Ed. note: It’s time for another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he looks at the recent film by the Frenchmen Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo, Daft Punk’s Electroma:

My roommate loves him some Daft Punk, to the exclusion of the rest of the canon of western music. He might branch out to such fare as Cut Copy, Hot Chip, and “Love Lockdown”; one time, he borrowed my copy of Discovered: A Collection of Daft Funk Samples to head-scratching results. But beyond that, it’s solely the work of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo that gets him going.

So you might presume that he would automatically be a fan of the French duo’s most recent artistic endeavor, a full-length film entitled Daft Punk’s Electroma. And yet, he’s avoided it so far. He is not alone. Take this testimonial from the IMDB message board about the 71-minute film that premiered to fleeing audiences at midnight movies across the country: “Daft Punk is one of my favorite bands of all time. I love the mood, texture, feel and dance-ability of their music. I love their costumes, live shows, and their (robotic lack of?) personality. But I did not like this movie.”

The film was written and directed by Bangalter and De Homem-Christo (with Bangalter handling cinematographic duties), though with Peter Hurteau and Michael Reich playing the DP roles, clad in Hedi Slimane Dior Homme leather– the Discovery-era helmets of silver and gold still firmly affixed. How could Daft Punk fans detest such fare? It’s easy: hushed, patient, stilled, naturalistic, sparing in releasing its pleasures, Daft Punk’s Electroma is the absolute antithesis of Daft Punk’s music.

Which is no doubt how the duo likes it. In the latest issue of Stop Smiling (full disclosure: my essay on Breathless actress Jean Seberg also appears in this issue), Daft Punk discuss the film, and when interviewer Matt Diehl confesses to hating the movie the first time through, Guy-Manuel responds: “Cool, I’m happy you didn’t like it the first time. You’re not the only one.” Indeed. In much the same way that viral video footage of Daft Punk’s Coachella performance (and subsequent US tour) exponentially spread the gospel, fans have taken to YouTube again to “remix” Electroma to their liking.

For this YouTube viewer, the movie is too long at 1 hour 11 minutes (?!) and since its soundtrack features decidedly “non-banger” fare from the likes of Brian Eno, folkies Linda Perhacs and Jackson C. Frank, Franz Joseph Hayden, and Fryderyk Chopin, Daft Punk’s music is plopped on top. Which wholly misses the point.

On previous albums, the group melded disparate influences like DJ Sneak, the Beach Boys, Supertramp, Li’l Louis, and Dr. Dre; Electroma performs a similar feat but with their favorite directors. Traces of Godardian jump cuts, Antonionian alien landscapes, THX-1138‘s dystopia, Phantom of the Paradise‘s leather gear, and David Lynch’s bent Americana all factor into the story. And rather than create their own soundtrack, the two draw on their extensive record collection (though other viewers have attempted to synch up Human After All to the movie, a la Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz, to mixed results). The ominous sinewaves at the film’s opening soon reveal themselves as the opening to Todd Rundgren’s acid-king pop opera A Wizard, a True Star.

After a few passes through the film, Electroma emerges as the story of two disconnected teenage friends unable to fit into a Twilight Zone-esque society of similarly masked robots. (The town sorta reminds me of my own youth, wherein I had helmeted astronauts from my space Lego set walk through my Lego town set.) The two friends, trapped in the despair that only such a small town can impart, rebel and become human. Such attempts at escape and being different only turn the town of silver and gold chrome-domes against them, so that the two friends flee as outcasts, abandoned to wander the scrublands of California until they come to realize the only real way to escape this life is through self-destruction and self-immolation.

Or are they wandering through the desert? After numerous slow shots of sand and people-less landscapes, lost acid-folk chanteuse Linda Perhac’s exquisite song of longing, “If You Were My Man,” comes on. Curvaceous mounds and dunes rise and fall as everything merges with the night. But I’ll be damned if those two long, smooth ridges don’t look like freshly shaved legs. And those two mounds higher up look awfully familiar. That scraggly bush seems strategically placed as well.

See for yourself at 3:05:

An art house film that climaxes with a shot that would make Gustave Courbet proud? How could Daft Punk fans not go for a beaver shot?

Ed. note: It’s time for another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he looks at the sounds of two mid-’70s movies by famed director Robert Altman, California Split and Thieves Like Us:

Film scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum contributed an essay to Stop Smiling (#35: The Gambling Issue), that connects the sound design in Robert Altman’s underappreciated 1974 film California Split to that of group-improvised jazz. The movie was the first to use an eight-track mixer, and Altman was finally able to deftly move the mix between scripted dialogue and improvised background chatter, highlighting riffs or lines that would’ve been lost otherwise (see 1970′s MASH to hear how such dialogue was previously, uh, mashed together).

