John Williams turns 92 today…and he’s still working.
In his honor, let’s listen to some of his work!
Williams won a Grammy just the other night for this: “Helena’s Theme” from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. It’s a typically gorgeous theme that manages to evoke Marion’s Theme from all the way back in Raiders of the Lost Ark without echoing it or quoting it.
Here’s something that vexed film music fans for years: the unavailability of the End Credits music that actually was heard in the film of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The suite that appeared on the album was nice enough, but the film version is longer, quoting several of the movie’s themes as the last scene in the Indian village plays out. And when we finally go to credits and the Raiders March fires up, it actually fades out in the repeat (at the 3:32 mark) so that we can here a brief quote of Short Round’s Theme. Williams’s ability to put seemingly disparate themes together into an actually cohesive whole is always amazing.
Going back even farther, here’s one of Williams’s earliest contributions to film music: his score to the law-school drama The Paper Chase. Yes, it sounds a bit dated, but you can absolutely hear the fingerprints of the Williams-to-come in this cue, the End Credits suite from that movie:
It’s the lot of most film composers to have to turn in really good work for movies that…aren’t. Hook is, for me, one of the few misfires in Steven Spielberg’s output; it fell in that weird late 80s-early 90s era when Spielberg hadn’t really transitioned into the finer drama work that was to come, but you could tell that his heart wasn’t entirely in the magic-and-fantasy flicks he was still doing. But along comes Williams with this amazing score, and this almost perfect tone-poem-in-miniature:
When Williams’s score to 2002’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones arrived, a lot of people were a bit befuddled by that score’s mix of darkness and lyrical love music. One person quipped on some message board or someplace, “It sounds like Nixon on a date.” That was pretty funny, but it seemed to highlight the fact that Williams’s score to Oliver Stone’s Nixon has never been particularly beloved. And that interests me, because I have always found it one of his most fascinating scores. He brings just the right blend of paranoid darkness and throwback Americana to Stone’s film (which I consider a masterpiece). Nixon has some of Williams’s most powerful and most overlooked music.
I do have to make an admission: I’m not always a big fan of Williams when he is scoring comedies or really light movies. For whatever reason, I always feel better when there’s a tinge of darkness in Williams’s music. (I can live quite happily without hearing Home Alone again, to be honest.) But in this wonderful march for Spielberg’s early big-budget misfire 1941, you can tell that John Williams has his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. This is absolutely delightful.
I’ve never seen Seven Years in Tibet. I couldn’t even tell you right now what it’s about without Googling it, other than…a guy is in Tibet for seven years. But I love this theme:
Finally–and I’m only ending this here because let’s be honest, I could go on a lot longer about John Williams and how much he’s meant to me and to my creative life throughout my years, but I actually have to eat dinner tonight–here’s a suite of another of what seems to me an underrated score, which is all the more surprising to me because every time I listen to it, I’m dazzled anew by how new this sounds, even for a throwback score. It’s Catch Me If You Can.
Ugh! I don’t know why this didn’t publish. I could swear I clicked the right thing on here. Anyway, this should have run the day before yesterday. Admittedly, this is one of my “Fallbacks because I’ve been having a busy week” kind of Tone Poem Tuesdays, but the thing should have at least gone live on the site! Here’s the post, as originally written:
Ever wonder how orders are communicated from the server to the grill cook and back again at Waffle House? No? Well, that’s OK, you’re still not going to understand it after you watch this training video.
There’s a bright thing in the sky! Has anybody contact NORAD about this?!
I kid, obviously…and complaining about the lack of sunshine this time of year is just a thing we WNYers do, along with bemoaning the latest Bills playoff loss, noting how crappy the Sabres are, or speculating on what our favorite MLB team’s Opening Day roster might look like, since pitchers and catchers report soon. But really, this particular “Long Gray Slog” has certainly felt, well, longer and grayer and sloggier than usual. This is likely not really the case and it only feels so because of the way Real Life Stuff has been mirroring the weather of late. (Some of this is stuff I haven’t written about yet.)
Today, though, the sun is back in the sky, and that’s a good thing. Maybe I can even get out my camera for once…January was bad for photography. Just Godawful. Sigh….
