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Movie Music Moments

This might be coming out of left field, but it’s something I’ve been increasingly pondering in my free time (which is becoming increasingly abundant.  Damn youse job market!).

Every so often in cinemaland,  the visuals, the acting, and the story take a backseat to something very underrepresented and special: the music. There are moments in film where the music is so perfectly composed or inserted at just the right moment to really drive home the point of a moment, serving as a layer on top of the rest of the sensory input we’re receiving from performance and speech and sound effects which speaks to something…more. It’s ethereal, summarizing a directorial point in the film, an unseen cue that may speak to the deeper emotional state of the character, or perhaps the writer and director themselves. The background suddenly takes precedence, and an entire film’s worth of emotional weight and resonance can hit with a few opening chords. I’m going to place a few of my own picks below, but please, add your own in to the comments. Also, if you haven’t seen the films, ignore the clips I manage to find. You’d be cheating yourself out of the real feel of things. Too, some of these may include SPOILERS, which I’m vehemently against, so, you’ve been warned.

The Matrix – Spybreak – Propellerheads

“Freeze!”

Neo and Trinity share a look, and then all hell breaks loose. As the first shot is fired, this song kicks in, and never before has a song been so synonymous with a debaucherous orgy of bullets and killins. You know exactly what song I’m talking about, in all likelihood, and if you don’t recognize it by name, you will as soon as you watch the clip. The scene has left an indelible mark on the movie map, and the adrenaline-laced breakbeat here works flawlessly, whether the tempo of the characters is in slow motion or full speed. It is seamlessly and undeniably entwined with the film, the lobby shootout, and the feel of the movie as a whole.

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Ana4ian’s top 5 movies of the decade

To narrow down a decade in which I fell in love with film not as an escape, but as an art form and something to be enjoyed with visceral emotion is not an easy thing to do. Instead of cheap thrills, fighting, blood, explosions and tits, movies instead became something to admire, a spectacle, to be experienced, devoured, voraciously enjoyed. It was a period of awakening in the idea that these films have the ability to ellicit a range of reactions in the viewer, and that to invest oneself wholly in the watching of a movie can be extremely rewarding. So, a difficult decision made, the list awaits, and in no particular order, for I could never place any one above the other:

Let The Right One In (2008)
Twilight has nothing, zero, zilch on a romantic vampire story compared to this. I won’t bash the former, but instead extort the gentleness of this movie. The subtle, slow love story between the two young leads in this movie is achingly genuine and pure. The secrets kept, embarrassment, shyness, adoration, protectiveness and need in the relationship between the vulnerable Eli and lonely Oskar is far more mature than their years. The way they complete one another lends a depth to this flick that is so rare even in movies without the fantastic aspect of vampirism that this movie bears. I really, genuinely have my fingers crossed now for the American remake, that it delivers a similarly deep experience to a wider audience, who deserve to indulge in this tale.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Michel Gondry, how do I love thee? I can really enjoy anything this guy does, but that’s a blanket statement the same as saying I can enjoy any sunny day. The sun does not a great day make, however, it’s just the setup. Eternal Sunshine is the sunny day with a cold beer, pretty company, your favorite song on the radio, and the knowledge that later tonight, you’re only going to be having more fun hanging out with good friends and bullshitting about life in general. It brings everything together, the quirkiness of Gondry’s direction, the off-center melancholy of Kaufman’s script, and great performances from everyone involved. It’s an exploration on the memories that make us human, good, bad or otherwise, and keeping them safe, to put it into an ill-fitting nutshell, and indeed, how precise can a movie about memories be, unique as they are? Well done. Read more…

Ana4ian’s top 5 movies of 2009 (so far)

5. Up
The first 15 minutes of this film are so achingly, brutally beautiful I missed half the rest of the movie just reflecting on it. The last 4/5ths isn’t as good, but I didn’t care. If this movie didn’t gut-punch you, then you should go to the doctor and call the cops, because your guts are missing, and someone somewhere has double guts now. Because, they have yours, see? Right.

4. Zombieland
Great opening credits, fun take on the genre, the “special guest” segment was great. It was just all around fun. Gore, giggles, and the girl. And zombies. This was the popcorn movie of the year, to share an audience expereince with, people laughing and just generally enjoying life in one room for a couple hours.

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Dem Reviews: District 9

For the love of all that’s holy, go see it.

