general.

Around the same time Conners was making COSMIC RAY, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn composed music for the 1961 film Paris Blues and were nominated for an Academy Award for it, but several pieces of the "score" (a term the Academy now defines as music written specifically for the film) were actually jazz standards that Ellington had recorded several decades before, such as "Take the A Train" and 'Mood Indigo." It was, by that time, commonplace for big budget Hollywood films like White Christmas to spawn chart-toppers in popular culture, but with Paris Blues that direction began to reverse a bit, and existing music started to find a larger audience through film.

On the flip side, the sixties also provide some interesting examples of just how score-happy the industry was at the time. The 1965 film The Knack...and How to Get It is about the sexual revolution among "mods and rockers" of mid-sixties London, but instead of a mod or rock soundtrack it had a score—a choice that would be fairly unthinkable for equivalent storylines today (can you imagine a score for High Fidelity?). Other quasi-edgy films of the 60's like Alfie and Breakfast at Tiffany's almost definitely would have had pop soundtracks had it been a more common practice at the time. During that same period From Russia With Love was released and was the first to use that Bond strategy of featuring a distinct title track, but it was written by Lionel Bart who came directly from the musical theater world. The result is a buttery Matt Monro number wholly untouched by Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, or rock and roll. Even fairly racy subject matter was still getting the ol' Irving Berlin treatment. 

Then, things began to change. In 1966 Michelangelo Antonioni released Blow Up, featuring score by Herbie Hancock, but also pop songs by the The Lovin' Spoonful, The Yardbirds, and Tomorrow (featuring a pre-Yes Steve Howe). In 1967, Mike Nichols busted out with The Graduate, and showed the world, definitively, just how powerful a non-score soundtrack could be in a work of serious cinema. Paul Simon had actually written two songs specifically for the film ("Punky's Dilemma" and "A Hazy Shade of Winter") but Nichols rejected both and instead chose "Mrs. Robinson," a song not written for the movie, but one that Simon had already been writing and had originally called "Mrs. Roosevelt," after Eleanor Roosevelt. The song became a hit after the film was released, once again showing film's ability to magnify existing works of music, instead of the more top-down approach of making hits out of music written specifically for a film.

The year 1968 was significant for the release of Yellow Submarine, which furthered and fueled—as many Beatles projects did—the public's appetite for rock set to fantastic images. Then Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider came along in 1969, featuring a full blown "various artists" soundtrack including Steppenwolf, The Byrds, The Band, Jimi Hendrix, Little Eva, and many others. Rock as counterculture was at its peak by then, and Easy Rider's soundtrack was inextricably linked to its power and cultural significance as a film. 

While that soundtrack was certainly groundbreaking, however, a lot of the credit for the approach should actually go to Italian director, Dino Risi. That's because from title to finale, Easy Rider was based on Dino Risi's 1962 film, Il Sorpasso ("The Easy Life") which had a full pop soundtrack featuring snappy Italian hits such as "Saint Tropez Twist" by Peppino di Capri, "Quando Quando Quando" by Emilio Pericoli, "Guarda come Dondolo" and "Pinne Fucili ed Occhiali" by Edoardo Vianello, and "Vecchio Frac" by Domenico Modugno.

Not coincidentally, Il Sorpasso is also considered the first truly modern road movie, with no back projections, no studio work, and no grand old automobiles. Its kicky early 60's sensibility differs dramatically from the late 60's psychedelia of Easy Rider, but several strong similarities are there too, including themes of how a nation chooses to recover from an era of war and repression. (If Il Sorpasso is any indication, Italians recovered by doing the Twist absolutely everywhere.)

By the time American Graffiti came along in 1973, its pop music soundtrack was still a new enough approach to signify George Lucas' sense of adventure as a director, but not so new that it was visionary. Other significant non-score soundtracks leading up to American Graffiti include Midnight Cowboy, Zabriskie Point, and Alice's Restaurant, but it's important to remember that Dino Risi's Il Sorpasso presaged all of these, including Easy Rider, and was truly a breakthrough in that sense.

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.

Thomas Mars of French Band Phoenix to Contribute Original Music to Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere"

Sofia Coppola's go-to sound designer, Richard Beggs, reports that her significant other, Thomas Mars, will be contributing original music to her upcoming film, "Somewhere," to be released in late 2010. This continues Coppola's track record of tapping leading edge pop and rock musicians to do score for her films, versus traditional composers. 

