The Screengrab : jack white

The Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs (Part One)

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Just above these words you’ll find the music video for “Another Way to Die” by Alicia Keys and Jack White. It’s the theme from the new James Bond movie, which is not called Another Way to Die but rather Quantum of Solace. Apparently Jack White couldn’t come up with a rhyme for solace (“Let’s see…'I need a quantum of solace, so don’t call me Wallace'? No...”), so instead the song title blurs in with such recent Bond themes as “Tomorrow Never Dies” and “Die Another Day.” The Screengrab joins with London’s Sunday Times in asking the musical question, “Can nobody do it better?”

In pondering why so many Bond themes have come up short in recent years, the Times asked series composer David Arnold (who has scored the last five 007 pictures) what makes a classic Bond theme. “Arnold contends that any aspiring Bond-song writer needs both to honour the canon — and its sonic staples of brass and strings — and to throw away the rulebook, which he concedes can be a tricky task. ‘I don’t think you can completely escape the history of these songs,’ he says. ‘Not only have many of them become standards, they have been around as part of the British musical landscape for more than 40 years. It’s something to embrace, rather than dismiss, but in doing that you immediately draw comparisons with the greats.’ As for the brass-and-strings trademarks, he argues that ‘those elements are one of the things the public feel defines the sound of a Bond song’.”

So what are the classic Bond themes? I have researched the matter extensively (that is, I have been sitting here on my ass watching YouTube clips for an hour or so), and I’ve come up with my own list of the top seven…or 007, if you will. (Or even if you won’t.) Feel free to argue in the comments.

007. Thunderball (Johnny Cash version)

OK, this one’s a cheat. Johnny Cash recorded this title track for the fourth Bond adventure, but it was rejected in favor of the Tom Jones version. I can’t argue that Cash’s Thunderball fits in with the James Bond universe, but I’d rather listen to it than the Jones cut anyday. This is not the only time a Bond theme has been rejected, by the way – Alice Cooper originally recorded The Man with the Golden Gun (which you can find on the 1973 Muscle of Love album) and Blondie’s For Your Eyes Only appears on 1982’s The Hunter.

006. A View to a Kill

Actually, I was hoping to make a case for a-ha’s theme from The Living Daylights here. I had completely forgotten a-ha had recorded a James Bond theme, and I thought it would make me look cooler to pick one of the more obscure choices. But then, unfortunately, I listened to it again and couldn’t pull the trigger. Both Daylights and Duran Duran’s View to a Kill theme are hopeless ‘80s relics, but this one has a little more oomph. (Hey look, I’m not a music critic here. “Oomph” is about the most technical term in my arsenal.)

005. Nobody Does It Better

Some truly grotesque love ballads have attached themselves to the Bond series. Just imagine if the producers had the balls to commission a song titled “Octopussy” from Prince instead of Rita Coolidge’s “All-Time High,” which shouldn’t be theme to anything except maybe your dentist’s waiting room. And I’m confident that “Moonraker” is nobody’s wedding song. Carly Simon’s theme from The Spy Who Loved Me has a sexy femme fatale allure that sets it apart from the others, and it’s certainly the one Bond theme that has taken on a life of its own (probably because it doesn’t share a title with the movie, although “the spy who loved me” appears in the lyrics).

Part Two

Stones, Scorsese Rock the Berlin Film Festival

Phil Nugent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Martin Scorsese's movie about the Rolling Stones, Shine a Light, has opened the Berlin Film Festival, marking "the first time a major film festival has dared to open with a non-fiction movie." Scorsese has been auditioning for this job for a long time. He worked on as an editor on such earlier rock docs as Woodstock, The Medicine Ball Caravan, and Elvis on Tour long before redefining the use of rock music in narrative movies in Mean Streets (where Robert De Niro's crazy badass Johnny Boy makes a show-boating entrance gliding into a bar to the tune of "Jumpin' Jack Flash") and perfecting the concert-documentary form with the 1978 The Last Waltz. As for the Stones, this project represents something of a return to one of their old habits — linking up with a name filmmaker to perhaps capture the "definitive" Rolling Stones experience on film — that for most of the past several years has been sublimated by Pay-Per-View TV gigs. (Classic examples include Jean-Luc Godard's studio-set Sympathy for the Devil, the Maysles brothers' end-of-the-60s Gimme Shelter, and Hal Ashby's 1983 Let's Spend the Night Together, which turned out as an accidental record of why the 1980s would not be remembered as the creative high point of either the Stones' or Hal Ashby's careers. The most notable of all these films is probably Robert Frank's 1972 Cocksucker Blues, which Mick Jagger had legally suppressed, thus giving it automatic street cred.) The new movie, which reportedly brought the house down in Berlin, was filmed over the course of two days at New York City's Beacon Theater in 2006, with guest appearances by Jack White, Buddy Guy, and Christina Aguilera, by an all-star camera crew headed by Robert Richardson. (The performance footage is intercut with highlights from decades' worth of Stones interviews. Questioner: What do you do before going on stage? Keith Richards: "I wake up." Not at a couple of shows I've seen, you didn't. Hiiiiiii-oh!) In addition to giving audiences the chance to see the band perform some of its standard numbers on a big screen, the movie also gave Scorsese the chance to preserve one of his standard numbers: it opens with him having a high-pitched meltdown because nobody will give him a finalized song list, and without it, he can't be sure that he'll have one of his seventeen cameras pointed right where he wants it for the first shot.

