No, not the tear-swelling New Order song. This Humphrey Bogart vehicle (dir Nicholas Ray, 1950) features a nice diegetic performance by Hadda Brooks. In typical style of the era our hero / anti-hero the murder suspect screenwriter HB sits in a bar at a piano with gorgeous Gloria Graham while Hadda sings and plays 'I Hadn't Anyone Till You', lyrically relevant to this burgeoning and troublesome love affair. Apparently Bogie shouted down a movie mogul who tried to change the way she performed. Bless him.
Throughout the movie a recurrent theme in various arrangements and styles (by composer George Antheil) plays behind Bogie's action. That's Wagnerian leitmotif, that is.
Tuesday 27 October 2009
Paul Blart - Mall Cop
Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009) dir Steve Carr, feat Kevin James as overweight, you guessed it, mall cop.
The music is a throw-away mixture of generic over-the-top Survivor / Bon Jovi / Kiss anthems that mean everything to American viewers, mall rats of a certain age. However there is one standout music cue. Beatles tribute band ELO (and I mean that in a nice way) massive smash 'Mr Blue Sky' accompanies Blart's journey on a 2-wheeled motorised scooter to his mall workplace. Skies are blue, natch, but it's the opening bars that really transport the visuals from the mundane to the ecstatic. The ultra-familiar chugging chords grabbed my short and curlies and I truly got the (intended) message that this loser work-obsessive can dream hisself into a make-believe super reality and achieve those wildest dreams. Which is, of course, what happens in the movie.
The music is a throw-away mixture of generic over-the-top Survivor / Bon Jovi / Kiss anthems that mean everything to American viewers, mall rats of a certain age. However there is one standout music cue. Beatles tribute band ELO (and I mean that in a nice way) massive smash 'Mr Blue Sky' accompanies Blart's journey on a 2-wheeled motorised scooter to his mall workplace. Skies are blue, natch, but it's the opening bars that really transport the visuals from the mundane to the ecstatic. The ultra-familiar chugging chords grabbed my short and curlies and I truly got the (intended) message that this loser work-obsessive can dream hisself into a make-believe super reality and achieve those wildest dreams. Which is, of course, what happens in the movie.
Wednesday 21 October 2009
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
If you're looking for creative music use in movies then dig out George Roy Hill's 1969 Western Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman and Robert Redford) from the library. Three prime music cues:
1. Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head (Bacharach) plays while Paul Newman rides around on a bike with menage a trois Katherine Ross on the handlebars (just find me something in those lyrics that matches that scene)
2. South American Getaway (wordless rising and falling vocals over footage of Bolivian adventures)
3. Stunning title tune which has haunted me since I first saw this movie in the 1970s sometime as a spotty urchin and reappears throughout in different styles and moods.
Go Burt, go.
1. Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head (Bacharach) plays while Paul Newman rides around on a bike with menage a trois Katherine Ross on the handlebars (just find me something in those lyrics that matches that scene)
2. South American Getaway (wordless rising and falling vocals over footage of Bolivian adventures)
3. Stunning title tune which has haunted me since I first saw this movie in the 1970s sometime as a spotty urchin and reappears throughout in different styles and moods.
Go Burt, go.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)