Boombox Serenade

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.

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.

Note for Note: Gus Van Sant's Musical Sense of Cinema

In Milk there's a moment so subtle that it could easily be missed if you're not paying close attention. It features a nighttime shot of the Eureka Valley (as it was then called) and during this shot the score dwindles down to six distinct notes, intoned very softly on piano. If you watch carefully, you can see off in the distance, as each note sounds, a different letter on the sign of the Castro Theater is lighting up, one by one:

C, A, S, T, R, O.

That sign is, to me, the ultimate symbol of San Francisco, so Van Sant may as well have been plucking each one of my heart strings when he did this. He did so again many times throughout Milk, but most memorably at the end when Sean Penn is speaking some of Harvey Milk's most well known words:

"I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you... and you... and you... Gotta give em hope."

For a fleeting second, just as that last "and you" is uttered, Van Sant abruptly repeats a tiny snippet of film we've just seen, like a skip in a record. The reprised footage is of San Francisco's City Hall, where Milk was assassinated by his colleague, Dan White. I think that by introducing this deliberate flaw at precisely this moment, Van Sant is breaking the fourth wall and applying that final "and you" to the viewer. It took me out of the film and made me feel the personal implications of Harvey Milk's message in a way that I hadn't before.

As meaningful as such moments are, I mention them also as examples of Van Sant's subtly brilliant arrangements of image and sound. The music in Milk (mostly comprised of the Danny Elfman score) is more conventional than most Van Sant soundtracks and yet he treats certain moments in his film almost as if they were, themselves, phrases in a score. Images can attain rhythm from individual notes and/or words in his work--a level of detail with which most filmmakers never bother. It's one of the reasons why even a biopic by Van Sant is more artful than the most wildly estoteric attempts of other directors.

When I got home, Mike Huckabee was on The Daily Show talking about Proposition 8 and why institution of marriage should not include same sex couples. I'm sure Huckabee doesn't understand how directly his views are connected to the kind of violence that ended Harvey Milk's life, and yet I'm equally sure that Milk wouldn't have wasted too much time wringing his hands over such a man and his ilk:

"I have tasted freedom. I will not give up that which I have tasted. I have a lot more to drink. For that reason, the political numbers game will be played. I know the rules of their game now and how to play it."

More than thirty years later, Milks' statement is still sharply relevant. For some further insight on this, read Rob Epstein's Huffington Post piece, What Harvey Milk Tells Us About Proposition 8 and if you haven't seen Milk yet, run don't walk. 

Mark Mothersbaugh Makes Me Eat My Words with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

Ah crap, I hate it when I'm wrong. On this blog I'm always going on about how licensed tracks tend to create more memorable film-music moments than score, and yet last night at a film that had an oh-so-of-the-moment hipster soundtrack and the word "playlist" in the damn title, the one truly brilliant film-music moment came courtesy of Mark Mothersbaugh, who did the score.

It was a funny little scene in which the drunk best friend (played by scene-stealing Ari Graynor) has locked herself inside a car with the keys, not realizing that a crowd is standing outside it, all yelling at her to unlock the door. Sollett crossfades to some cotton candy synth confection by Mothersbaugh, and it perfectly brings out the absurdity of the situation. (You can hear the track, or at least a variation on it here, see "Nick and Norah's Theme").

Ultimately, Nick and Norah is pretty weak sauce though ("thin as an iPod Nano," said the New York Times) but there's a lot to like in it, including Kat Denning's pre-Raphaelite beauty, Michael Cera's low key charm, a roving band of merry gay boys, and the aforementioned performance of Graynor, who somehow makes an overprivileged trainwreck of a character seem downright irresistible. What's a little less likable is the film's depiction of New York as little more than a giant playground for suburban teens, or Sollet's tendency to use licensed tracks in a perfunctory way...a kind of sonic name dropping.

It's a weird and wonderful truth about film music: no matter how hot the track, you can't just stick it in your movie and expect it to resonate. The music has to be deeply felt and at least sometimes, allowed to shape moments rather than just comment on them (Gus Van Sant is the master of this).

The Juno soundtrack may have annoyed a lot of folks, but there was a tenderness in it that worked well for the subject matter, and a greater overall loyalty to mood than trends. There was also a little hypocrisy in it, however, in how radically it diverged from the protagonist's supposed taste in music (The Stooges). That same kind of posing is present in Nick and Norah's, where the protagonist is in a queercore band, but also somehow likes to listen to weepy singer-songwriter fare in his bedroom. If you're going to use music as a shortcut to character development, you have to make more of a commitment than that. 

It's just a harmless teen movie though, and a pretty sophisticated one in the grand scheme of things, so I should probably just relax. The Times lightly criticized Nick and Norah's for not having even a "touch of danger" in it, but with a friend lost in the city and key relationships on the line, the stakes were probably plenty high for the intended audience.

Before There Was Iron Man, There Was...Der Golem!

