The 2022 movies that contributed to my 2023 mix*

* - And one not from 2022

Every year, when I finally finish the business of the previous movie year, I get to a project that now feels like it's bursting at the seams, waiting to be completed: I make my annual mix.

It's actually a mix for exactly two people. It was only one until recently, but last year I added a second since he's also a close friend and the two of them were making mixes for each other. In fact, the guy who has been reciprocating with me for something like 15 years now was giving the same mix he made for me to this other guy -- though I suppose he could have been making it for him and giving it to me. I like to think he had both of us in mind when making it, but let's be honest -- you make a mix more for yourself than you do for anyone else, because there's a good chance you'll end up listening to it more than the recipient. 

So last year, I decided to start sending my mix to the third guy and have him send his mix to me. Now I get exposed to twice the new music every year without any additional effort on anyone's part.

I don't know how many nearly 50-year-olds -- one actually turned 50 yesterday, the other does so on March 1st, I do in October -- still make mixes. But I never want to give it up. It allows me to use my sound editing software Audacity, which I love, and it keeps me engaged with music on a year-round basis, as I spend the year collecting contenders for the following year's mix. The editing software comes into play because I like to string the tracks together to blend into one another (where appropriate), or so there's no pause between songs with a hard ending and a hard beginning. Then I export it as one 80-minute track and chop it up into proper tracks using the same software. (The 80 minutes comes from the capacity of a CD, and even though we don't send each other CDs anymore, it still feels like a good length for a mix.)

My song candidates come from a number of places, obviously, the most common being the radio. I'll Shazam a song I like, email it to myself and add it to the Excel spreadsheet where I log my candidates for each year's mix. This year I ended up with 73 candidates for what ended up being 23 songs, down from 80 last year. 

But each year, as a benefit of watching in excess of 150 new releases, I also Shazam songs in movies. If I did not, I probably would not be writing about it here.

I swear I've written about this on this blog before, but using the key words "shazam" and "mix" did not find it for me. Well, the next time I do that search it'll at least find this post.

I was inclined to tell you all the songs I've ever selected from movies for one of these mixes, and someday that would be a good post -- then I could also tell you the five best. But that's more work than I have time for today.

So today I'll just tell you which ones contributed this year.

The interesting, and probably obvious, thing is that a movie doesn't have to be good to contribute a song to my mix. In fact, I learned about the banger "Dance Off" by Macklemore featuring Idris Elba from the movie He's All That, which came in at #164 out of 170 last year. There aren't any that low this year, but they do represent a range in my rankings -- with one not actually coming from a 2022 movie, as I teased earlier. 

Here they are, with YouTube links in case you want to check out the songs. I'll go in order of where these movies ranked for me:

1. "Quietly Yours" - Birdy
Film: Persuasion (#59)
Track #: 21 of 23

A quiet, pretty, piano-driven ballad like this has to go near the end of the mix, and there can be at most two of them in any given mix. In this case, the song itself, which plays as the camera draws out from two lovers on a coastal cliff at the end of the movie (no spoilers), was almost responsible for tacking on an extra half-star to Persuasion. I am a sucker for this sort of sentiment in a song, with the piano and Birdy's beautiful voice turning me into putty in both the singer's and the movie's hands.

   

2. "I Have Never Felt More Alive" - Madison Beer
Film: Fall (#65)
Track #: 8 of 23

This also plays over the closing of Fall, if memory serves, again in a situation where the camera pulls out. This, however, is more of an empowerment song, driven by increasingly industrial synthesizer as the song progresses. This is not only a story of literal survival, but of surviving a relationship betrayal, and the lyrics go well with that. Track 8 is usually a part of any mix where I'm still supposed to be giving you a bit more of a fun, party vibe, but what can I say, there were not as many fun, party vibe songs in this year's mix. 

3. "Barbarian" - Besomorph & Jurgaz
Film: Tar (#88)
Track #: 14 of 23

The song "Barbarian" is not from Barbarian. Who knew? My memory betrays me a little on this one because I was going to say this was from the closing credits of Tar, but then I remembered that Todd Field puts most of the credits at the start of this movie, so I don't know for sure what the context was. But there's something icy about this, which perfectly encapsulates Lydia Tar's fall from grace. It's the only instrumental on my 2023 mix. (I usually have two or three.) Track 14 is a good part of a mix to be dwelling in the dark before either becoming lighter or more romantic by the end. 

4. "String You Out" - Zarah Mahler
Film: The Wretched (from 2020)
Track #: 7 of 23

I said there would be one movie I saw in 2022 that didn't come out in 2022, and here it is. It's probably my favorite of the four -- so sinister! But also playful; I love those vocalizations by Mahler, who impressed me because she is also an actor in the film. It's a mediocre horror that had some things I really liked about it. (It actually prompted a second Shazam of a song I didn't use, even though it's quite good, just because I ran out of room and there were too many similar songs. That's Joypopp's "Desire.") See previous comment about the need to have a more uppy vibe in the first ten tracks, and the lack of such songs this year, but at least this is also a banger. 

When I decided to write this post I really hoped there would be five, but I came up one short. 

But just to give you some additional insight into my tastes and my process, I might as well give you the honorable mentions -- songs I Shazamed but ultimately didn't use. That list is much longer:

"Impossible" - Shontelle, from Sharp Stick (#98)
"Ready" - Montaigne, from Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (#83)
"Sometimes" - Erasure, from Fire Island (#28)
"We're All Going to the World's Fair (Main Theme)" - Alex G., from We're All Going to the World's Fair (#75)
"Wolf Like Me" - TV on the Radio, from Wendell & Wild (#22)

"Born Again" - Rihanna, from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (#25)
"The Girl in the Window" - Mark Lenover, from Banshee Chapter (released in 2013)
"Hot Girls" - Charli XCX, from Bodies Bodies Bodies (#26)
"My Power" - Beyonce, from The Woman King (#128)
"Assassin Montage" - Ramin Djawadi, from The Man from Toronto (#143)
"Topdown" - Channel Tres, from Emergency (#20)

"Glide" - Mitski, from After Yang (#29)

Thanks for letting me nerd out on music there for a minute. I'll go back to nerding out on movies tomorrow. 