On "The Virgin Suicides" she collaborated with the French downtempo electronic band, AIR, and on "Lost in Translation" it was Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine. Brian Reitzell is her favorite music supervisor, although it's not clear yet whether or not he's working on "Somewhere." It seems impossible, though, that Sofia will be able to resist slipping in some licensed tracks, so his presence is anticipated.

Beggs described "Somewhere" as "airy, open, transparent" and seemed very taken with the broad canvas it's provided for sound design. He described his own style of sound design as having grown "sparser and sparser" over the years.

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: Shoshanna Prepares to Murder the Nazis

If the quantum physicists are right and time is like a giant piece of fabric with all events occurring at the same moment, then I'm fairly certain that Inglourious Basterds helped the Allies win the war. Quentin Tarantino has created revenge propaganda so clear-eyed and boldly executed that it ripped a hole in the time-space continuum and demoralized the Nazis in some kind of crazy backward tipping point. History says 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 joined the ranks of the very few directors (like Robert Altman and Sofia Coppola) brave and talented enough to put contemporary music in their period pieces in an effective way. "You're actually shocked at how well the lyrics to 'Cat People' work to her story," he told the L.A. Times.

Personally, I wasn't so much "shocked" as I was simply saucer-eyed with delight because Tarantino knows exactly what to do with David Bowie's ominous and opulent voice, placing it at the very heart of his film like a jewel while lavishing some old-school camera work on his heroine.

See these eyes so green
I can stare for a thousand years
Colder than the moon
It's been so long
And I've been putting out fire
With gasoline

"It would've been easy to hire some artist to do the 'Ballad of Shoshanna,'" he explained, "and it could be telling her story in a very on-point, nail-on-the-head kind of way. I just don't like the idea of giving that much power to anybody on one of my movies," he continued. I would much rather work with a music editor than a music composer."

There's another great film-music moment in Basterds, and it's later when Shoshanna and Private Zoller gun one another down at point blank range to Nick Perito's instrumental version of "The Green Leaves of Summer," a track that sounds about as fresh as a fifty year old can of peaches in heavy syrup. It's a signature Tarantino move to set scenes of graphic violence to wildly inappropriate music, and the trick words again here. I actually giggled as one of the best film heroines I've seen in some time was savagely killed. The music cue is also a reference—no doubt—to the 1960 John Wayne film The Alamo, for which the unbelievably saccharine vocal version won an Oscar for Best Song, and as if we needed more proof that Basterds is a film about filmmaking, Tarantino borrowed the Bowie track too; it was an original written for the 1982 remake of Cat People.

So thanks Quentin, you wonderful nerd. Thanks for inserting flowery music at the most brutal moments. Thanks for the well-placed White Duke. Thanks for projecting the gorgeous ghost of Shoshanna onto smoke and letting her laugh while she barbecues a theater full of Nazis to a crisp. Thanks for ripping a hole in the space-time continuum and helping the Allies win the war. Thanks for blowing my mind, again, at least seven different times. I love that a real auteur has the number one grossing movie in the country right now, and I love, love, love your wicked ways.

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.

---

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. 

If You Were Here: Ten Filmmakers Who May or May Not Be John Hughes' Rightful Heir

John Hughes wrote his own movies, created a dozen iconic film-music moments, and gave us a funny yet soulful depictions of teenagers complete with multifacted female protagonists. Is there anyone making films today who can carry this torch? The famously lucrative teen market means there's no shortage of comers. Let's review...