Collins no longer performs due to age and health reasons, which is very sad…but there was a time when he was ubiquitous to a staggering degree. From the mid-80s to around 2000 or so, you couldn’t get away from the guy. In fact, I actually OD’d on Phil Collins during my college years, which is a shame but also a blessing in disguise, because in recent years I’ve been lucky enough to gradually rediscover him. In his prime he really was an electrifying musician.
Here are a few Phil favorites. This isn’t even close to all of his music that I love, and I’m limiting myself here to just his solo work. I’ve had a long-form essay in my head about the Genesis album Invisible Touch for a few years now….
(This was my first-ever Phil Collins song. I remember listening to it via MTV and thinking, “Wow, who’s this guy?”)
(Of all the great Phil Collins ballads, this one might be my favorite. From the movie White Nights, this duet–featuring a singer named Marilyn Martin who had a brief career in the 80s, this song is everything an 80s power ballad should be.)
By the way, I should admit that the one Phil Collins song that seems to get the most airplay these days, “In the Air Tonight”, has never been one of my favorites. That’s just how it goes. It always amazes me, though, that Collins could do gentle love songs, emotion-dripping power ballads, fast-paced dance bangers, and then he also did this genre of what I call “noir rock”, very dark and almost harsh songs that showed up in the soundtracks of Miami Vice and the noir-tinged episodes of Magnum PI.
Peter Schickele died on January 16 of this year. He was a composer and a comedian who was best known as the self-styled musicologist responsible for “unearthing” the music of “P.D.Q. Bach”, the “21st of J.S. Bach’s 20 children”. Over the years, Schickele crafted an entire life history of his fictional composer, and used “PDQ Bach”‘s work as a springboard to lampoon much of classical music. I have to admit that I have heard very little of Schickele/Bach, but what I have heard has always amused me. It takes a very good musician to do pastiche at this level, after all.
Schickele’s work along these lines was quite prolific, and he leaves behind an impressive catalog of musical works and albums that won several Grammys for Best Comedy Album. Often his work rewards knowledge of classical music, like this work here, which teases throughout with familiarity before going in completely different, frustratingly hilarious directions. Here is the 1712 Overture by Peter Schickele/PDQ Bach.
Last week I watched not one but two musical movies. These two movies are about as different from one another as you can imagine; in fact, about the only thing they have in common is that they are musical movies. One is a “traditional” style of musical in which the characters do the “break into song and dance” thing, a la the old classic musicals of the MGM and Warners era, while the other is a kind of mashup of a rockumentary and romance film about a performing duo, so the music is a part of the movie in terms of performance.
I adored both movies. They were La La Land and Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.
I’ll start with Eurovision. It opens in an Iceland household, sometime a few decades ago, when Lars, the son of a local fisherman (played by Pierce Brosnan in a craggy, growling performance that will remind no one of James Bond) forms his lifelong dream: to perform in the Eurovision Song Contest for Iceland, with his best friend, local girl Sigrit, as his duet partner. The film shifts to these two in adulthood as they are still pursuing this dream, even while they perform nonsense songs for the local bar crowd. Events ensue that lead them to that very Eurovision stage, with some of those events being much more improbable than others. If you’ve seen any version of the “Young musicians from the backwater try to make it big” story, you can see virtually every plot turn in his movie coming from a mile away…but there are surprises, as the way the movie gets the plot to unfold is, at times, surprising in the most delightful way. For instance–and I will say no more about it than this–the famous Icelandic Huldufolk, the “hidden people” who live in a magical parallel world and are said to occasionally visit our world to delve briefly into the affairs of humans, may or may not end up playing a role in a particularly sticky point in the story.
It doesn’t really matter if this movie’s twists and turns are obvious. You know Lars and Sigrit are going to make it to Eurovision, and you know that they are going to get closer and closer–maybe closer than they should. You know that they’ll suffer a major setback right when it seems they are on the cusp of victory, and you know that they’ll have to break up but then meet again when events somehow conspire to get them back on the Eurovision stage. This is one of those movies where you’re not seeing what happens next, but rather how the next thing happens.