Friday night was big fun at the Castro Theater, where sitting in the nose-bleedingest part of the balcony for Carl Boese's 1920's horror classic Der Golem turned out to be an unexpected pleasure because my pal Rachael and I could spy all sorts of weird architectural detail that we'd never seen before, including the crazy circus tent effect of the chandelier's medallion and the ruddy, art deco mitochondria on the balcony ceiling.

Black Francis and his band, on the other hand, remained just out of view, but his weird and wonderful keening reached us just fine while he played his brand new anti-score to Der Golem, and in particular the song "Meet Me at the Ghetto Gates," made us giggle wildly throughout because of its refrain, "What can I do? I'm just an evil Jew." Yes, this film has a few questionable depictions of Semitic peoples here and there, and Black Francis made sure to riff on them with dark glee and tongue firmly in cheek.

(This whole event and its tone, in fact, forces me to consider the possibility that maybe not everyone at the San Francisco Film Society is chronically stuck up after all.)

Always a fan of religious mysticism and the supernatural, Francis was clearly delighted with Der Golem's old world cosmology, lacing his new songs with references to Astaroth, the Maharal of Prague, and the "Makanujo." He's always liked doing this...putting arcane sounding words and names in his songs, knowing the strange pleasure that can be had in saying such rarely-said things. Great too how he delivers such portentous phrases in the most nonchalant style possible... as if casually mentioning that some guy named Astaroth had stopped by the club that afternoon. One of the songs is titled "Custom All The Way," and in a film with a rabbi protagonist we can probably assume that Francis is referring to Judaic custom, but he manages to make it sound like the slogan for an L.A. auto body shop.

I say that the music was an "anti-score" because it was a series of distinct songs, many with vocals, that neither tracked directly to the action of the film nor tried to amplify the mood or emotional resonance of any given scene, which I really appreciated this because I can generally figure out how to feel about something without being instructed by the music. This was more a single-artist soundtrack approach a la Magnolia or The Graduate, and it sounded fantastic. Many were mid-tempo and had the Black boppiness of "Here Comes Your Man," and several instrumental numbers captured the odd mix of pathos and bemusement with which a modern audience views this poetic but stereotype-inflected film. The poppiest, most radio friendly of the new tracks was "The Obedient Servant," in which Black Francis playfully suggests, "You be the master, I'll be the servant," and later vice versa, rhyming the word "servant" with "observant" and "fervent."

For this shindig Black Francis assembled a sterling band  including Erick Drew Feldmen (Pere Ubu, Captain Beefheart) on keys/synth, Ralph Carney (Tom Waits, Galaxie 500) on horns, Joseph Pope (Angst) on bass, Duane Jarvis (Lucinda Williams, John Prine) on guitar, Jason Carter (Guards of Metropolis) on drums.

The songs that were performed, in order:

1. I Am The Maharal
2. The Conjuring
3. Makanujo
4. Meet Me At The Ghetto Gates
5. Stars
6. The Obedient Servant
7. Miriam and Florian
8. (Oh I Wish I Could) Stay
9. The Flower Song
10. Custom All The Way
11. Bad News
12. Astaroth
13. The Word
14. You're Going to Pay

The rumor on Frank Black Forum is that there are plans to release the music in album form at some point. Fingers crossed.

Update: My friend Ezra Gale (who wrote this nice little piece on music's role in SFIFF this year) said that one of the event organizers told him that Black Francis and his band did indeed record this album a week prior to playing it live, so it should be released at some point.

 

The Battlestar Galactica Post, In Which I Admit I Like a Score

Ok, I admit it. I love the Battlestar Galactica score, but to me there's only one part of it that's indispensable...that stands on its own as something more than outstanding accompaniment to a peerless show. The "Passacaglia" and "Shape of Things to Come" themes by Bear McCreary are recurring ones, used in Battlestar's most emotionally resonant moments including the Opera House visions experienced by Six and Roslin. It's the music that comes out when the really big, cosmic stuff is going down in BSG, when the stars are aligning and the door of fate is creaking ajar. It's mathematical and precise, but also yearning and lyrical...a rich, lucid piece that's perfectly poised somewhere between logic and love, artificial intelligence and humanity. I'm crazy about it.

I recently read an excellent article by Nick Coleman in The Guardian on how he used to experience music before losing his hearing in one ear.

Speaking for myself, I used to hear "buildings"... three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not "see" these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them. These forms had "floors", "walls", "roofs", "windows", "cellars". They expressed volume. Music to me has always been a handsome three-dimensional container, a vessel, as real in its way as a Scout hut or a cathedral or a ship, with an inside and an outside and subdivided internal spaces.

When I read this, I immediately thought of Bear McCreary's passacaglia. First, a passacaglia is an old classical music trope originating in 15th century Italy. It began as the strummed interlude they'd play between dances or songs but in later centuries came to mean a set of bass variations, usually of a serious mood, repeating unchangingly while upper lines were "varied freely" over top.

It wasn't until I read Coleman's piece, that I realized I had been "hearing buildings" whenever I listened to McCreary's passacaglia, and that I was hearing it as an arcade...a succession of arches, supported by columns:

When I listen to his passacaglia with my eyes closed, in fact, I get a vivid image of standing in the center of a courtyard at night with a perfectly circular arcade all around me and the structure is, well it's....arcading. I don't know how else to describe it, but the music makes the architecture seem like it's moving—like it's breeching in an out of the water rhythmically, porpoise-style.

