(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

I have very mixed feelings about Sarah McLachlan. On one hand, I really love some of her songs (never the whole album, though, although "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy" was decent, overall, as a cohesive whole). I enjoy being entranced, in a somewhat uncomfortable way, by the creepy subversiveness of "Possession," I delight in "Building a Mystery," I love her cover of "Dear God" and I think "Ice" is one of the most beautiful songs ever writetn by anyone, period. But on the other hand, so much of the the time she is way too Lilith Fair for me without any nuances to differentiate that entire body of her work from a thousand other songs that I find as interesting and engaging as pretty wallpaper. She fails to be consistently interesting (to me) and that makes me suspicious that when she IS interesting, it is accidental.

BUT I have to say that without fail I appreciate how her music has been used in the visual medium. Either it's something about her music that makes it particularly suitable for sound illustrations, or it's just random fortune, but her music has been put to excellent use on the big screen and the small one.

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer," was a show that, unlike its WB (for the first 5 seasons at least) peers, really made a consistent and concerted effort to score its narratives with really independent/obscure/alternative music (as opposed, say, to the "alternative" soundtrack of "Dawson's Crack"). Through "Buffy" I discovered Cibo Matto, Rasputina, Velvet Chain, Darling Violetta, Dollshead, K's Choice, THC, etc. Music on "Buffy" was always used very well, without lapsing into that eye-rolling territory of song-lyrics-literally-illustrating-screen-ongoings. But two of the best "use of music" moments on "Buffy" happened in season 2 and season 6 finales, and involved Sarah McLachlan.

The final five minutes of "Becoming Part 2," the season two finale, the saddest five minutes scripted and produced for network TV ever (with the possible exception of the Al Gore "West Wing" SNL skit in 2003) are set to "Full of Grace," and from the shot of her stepping away from the statue of Acathla starts up, scrunching up her face as "the winter here's cold and bitter...", to the final fade-out of her on the Greyhound out of Sunnydale, I really can't think of any other song that would have worked as well.

And similarly, as the black drains out of Willow's hair and Buffy and Dawn climb out of the grave at the end of "Grave," "The Prayer of St. Francis" provides a perfect musical culmination to the one Buffy finale that was slightly more uplifting at the end, rather than utterly and completely devastating, as they tended to be.

There was a peculiar film called "Kissed" a few years ago, that I liked, although I didn't expect to. Some people get angry at films that are obvious tearjerkers, films that they feel manipulate them in a slick but effective Pavlovian way. Those films don't bother me. I may cry at them, but it's like a sunshower, I flex the tearducts, and there is no trace five minutes later, not like with films that may not make me cry, but haunt me for days (like "Mysterious Skin" which I saw last weekend). I do have an ambivalent relationship to films that make me like them because of their sheer beauty. I don't mean, like, "inner beauty" of the message, we all know how I feel about "beauty", but I mean a particular kind of cinematography, of the sort you find in Alfonso Cuaron films, that affects me in the same way that the "icy geometry" prose pieces do. The ambiguity comes from being dissatisfied with the content, while being completely enraptured by the medium. "Great Expectations," the 1998 adaptation with Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, is a perfect example of that. The script was atroctious and the whole project was misguided and uneven in flow, but the film was so fucking beautiful, from the scenes of the dilapidated, green-and-sun-drenched Florida mansion set to "Besame Mucho" to the Francisco Clemente paintings used as Pip's/Finn's creations.