1. Kevin Smith (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy) In the 90's Kevin Smith gave us a totally new take on the teenage wasteland and took on the complicated sexual politics of the day with nerdy verve. He also showed a passionate devotion to soundtrack (the music rights to Clerks cost more than the entire production budget), but he never quite had Hughes' gift for creating iconic moments with music. Smith's gifts lie more in his stylized dialogue, ultra-colorful characters, and witty riffs on the culture at large. By the way, if Hughes' influence on Smith was ever in doubt, note that the characters in Dogma directly reference Sixteen Candles by name, as well as The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, and Shermer, Illinois.
2. Danny Leiner (Director, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Dude, Where's My Car?). Leiner definitely has a certain Hughes'-like playfulness and goofy sense of fantasy and he also uses a lot of contemporary music in his soundtracks, but he tends to neglect the angstier side of young adulthood and doesn't write his own work as Hughes did. Still, it seems likely that Harold & Kumar in particular will long be remembered (and recited) by an entire generation. At South by Southwest Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg revealed that they wrote the film partly in response to the negative racial stereotype of Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles, which makes Harold's infatuation with it in the movie especially funny. 
3. Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre). Like Hughes, Hess writes his own work and infuses it with both deeply comic and soulful elements. He has a unique, recognizable style and the skillz to create iconic film-music moments, the most memorable being Napoleon Dynamite's dance to Jamiroquai's "Canned Heat."Hess has a strong visual aesthetic too—its full of poetically quirky portraits and tableaus—which make his films more big-screen worthy than the more conventional, character-driven comedies of Hughes. Hess' next project, Gentlemen Broncos, has a teenage protagonist. 
4. Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums) Anderson has apparently named Hughes as an influence (although I can't find a primary source on that) and there's no doubt that the man is a genius with music and bittersweet tones, but his aesthetic choices lean heavily toward a vintage fantasy feeling whereas Hughes preferred the traditional screwball comedy. Plus, Rushmore is the only evidence that Anderson is much interested in adolescence at all. His work, if anything, tends to preoccupy itself with the questions (and the melancholy) that arise after youth is really gone and characters realize they have become completely and irretrievably adult. 
5. Greg Mottola (Superbad, Adventureland), Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg (Writers, Superbad) A part of the circle that's helping to establish a millennial brat pack complete with adorable nerds and lovable losers, this trio—like Hughes—has a real gift for balancing comedy with heart and showing the truly painful, awkward details of growing up, as well as the things that sustain us through it. Mottola has also shown chops for creating memorable film-music moments. Like Wes Anderson, he steers clear of contemporary music, but where Anderson favors obscure artists and b-sides, Mottola seems to cherry pick from bygone decades, which seems a bit safe. We'd like to see him branch out past the ironic funk of Superbad and 80's nostalgia of Adventureland to embrace something as zeitgeist-y as his own films. 
6. Judd Apatow, Steve Carrell, Adam McCay, et al. (Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall). Much more of a team player than Hughes, Apatow has nevertheless shown a Hughes-like ability to create work that is both critically and commercially successful, but Apatow has been more interested in grown-up stories than teenage ones for some time, and despite lengthy soundtracks, the truly memorable film-music moments are surprisingly few. Still, the real warmth and camraderie that Team Underdog has built can be felt in the films. Like Hughes' movies, they're flawed, but also deeply human. They also have a quality that I remember grown-ups reacting to in Hughes' films: the dialogue is explicit in a way that many adults really hate, but I do not. It's less gratuitous than typical movie profanity in that it seems to be there, in part, to show that characters are masking insecurity or immaturity or both. 
7. Jason Reitman (Director Juno) and Diablo Cody (Writer Juno). Cody and Reitman charted a wry and confident path through some of the more poignant terrain of adolescence, including teen pregnancy of course, but also a rarely explored nuance: dealing with adults who mistake you for one. Juno herself was every bit as sharp and funny as Hughes' Samantha Baker or Andie Walsh, and she was especially minty fresh for arriving on the scene during a veritable golden age of bromance. And whether you loved the music in Juno or found it too twee (especially for a film about a young woman who claimed to love The Stooges), you have to give Reitman and Music Supervisor Peter Afterman credit for crafting a soundtrack of relative unknowns and coming up with something that not only worked well with the subject matter, but resonated deeply with the audience. Soundtrack sales don't tend to be all that impressive these days, but Juno's went gold and was Rhino Records' first-ever Billboard top ten in their 30 year history.
8. Cameron Crowe (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything). Crowe is only seven years younger than Hughes so he's a peer not an heir (the two even used some of the same actors including John Cusack). What's interesting, though, is that Hughes apparently named Fast Times at Ridgemont High as one of the films he felt portrayed teens in a callow way and one of the reasons he wrote Sixteen Candles, yet Crowe's Say Anything revealed him to be every bit as philosophical about youth and equally as gifted at creating iconic film-music moments. Say Anything was released in 1989, a few years after Hughes' peak Brat Pack years. Was this film influenced by Hughes' work?
9. Sofia Coppola (Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette). If Hughes was "the philosopher of adolescence," then Sofia Coppola is its auteur. Like Hughes, she has shown a thematic preoccupation with the teenage and young adult years, and fearlessly explores the aimlessness, distortions, and freedoms they bring. Her films are not comedies to be sure, but she does use contemporary songs in pivotal, deeply felt ways, taking them way beyond mere soundtrack territory. She has also given us memorable female protagonists, complete with literary scale imperfections.  
10. Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused). Like Cameron Crowe, Linklater is closer in age to Hughes than most of the directors on this list. He's long since strayed from teen-centric fare, but like Hughes his early films were so casually funny and so good at conveying the much looser sense of time that tends to govern pre-adult years that he definitely warrants a mention. Plus he has great taste in music, though he uses it in a much more vérité style than Hughes did.
11. A few others that occur to us: Zach Braff (Garden State), Harmony Korine (Kids), the Farrelley Brothers (Something About Mary), Amy Heckerling (Clueless), Marc Webb ((500) Days of Summer), Paul and Chris Weitz (American Pie, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist), plus the whole Mumblecore crew.