A fine line between best and worst

As the interminable wait continues for the Oscar nominations to finally be revealed -- just two more days now -- the penultimate 2020 movie "awards" announcement has gotten the internet's attention the past few days.

The Golden Raspberries delayed their own announcement of 2020 dishonors to coincide with that of the Oscars, as they always do, and one of the nominees has reminded me of my own problematic position on a 2020 movie. 

It's actually a 2021 movie for all intents and purposes, but those are the times we live in.

And it's actually a movie that has already gotten a different kind of "golden" nomination -- a Golden Globe.

When I went to see Sia's feature directorial debut, Music, back at the end of January, the ticket seller did something I thought was sort of unusual for someone in her position: she badmouthed the movie. She hadn't actually seen it, but thought it was possible to badmouth it on reputation alone. "Good luck with that," she told me. "I understand it's pretty rough."

In Australia, this use of the word "rough" -- assuming my memory is correct and this is actually what she said -- would colloquially be understood as "bad," not "emotionally challenging" as an American might interpret it. You know, like "rough sledding."

When I came out of the movie, though, I thought she'd misheard. I understand why she gave me the warning, but I thought Sia largely pulled it off. I was conscious that I might be going against the grain of the popular perspective on the movie, but I gave it a 7/10 on ReelGood when I reviewed it. I don't let ticket sellers who haven't actually seen the movie bias my reviews, whenever possible.

My limited affection for Music seemed to be justified when, lo and behold, Sia's film turned up among the Golden Globe nominations just a week later. Not just one nomination, for the film itself as best musical or comedy, but a nomination for Kate Hudson as best actress in a musical or comedy. At the time, its inclusion surprised me more on the basis of its release year, as I thought this was a genuine 2021 release (and in most years would be), than on the basis of its quality. Though I was also surprised to see this apparently shit movie, according to the hearsay propagated by theater ticket sellers, embraced as decidedly not shit.

Music didn't win any globes, which I think would have been the biggest surprise of all. And probably would have started to fade into our collective memories if not for the Razzie announcement.

Music didn't just slide in there with one nomination, but it was almost leading the pack. It was nominated for worst picture, worst actress (also Hudson), worst supporting actress and worst director. In fact, if not for Dolittle and the Netflix movie 365 (gotta watch that now), which led with six, Music probably would have gotten a lot more headlines than it did.

Perhaps that ticket seller had her finger on something after all.

The Big Problem with Music, of course, is that it does that thing that is an absolute cinematic no-no: It casts a normally abled actress as a person with intellectual disabilities. It "goes full retard," to use the intentionally offensive parlance of Tropic Thunder.

This actress, Maddie Ziegler, is a veteran of a number of Sia videos. She was cast for her abilities in the dance numbers that populate this film and dramatize the title character's inner life. Turns out, she's also an actress of some ability. I don't suppose I found her portrayal 100% free of the reasons we are legitimately worried about normally abled actors essaying these roles, but it could have been a lot worse. And I thought the character was ultimately sweet. If you decide you are forced to do this for logistical reasons, like the actress needing to perform complicated dance choreography for the role, Ziegler walks that tightrope about as well as you might hope. (That's not to say a person with autism couldn't also be an amazing dancer, but I suspect it's considerably less likely.)

Of course, as it turns out, most critics stopped at "normally abled actress as a person with intellectual disabilities."

When I saw how the Razzies had rained scorn on Music, I had to do something I hadn't yet done for this film: check out its Metacritic score. With this new information that contradicted the praise of the Golden Globes, I guessed it was worse than I thought it might be. I guessed 37. It was worse than that: 23.

Ouch.

Of course, at that moment I started to panic about my own review. Had I gotten this really, really wrong?

The 18 Metacritic reviews are divided between mixed (six) and negative (12), without a single positive review in there. The highest individual score listed was 60, which I suppose is only ten points lower than my own converted score of 70 would have been. But still, giving the movie a better review than the 18 other critics on Metacritic gave me a wave of nausea that reminded me of other extreme outlier positions I've held in the past, like my affection for the universally loathed The Emoji Movie. (Fortunately, I had the good sense not to review that one, a consequence of seeing it a good two months after it actually came out.)

But then I noticed something interesting: the user score. That score exactly equalled my own 7.0 rating of the film (Metacritic includes the decimal point in this calculation), based on a lot more than 18 opinions. 

That's right, among users of Metacritic, Music has a staggering 113 positive reviews, 48 negative reviews, and somehow only four mixed reviews. I guess you either love it or you hate it. 

With these new data points, I started to feel a bit better about my own positive review. I mean, if you're a critic, you're likely to turn your nose up at what the rabble thinks of any movie. But if you go back to the guiding principles of why you started reviewing movies, one of those was to make useful recommendations to average moviegoers. My review of Music would have steered at least 113 people in the right direction. 

This is the latest strong bit of evidence about a disconnect between critics and the people they write for. There may be a lot more film snobs going into film criticism than ever before, as the cheery working professionals who championed popular entertainments are steadily retiring. I don't know why that would be -- the industry should have been peopled with snobs from the start -- but the obvious gulf between critics and audiences on Music has to mean something, and this may be it.

It seems to be an example of the way our core assumptions fail us sometimes. A core assumption is that a movie where an actress goes "full retard" is going to be patently offensive no matter what. It isn't going to matter if there are subtleties in her performance, moments where she held back and opted for a less showy way of demonstrating the traits of the character's affliction. But a movie about a person with autism can't be all moments like that; she has fits and moments of extreme agitation, and for those critics who judged Maddie Ziegler harshly, the moment the script called for one of those moments, they started writing the review in their head.