Anyway, "Kissed" was kind of like that. I am not sure how I ended up seeing a film about necrophilia, it must have been by accident, because while I am not, like, Horrified by the topic, I can't imagine being intrigued by the idea of a film about it enough to actively seek it out. But somehow I ended up seeing it and I had the same dissonant experience of being unmoved and uncaptivated by the subject (I stayed interested throughout the main heroine's childhood relationship to death and her rituals for the dead animals she found, but the film became too literal for me once she gets a job at the funeral parlor and practices her fusion of spirituality/sexuality with the more attractive corpses), but drawn in by the slow, serious, grave beauty and carefulness with which the film unfolded on-screen. Still, I wasn't as seduced even by this aesthetic as I was with "Great Expectations" until the climactic scene which is set to "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy," and that song completes that film, at least on an aesthetic level, that took it from "films I am unsure about" to "films I am ambivalent about because they captivate me for reasons I maybe find shallow but I am okay with that, mostly."

And when I saw that trainwreck of a film, "Brokedown Palace" with Claire Danes, my only positive memory of anything pertaining to that film is the trailer (I really appreciate good trailers), which conveyed just the right urgency and anxiety and desperation that the film failed to deliver. The trailer was set to the Delirium/Sarah McLachlan song "Silence."

I am trying to think of another artist who has been used to well so consistently in films and I sort of can't. Except possibly Johnny Cash.

P.S. In Sarah McLachlan's case, I claim exemption with regard to her song "Angel" featured in "City of Angels" on the grounds that I hate the song, the film and 99% of American remakes in general.

Comments

my $0.02

[damiella.livejournal.com]

You know, I agree with you on Sarah's hits and misses and the general quality of Fumbling Toward Ecstasy, but I can't stand hearing her songs used in poignant movie/tv moments (ESPECIALLY "I Will Remember You". I have no doubt she wrote that song solely for licensing purposes). I don't know what it is, because I think she has a beautiful voice, but hearing it undercut a dramatic big/small screen moment feels so cloying and irks me to no end. I don't count "Silence", though, because I consider it a Delerium song, and it has a completely other (much sexier and haunting) mood and tone.

Re: my $0.02

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I think I have been lucky enough to have been spared hearing "I Will Remember You"! Which movies did it show up in? I think it was in "Brothers McMullen" which I never saw, and I am sure it was in a gazillion other things...

[boymaenad.livejournal.com]

I look at it like this: she was starting out experimentally, hit her stride coincidental with a big emotional breakup or other when writing Fumbling, and since then has tried to recapture the beauty and urgency of that album but is just too successful and happy to do it. with a few exceptions, I can chart her brilliance as a narrow bell curve centered around Fumbling. have you heard her cover of Joni Mitchell's "Blue"? I can mail it to you (even though I still haven't actually sat and listened to the stuff you sent me).

on the buffy use (http://boymaenad.livejournal.com/37756.html)

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I have heard her cover of "Blue" (I own the Bee-Sides CD) and I like it, but the thing is, I've just never liked Joni Mitchell's songs as much as I would like to, they are just not very interesting to me, which is kind of meta-interesting to me, because it seems like they should be based on everything I like in music.

I love her cover of "Gloomy Sunday," though.

Thanks for the link to the Buffy entry! You were so lucky to have been there!

I think at least in the first 5 seasons BtVS was so consciously anti-christian/anti-religious that they are sort of like Caesar's Wife, above suspicion in my mind when it comes to that. I don't know what happened in season 7 when they kind of turned Spike into a JC figure, from that episode where Buffy first finds out he has a soul and he burns a cross into his chest at the church to the finale where he Dies for Sunnydale's Sins, but I didn't find Xander's intervention in S. 6 to be Christ-like. That was, actually, to me, the only non-annoying Xander moment after Becoming Part 2 where he fails to deliver Willow's message. And of course, later in season 7 he is still annoying, because he reminds everyone of his accomplishments w/r/t "saving the world with a crayon." He was way cooler than that in the Zeppo where he just kind of doesn't tell them what happened. Okay, I guess he didn't annoy me in "The Zeppo" too much, either.

[schrodingersgnu.livejournal.com]

My favorite score-use is still Rammsteins "Heirate Mich" in Lost Highway. The raw agression fits the moment perfectly, and the german lyrics functions to underscrore the main characters confusion. You get the feeling that if you only understood what they were singing, you'd understand what is going on (which is partially true), but like the main character you are left in incomprehension and fear.

