Boombox Serenade

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"

A few weeks ago sound designer Richard Beggs mentioned that Sofia Coppola's significant other, Thomas Mars, will be contributing original music to her upcoming film, "Somewhere," to be released in 2010. This continues Coppola's track record of tapping leading edge pop/rock musicians to provide the original music for her films, rather than traditional film score composers. 

On "The Virgin Suicides" she collaborated with the French downtempo electronic band, AIR. On "Lost in Translation" it was Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine who provided the original music. Brian Reitzell is usually her go-to music supervisor, although it's not clear yet whether or not he's working on "Somewhere." Our guess is that as with her previous films there will be licensed tracks in addition to score, 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?

Film Music Moment of the Day: Psychotic Break Dance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Film Music Moment of the Day: Food Inc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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