Of couse, there's no exact ringer for John Hughes on this list, nor should we expect there to be. In the 1990's Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater gave us as different a take on adolescence as Hughes and Crowe had in the 80's. Now it's Mottola, Rogan, Apatow, and Reitman/Cody who seem to occupy much of the same space Hughes did: a deep love of the underdog, an equally deep love of the teen/young adult market, a gift for blending comedy and drama in a soulful way, and a way of using music that enhances everything. Mottola is the most commercial of these, so you could argue he's the most like Hughes, but Jared Hess gets extra credit for writing and directing all his own work and creating one of the classics of the decade on a $400,000 budget.

There are several auteurs in this bunch, and some of their names have even achieved the adjective-like status that John Hughes' did, yet it is, admittedly, the less arty Mottola/Apatow crew that have much more in common with him in their ability to create a consistently successful and distinct brand of comedy, as well as in their preference for re-casting the same favorites over and over (which begs the question: is Michael Cera the Molly Ringwald of his generation?). In fact, the auteur factor almost works against the grain here. Some films are important because they promises to stand the test of time, and some, because they commit so deeply to the time in which they are made. A critical mass of teenagers have imprinted on Reitman/Cody, Mottola, Rogan, and Apatow's work like so many baby geese; they will remember it fondly and always, just as many of us are now remembering Hughes. As we speak, these directors are influencing the next generation of filmmakers, who will in turn bring to life their own version of the American Teen. All of which is to say danke schoen John Hughes, for influencing multiple generations of new talent and ensuring that we'll never really have to say goodbye to you.

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. 

Fourteen Fall Film Picks

The fall movie line-up looks bright, and here are our picks for the best of the upcoming releases. Of the films that don't yet have U.S. distribution, we want to highlight The Illusionist by Sylvain Chomet (of The Triplets of Belleville), The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (by Terry Gilliam), and the documentary Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo by newcomer Jessica Oreck as those we're particularly hoping get deals.

1. Inglourious Basterds. August 21. Directed by Quentin Tarantino (Resevoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction). We don't care that the reviews from Cannes were mixed. Tarantino has a great way with revenge fantasies and this one is juicy: Jewish-American soldiers are chosen to spread fear among the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. Here's the trailer.

2. The September Issue. August 28. Directed by R.J. Cutler (American High). "Hoopla attendant" upon the arrival of this brisk, glittering documentary, the result of Cutler following around American Vogue Editor Anna Wintour (the inspiration for the despotic Miranda Priestly character in The Devil Wears Prada) for most of 2007 while she and her staff created the largest edition ever of the influential fashion magazine. We predict healthy box office for this one. Watch the trailer.

3. Bright Star. September 18. Directed by Jane Campion (The Piano, The Portrait of a Lady). There's major buzz attached to this film about the three-year romance between the 19th century poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, and it looks absolutely gorgeous. Campion has proved that she can put her own stamp on period pieces, including a uniquely intimate sense of sweep. Watch the trailer.

4. Jennifer's Body. September 18. Directed by Karyn Kusama (Girlfight). Say what you will about Diablo Cody's kitschy dialogue, but we're totally on board for a film about a murderous, demonically possessed man-hating cheerleader...no matter what. We might even brave the sketchy drive-in theater in Concord for this one. Watch the trailer.

5. A Serious Man. October 2. Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen (Fargo, The Big Lebowski). If the Coens can do any wrong, we have yet to see it. This one is a black comedy set in the late 1960's about a Midwestern professor whose wife is leaving him because his brother won't move out of the house. The Coens selected a cast comprised entirely of unknowns for this film. Kudos them. No trailer yet.