[tigermilkdrunk.livejournal.com]

Cool moment, certainly, but it's trumped by the the use of Mein Herz Brennt (forgive my lack of German spelling) at the opening of Lilya 4-Ever.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Oh, there are tons of other artists/songs that are used very successfully and skillfully in specific movies/TV shows/soundtracks, but I meant an artist who is consistnely used well in different, diverse contexts.

[theophile.livejournal.com]

what is there to understand? Marilyn Manson sodomizing Twiggy Ramirez? it speaks for itself!

[tigermilkdrunk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, while I'm not a fan of hers per se, I really do like the version of Prayer of St. Francis at the end of season 6 (a story arc, and an episode, that only worked when I saw it a second time all in one go several years later).

The use of Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man (most of the album, really) in Love Etc. I remember really liking...

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

In terms of best use of an artist in a single movie, Leonard Cohen wins for "Pump Up The Volume" with "Natural Born Killers" coming in at close second.

[theophile.livejournal.com]

I think Sarah is an amazing songwriter and performer who has, throughout her career, almost never stumbled into good production at the right time. her first few Nettwerk albums are synthpoppy in all of the worst ways-- she used synth drums and pads to ruin her music almost as effectively as Jane Siberry did, in her Madonna-wannabe days-- and then there was a brief window, including Fumbling and about 2/3 of Solace where she actually gave her music the respect and reverence it deserves.

I mean, with almost no exceptions, every "raw" track on the Freedom Sessions is better than the corresponding studio version (the heavily-distorted Ice and the stripped-down Ice Cream are both stellar, and the Old '55 cover is one of the best inappropriate covers I know). and watching her live is still breathtaking. she just needs some goddamn confidence in her abilities, and she needs to go the Morrissey/Orbison/Bargeld route of: one vocal take per song, period.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

What did you think of "Surfacing"?

I like "Freedom Sessions" a lot, but not across the board. I think the stripped-down "Ice Cream" is way better than the "Fumbling" track, but I prefer the album version of "Ice" and "Possession" (although I can appreciate the the acoustic versions, it's a "thinking about it" kind of liking, rather than visceral "yes" kind of liking).

[already2late.livejournal.com]

The script was atroctious and the whole project was misguided and uneven in flow, but the film was so fucking beautiful, from the scenes of the dilapidated, green-and-sun-drenched Florida mansion set to "Besame Mucho" to the Francisco Clemente paintings used as Pip's/Finn's creations.

And let's not forget the scene in which Ethan is painting Gwyneth's portrait, set to Pulp's Like A Friend... Feel the same way about that movie. Hated and loved it at the same time.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

If I remember correctly, amadea mentioned that you are also a big fan of that song, "Life in Mono" from that soundtrack, yes?

also

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking about the movie on the subway ride home, and for all of its flaws, I think it has one of the sexiest scenes I've ever seen in a film. Not the one later in the movie where they get it on after he waltzes her out of the restaurant, but in the beginning, after she stands him up for some party, and then comes over to his house and he gets her off, and then she leaves.

I don't really have conventional taste in what I find sexy in films, though. My favorite "sex scene" is in "Out of Sight" because of how it's shot, even though it's not graphic at all.

Oh, and I guess I thought "Bound" and "Secretary" were really hot, and that, I imagine is pretty common.

[alice-ayers.livejournal.com]

I think I loved hating it. Alot.

Seriously, I love how Cuaron uses music like colour in that film. Like the preponderance of green. And how in his A Little Princess green is how a perfect home looks to the protangonist. It's lovely and amazing.

[isolt.livejournal.com]

I've also liked "Life in Mono" since I first heard it, before I'd even seen the movie.