And you’re also watching for the music. At least, I hope you are. This movie is chock-a-block with some of the most delightfully, zanily weird music I’ve ever heard in a movie. Imagine Icelandic pop songs given the prog rock treatment, with stage productions that are as over the top as you might imagine–and that’s just what you’d imagine in a movie with this plot description. But it’s also a Will Ferrell movie, and even if you don’t like Will Ferrell (I love him, personally), you can never accuse him of not giving himself entirely to the task at hand. And the task here is to play an almost endlessly optimistic dreamer of an aspiring Icelandic rock star whose dreams and vision might exceed his talent. Maybe.
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is a gorgeous film to watch and hear, and the acting is really top-notch, given how pretty much everyone is required to be over-the-top throughout. Did I mention Brosnan’s growling, snarling Icelandic fisherman? I did? Well, I’m mentioning him again. And Rachel McAdams as Sigrit is a perfect foil for Ferrell’s Lars; both are weirdly naive, but they’re weirdly naive in different ways, resulting in a couple that’s two adorkably clueless people trying to navigate a world they don’t really understand but desperately want to inhabit.
Oh, and Sigrit spends much of the movie rocking a cute pair of overalls. I report, folks.
Some critics think this movie was overlong, with too much music or whatnot. For me, it was perfect. I loved it.
Next:
Then there’s La La Land, which I though came out much more recently than it did. I honestly thought it came out either during COVID or just shortly before, but it actually arrived in 2016. Netflix kept suggesting La La Land to me, but I kept resisting, until the suggestion was accompanied by the warning: “Leaving Soon”. So, one night last week when I was home alone, I decided to finally watch it.
A few days after that, when I was not home alone, I asked The Wife if she wanted to watch a movie, and I cued up La La Land again.
I absolutely loved this movie. Loved loved loved this movie.
La La Land is a full-on musical in the grand old fashion. It even starts with a “vintage”-style animation for the studio logo, and when the film’s title finally appears onscreen, also in the “grand old style”, it takes up the entire screen, with a copyright notice in small print down at the bottom. The movie opens with a Big Ensemble Number, which unfolds during an LA traffic jam. Then we meet our protagonists: Mia (Emma Stone), who is on her way to work but isn’t focused on driving as much as her phone call, and Seb (Ryan Gosling), who is also on his way to work but is stuck behind Mia. He lays on the horn, she gives him the one-finger salute. That would be the end of it, if this weren’t an old-school Hollywood musical being made in 2016. Of course Mia and Seb are going to meet again. Of course they are going to make bad impressions on each other, which will culminate in a song-and-dance number about the fact that they have made bad impressions on each other. And of course that very song and dance number will be when their impressions of each other start to shift the other way.
Mia is an aspiring actress who works at the coffee shop on the Warners lot, so she gets to serve the Big Stars who come in for coffee before she goes off to an audition, still in her coffee shop uniform of a white blouse and black pants. (Of course she’s going to plow into a customer and end up with coffee all over her white blouse and of course she’s not going to have time to change so of course she’ll audition with the coffee stained shirt, not get the part, and end up walking down the hallway from the talent office back to the elevator, passing a dozen other white-shirted baristas hoping to land the same role.
Meanwhile, Seb is a chronically behind-on-his-bills jazz pianist, so of course his apartment is a spartan mess and of course his car is the one good thing he owns. Of course his current job is being the piano player in a local lounge, and of course he chafes against playing the set list as written (it’s December, so it’s Christmas tunes). Of course he veers off course in the middle of a Christmas carol and instead goes on an improvisational tear, which leads to his firing. Of course his next gig is playing synth for an 80s cover band. (A scene where Mia is at the same party he’s playing, recognizes him, and tweaks him by requesting that the band play “I Ran” is one of the movie’s biggest laughs.)
La La Land‘s first hour isn’t surprising at all, but that’s not the point. These two characters are sympathetic and likeable, even if they don’t like each other just yet, and the musical numbers are really catchy and well-shot and excellently choreographed. Neither Gosling nor Stone is really endowed with a singer’s voice, but both do very well with what they’ve got, and the dancing is the real star here, anyway. As they segue from not liking one another to wooing one another, often in the backdrop of great music and great movies, the courtship culminates in a magical number set at the Griffith Observatory. This number is when I committed to loving this movie. (This movie makes me want to go to Los Angeles, which is saying something. I’ve nothing against LA, particularly, but it’s never been a place I want to visit, either.)