Throughout his career, Altman’s soundtracks were striking affairs. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, he deployed Leonard Cohen’s music to devastating effect; 1973′s The Long Goodbye takes Johnny Williams and Johnny Mercer’s song “The Long Goodbye” and inundates the southern California landscape with it in such a way that it resounds from every nook and cranny, be it the canned music of a supermarket or the chime of a doorbell.

But California Split made extant Altman’s long-held love for the art of jazz, particularly the more ensemble-based strains as rendered by Dixieland ensembles and Count Basie in Kansas City (see 1996′s love letter to the form, Kansas City). That jazz metaphor extends to Split‘s leads themselves, as Rosenbaum notes: “[George] Segal plays…a sort of inner-fire Miles Davis to [Elliott] Gould’s Charlie Parker, smoldering with brooding intensity.” Such an ability to mic up and mix his ensemble’s scripted lines, improvisations, accidents, and riffing in ways that revealed new nuances and coincidences would reach its apex in 1975′s Nashville.

In 1974′s Thieves Like Us, Altman went for a completely different stylistic approach. In telling the doomed love story between escaped convict Keith Carradine and naïf counter girl Shelley Duvall against the backdrop of the Great Depression-era Mississippi, Altman emphasizes a nearly silent sound design. The film hews to his insistence–as he noted in the 2005 collection, Altman on Altman–that his movie’s “music be indigenous, so that there’s not going to be any violins that you can’t see, that it won’t come from nowhere.” As much as his later work would emphasize jazz, Thieves also draws on the other music from Altman’s childhood.

He notes in the same book that “in the 1930s all I did as a kid (was) listen to the radio for two hours when I got home from school. Radio was everywhere, filled with commercials–it’s what created the consumer society.” The film’s convicts, shopkeeps, farmhands, and others all pass the evening hours by the radio out on the patio, sipping nickel Cokes or whiskey while rocking in their chairs. As critic Catherine Plumb noted in her 1974 essay on the film, “the characters are not merely products of the American Dream; they’re the dreamers who keep it going, as well. They’re myth buyers, consumers who devour the Dream as if their identities and then their very lives depend upon the intake.” She goes on to add that the radio is the antagonist itself: “Radio functions here as myth barker, hawking its American Dream of love songs and glamour and Norge Home Appliances to people who can’t afford the price.” Stemming from such a blanketing of delusions, the radio and its old-time programming provides the soundtrack for the film while furthering the plot.

“I’m not much interested in music that just goes along with the action,” Altman once stated, and the meticulously curated radio selections back that up. Snatches from bygone shows like Speed Gibson of the International Secret Police and radio announcements about Seabiscuit either buoy or offer juxtapose to the on-screen proceedings. While Gangbusters, with its hammy organ chords and Tommy gun sound-effects, cartoonishly frames the film’s first bank robbery, later on a bloody heist gets scored by a speech from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The sinister laugh and announcement “Who knows what evil lies in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” provides foreshadowing even during something as innocuous as washing the dishes after dinner.

Naturalistic as the radio is in its appearance, in one lone scene, it breaks from the reality entirely. It occurs when Carradine’s Bowie invites Duvall’s Keechie to “listen to the radio” with him. This awkward, gawky, though wholly endearing beanpole couple–all teeth, elbows, knees, and ear cartilage–comes together while listening to that evening’s program, “The Radio School of the Air Presents Romeo and Juliet.” Three times the new couple copulate to the heave of Shakespearean strings. And thrice the radio announcer states: “Thus did Romeo and Juliet consummate their first interview by falling madly in love with each other.” Time itself ruptures here, which raised the ire of critics and audiences for being too cloying and clever.

For a film that has kept to the realistic, this is an awkward and unnatural occurrence, but what’s interesting is that the first instance of the radio in the film also marks the first appearance of Keechie herself. And while the radio trades in delusions, myths, “American dreams” and is (in Plumb’s rightful estimation) the antagonist, Duvall proffers instead the exact opposite. For one fleeting instant, this naïve love scene hints that what’s between the two characters might somehow be more real than reality itself.

Ed. note: It’s time for another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he looks at the music that serves as the backdrop to Wall-E‘s scorched earth:

Not that my eyes are the most discerning sensory organs, but after watching the computer animated sequences of Walt Disney’s uneven Fantasia 2000, I found myself wholly unable to sit through more than ten minutes of a Pixar or any similarly computer-animated film. Try as I might to get into Toy Story, Osmosis Jones, The Iron Giant, or Shrek, the surface sheen of them–for whatever intangible aesthetic reason–repulsed my optic nerves. For years, I simply couldn’t take the look of them, firmly resolved to never find Nemo.

