It’s Academy Awards Day and the organisers must have
discovered my blog. How else to explain
their Music In The Movies theme for this year’s telecast?
Seriously, I’m in two minds about the use of music in today’s
movies. At its best, a great soundtrack
is totally subservient to the demands of the movie and is barely noticed. In other words it is one of a number of
elements used by a director in setting the mood of a particular scene along
with camera placement and movement, shot selection, editing, the script, sound (and
visual) effects and the skills of the actors. Sometimes the music can be so thoroughly integrated
into the movie that you’ll barely notice it.
I think it was only on my third viewing of the French Connection, for
example, when it dawned on me that it even had one. In other instances, it can become something
else entirely. In the celebrated opening
sequence of Jaws, Steven Spielberg effectively turned John Williams’ theme into
a character, using it to represent the otherwise invisible shark that stalks, attacks
and kills the skinny dipper.
But what can really irk me with some movies today are
instances when the equivalent of a music video appears during a film. Think of all those montage scenes where filmmakers
seek to explain away something that is occurring, like arriving in Australia,
set against a song containing the most obvious lyrical content imaginable (say for
the purposes of this example, Men At Work’s Down Under). When I see scenes like that I wonder whether a)
the screenwriter was unable to write any meaningful dialogue for the scene, b) the
studio had a tie in deal with a record company (probably from the same multi-national)
to push either a soundtrack album or the artist or c) the director came from a
music video background and is trying something with which they’re most
comfortable. No doubt there are other reasons but the effect is the same with either
the competence of the film maker or the studio’s motives called into question.
I’ve excluded the music played during the opening and end
credit sequences because this is where it might pay to be obvious. Some work absolutely brilliantly. The action film xXx with Vin Diesel thoroughly
integrated Rammstein’s Fire Frei! into its opening scene even to the extent of
letting the song commence with the studio’s logo through to the band’s
performance of the track in the scene. In
this respect, band and movie – both over the top and containing healthy lashes
of knowing humour – made for a perfect fit.
Ditto David Fincher’s use of Bowie’s superb The Heart’s Filthy Lesson
during the closing credits of se7en, ensuring that the unsettling, paranoid
nature of the film carried through to its very end. There are also examples where a track is
commissioned for one purpose but persuades the film maker into another
use. I read somewhere recently that
Jonathan Demme commissioned Bruce Springsteen to write an aids song to be
placed during the closing credits of Philadelphia. When Springsteen delivered The Streets Of
Philadelphia, Demme realised this perfectly fitted the way he envisaged it to
commence.
And so today’s listening is an attempt to fit some notable
Oscar listening into my busy day:
(149) Prince and the
Revolution – Music From Purple Rain
The winner of the Oscar for the Best Original Song Score in
1985, these songs have become so imprinted in the world’s consciousness that it
is almost critic proof. This is not to
say that the album is without flaws; there are some now fairly undesirable 80s
production sounds on it and The Beautiful Ones and Computer Blue are just
so-so. But the rest, notably When Doves
Cry (as unlikely a #1 as there’s ever been) and the epic title track, has stood
the test of time as a classic.
(150) Rodriquez – Cold
Fact
Waiting For Sugar Man today won the Oscar for Best Documentary
Feature. To just about anyone in the
world, it is the story of how a couple of South Africans set out to find the
hitherto unknown singer songwriter Rodriquez after he became a megastar in
their country. What the documentary, apparently
(I’ve yet to see it), doesn’t mention was that Rodriquez’s two albums (especially
this, his debut) were hits in Australia to the extent that he toured here
during the70s before he slipping into obscurity. Cold Fact explains the reasons for both
scenarios. He has a vocal style not
unlike Dylan’s and wrote tracks synonymous with the realities of urban life in
the late 60s/early 70s. The songs,
Sugar Man, Only Good For Conversations and Crucify Your Mind in particular, are
tremendous and would have appealed to 70s audiences, however, it is a style of
music has such a time bound feel to it that it is understandable why it’s since
been overlooked which makes his rediscovery all the more remarkable.
(151) Randy Newman –
Trouble In Paradise
Randy Newman is one of the few popular music icons to have
carved out a successful career in Hollywood.
Actually successful is a bit of an understatement here given his record
of 20 nominations and 2 wins (incorporating a record first 16 nominations
without a single win). This is one of
his regular albums recorded in the early 80s after his brush with fame following
the release of the Short People hit had well and truly died off. This is about as close to a mainstream commercial
album that he’s ever likely to record with slow ballads such as Same Girl and
Real Emotional Girl, a send up of Paul Simon called The Blues (in which he gets
Simon to sing) and some heavy handed attempts at pointed social comment with
Christmas In Cape Town and Song For The Dead.
It also contains the hilarious My
Life Is Good in which a big shot attempts to impress someone by claiming to
have met Springsteen who tells him “You know Rand I’m tired/How would like to
be The Boss for a while?”, followed by the cry “Blow Big Man Blow” and a
Clarence Clemons type sax solo. But the
major reason for playing this is its opening cut – I Love L.A. – a song I loved
on its initial release but a prime example of a song that’s been misused in a
number of non Newman scored films.
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