Let's be honest, they started writing the review even before they watched the movie. It helps that Sia is an easy target. She's got a unique combination of traits that make her easy to pick on. For one, she offends critics by suggesting that anyone can direct a feature film, even a musician who theoretically excels in a different type of artistic expression altogether. (Though Sia has been directing her own videos for some time.) Then she's got that eccentric public personality that includes airy fairy statements and wigs that cover her eyes entirely. This is a person they can pile on without getting a guilty conscience. 

The critics are right that Music should not have worked. But the truth is, it does. And you have to review the movie you're seeing, not the movie you assume it will be.

Of course, the community of critics is no monolithic entity who do any one thing for the same set of reasons. I have to assume there are plenty of critics who did give Music a chance, but it still didn't work for them, possibly as much for their antipathy to Sia's colorful dance numbers featuring silly outfits (I said she had a "Teletubby aesthetic" in my review) as for Ziegler's casting or performance. And in fact, I noticed the critic who has the highest listed review of Music on Metacritic -- Tara Brady of The Irish Times -- states in the part of her review they excerpted, "Ziegler's performance is the best thing about Music." I'm not sure I agree, as I did sort of go for the dance numbers and for Hudson's performance, but I'm glad she had the courage to say what she did.

But back to the Golden Globes and the Golden Raspberries. One thing that's for sure is that the Globes' endorsement of Music, even if having some validity according to me, is a bad look for them in a year in which the Hollywood Foreign Press has gotten some of its worse PR ever. That body has come under fire this year, quite rightfully, for having almost no racial diversity, and I'm sure its decision to honor Music only contributes to that sense of its fatal tone deafness. 

In truth, even though I like it, Music would never have made my own nominee shortlist. It's one thing to say a movie succeeds on its own terms; it's quite another to say it is among the best of the year. And at least I can provide some separation between myself and the Hollywood Foreign Press on that one. 

In determining who votes on the Golden Raspberries, I noted Wikipedia describes the voting body as being comprised of "filmmakers and very opinionated film buffs from around the world," and that members hail from "all 50 states and every continent except Antarctica." (That's good; I'm glad that neither climate scientists nor penguins are taking time from their busy schedules to trash the worst movies of the year.)

I wonder if the Razzie voting for Music was a direct sign of outrage at the Golden Globes, and that maybe if the movie hadn't already been singled out by that body, it would have just slipped under everyone's radar as a problematic movie that wasn't as problematic as it seemed like it should have been. Instead, now it will live in infamy as a movie straddling the line between a dubious best and a dubious worst of 2020. 

And all this for a movie that didn't even come out that year. 

Grading on a curve

Do they still make bad movies?

It's a silly question to ask, of course. Did you see Hubie Halloween?

But I'm five movies into my new movie year, and I have yet to see one that I graded lower than 3.5 stars out of five. 

Of course, there have been plenty of times I've seen five straight movies that I liked, even from the same release year. But maybe never at the start of the year. Historically, the start of the year is when the studios shit out their worst prospects, which I use to lump under the all-encompassing umbrella of "January releases." That means something a little different in COVID times, but even last year, before the pandemic had really started, my first movie of the year was the execrable Dolittle.

This year things have started a bit differently. So far in 2021 I have seen Shadow in the Cloud (four stars), Penguin Bloom (four stars), Music (3.5 stars), The White Tiger (four stars) and now The Dig (3.5 stars).

The thing is, I think The Dig may actually have been a four-star movie too, after a slow start. But I graded that slow start and some later protagonist confusion more harshly than I might have in another year, and knocked The Dig down to 3.5. (See my full review here.)

The pairing of Penguin Bloom and Music is the thing that makes me wonder if it's not them, but me. Either one of these movies should have been my first stinker of the year, a potentially maudlin story of a woman whose life changes after a spinal injury, or a potentially bizarre misfire about a girl with severe autism who imagines musical fantasies in her head. Instead, I liked both of them. I saw them on the same night, so maybe I was just in a good mood that night.

It occurs to me that we are always grading on a curve, a bit. Now that I have gotten my Excel spreadsheet containing all my movies -- not to be confused with my Microsoft Word document containing all my movies -- up to date again, I can't help but be a little fixated on the cell that calculates what percentage of my movies I've given a thumbs up. In addition to the more finely detailed star ratings I use on Letterboxd, I also include a flat yea or nay in this spreadsheet, and update the totals at the bottom each time. Right now I am hovering around 68% in terms of the movies in my life I've liked, which either means I'm way too generous, or that this was indeed a good way to spend my 47 years so far since it brings me such pleasure.

But the former is the one I'm worried about, so any time I stray too high above 68% (I might have gotten as high as 68.05), I worry that I am turning into an old softie. So either I look a bit more harshly on the next movie I see, or I see a movie I know will be bad. I don't want to be held captive by that percentage (wouldn't most people be closer to 60/40?), but I do admit I breathe a sigh of relief when it goes back under that threshold again.

I guess the difference here might be between "most people" and "most critics." Most people try only to see movies they know they have a good chance of liking, because they value their time too much to waste it on crappy movies. See, they have other interests, unlike we cinephiles (ha ha). Most critics, though, are exposed to a random sample of what's out there, whether they are interested in watching it or not, so in the case of some really stern ones it might fall closer to 50/50 or even below that.

Maybe this means I'm somewhere between "most people" and "most critics." I have never felt my purpose as a critic was to tear down movies, even though I relish the opportunity to go off on a movie that richly deserves it. I'm a bit more inclined to forgive a movie its minor faults and see the greater good it brings to the table. I guess it's the optimist in me.

So it looks like I'm off and running on another year where I'm unable to adjust my star ratings downward, to make Music a three, to make Penguin Bloom a 3.5. It's something I've wanted to do for a while, use more of the range of available star ratings, but maybe that's just not in my nature.

And I guess seeing too many good movies is a better problem than the opposite. 

Movie music in name only

As I have probably not yet had occasion to share with you in this space, my wife and I are watching American Idol this season.