(No, I'm not becoming a hippy.)

But I'm not the only non-score nerd to have noticed that there's something really special about this piece. Maybe one reason it resonates so profoundly is because with it's repeated, looping phrases, the passacaglia presaged modern, synthesized music and sequencing, so it's perfect metaphor for the evolutionary crossroads at which humanity finds itself in this show. It really captures the tension and the pathos and the overlap of that.

And now a brief nod to my usual party line about licensed music usually being more memorable than score: one of the most pivotal moments in Battlestar is given not to the talented McCreary, but to Mister Bob Dylan. The "All Along the Watchtower" climax at the end of Season 3 is unforgettable, though it's a shame they couldn't use Dylan version because the cover they used was sung by a Cheesy Rock-Dude—all hard sell vocals and none of Dylan's inherent weirdness or opacity—but I guess they needed a more climactic version of the song, including an instrumental trailer they could use it all throughout that episode, a brilliantly irritating snippet of sitar that sounded like a half-received Goan radio station. It's an amazing musical ramp-up to the final scene. The music gets more frequent and insistent and crazy-making throughout, and the four characters start to repeat little snippets of the song's lyrics without knowing why, a harbinger of perilous things to come.

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

In live shows, Dylan has performed "All Along the Watchtower" more often than any of his other works, and literary critic Christopher Ricks has commented that at the conclusion of the last verse, "it's as if the song bizarrely begins at last, and as if the myth began again," which makes it a brilliant way to end a season because it trails off just as you're wanting to know what happens next...a musical ellipses. The lyrics imply there is danger both within and without the castle walls, which perfectly describes humanity's predicament at the close of the episode: Cylons within and without the fortress, Adama and Roslin in the watchtower. How much power do they have to stop any of it?

In recent years, Dylan has taken to singing the first verse of the song again at the end, finishing with the line "None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

We'll see about that.

Throwback Thursday: Jules Dassin's "Rififi"

I recently saw Lagerfeld Confidential, a fairly artless and not very confidential documentary about fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who manages to partially redeem the bad filmmaking through sheer dint of his own fabulousness and by saying things like "you must keep a sword of Damocles hanging over a friendship at all times, or the relationship loses all meaning." Karl makes this statement in the most matter of fact way possible, as if everyone has reached the same conclusion and has the same policy in place. Sure, sure. Sword of Damocles. Yep. I keep one over every friendship, like a pendant lamp from Pottery Barn. A pointy, pointy pendant lamp.

But it's that same sword, I suspect, that a real artist has to dangle over his or her work, lest the work lose meaning and lapse into formula and cliche. Such an artist was Jules Dassin, who died on Monday at the age of 96. While making his now classic heist movie, Rafifi, he was told over and over again that he should put music into the key scene. He refused, but so elegantly. From the Fresh Air interview:

- - - - - -

Terry Gross: The most famous scene in Rififi is the actual jewlery heist, a scene of almost 30 minutes in which there is no dialog and no music, as these guys work without making a sound. Why did you shoot it without dialogue or music?

Jules Dassin: I just felt it that way and I think it came from my trust in the characters as written and as played. They had no need to talk or communicate. They were professionals. They knew each other; they anticipated each other and they knew that noise was an enemy. Noise was dangerous. They worked quietly and efficiently and in touch with one another. The contact was very strong and worked better in the silence.

Terry Gross: Most directors I think would have put music underneath. Suspense music or some kind of music.

Jules Dassin: Oh I think then you've heard my story...there's a wonderful composer, in French history, in fact, named Georges Auric who also did film work and has written some marvelous stuff for movies and he said 'I look forward to writing music for this huge sequence.' And I said, 'No I don't want music.' And he said, 'You're mad, you're mad!' and the producer said 'You're mad! You're going to go 30 minutes without dialogue and without music?!' And I said, 'That's what I hope.' Auric said, 'Look, I'm your friend, I'm going to cover you. I'm going to write the music.' I said, 'I don't want it.' and he said, 'I'm going to write it.' and he did, almost a symphony. And this wonderful guy, I invited him, I said, 'Come to screening. I'm going to show you the film once with music and once without music and I want you to tell me what you think I should do.' He sat through both versions and he said, 'music out!' Wonderful guy.

- - - - - -

As much as I celebrate the skillful use of music in film, I also like to acknowledge those directors who refrain from using it when that's the more powerful choice, so I'm happy to highlight directors like Dassin who let the internal logic of the film guide his choices instead of the score-happy movie industry. He was a sophisticated, authentic director of great integrity...a man at ease with ambiguity and one so powerfully in command of a film's mood that he didn't need to rely on score to create it. (See No Country For Old Men for another example of a highly atmospheric film that doesn't have a score.)

I should say, however, that there is actually one tiny scrap of music in Rififi's 30 minute heist scene , and it's perhaps the only time in history a single note made an audience gasp. Listen to the Fresh Air interview to hear more, or just watch it.