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Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

HEAD (1968)

I think just about anyone who’s familiar with the Monkees’ sweet, goofy Peter Tork was bummed by the actor/musician’s recent diagnosis with head and neck cancer (although, apparently, the prognosis is currently good). And I think no matter how silly or cynically conceived hippies found the Pre-Fab Four back in the sixties, the songs the TV band had written for them (“I’m a Believer,” “Daydream Believer,” “Steppin’ Stone,” etc.) are a helluva lot better than most of the songs being written for today’s prefabricated music industry shills, most of whom don’t even have the self-awareness to be self-deprecating and more than a little embarrassed by their place in the pop culture firmament. To their credit, Tork and his bandmates Mickey Dolenz (the funny one), Davy Jones (the cute one) and Michael Nesmith (the smart one) tried their best to rebel against their corporate overlords with Head, a big-screen attempt at image-smashing phantasmagoria that plays like an LSD-inspired episode of the group’s small-screen show, i.e. a brainy, mostly well-behaved mind-fuck that’s actually a lot more entertaining and thought-provoking than some of the more “authentic” freak-outs of the era, what with the underwater imagery accompanying the haunting “Porpoise Song,” the burlesque meditations on fame and the peculiar cameos by the likes of Victor Mature, Annette Funicello and Frank Zappa with a cow.

HIGH FIDELITY (2000)

That High Fidelity is playfully self-conscious and yet not overly precious is a testament to both director Stephen Frears, here smoothly segueing between goofy comedy and sobering drama, as well as star (and co-writer) John Cusack, whose turn as romantically challenged record store owner Rob stands as one of his finest performances. Retaining the ragamuffin spirit of Nick Hornby’s source novel, Frears’ funny and incisive adaptation boasts two superb supporting players in Jack Black and Todd Louiso as Rob’s employees, as well as a script that refuses to sentimentalize the stunted-maturity failings of its protagonist. Rob is a man-child whose compulsive habit of concocting lists – about favorite songs and past break-ups – speaks to the vital role music plays in his romantic life, while also serving as his means of engaging in self-analysis through a safe, detached filter. A bit too much of Cusack’s narration and dialogue (taken verbatim from Hornby’s novel) lands with a writerly thud on screen, but the actor’s warts-and-all performance – unafraid to posit his protagonist as a navel-gazing prick, and still capable of making him endearing – is so energized that it overshadows any occasional missteps.

LAST DAYS (2005)

The high point of Gus Van Sant’s Béla Tarr-inspired “death trilogy” (following 2002’s Gerry and 2003’s Elephant), Last Days charts the final, pedestrian events in the life of a Kurt Cobain surrogate (Michael Pitt) in and around his Pacific Northwest estate. A ruminative, melancholy work with little interest in traditional narrative, Van Sant’s evocative gem aims mainly to situate viewers in a particular physical environment and headspace. In this case, that’s the remote residence and fuzzy mind of a shuffling, head-downturned, shaggy-haired rock star who wanders about his property like a ghost burdened by some ill-defined psychological and emotional misery. Rife with ambiguous religious overtones that contribute to an atmosphere of spiritual malaise, obliquely addressing the relationship between image and reality, and depicting its protagonist – constricted by claustrophobic full-frame compositions – as beset by hangers-on and record studio execs who take but don’t give, Last Days operates as a richly textured, arrestingly evocative avant-garde hypothesis about the forces that might have contributed to Cobain’s suicidal demise.

SINGLES (1992)

No one will mistake Singles for a great rom-com, but viewed as a snapshot of a very particular musical era, Cameron Crowe’s 1992 film holds up surprisingly well. The story has to do with two on-again, off-again couples (Campbell Scott and Kyra Sedgwick, Matt Dillon and Bridget Fonda) attempting to navigate choppy romantic waters. However, despite Crowe’s reasonably sturdy dramatization of twentysomethings in search of love and their post-collegiate identities – as well as his inconsistent (but far-from-disastrous) decision to have characters break the fourth wall to deliver commentary – the film’s lasting appeal has as much to do with timing as with storytelling. By setting the action in a Seattle grunge scene on the brink of exploding, Crowe hopelessly dated his film. Yet that turns out to be a good thing, since Singles, bolstered by cameos and performances by various members of the bands (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains) that would temporarily make Seattle the epicenter of rock, while comfortably rooted in the damp, sleepy, basketball-loving atmosphere of his Pacific Northwest milieu, proves an engaging, enduring time capsule.

