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Movies that make you feel musical


deanmass

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Platoon. The way Stone used Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. Bits here and there. The piece never resolves really. For 10 minutes all we get is more and more suspension. Used beautifully in that flick. Mix that with the careless rock and roll of the era and you have a pretty potent brew of music. From excruciatingly sad to over the top joy.

 

Moulin Rouge! Before seeing the picture, I wanted nothing to do with it. Rock and pop songs redone in a MTV-esque opera with Ewen MacGregor and Nicole Kidman singing? Thanks, but no. Then, with protest, I saw it. Baz Luhrmann's idea really was captured better than anyone could ever have imagined. The Flamenco treatment of Roxanne is amazing. To the rolling eyes of my buddies, I love this flick and its music. Beck does a killer cover of Bowie's Diamond Dogs. And of all people, John Leguazamo's rendition of Nat King Cole's Nature Boy steals the show.

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Platoon
. The way Stone used Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. Bits hear and there. The piece never resolves really. For 10 minutes all we get is more and more suspension. Used beautifully in that flick. Mix that with the careless rock and roll of the era and you have a pretty potent brew of music. From excruciatingly sad to over the top joy.

 

 

 

Thanks for the reminder, Lee! I always had a feeling about the use of the Adagio. Thanks to the miracles of Google and Google Books I can confirm that suspicion. It was "Temp Music" that stuck. Temp music is used during the film cutting.

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A Clockwork Orange. Walter (then) / Wendy (now) Carlos' electronic treatment of standard classical repertoire was perversely fitting. The juxtaposition of the old traditional with the new and frightening young played perfectly with Alex's joyfully violent droogs.

 

2001: A Space Odyssey. The contrast between the 2 Strauss. Johann's Blue Danube is the ecstasy to Richard's ominous and fear of the unknown Also Sprach Zarathustra. It got a generation into the classics.

 

I can't let you do that, Dave...

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Performance. Directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. Possibly Mick Jagger's best screen role. (Not saying a whole lot, I know; I also saw Ned Kelly... oh my.) Jagger doesn't do much singing -- at all -- but the soundtrack put together by Jack Nitzsche is brilliant, a collection of great snippets from all kinds of folks, with de facto soundtrack theme, "Gone Dead Train" performed by Crazy Horse with Randy Newman singing lead and, IIRC, Ry Cooder sitting in on slide. And the wonderful Jagger composition, "Memo from Turner," done with the same backup but Jagger doing a great, snarling job of it -- and the hallucinatory movie sequence that accompanies it is... oh... just frigging brilliant!
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BTW Ras, West Side Story is one of my favorites. I love the sinister gang sequences. Get Cool boy, When You're a Jet, etc. Berstein. Why didn't he do more of this? I never understood why he didin't a least do another musical.

 

 

Because he was driven by the need to serve "Ahhht", that bitch-goddess.

 

I read recently that his 1971 cantata, MASS, was re-mounted in a big way in NYC.

 

The new reassessment is that it's not nearly as bad as it sounds.

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