More details?  Fine, fine.  Look…the film is mind blowing on its own, *before* you come to learn that the flick only cost $30 million to make.  Before you learn that it was filmed on the Red digital camera.  Before you find out that this is Neill Blomkamp’s first major film, both written and directed.  You watch the movie not knowing any of this and you think, hey…Hollywood finally put out some original, amazing Sci-fi for the first time since The Matrix.  You learn these facts, and all of a sudden it seems like something magical just happened. Read more…

Hey, have you ever seen…28 Weeks Later?

Stone:

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

This is going to be another of those films that may be a bit more…common and not quite as under the radar as a lot of the movies in this series are, but I have noticed a disproportionate amount of the people I’ve spoken to haven’t seen this movie, or haven’t seen it all, or what have you, and it deserves a little more attention than that; then just falling off the radar, as it seems to have done. More so than its predecessor of similar name, 28 days Later.  It has its flaws, but there is some really great stuff going on in this movie. Other than, y’know…the obvious Zombi…er…Infected. Read more…

Hey, have you ever seen…The Signal?

Jim:

I went to a party last year. Everybody started kissing each other, you know, at midnight. The tradition. How’d that start? Everyone starts kissing each other, and I had no one else to kiss, so I just as a joke kissed the dog. But then I realized when I got home that I made out with a dog for my New Years. It’s wrong.

If you had to come up with a double header that included Shaun of the Dead and one other film, and you had a theme, and that theme encompassed Shaun of the Dead, then it probably encompasses The Signal, and makes this the number two part of your double header.  Or the number one part, if Shaun of the Dead is going to be playing last.

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Hey, have you ever seen…The Science of Sleep?

Stephane:

This girl is at once all the women that broke my heart. She is so beautiful and generous and she is asking me to leave because she is dumping me. She is dumping me because I am a cheap drug dealer. And I am a drug dealer because she wants to leave me.

Ah Michel Gondry, you can do no wrong in my book.

This is another of those films that may be familiar to a lot of the usual contributors of DumbDrum, being the bunch of uber-nerds that we are, but that has sort of passed from the public consciousness almost as soon as it left theaters (if it ever made it there in the first place).  Even myself, I always am sort of taken aback when I see this DVD in the collection, like, “Oh…oh yeah!  That one!”  It’s the sort of movie that you can’t believe you forgot about after you’d forgotten about it, and it immediately gets tossed in the ole’ Panasonic for some enjoyment. Read more…

Hey, have you ever seen…After Life?

You died yesterday. I’m sorry for your loss.

We’re a day early this week, as real life butts in and schedules conflict.  Next week should be back on track, but in any case, onwards!

There was a point where I was employed at a certain large company and had the horrifying combination of very limited internet access and a lot of free time on my hands.  One of the sites I could get to was bestbuy.com because of some business partner agreement, so I would spend time browsing their movies for something to do, and I stumbled across this little number, much to my eventual happiness. Read more…

Hey, have you ever seen…In Bruges?

Harry:

An Uzi? I’m not from South Central Los Angeles. I didn’t come here to shoot twenty black ten year olds in a drive-by. I want a normal gun for a normal person.

The hardest part of this article was picking just one quote from what is an amazingly, amazingly funny and well-written script.  I haven’t seen Milk yet (it’s in the queue) but it better make Shakespeare look like a retarded child on methamphetamine drawing pictures on mommy’s fridge with “cat crayons” from the litterbox to have ganked the Oscar from this flick. It’s really, really well done. Read more…

Hey, have you ever seen… Death Race?

Hennessy:

Okay cocksucker. Fuck with me,and we’ll see who shits on the sidewalk.

Yeah, that’s right, I said it.  Death Race.  Not even the original.  I’m going to assault all sense of human decency and goodness you may have thought remained on this blog and drag it through the mud, laughing like a mad cannibal and strongly proclaiming my allegiance to France while firmly grasping my own genitals.  I’m recommending Death Race to you, because gosh darnit, it’s too much high caliber good times to pass up.  Plus, Brodie hated it, and that just makes it even better.  Let the desecration begin. Read more…

Danger Mouse shafted, shafts back.

Just a quick little blurb about this: apparently Danger Mouse’s record label EMI is going to shelf his latest album over some “legal battle”.  Danger Mouse, who is not very happy about the situation, is intead releasing a book full of photographs inspired by and based around the music (and taken by one David Lynch) and a blank CD-R, to be used “as you will” which translates roughly into “use the magic of the webernets and find my shit, and put it onto this disc.”  At least that’s my giant silly leap of logic.  I’m sure the Mouse didn’t mean it in that way.  All of this info and more thanks to Gizmodo.

How does this make you feel, deep down inside?