It's something we've never done before, but we figured, in its tenth season on the air, time to try something new, right?

Actually, it's that my wife knows one of the contestants. (We figure "knows" is just barely the correct term -- I believe she's met him once.) She knows his mother much better, having worked with her for about three years. In the interest of my much-ballyhooed anonymity, I won't name any names, but the savvy among you could probably piece it together, if you wanted to, based on my geographical location and the fact that he's one of the five men still remaining on the show.

Well, I have to say I've been really enjoying the show. I'm a sucker for reality shows that use elimination formats, almost no matter what the subject matter is -- if I start watching, I'll keep watching. Which is why I watch only a few of them -- really only Survivor and Hell's Kitchen. I watched a couple seasons of The Bachelor/Bachelorette and Beauty and the Geek a long time ago, and have sampled other formats (we had the fastest "addicted to/lost interest in" cycle in the history of television with The Amazing Race, which lasted about an episode and a half this season).

Idol, however, could be here to stay -- we'll have to see if our interest endures past the personal stake we have in this year's competition. Truth be told, our initial buzz has lost some of its fizz since the season started, as it's become more and more clear that the entertaining panel of judges are unable to deliver the really tough criticism -- with the exception of Randy Jackson, who has inherited Simon Cowell's mantle as "the tough one," though just barely. Even Steven Tyler is not as entertaining as he once was, partly because he's such a softie and you can't expect anything out of him but varying levels of praise.

Yes, there's a tie-in to movies here, just hold on a second.

As even the casual observer will be aware, American Idol has "theme weeks" -- or, I should say, every week is a theme week, where the contestants sing songs according to some overarching theme. This season they've sung songs from the year they were born, songs from Motown, songs from the catalogue of the great Elton John, and songs celebrating rock n' roll. (I may have missed one in there.) I wondered if they were eventually going to get to the obvious theme that had special importance to me, and this week they did -- songs from the movies.

Except, they didn't really.

Each of the eight remaining contestants sung a song that was technically in or inspired by some sort of movie that someone might have heard of once. Few, if any, were what you would call iconic movie songs. Where was the "Eye of the Tiger"? Where was the "Danger Zone"? (For some reason, I can only think of songs from 80s movies.) If Pia Toscano hadn't gotten eliminated the week before, she surely would have sung Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On."

But Pia was eliminated, and the remaining group was content to skate by on bending the rules, either by choosing a movie no one had heard of, or choosing a song no one considers to be directly associated with the movie it was supposed to have appeared in. Check it out:

Contestant: Scotty McCreery
His thing: Country singer with a deep voice
Song choice: Title track from the film Pure Country (1992, Christopher Cain), composed and performed by George Strait, who stars in the film
What he should have sung: Producer Jimmy Iovine had him working out Harry Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'" from Midnight Cowboy (1969, John Schlesinger), but he rejected it
My comment: Scotty is a very engaging country singer whose voice belies his 17 years, but he's very comfortable inside the box -- which seems pretty safe since he apparently has a hugely loyal voting bloc throughout America's many rural regions. One of his most interesting performances, to me, was when he was forced to do a Motown song -- he got his voice around a Stevie Wonder song in a really interesting way. But when left to his own devices, he's gone as safe as possible, and that includes ramming his exact shtick down our throat by ignoring Iovine's suggestion (of a song that would have been in his wheelhouse anyway) and selecting a song from a movie with the word Country in the title (because having the word Cowboy in the title was not close enough).
Result: Didn't make a difference. He sailed through once again on last night's results show.

Contestant: Lauren Alaina
Her thing: A combination of Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson
Song choice: The Miley Cyrus song "The Climb" from Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009, Peter Chelsom)
What she should have sung: "Let the River Run" by Carly Simon from Working Girl (1988, Mike Nichols)
My comment: Am I just an old man? I guess it was a smart move, in some senses, to pander to the young girls and their quick texting fingers by singing a Miley Cyrus song, and I had in fact heard the song before. But even fans of Miley Cyrus probably don't think the Hannah Montana movie is a work of high art, or even something that most people have seen. Why the Carly Simon song? I don't know, it's just one of those songs that strike me as a consummate movie song, and she's the more appropriate of the two women remaining on the show to sing it. Then again, most of the Idol viewers -- and contestants -- hadn't yet been born when the movie came out.
Result: Sailed through. Another strong heartland voting bloc. Like Scotty, she has yet to be in the bottom three.

Contestant: Jacob Lusk
His thing: Big, powerful gospel vocals, often compared to Luther Vandross by Jennifer Lopez
Song choice: "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" -- the Roberta Flack cover that was apparently used in The Pursuit of Happyness (2006, Gabriele Muccino)
What he should have sung: "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday" from Cooley High (1975, Michael Schultz)
My comment: "Bridge" is a great song, of course, and who am I to argue with Jimmy Iovine for suggesting it? (Jacob had a really corny first choice -- "The Impossible Dream," which would have been from the 1972 film version of Man of La Mancha -- but Iovine shamed him out of it.) But does anyone really associate this song, even the Roberta Flack version, with The Pursuit of Happyness? I love The Pursuit of Happyness, I just think it's way down the list of possible associations for this song. Yeah, maybe my choice is a bit musty, and more people know it from Boyz II Men covering it for their album (which was a tribute of sorts to the film) Cooleyhighharmony. But Jacob could have sent it soaring.
Result: Good enough to avoid the bottom three.

Contestant: Casey Abrams
His thing: Jazzy vocals, upright bass, a little bit of a growl in his voice
Song choice: "Nature Boy" by Nat King Cole from The Boy With Green Hair (1948, Joseph Losey)
What he should have sung: "Falling Slowly" by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova from Once (2007, John Carney)
My comment: "Nature Boy" actually makes the second song Casey has sung that was used in Moulin Rouge! -- he also sang "Your Song" for Elton John week. Maybe he just loves that movie. And he did a beautiful job on the song. But, The Boy With Green Hair? Who's ever even heard of that movie? (I could be revealing my ignorance, so please scold me if that's the case.) And it came out in 1948, which just shows a stretch to fit the criteria of the theme. Zeitgeist it was not, but then again, Casey's made it this far on making his own choices (remember that he actually performed a screaming version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for "year you were born" week). The Once song would have allowed his mixture of softness (which he's needed to emphasize) and angst (which he's needed to downplay despite it being an essential ingredient in his artistry). Then again, it's a duet on the chorus, so maybe it wouldn't work in this situation.
Result: Safe, as he's been every week since the judges famously saved him from elimination.