GRACE OF MY HEART (1996)

This movie is character actress Illeana Douglas's best role to date. As in Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine and I'm Not There, Grace of My Heart attempts to create a transcendent reality for the stories about Carole King, who some readers may need to be reminded was one of the Brill Building songwriters of the early '60s who later went on to have commercial success as a singer-songwriter with her album Tapestry. Perhaps you saw her on Stephen Colbert's show. In this movie, she is known as Denise Waverly. Denise comes to work in the Brill Building for a Phil Spector-alike played by John Turturro, writing songs for girl groups. She takes up with her co-songwriter, a Gerry Goffin-alike played by Eric Stolz (among the real-life Goffin-King compositions: "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "The Loco-Motion," "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"), but their marraige falls apart. Later, she moves to California and takes up with a Brian Wilson-alike played by Matt Dillon. Even though it's not as smart as the Haynes rock fictions, it's quite a lovely little movie with lots of nice touches to people familiar with the characters portrayed. I especially enjoy the faux-Wilson's mental breakdown while working on the movie's version of Smile, the real-life album that broke Brian Wilson's spirit for a time.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

OST: "Beetlejuice"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Danny Elfman's reputation as a film composer, to put it politely, is mixed. To put it not so politely, there are a lot of people who think he sucks. Though Elfman himself -- a multiple Oscar nominee, a millionaire many times over, and Mr. Bridget Fonda -- probably doesn't pay his detractors any mind, there is a growing consensus that the man who started out as the most unlikely person to achieve success as a composer of scores for blockbuster Hollywood films has turned into a contemptible hack whose name in the opening credits is a sure sign of sonic disappointment ahead. Of course, for everyone who feels that way, there's also those who fiercely defend his scores as memorable, inventive, and distinct; how many other film composers can you name who have gold records for collections of their motion picture scores? Elfman has two of them, and a legion of devoted fans. This kind of vehement disagreement is, in fact, familiar to Danny Elfman: during the 1980s heyday of his band Oingo Boingo, opinion was roughly split between those who found him an obnoxious noisemaker whose danceable, horn-laden compositions were an embarrasment to the punk circles in which he traveled, and those who found his music creative, infectious, and a welcome change of pace from the business-as-usual of L.A. hardcore.

But as Elfman's career as a film composer enters its third decade, those who defend him are growing fewer, and those who attack him are growing more. The time at which his name in the credits alone was enough to make fans line up at the box office for a ticket are long behind him, and it seems the more he embraced his fame as a Hollywood name worthy of dropping, the more he moved from his ludic, sonically inventive early work to a sense of darkness and bombast that never quite suited him to what can only be described as hackwork in films like A Civil Action, Proof of Life and Red Dragon. The sad thing is, it was not always thus: Elfman got his start composing music for the films of his friend, fan and frequent collaborator, the director Tim Burton -- and the early work they produced together really was special. Back then, Elfman geniunely sounded like someone who might seriously change the game when it came to film scores: his utterly postmodern approach of mixing the high and the low, and his keen sense of comic and dramatic timing, which he used to blow the doors off scenes with a judicious application of musical cues, seemed to be indicators of someone who was there to do more than just collect a paycheck.

The best of Danny Elfman's early collaborations with Tim Burton was the fantastic score to Pee Wee's Big Adventure. A more perfect marriage of score and film is hard to imaging, and the opening sequence of the beloved comedy -- with Pee Wee's activities growing more and more absurd as the main theme becomes louder and louder, finally hammering away at a perfect comic crescendo -- is unforgettable. Unfortunately, the commercial release is marred by many omissions, and by being paired on a double release with Elfman's passable but unspectacular soundtrack to the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School. So, for Elfman aficianados who want to show off what the man was capable of before he started sleepwalking through his career, Beetlejuice is the default pick. Not that it's much of a step down from Pee Wee's Big Adventure; they're both showcases for his blend of acumen and absurdity, his sure comic timing, his ability to use odd percussive patterns and polyrhythms to such a listener into the scene, and his deft mixing of cartoonish exaggeration with clever and appropriate instrumentation. The ghostly conjurations of the score proved that Elfman, despite later evidence to the contrary, was capable of sounding sinister without taking himself too seriously, and its magical mixture of catchy melodic elements and almost avant-garde experimental sounds makes it a collection of music worth listening to even outside of the context of the movie -- the true test of any great score. Beetlejuice is the pinnacle of Elfman's work with Tim Burton, for good and for ill: it never got any better, and it would all be downhill from there.

BEST TRACKS: The famous opening theme to Beetlejuice is a perfect example of what Danny Elfman is capable of when he's not just out to make a buck. Its clever folding of Harry Belafonte's "The Banana Boat Song" into what becomes a whirling, sinister piece of music is funny and unexpected, and the rest of the piece plays out with excellent and energetic stings over a rapid-fire death train of increasing tempos. "Travel Music", with its conjuration of 1950s-style on-the-road dynamics and its simple innocence twisted by its underlying nastiness, works very well, as does the hilarious muzak-from-beyond-the-grave of "The Flier/Lydia's Pep Talk". The eerie "Incantation", with its high-strung percussion that blasts out into an explosion of creepy vocal cues, haunted-house organ and propulsive horns, nicely rounds out the score.

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