What’s it like when the music and the visuals of a film meld together perfectly? Well, here’s one such example, which is simply the greatest opening credits sequence history ever. Yes, I said it. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
(This is a repost from a number of years ago. I recently saw the movie Cousins for free on YouTube, so watched it over several breaks and lunches at work, as I hadn’t seen it in quite a few years. It actually holds up pretty well, and when I looked up my earlier post, I realized that I honestly wouldn’t change much of it at all, except to maybe accentuate more the point that the movie really is a fantasy of sorts, and if a situation like this movie’s came to pass in real life the participants would all need extensiveDown the rabbit hole….
Eighty-three years of Casablanca. This morning I got in the car, turned on the radio, and as I was preparing to switch it over to my phone’s output so I could listen to a podcast, the announcer on WNED indicated that they were about to play a suite of Max Steiner’s wonderful music for Casablanca, because the film opened eighty-three years ago today. That movie has been a part of my world my entire life. I didn’t watch it myself until sometime during, or immediately after, my freshman year of college, but I was always aware of it, and my parents alwaysDown the rabbit hole….
We all have those movies, don’t we? They’re the movies where we’ll be going about our day, doing stuff that we’ve planned out and intended to get done…but then we’ll see that one of those movies is on teevee or something, and that’s that, screw the To Do List, we’re watching that movie again! One of those movies for me is The Hunt for Red October, that wonderful submarine thriller based on the Tom Clancy novel. (I never read that particular Clancy book. I read a couple other ones and honestly, I wasn’t super-impressed beyond an appreciation for his plotting. My drug-of-choice for late-80s-early-90s spy fictionDown the rabbit hole….
Like I said the other day, there’s a kind of perfect storm of STUFF all coming to a head at once that isn’t leaving me with a ton of time for posting, so posting much, I have not. This is likely to continue for the next week, maybe even two, depending on how things transpire. None of this is bad, by any means: we have a big work event that’s taking up tons of time to prep coming up, and then next weekend is our annual getaway to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes, and right after that, The Wife has aDown the rabbit hole….
Social media has been abuzz lately over the trailer for a new film of Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights. I mean, look at this thing: Yeah, that’s…quite something, isn’t it? Will I watch that? Maybe. I think it will be viewed best at home, after several drinks. But anyway, here’s a suite of music by film score great Alfred Newman, composed for the 1939 film of the same book. Of course, I suppose as time marches on it becomes less and less known that the greatest single adaptation of Wuthering Heights is the semaphore version! Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
The Music Man doesn’t get enough credit for how inventive it is, methinks. The Music Man is known for its Iowa setting, and it generally seems to be viewed as safe Americana. But it makes a lot of interesting choices, and those include its music numbers. This one, “Lida Rose and Will I Ever Tell You”, blends two different songs together, sung by entirely different characters, who aren’t even in the same place. How does that work? It starts as our hero, con man Professor Harold Hill, is returning to his hotel room where he is met by the local school board, fourDown the rabbit hole….
I just finished a remarkable novel the other night, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos. The book is a slow burn of a novel about the life of a man (told as a series of memories as he looks back on his life during his last hours, in a seedy hotel in New York City) who, along with his brother, was once a major figure in Cuban music (particularly Mambo music) in the 1950s. Cesar Castillo remembers his childhood with his brother, Nestor, in Cuba, and he remembers the loves they had there before they came to NewDown the rabbit hole….
(This is a repost of what I wrote when composer James Horner died ten years ago, very prematurely, in a plane crash. Apparently Horner had been an amateur, hobbyist pilot. My relationship with his music through the years was complicated, but I wouldn’t ever say it was complicated to the point of being “love-hate”. Horner was one of the most important and notable film composers from 1980 until his death, after all, and as prolific as he was, I wish he was still around.) Composer James Horner died the other day when the airplane he was piloting crashed. He wasDown the rabbit hole….
(This is a repost from a couple of years ago. I’m bringing it back in honor of the 50th anniversary of the release of JAWS, which opened June 20, 1975. I didn’t get to watch JAWS until I was a teenager, which is both probably a wise move on my parents’ part and also really lame. I mean, come on! JAWS! But hey, it instantly became one of my favorite movies ever when I finally did get to watch it all the way through, instead of seeing little bits and pieces through sneaky glimpses at this or that telecast. Anyway, here’s a bitDown the rabbit hole….