Contestant: Sefano Langone
His thing: Big voice with traditional credentials of R&B artists from the last two decades
Song choice: "End of the Road" by Boyz II Men from Boomerang (1992, Reginald Hudlin)
What he should have sung: "Against All Odds" by Phil Collins from Against All Odds (1984, Taylor Hackford)
My comment: I was surprised to discover just now that "End of the Road" was actually written for Boomerang -- surprised because the song was #1 for a record-setting 13 straight weeks and far, far outdistanced any association with that forgettable Eddie Murphy vehicle. In that sense it's more just a really popular song than a song from a movie. He did do it well, however. As for "Against All Odds," well, at least the movie it's from had the same name as the song -- even if that song also outdistanced its association with the movie. In any case, Stefano could have sung it well and it would have been a break from his same-sounding R&B songs week after week.
Result: Stefano is used to just scraping by, and this week he was one of the final two of the bottom three. But he survived again.

Contestant: James Durbin
His thing: Would have been one of the best lead singers ever of a 1980s hair band, and that's a compliment in this case
Song choice: "Heavy Metal" by Sammy Hagar from Heavy Metal (1981, Gerald Potterton)
What he should have sung: "Blaze of Glory" by Jon Bon Jovi from Young Guns II (1990, Geoff Murphy)
My comment: James is probably our favorite contestant -- though he is not necessarily the person we know. (Still being cagey here.) He's never really made a misstep and he's never been in the bottom three. Simply put, he rocks. His decision to bring heavy metal to American Idol has worked every time, and he overran Jimmy Iovine's objections to do this particular song. And he was right. Still, he might have done a slightly better service to his long-term aspirations with the wider voting public if he'd gone just a bit safer here, as indeed, this was a song most people don't know from a movie most people don't know (even my wife hadn't heard of it; I remember being excited to see it when I was younger because it contained cartoon nudity). "Blaze of Glory" would have allowed him to use his astounding rock voice on a song we all know and a lot of us love.
Result: James sailed through again.

Contestant: Haley Reinhart
Her thing: Repeatedly compared to the bluesy quality of Janis Joplin, though she notoriously had a problem "finding herself" with the judges early on
Song choice: "Call Me" by Blondie from American Gigolo (1980, Paul Schrader)
What she should have sung: "Take My Breath Away" by Berlin from Top Gun (1986, Tony Scott)
My comment: I actually think she did a good job with "Call Me," which I do actually associate with American Gigolo now that you mention it -- but you'd have to mention it for me to do so. Strangely, the judges sort of ripped her, even though they were hesitant to do so because five straight women had already been voted off the show (and no men). I admit I've got a bit of a soft spot for her -- appearance-wise, she reminds me a bit of my favorite female artist, Tori Amos. I suggested the Berlin song primarily because I couldn't really think of anything for her, and I must admit I'm using wikipedia's "Academy Award for Best Song" page as a crutch here ("Take My Breath Away" won in 1986). Still, this song can be sung pretty bluesy and has more soul than your standard female power ballad.
Result: Like Stefano, Haley is no stranger to the bottom three, but she squeaked through again.

Contestant: Paul McDonald
His thing: A singer-songwriter type who also has a lively dancing performance style, and reminds me of Rod Stewart (perhaps because he sang "Maggie May")
Song choice: "Old Time Rock and Roll" by Bob Seger from Risky Business (1983, Paul Brickman)
What he should have sung: Even though I don't really like this song, I'm fine with the choice
My comment: There's a reason why I left Paul until last -- he actually followed the spirit of the theme. No, "Old Time Rock and Roll" was not written for Risky Business, but this is not the best original song category at the Oscars. And the fact is, whenever anybody hears the first few notes of that song, they think of Tom Cruise sliding into the shot in his button-down shirt and underwear.
Result: And what did playing by the rules get him? Voted off. That's right, Paul was the first guy to go after paying an honest tribute to the movies, as this week's theme intended to do.

When you come right down to it, the failure of American Idol to have an interesting movie-themed week came from the top down. With the exception of his recommendation of "Everybody's Talkin'," Jimmy Iovine didn't really steer the contestants in the right direction (whether they chose to accept his advice or not). Iovine wanted Casey to sing Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight," which I associate a lot more with that urban legend of the drowning victim/Collins spot-lighting the person who didn't help at the concert, than I do with its usage in a number of different movies, including the aforementioned Risky Business. And what was the bit where Rob Reiner came on to talk to the contestants about the value of music to movies? His appearance was consumed mostly by an ill-advised joke about Chariots of Fire, in which Reiner came up with imaginary humorous lyrics to the signature theme from the score. The contestants laughed because they knew they were supposed to, not because they got the reference in the slightest.

Well, maybe I will have to watch next year, to see if they do a better job with this.

And I can pretty much promise you this is the last post I will write about American Idol ... until then, at least.

Movies vs. music

There's a blogger I follow, whom I think I would follow a lot more if it weren't for one thing:

He/she (I know the gender, I'm just being purposely vague) blogs about music in addition to movies.

This is a perfectly valid creative choice for a blog, and I support it in the abstract. But when it gets down to the particular, I don't read his/her blog as much simply because I'm not that interested in sifting through the music posts.

I've been thinking about why this is. It's not because I don't like music. On the contrary -- music always has been and always will be an essential part of my life, even if I listen to more public radio and less music as I grow older. And what would films be without music? Music and movies inform each other intimately. We say that a particular song seems very "cinematic," either because it's grandiose or seems to tell some kind of story; likewise, we refer to films as "lyrical."