Take Five: Mockumentaries

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:45:00 GMT

It can't have been long after the first documentary film was made that some enterprising wise-ass with a cut-rate kinetoscope hit upon the idea of making a fake documentary. After all, since it's an age-old comedy trope that reality always outstrips satire, it only makes sense to create satire that apes reality as closely as possible. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story opens wide this weekend, and there's plenty of reasons to believe it'll be a fine entry into the mockumentary canon; it's directed by Jake Kasdan, co-written by the red-hot Judd Apatow, and stars the talented and eminently likable John C. Reilly (as well as a boatload of potentially amusing guest stars, including Jack White as Elvis, Frankie Muniz as Buddy Holly, and, as the Beatles, Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Justin Long, and Jason Schwartzman!). We figured it might be a good time to bring up some of our other favorite pseudo-documentaries, and, as an extra challenge, do it without mentioning any of the films of a certain Mr. Christopher Guest. (To top it all off, I'm not even going to discuss Albert Brooks' amazing Real Life. Well, except right then.)

THE RUTLES: ALL YOU NEED IS CASH (1978)

Yes, Screengrab readers, there actually was a time when goofing on the Beatles wasn't the most played-out thing a human being could do! That time was about thirty years ago, when Monty Python alum Eric Idle penned, starred in, and co-directed this made-for-TV movie about the rise and decline of the Prefab Four, the most famous band ever to come out of Rutland. George Harrison liked it enough to funnel some money into producing the film, even though he's savagely parodied as Stig O'Hara, the group's dullest member, who doesn't appear to speak any English, accidentally sues himself, and is eventually replaced by a wax dummy. It features a few other Python members as well as some Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time SNL alums — the only filmed collaboration between the two groups — and as such, contains more than its share of hilarious dialogue and situations. What really elevates it above the level of standard rock 'n' roll pseudo-documentary is the music, written entirely by co-star (and former Bonzo Dog Band front man) Neil Innes. The songs so closely resemble Beatles originals that it's easy to miss the absurdly funny lyrics.

BOB ROBERTS (1992)

Tim Robbins' mockumentary about the rise of a right-wing demagogue who rises to fame on the strength of a bunch of pseudo-populist folk hits directed at the underclass was a labor of love, growing out of his sincere liberal political beliefs and his fear of the then-growing power of conservative radio talk shows. Sincerity and deeply held beliefs, though, can be death to comedy, and the worst parts of Bob Roberts are the ones where he tips his hand too much or allows his characters to devolve into one-dimensional caricatures, whether on the left or the right. But it's still a very worthwhile film, with a smart script, some excellent and sure-handed direction, and a few terrific performances and cameos from the likes of Gore Vidal and John Cusack. Robbins wrote the Bob Roberts songs himself, and they're catchy enough to make you believe that they could actually catch the popular imagination, though they play like parody, and whoever heard of a right-wing folksinger, anyway? Also of interest, if for no other reason than its prescience, is Alan Rickman as a Karl-Rove-like figure.

FEAR OF A BLACK HAT (1994)

As the East Coast-West Coast wars heated up and gangsta rap swept the nation, fans were waiting for just the right man to come along and make the quinessential hip-hop mockumentary. As it happened, they got two — but while Chris Rock's CB4 was the bigger hit, Rusty Cundieff's Fear of a Black Hat was the better film. Universally broad in its targets, merciless in its self-parody (particularly biting are the scenes where Cundieff's Ice Cold attempts ham-handed political justifications for his bottom-drawer lyrics: "See, the butt is like society..."), and dead-on in its use of songs that cleverly mirror then-popular hip-hop trends, from g-funk to Native Tongues to Miami bass, it's the best satirical treatment of the rap world to come along so far. It's not perfect; it goes on about a half hour too long, and some of its targets are ridiculously dated (how much comic mileage can you get out of making fun of Kriss Kross?), but it's still worth seeing, and the three lead actors — Cundieff, Mark Christopher Lawrence as the goofy mystic Tone Def, and a coked-up, paranoid Larry B. Scott as Tasty Taste — are pitch-perfect in their roles.

DILL SCALLION (1999)

Every other musical genre seems to get its own fake documentary, so why shouldn't country? Well, possibly because country so often plays as self-parody. Or maybe because it would be almost impossible to top Henry Gibson as Haven Hamilton in Nashville. Still, Jordan Brady's Dill Scallion gives it the ol' dropped-out-of-grade-school try, and is carried for quite a while by a charismatic lead performance by Billy Burke. Some of the gags are real killers (Dill's producer, played by Henry Winkler, strives to create a "barn of sound", and his signature dance requires him to dislocate his own ankle); some are subtler jokes that require a fairly intimate knowledge of country history; and others are just flat-out failures. But the songs (by Sheryl Crow, of all people) work quite well, and there are a ton of winning cameos — everyone from Willie Nelson to Jason Priestley, who's truly funny as the amusingly named Jo Joe Hicks. At its best when it's smart and self-referential and at its worst when it takes easy laugh-at-the-hillbillies cheap shots, Dill Scallion is only half a good movie, but it's a pretty good half-a-movie.

IT'S ALL GONE PETE TONG (2004)

Attempting to do for the world of DJ culture what This is Spinal Tap did for metal, Michael Dowse's It's All Gone Pete Tong (the phrase is rhyming slang for "it's all gone wrong") scores largely on the strength of some blindingly funny dialogue and a handful of near-perfect performances. Paul Kaye is both ridiculous and hilarious as DJ Frankie Wilde, whose stellar career is derailed when he starts to go deaf, and Neil Maskell nearly steals the movie as a callous record company executive. The movie goes off the rails with a few obvious jokes and a detour, late in its run time, into taking itself a bit too seriously, but it's worth watching for the comedic moments that score, an outstanding score (including a few songs by the actual Pete Tong), and a refusal to tip its hand to the bitter end.