6. An Education. October 9. Directed by Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners) and written by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity). This coming-of-age story set in 1960's London did well at Sundance and seems like the perfect cardigan-clad fare for early fall. It has great cast including Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Emma Thompson, and Sally Hawkins. It'll be interesting to see how Scherfig and Music Supervisor Kle Savidge approach the soundtrack. Watch the trailer.

7. The Informant! October 9. Directed by Steven Soderbergh (Ocean's Eleven, Sex, Lies, and Videotape). Really nice to see a comedy coming down the pike that doesn't revolve around weddings or getting stoned. Instead this one hinges on a corporate VP turned informant (played by Matt Damon) for a federal price-fixing case against an agri-business giant. Yes, it's really a comedy and a hilariously funny looking one at that. Watch the trailer.

8. Where The Wild Things Are. October 16. Directed by Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation). We've been foaming at the mouth for this one along with everyone else, and the fact that Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is collaborating on music hasn't done much to make things less foamy around here. Watch the trailer.

9. Antichrist. October 23. Directed by Lars von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves). Yes, we are so very up for this totally crazypants art-horror flick. Bring it Lars! Watch the trailer. 

10. Gentlemen Broncos. October 30. Directed by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre). Our highly trained surveillance does have spotted some extreme goodness on the horizon, and it goes by the name of Gentlemen Broncos. Watch the trailer.

11. Precious. November 6. Directed by Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer). Christ on a bike, what an emotional wallop! We can't remember the last time a trailer made us curl up into the fetal position and sob. This film is an unflinching look at what happens when an overweight, pregnant, illiterate teen with an abusive mom is given the chance to enroll in an alternative school. Promises strong performances and a 100 percent chance of you crying. Watch the trailer. 

12. Nine. November 25. Directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago). The trailer makes it very clear that this film is going to deliver some straight up, old fashioned entertainment in a big way—complete with big, glitzy musical numbers performed by A-listers in sexy get-ups. Lush, lusty, decadent. If this film were a dinner course, it'd be dessert. Watch the trailer.

13. The Lovely Bones. December 11. Directed by Peter Jackson (Heavenly Creatures, the Lord of the Rings trilogy). If anyone can translate the story about a murdered girl who watches over her family and her killer from heaven, Peter Jackson can. No trailer yet.

14. The Illusionist. No U.S. release date yet. Directed by Sylvain Chomet (Triplets of Belleville).  Triplets of Belleville was an unforgettable masterpiece, so it's with a sense of childlike glee that we're looking forward to The Illusionist. It's about a stage performer "of a dying breed" who meets a young fan and is forever changed by the experience. No trailer yet.

Films We'd Really Like to See That Don't Yet Have Distribution:
--The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Trailer.
--Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. Dir: Jessica Oreck. Trailer.
--Le Donk. Dir: Shane Meadows. Trailer.
--Mary and Max. Dir: Adam Elliot. Trailer.
--Guy & Madeline on a Park Bench. Dir: D. Chazelle Trailer.
--The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle. Dir: David Russo. Trailer.

More Upcoming 2009 goodness...?
--Paper Heart. Director: Nicholas Jasenovec (Aug 7) Trailer.
--Julie & Julia. Director: Nora Ephron (Aug 7) Trailer.
--Beeswax. Director: Andrew Bujalski (Aug 7) Trailer.
--Extract. Director: Mike Judge (Sept 4). Trailer.
--9. Director: Shane Acker. (Sept 9) Trailer.
--Coco Avant Chanel. Director: Anne Fontain (Sept. 25) Trailer.
--Capitalism: A Love Story. Dir: Michael Moore (Oct 2) Trailer.
--Whip It. Director: Drew Barrymore (Oct 9). Trailer.
--Cold Souls. Director: Sophie Barthes (Nov 6). Trailer.
--The Fantastic Mister Fox. Director: Wes Anderson (Nov. 13)
--Invictus. Director: Clint Eastwood (Dec 11)
--Avatar. Director: James Cameron (Dec 18) Trailer.

Which films are you looking forward to this fall? Let us know!

"And it thrilled my soul." Lynch gets turned onto opera.

We're big ol' dorks for David Lynch here at Boombox Serenade, so we have—of course—been idly wondering where the Renaissance man will go after having written and recorded some of his own music for INLAND EMPIRE as well as inspiring and co-creating one of 2009's best albums, Dark Night of the Soul, in conjunction with Dangermouse and Sparklehorse. Here's what Lynch had to say about his ever-deepening relationship with music during a recent guest DJ stint on KCRW:

"I always of course loved music but was way more involved with sound effects because of film, and I loved sound that approached music. I'm not a musician but I love to play and I love to experiment. And I love musicians. Musicians are, generally speaking, like children. They love to sleep late. They're happier than most people. They get along well (unless they're in a band and then they start fighting). They're very special people and I love to be in the studio with musicians. It's a thrilling, thrilling thing and it all led to more experiments with music."