It stands to reason that a blog that combines both could be quite a brilliant read. And I'm not saying this blog is not. However, I wouldn't really know, because I don't give the music articles a chance -- I don't even read them in the first place.

Again, I've been thinking about why this is.

And it basically comes down to this: Movies are universal, while music can be very, very subjective.

Let's put it another way. I feel like I could recommend a great movie to anyone who likes movies. Great music? No way. Because my great music could be their crap. Where I hear brilliance, they may just hear noise. And we're listening to the same piece, it's just we're not fans of the same kind of music.

To be sure, movies can have the same kind of subjectivity. One person's brilliance can be another person's crap. I could show you the best western in the world (Unforgiven, for the record), and you might not like it because you don't like westerns. Actually, that's a bad example, because I love Unforgiven even though I don't particularly like the western genre.

But that's kind of my point exactly. Unforgiven speaks to me because I love film, not because I love westerns, and I think it would do the same for most people. I don't have to like that particular genre to like the film.

You can't say the same thing with music -- maybe even with books, or TV, or any other kind of creative endeavor, though I'd have to think about each of those individually before I could say for sure. The best hip hop song that has ever been recorded might sound like insolent fluff to a fan of classical music. Similarly, a hip hop fan may listen to a symphony and be utterly unable to distinguish it as something worthy of his/her time.

And what this leads me to decide is that films have an absolute value that music does not. Very few people will look at the world's greatest films and decide that they aren't at least somewhat good. Whereas, if you don't like U2, you don't like U2, and that's that.

It's for this reason that I have never been interested in the Grammys, the way I'm interested in the Oscars. Sure, some of that has to do with the fact that I'm educated about film and can both write and speak about it intelligently, whereas I'd be speaking in generalities if I tried to write about music on a regular basis. Simply put, I'm more passionate, per se, about movies than I am about music.

But I also have trouble with the Grammys because I feel like they're always comparing apples to oranges, and rarely do the winners have a true hold on the musical zeitgeist, because different people have such different tastes in music. (So, by extension, there may be no true musical zeitgeist.)

I think of the year that Steely Dan won Album of the Year for a record called Two Against Nature. It was 2001, and I didn't know a single person who had heard a single note off that album. But the rest of the nominees were pretty much a grab bag from across the musical spectrum as well: Midnite Vultures by Beck, Kid A by Radiohead, The Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem and You're the One by Paul Simon. You might argue that Steely Dan should be the least likely to walk away with that award, given the musical temperature of the country at that time (though I don't know a word from the Paul Simon album either). If any album "should" have won in terms of its influence on culture, it would be Eminem's album. But there you have an example of an album that would polarize as many people as it would convert.

Not so, really, with the movies. When Slumdog Millionaire wins best picture, it's because that's the movie everyone's talking about. When The Hurt Locker wins best picture, it's because that's the movie everyone's talking about. Those two movies are very different from each other, but the same people can love them equally.

That could just be because movie buzz gets very loud, very quickly. And since that buzz is controlled by a relatively small number of entertainment outlets, it tends to coronate frontrunners pretty quickly, and get us all thinking on the same page. Or it could just be because movies are a smaller universe than music, where it's not apples vs. oranges, but Granny Smith apples vs. Golden Delicious. And where opinions of greatness -- or lack of greatness -- translate better from person to person.

And so to this blogger, who may have determined his or her identity in the course of this piece, but who is really only being used as an example who inspired me to a certain line of thinking: Your decision to combine music and movies on your blog does not work for me as well as it should, for the above reasons. It's hard to read a music recommendation the same way I read a movie recommendation. With music, I need to know where you're coming from; with movies, I don't.

But more power to you for trying. Music and movies do inform each other in more ways than we can even touch on here, and as I said, it's a good idea for a blog if you can pull it off. And I think you can.

I'm just not always going to be your most regular reader, because I like to keep my apples and my oranges separate.

A Swell evening

I don't usually write about music on my movie blog, but there's always a way to work it into the theme if you're clever.

Actually, last night didn't require too much cleverness. Last night I saw a musical celebration of my love for the movie Once, and, to a (far) lesser extent, my love for the movie Elf.

My wife is into her eighth month of pregnancy, but she's also known for her ambitiousness -- which in some cases comes back to bite her. Fortunately, last night wasn't one of those cases, though it certainly was ambitious: A Sunday night trip to the Hollywood Bowl to see The Swell Season, She & Him and The Bird and the Bee. It was a special surprise for me, a last hurrah before this kind of thing will start requiring a babysitter. We amassed a picnic of pita chips, hummus, feta and sundried tomato spread, port salut cheese and crackers, olives, tangelos and open-face sandwiches of ham and avocado. At the Hollywood Bowl, you can picnic anywhere -- from grassy parks around the perimeter, to parks inside, to picnic tables inside, even at your seats. Usually there's alcohol involved, and they're fine with BYO on that front, too.

With the picnic experience beforehand, sometimes it doesn't really matter who you see -- it's just a fun embrace of the Los Angeles summer. And in many of my previous visits to the Bowl, I've seen a band I was only marginally interested in seeing. If those were cherished experiences even without the band being a perfect fit, just imagine what it's like when you see one that is.

If you aren't familiar with The Swell Season -- and the above picture hasn't jogged your memory -- the band basically consists of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the stars of John Carney's film Once. They had at least six other accompanists last night, but wikipedia tells me they're the only formal members of the band.

Like many of you, I loved Once, and bought the soundtrack only days after first seeing it in the summer of 2007. (In fact, on Wednesday, it will have been exactly three years since I saw the film.) I was entranced by Hansard's soaring, passionate voice, and the comparative softness and delicacy of Irglova's, which complemented his so well. I fell in love with their (almost) love story on screen, and was tickled to learn that they were real-life lovers -- even with the somewhat suspect 18-year age difference, of which I wasn't initially aware. The bittersweet story within the film, and the less ambiguous story outside the film, were both living, blossoming entities in my mind, as I continued to listen to that soundtrack until I'd run it ragged. When they won the Oscar the following March, it was another defining moment in my love of the film.