Stone and Gosling have considerable chemistry together, and it’s never hard to believe either of them, either separately as an aspiring actress and an aspiring jazz club owner, or together as a couple trying to enable each others’ passions and dreams while recognizing along the way that each is at times backing away from those dreams and settling for a life of unsatisfying comfort over a life of never backing down. Their relationship develops in a logical way and takes them to places that make sense.
It’s no surprise that their relationship is tested more and more as both Mia and Seb get closer to their dreams, in ways that seem to be costing them in terms of themselves and each other. The film’s ultimate resolution of their love story is bittersweetly satisfying, culminating in a long montage-like dance number that is so clearly modeled on the “Broadway Melody” ballet from Singin’ in the Rain that I was almost expecting a young hoofer to enter from stage right, singing “Gotta dance!” This is absolutely a homage and not a theft, though; ultimately La La Land is a modern love letter to the great musicals of Hollywood’s studio era. And this, I suppose, is a love letter to La La Land. What a wonderful movie.
No, I never met Kreskin. Never saw him in person either, though once I was in Laughlin, Nevada for a few days and he was playing at the hotel right across the street. I saw an ad — I think tickets to his show were $9.95 or even lower — and there was a number to call for reservations. I thought, “Reservations? If Kreskin’s any good, he oughta just know I’m coming and save a seat for me!”
But I never got over there. I’d have liked to see him because I liked his style and patter, especially when he was guesting on someone else’s show and had time restraints put on him. He had his own show for a while and I recall that he would take a solid three-minute trick and stretch it out to what felt like ten.
But! In the last decade or two I developed an aversion to magicians who pass perfectly simple magic tricks off as genuine psychic power or telepathy. I’m one of those people who believes — no, knows that there ain’t no such thing as genuine psychic power. I could tolerate and even appreciate it with someone like my pal, the late Max Maven. Max did it with style and in a manner that…well, you’d have to be really, really dimwitted to think it was anything but a trick.
But I have seen magicians who felt that a vital part of their act was convincing the audience that their “psychic powers” were bona fide. I have to wonder how many of them acted as a kind of gateway drug for the kind of people who fall prey to the Sylvia Brownes of the world. I’m talking about connivers who feign such powers to bilk the bilkable.
Reading this, I suddenly remembered: I saw The Amazing Kreskin perform! It was when I was just in 2nd grade. We lived in Elkins, WV at the time; this was 1978-1979. Kreskin is still alive now; he’s 89 years old, so he would have been around 44 when I saw him perform live.
I don’t remember much specifically about the performance, though I do recall that he did some “Blind reading” type stuff, where he’d purport to opening himself up to the mental energies of the room, and then he’d start saying things like “I’m getting something about…someone here has a loved one–a brother, maybe–in the hospital. The brother needs a procedure….” And eventually someone in the audience whose life kinda-sorta matched what Kreskin was saying would stand up and say “That’s me!” It was easy to fall for, honestly.
He also did some sleight-of-hand magic, which is what I liked the most. I only remember one trick, where he put his hands inside a thick pillowcase and had a couple of audience members tightly bunch it up around his wrists so he couldn’t move or do anything…and then suddenly he pulls his hands out, holding a glass of water. That trick was pretty cool.
I don’t recall a whole lot more than that. Mr. Evanier is right that magicians have to walk a careful line between willing suspension of disbelief and soliciting outright belief. David Copperfield (whom I also saw live, in 1996 or so) was–is?–a magnificent showman who created real tension and an atmosphere conducive to belief in what he was doing, but nobody really believed that he had been cut in half by the falling blade or that he had made the Statue of Liberty disappear or that he had actually passed incorporeally through the Great Wall of China.
I know that I didn’t come out of Kreskin’s show way back then believing in magic any more than I had the day before. I do remember a good time and being somewhat amazed by what went on that night. So, I think I came out ahead.