Modest talk for a man who is now inspiring entire albums' worth of material, who has himself recorded some of the most atmospheric music we've heard in a long time, and whose very name has become a cliche of music review—a shorthand way of saying "dark, mysterious, and a little perverse." Yet as always, Lynch seemed less interested in his own accomplishments than in new influences:

"I’m going to go to Richard Strauss. We’re getting into long haired stuff now. I was in a really swank Mercedes Benz in Germany one night. Black, deep black and snow flakes the size of silver dollars coming down. And I'd been left in the car -- I forget who I was with but they had gone into a building and I had been left in the car -- and I turned on the radio and I heard this thing. And it thrilled my soul. This particular piece of music at that particular time, I saw in my minds eye, my four year old son coming down a flight of stairs and it made me start crying."

It makes sense, of course, that Lynch would be drawn to a genre full of voices so rare—and rarely heard in mainstream culture—that they are, in their way, surreal. And he's always loved velvety textures, so what must it be like for him to enter an entire sonic world made of velvet and butter? I once had a fantasy of corralling an entire herd of electro-hippie ravers into a room and making them listen to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson perform Handel live, but I'll trade in this fantasy for one David Lynch film with lots of opera in it.

You can hear Lynch's full KCRW guest DJ spot here. And since KCRW couldn't be bothered to play the whole "Im Abendrot" track by Strauss that Lynch was referring to, here are a few links to some performances recommended by the excellent Opera Chic blog:

• Renee Fleming
• Jessye Norman

It's worth noting that "Im Abendrot" means "at sunset," and it's from a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff. Strauss happened upon this poem during his final days of his life and set it to music:

We've gone through joy and crisis
Together, hand in hand,
And now we rest from wandering
Above the silent land.
The valleys slope around us,
The air is growing dark,
And dreamily, into the haze,
There still ascends two larks.
Come here, and let them flutter,
The time for sleep is soon.
We would not want to lose our way
In this great solitude.
O vast and silent peace!
So deep in twilight ruddiness,
We are so wander-weary -
Could this perchance be death?

Wild Things Follow-Up: The Playlist Posts Sendak/Jonze featurette with Karen O (?) Strumming in the Background

We love what film-music nerds the folks over at The Playlist are. They just posted a great little clip featuring interviews with Maurice Sendak and Spike Jonze, but what they're really breathless about is the fact that Karen O can be heard to be rehearsing some of the theme music in the background. She's worked on the film's original music along with composer Carter Burwell, with some help from Deerhunter/Atlas Sound frontman Bradford Cox and Yeah Yeah Yeahs/Folk Implosion collaborator Imaad Wasif.

Trailer for Where The Wild Things Are Continues to Thrill on the Big Screen

If you've already seen Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, then chances are you've seen the big screen premier of the buzz-making trailer for Spike Jonze's much anticipated Where The Wild Things Are, based on the classic childrens' book by Maurice Sendak. It's set to "Wake Up" by The Arcade Fire from the 2004 album Funeral, a big, gamboling anthem that perfectly suits Jonze's inspired blend of make-believe and naturalism (a sensibility that feels especially fresh next to trailers like Tim Burton's Alice and Wonderland, which appears CGI-ed within an inch of its life.) The Wild Things trailer, by contrast, has real roses in its cheeks thanks in no small part to Win Butler's passionate plea to children: "Wake up, hold your mistake up before they turn the summer into dust." The whole thing feels beautiful and bracing...filled with the forward motion that is childhood, but also with wistful awareness of what's being left behind.

More to be excited about: way back in 2007, Vanity Fair broke the news that Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs would be contributing music to Wild Things as well (footnote: Jonze and O were once a couple) and later The Playlist blog reported that she is in fact doing "most of the music" for the film, including some original score work and an "upbeat" song at the end. Jonze has typically favored score for his films in the past and it's true that Carter Burwell of Being John Malkovich and numerous Coen Brothers projects did some score for Wild Things. It's also clear, however, that with Wild Things Jonze is reconciling his film work with his music video witchcraft, and hey speaking of which, have you seen his hypnotically gorgeous and death defying take on "Heaven" by UNKLE?