Since then, my wife and I have both been looking for opportunities to see them perform live, since stories of Hansard's on-stage presence were legendary. They seemed to play locally quite regularly, several times a year, but the ticket prices were always in the vicinity of a hundred bucks, so we never pulled the trigger. I actually had one instance where I was dialing into KCRW, the local NPR affiliate that also has a schedule of terrific music shows, to win tickets, but needless to say, I never got through.

The Hollywood Bowl proved to be the opportunity we were waiting for. Since we sat in the nosebleeds, I'm sure they weren't that expensive, plus we got the picnic in as well.

And Glen and Marketa didn't disappoint. Not only did they play a half-dozen songs from the Once soundtrack -- "Lies," "If You Want Me," "Leave," "When Your Mind's Made Up," "Falling Slowly," and as an encore, a personal favorite, "Say It To Me Now" -- but they killed in their other selections, only one or two of which I was familiar with. That's the brilliance of The Swell Season -- unlike many other bands, you don't have to already know their songs in order to be drawn into them. Hansard's charismatic words to the audience, followed by a performance style that ranges between gentle and intense, makes every song interesting. Rarely have I seen someone wail on an acoustic guitar the way Hansard does, yet there's never any doubt that the songs are deeply melodic and beautifully passionate. The Swell Season also did at least two covers, one of a Bruce Springsteen song I was not familiar with, and one of Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic," which is my favorite of his songs. It was an unforgettable version of that song as well -- if you've got Hansard's voice in your head right now, just imagine him during the "I want to rock your gypsy soul" high part of that song.

Did I mention something about the movie Elf?

That's because the band we saw before The Swell Season, She & Him, is a collaboration between actress Zooey Deschanel and musician M. Ward. I actually considered writing about She & Him a couple months ago, as some variation on the wariness I usually feel when actors and actresses try to moonlight as musicians. However, I don't really have any snarkiness reserved for Deschanel on this front. She has a legit voice, and having sat through their set last night, I no longer think she's "just trying to be cool." In fact, I think her band has almost a country western sound to it, her voice sounding like it would have been comfortable on a jukebox jam-packed with Patsy Cline songs. Without having really heard them, I would have assumed they were achingly hip, but I found them to be almost disarmingly cute -- kind of like Deschanel always comes across on screen. This doesn't mean they were exactly my cup of tea, and I did feel the couple beers I'd had starting to make me tired when my mind couldn't attach to a number of songs in a row that didn't seem very distinctive. But I definitely respect what they do, and Deschanel really belted it out on a closing cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You."

Oh yeah, Elf. That was the first time I was really aware that Deschanel could sing, as she has that scene where she's singing in the shower ("Baby It's Cold Outside"), and then the closing scene, where she sings "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" in order to elevate the Christmas spirit of the Central Park crowd, enough to power Santa's sleigh. In fact, I cited Elf as the reason I knew what Deschanel's voice sounded like, as my wife and I were making our way up the hill and wondering which act was currently performing. Not that I'd heard a couple of their songs on the radio, but that I remembered her voice from Elf.

So yeah, we missed The Bird and The Bee during our picnicking. But that's okay. I don't have a cinematic reference point for them anyway.

Generic zany productivity music

Today will be my first experience embedding video into my blog. I don't plan to make it a regular occurrence -- the core of my blog is writing, and always will be. But sometimes, I'll need an audio visual reference to a point I'm making, and today is the first example of that.

However, I should warn you -- the video here is pretty crappy. You'll see what I'm talking about in a minute. I chose to film it on my blackberry after my wife was already asleep last night, so I couldn't turn the volume on the source material up very high. (In fact, I wanted to use just audio, because that's all I'll really need. However, I couldn't figure out how to embed just audio. Hey, I'm 36 years old, I'm not one of you twentysomethings who knows how to do everything. Just ignore the fact that I work in IT, so I have no excuse for playing the role of a technophobe.)

Anyway, to the topic at hand. I've been watching a lot of family-oriented zany comedies lately, some to review them (Daddy Day Camp, Are We Done Yet?) and some to give me background for a review (Daddy Day Care). There may have been a couple others, but it's kind of a blur right now.

These three have one obvious thing in common -- they all star African-Americans. But I don't believe that has anything to do with my point today, or if it does, it's a very strained connection.

No, the other thing they all have in common is the music that plays while the DVD menu is up. It's not the exact same song on these three movies, but it is the same kind of generic zany productivity music. Take a listen. (You may have to turn up your volume a little bit.)




I guess you could also call it Old West music. It sounds a bit like it should be in a Western, and maybe that's appropriate for a movie about a day camp. Sort of.

But it also seems to me to indicate a certain grandiose buffoonery to what the actors are doing. In each of the movies I mentioned above, there's someone engaged in some sort of buffoonish activity related to children. But I also call it "productivity music" because it sounds like a grand venture is being undertaken.

Since I've sort of realized I don't have a very interesting point here, I'm going to cut my losses and use this post primarily as a test of my embedding skills. (As much as being able to embed a video into a blog post can be described as a "skill").

Don't hold it against me, and tune in tomorrow for the next installment of Second Chances.

I'm easy

Just throw a little Nine Inch Nails in your trailer, and you've got me. Hook, line and sinker.

Take Terminator: Salvation, for example. They showed the trailer during last night's season finale of Lost -- an honor I thought was reserved exclusively for Star Trek during J.J. Abrams shows -- and I was reminded of the fact that Nine Inch Nails' "The Day The World Went Away" scores it.

I was going to see this movie anyway, but now -- whoa. Watch out.

I should say that Nine Inch Nails is my favorite band, so there is nothing purely objective about what I'm saying. But I also think there's a reason Trent Reznor's music is chosen for trailers. It increases the awesomeness factor by ten.

