Howard Who?

Films about music will always be made, because music and film go together like carpet and floor. They are both mediums that require time to unfold. And they both attempt to capture a spontaneous moment of performance. A few movies go further and attempt to capture the spontaneous moment of music creation, meaning that one spark that makes a song appear out of thin air. Barring a cheesy one like Coyote Ugly, it’s done pretty well sometimes.

The mother of them all for me is Amadeus. Aside from it being Mozart year (he would have turned 250 years old had he lived), this film is a perennial favorite because it details the creative process in a realistic way. I mean negotiating revenues and commissions for an opera spectacle could come straight out of a movie about Hollywood. Of course, the movie also takes great care to canonize Mozart, in case we didn’t think he was special.

The picture above is from a scene in Amadeus that I think may be the greatest movie musical muse moment. The sick Mozart frantically tells Salieri what to write in order to satisfy his last commission. It’s not that Mozart actually composed this way. It’s not even that the musical terminology is used correctly. It’s that here’s a guy whose music lives in his head, and that the “head” music all us composers try to write on paper, he did because he was that good.

The piece being composed by the way is the Confutatis from the Requiem Mass, K. 626. He starts to compose each individual line starting with basses and then moves up (basses are at the bottom of an orchestral score). And when they’ve written enough, he looks at the page and we hear the music he just dictated scoring the movie we’re watching. Thank God this movie won Best Picture.

Confutatis (mp3) - Mozart  Buy

I want to write about Eminem’s Lose Yourself because it is such a great movie song, but…cut to 2005:

Walk the Line is a good movie about Johnny Cash and his travails with drugs, women, music, and most of all, daddy issues. And we see him in the army, watching an informational video about Folsom Prison. And we see him later in military garb playing guitar and singing “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” And then we see Cash audition at record company trying to sing some standard rockabilly tune. Well, after the record exec trashes that, Cash comes back with his Folsom Prison Blues in a form we almost recognize. And then by the end of the movie, we see him get on the Folsom Prison stage and rock them with the famous version. Kudos goes to Joaquin Phoenix for attempting to imitate the Cash drawl…but nothing beats the real thing.

Folsom Prison Blues (mp3) - Joaquin Phoenix Buy

Folsom Prison Blues (mp3) - Johnny Cash Buy

Hustle and Flow is an admirable movie because it shows the pimping game with the least amount of rose colored glassing that I’ve ever seen. It’s not so much romanticized as much as Terrence Howard gives an absolutely mesmerizing performance that can’t help but be universal. And even though rap is not a universal art form, it has the virtue of being genuine expression of hopes, desires, libidos, violence, and everything else that crosses the human psyche. Hustle does it unusually well with its exploration of how Taraji Henson is coaxed into singing her impassioned rendition of the chorus and how Howard writes his lyrics and how a scrawny white kid can put together a phat beat. Sure, the words may be unsavory at times, but it’s an expression of the outlaw lifestyle just as surely as Johnny Cash was. Times and words may change, but the message stays the same.

It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp (mp3) - Terrence Howard Buy

A Prairie Home Companion is probably the best musical movie of 2006, a title that will mostly like be taken away promptly when Dreamgirls opens later this year. But Lindsay Lohan only appears in one of these movies. Now I like Mean Girls and I think Lindsay is talented, but she doesn’t strike me as being Altman material. In the movie, she doesn’t seem entirely comfortable, but she does a good enough job, especially in her scene where she reminisces with Garrison Keillor, who has a tendency to make everyone look good because he is that good.

Lindsay can be seen in the movie writing lyrics about death and suicide, which sound funny and over the top, and of course, by the end of the movie, she has to sing it. The performance has texture, and she makes the song feel like a spontaneous adaptation of her lyrics into sung melodies (around 1:35 she purposefully muffs part of the chorus). It’s a nice moment in the movie, and speaks to the spirit of getting up and singing your thoughts….a sort of blue grass karaoke if you will.

Frankie & Johnny (mp3) - Lindsay Lohan Buy

There’s so many more example that could be in this post that I’ll have to save them for later.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 9:06 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Classical Music, Movies, Film Music, Pop Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.