[saintpeg.livejournal.com]

Boy, did I ever like (her album) Solace when I was in high school. I never got into her records after that one, but I certainly wasted many a minute of Chemistry class scrawling "If I cried me a river of all my confessions would I drown in my shallow regret" over and over in my notebooks in swirly handwriting. Yep, I was deep.
Always dug her Donovan cover on that record too. Unfortunately my brief Sarah fandom led to my mom classifying my entire taste in music as subscribing to a genre she called "whiny girl music," which I must say was SO unfair. Because I listened to a LOT of Morrissey who is SO CLEARLY not a girl.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Morrissey is more of a girl than Kirsten Hersh.

[theodora.livejournal.com]

I think I liked - or, was seriously affected by, Brokedown Palace because I was in law school at the time, which felt distinctly like prison, and which at the same time was...useful, in a way I can't fully explain. It was willable confinement in a way that that Southeast Asian prison can to be willable confinement. So the movie was bad. I was clocking it as bad. And yet at the end, I was fucking destroyed. Something about Claire Danes being a screaming bad girl...that I believed, that came across, in a way that doesn't usually when flawlessly-skinned young A-list actresses take a turn playing rough.

And Buffy, conversations about Buffy being so hard to resist, even when they're other people's conversations. I feel moves to mention The Wish, the dream episode finale of season 3, Selfless, Dopplegangland...
It's hard. There were killer episodes, and then there were also killer moments enclosed in not-overall-killer episodes. The history of Spike, the handful of bills Buffy throws in his face, the finale of that episode where Faith bodysnatches Buffy, the way that, tucked in Buffy's body, she has a go at killing herself...

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Well, that could be a separate Buffy category, "moments that killed me"--which is why I exerpted "I Was Made To Love You" as an Episode That Killed Me, b/c aside from that scene at the end where Buffy is consoling the robot girl on the playground as her batteries are running out, it's not a particularly remarkable episode.

But, sure, okay, Moments That Killed Me:


The entire scene in "Passion" where the audience is Angel's POV from outside the Summers house, so we can't hear anything that's going on, but we can see through the window and we realize that they find out that Jenny is dead

When Buffy says she'll just let the candle burn at the end of "Innocence"

When Anyanka asks Giles how he knows that the other world is any better at the end of "The Wish" and he says "because it has to be"

The entire last 10 minutes of "The Prom"

Liek you said, the history of Spike and when Buffy repeats that line, "you're beneath me" except that I disagree with you in the sense that I thought "Fool for Love" was an overall-killer episode

Again, like you said, that scene with Buffy/Faith and Faith/Buffy in the church where Faith is, essentially, beating the shit out of herself, screaming "you are nothing, you murderous bitch"

Spike's "every night I saved you" speech at the end of the second part of "Bargaining"

Then later when he says to Buffy "you are not drawn to the darkness...you are addicted to the misery"

Anya walking down the aisle in the most cruel perversion of a wedding scene ever in "Hell's Bells"


and then there are perfect tiny moments that aren't even scenes, but the way Spike cocks his head when he puts down the shotgun he intended to shoot Buffy with at the end of "Fool for Love" when he realizes she is crying

And moments like the end of the "Angel" series finale when Harmony says she misses her heart...like, no character on those shows was ever truly two-dimensional.

[atallvlad.livejournal.com]

How do you always manage to convey that perfectly appropriate nerdiliciously apt brand of intelligent humor of yours? I think I love ya.

[apathyfabulous.livejournal.com]

No one has mentioned Moby: Play.

Certainly the most insanely over exposed album in commercials and crap maintstream films of all time, no?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

right, but I was talking about "used a lot and well" rather than overexposed in ridiculous and redundant ways.

[christophrawr.livejournal.com]

Got Roy Orbison and KD Lang doing their duet of "Crying", shilling silently into the chilly night with kite-d wi-fi. sighsighsigh. :)

[apathyfabulous.livejournal.com]

ohhh good call. Roy Orbison has been used quite a bit and very effectively.