It did the same for me back when 300 came out. This trailer also gooses the excitement level with a little NIN, this time "Just Like You Imagined," also from the album The Fragile. I have no doubt the song itself contributed to my near-feverish level of desire to see that film, and therefore, also to my ultimate disappointment in its ability to live up to my expectations.

I've written at length about the power of trailer music, so I don't need to go into another dissertation here.

However, it would be useful to pause a minute to reflect on why NIN's stuff works so well in particular. It's those cinematic industrial soundscapes that Reznor is so good at concocting. In many a Nine Inch Nails song, you can hear the clanking, the mashing, the sound of one piece of metal scraping against another. These are highly effective sonic attributes when you've got something like a Terminator movie. If ever the world is going to be destroyed by machines, you want a Nine Inch Nails song to usher in the end -- even if "The Day the World Went Away" could be construed as a little on-the-nose in this case.

I will say that the use of a Nine Inch Nails song within the body of a film does not have a 100% success rate for me.

While scoring a cool-ass car chase through the desert with NIN's seminal "Closer" probably took the remake of The Hitcher up a couple levels for me, the same cannot be said of the use of "Every Day is Exactly the Same" in Wanted. In fact, you might say that's the moment when I realized Wanted was going to suck. "Every Day is Exactly the Same" is not a particularly deep song to begin with, but when it was used to demonstrate the daily drudgery of the existence of Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), it was as obvious as being smacked in the face with a two-by-four.

Then again, that's not Trent Reznor's fault. It's Timur Bekmambetov's. His Wanted isn't much for subtlety in any respect.

When trailer music sets impossible standards

When I first started this blog way back in January, and was flooded with ideas, one of the things I'd wanted to write was a post called "The impossibility of Pineapple Express ever being good enough." It would have begun this way:


In the past year, I believe I've listened to the song "Paper Planes" by M.I.A. between 50 and 75 times. Because it's a really, really good song, I still haven't gotten sick of it. And because it's a really, really good song, I had ten times higher expectations for Pineapple Express than I should have.


Okay, back to the post that's actually being written right now. I'm not sure if you had the same experience I did, though I know some of you did, because we've discussed it. The original trailer for Pineapple Express was going along compellingly enough, looking like a fun and probably hilarious blending of the stoner and action genres. But then M.I.A.'s enthralling anthem -- with its gunshots, cocked hammers and cash registers providing crucial instrumentation -- kicked in. After that, Pineapple Express became The Awesomest Movie Ever.

Or so I was hoping. When months of anticipation finally culminated for me in a screening on opening weekend last August, the word that came to mind was "disappointment." Not only does the movie's tone turn too violent toward the end, resulting in a bunch of gory deaths that are out of synch with what you want from a comedy, but most crucially, "Paper Planes" never makes an appearance. And I'm sorry, but Huey Lewis' eponymous theme song just didn't satisfy me as a substitute.

It's a phenomenon we've seen numerous times before. A really well made trailer is distinguished by its choice of music far more often than we may consciously acknowledge. Sure, the editing has to be good, and it has to give more of a sense of what to expect, rather than a miniature synopsis of the entire plot. We remember those things. What we may not remember as consciously is how the music can also whip us up into a fervor. Whether it was the stirring Mozart score to the trailer for the Sly Stallone actioner Cliffhanger, or Wyclef Jean covering "Stayin' Alive" for The Big Hit (another sub-par action movie), I remember the way the combination of the perfect music and the perfect images jazzes me up exponentially.

Just think back to that M.I.A. song and the Pineapple Express trailer. "I fly like paper, get high like planes ..." Meanwhile, in the background, James Franco is doing the worm, Seth Rogen is doing some kind of upper-body breakdancing move, James Franco kicks his foot through the windshield of the police car he's driving, Seth Rogen jumps off a balcony onto a baddie below. Awesome stuff, right?

If it weren't for this trailer, I think I probably would have liked Pineapple Express a lot better. After all, the main thing it's guilty of is not being quite as good as it should have been. And I blame the trailer for giving me my notion of how good it should have been. But I wouldn't trade it. I'll always consider that a perfectly executed trailer, and I get chills even now when I watch it, even knowing I was ultimately disappointed.

So how does this all relate to Watchmen? Well, it's happening to me all over again. Watchmen -- based on what's widely considered to be the greatest graphic novel of all time -- has lots of much more significant reasons it's being anticipated than good trailer music. However, most of those reasons belong to the comic book geeks. And though I like a good comic book, I am far from a comic book geek. In fact, when I first saw the cast of Watchmen on the cover of Entertainment Weekly last summer, timed with Comic-Con, I thought, "Who're these fucking guys?" (Thank you, Major League, for the quotation.)

But as soon as I saw the first trailer, it was all over for me. The music got me again.

It's Smashing Pumpkins doing the honors this time. And even though I haven't been a regular listener of Smashing Pumpkins for ten years, there's something about the way "The End is the Beginning is the End" just pushes this trailer over the top. As the music really kicks in, a giant amphibious flying machine bursts through the surface of a river next to a major American city. Then the beats are timed up again for a man being thrown backwards through a plate-glass window. Then again for a masked man using an aerosol can as a flamethrower. The goose bumps are coming out on my skin.

As the music continues to pulse forward, a number of wondrous sites hit our eyes -- a hairless blue dude making people explode by shooting rays from his hands, a Molotov cocktail smashing into a truck, and what's that crazy-ass contraption rising out of the desert? Sure, the images themselves are doing a lot of the work here. But you'd be lying if you didn't acknowledge how well the music brings you to that place.

Will Watchmen live up to the hype? I'll be able to answer that question for you this weekend. You better bet I'm seeing it no later than Sunday, and I'll be opting for IMAX to heighten the experience.

Comic book fans will be trying to see how it measures up to the graphic novel. Me? I'll be wondering if and when that Smashing Pumpkins song will appear.