That all changed with 2004′s The Incredibles, though I still can’t pinpoint what exactly catapulted me over that visual block. Perhaps the lifelike recreation of that superhero family struck me as more marionette-like than machine-made. (In my mind’s eye, I can still see every strand of Dash Parr’s hair.) Maybe the Brad Bird-directed film pushed all the (correctly sequenced) emotional buttons and drew me deeply into the story. Regardless, I found myself hooked, and I was subsequently drawn to the metroplex itself for Ratatouille and Pixar’s most recent entry, WALL-E. Call it Magic Eye Syndrome or something; once stuck on the surface, I now readily plunge into such computer-generated realms, drawn in by the human-like poignancy that directors like Bird and WALL-E‘s Andrew Stanton elicit from rats, cars, cockroaches, and rusty trash-compacting robots.

WALL-E opens with “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” from Hello, Dolly!–more on that particular musical later–and it’s light and buoyant, a prelude to WALL-E‘s grim reality of a junkyard earth and our hero, the Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class ‘bot, left behind to routinely stack up the trash. In the wordless opening half of the film, the soundtrack mixes robotic whirrs, bleeps, start-up dings, and rrrrrrs (courtesy of the man who voiced R2-D2, sound designer Ben Burtt) with the harps, horns, and tympanum composed by Randy Newman’s cousin, Thomas Newman. (The Newman clan basically has Pixar soundtracks on lock, to say nothing of ZZ Top videos directed by cousin Tim Newman.)

After starting his career crafting electronic-based scores for ’80s fare like Desperately Seeking Susan, Revenge of the Nerds, and Real Genius, Newman shaded toward more classical orchestrations in the ’90s. And while he has lost in each of his past eight Academy Award nominations (though cousin Randy lost plenty more before winning with Monsters, Inc. in 2001), Newman did win an Emmy for composing the theme to Six Feet Under. Since the film tacks on a Peter Gabriel-assisted “feel good about the environment” single (“Down to Earth”) at the end, there’s hope that Newman might finally garner an Oscar of his own this year. For his efforts in the earliest parts of the film, he seems a lock.

Aside from deftly carrying the action of the film without any dialogue for the first half, the sound design here effectively inserts musical jokes amid its music (extra points go to somehow shoehorning in that annoying mounted fish that sings “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”). Once inside the compound of WALL-E, we realize that in addition to his robotic recycling routine, he basically has the tastes of your shiny and kitschy geegaw-collecting gay uncle. WALL-E’s most prized possession is a VHS copy of Hello, Dolly!, which he watches obsessively (cue “It Only Takes a Moment”) so as to learn how to dance, dress like a dandy, wag his straw hat (in this case, a trash can lid), and, most crucially, learn the subtle art of hand-holding. Now if he only had a life-partner–er, girl robot.

Elsewhere, the soundtrack effectively deploys Louis Armstrong’s rasp on “La Vie en Rose” and pays homage to yet another mostly silent space movie, Stanley Kubrick’s epochal 2001: A Space Odyssey, by scoring the cold void of space via the lilting “The Blue Danube” and momentous “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” Much like the trash heap that Wall-E calls home, the soundtrack mashes together the disparate elements of musicals, computer noise, Bobby McFerrin, and Strauss effectively.

As other reviews have noted, Disney has basically leveled a charge at the fat and consumptive zombies that make up its target audience (itself a curious move) with WALL-E, but that it somehow manages to also twist the very real and chilling prospect of a lifeless earth into something heart-warming and affirmative is the real trick. As is the fact that this reviewer was made misty-eyed by a robot that looks an awful lot like Johnny 5.

Ed. note: It’s time for another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he talks to fellow film-music obsessive Alan Bishop about Ennio Morricone, underheralded score composers, and the work his group the Sun City Girls did on Harmony Korine’s latest movie, Mister Lonely:

Late last year, two head-scratching, ear-gouging soundtracks from the massive back catalog of the Sun City Girls, Dulce and Piasa, were reissued on CD, shedding light on the Seattle trio’s long-held obsession with film and film music. Scanning the band’s Web site reveals a soundtrack section featuring surefire drive-in classic titles like Guns of El Chupacabra, Larry Clark’s Another Day in Paradise, and a few short films that have either never been released or have quickly disappeared into the arthouse ether. (The entry for Karen Young’s 1995 short The Pesky Suitor notes that young actress Claire Danes makes her film debut to the strains of The Girls’ “Space Prophet Dogon,” from the epochal and out of print Torch of the Mystics.)

This spring, along with separate cues and contributions from Spiritualized’s J. Spaceman, The Sun City Girls recorded a soundtrack for enfant terrible Harmony Korine’s latest film, Mister Lonely. Released by Drag City, the soundtrack bolsters an oddball story about a community of celebrity impersonators (Michael Jackson, Madonna, Shirley Temple, Charlie Chaplin, etc.), skydiving nuns, and the other inscrutables that always comprise a Korine joint. With such an excuse, how could we not talk to the Sun City Girls’ Alan Bishop about working with Korine, and about the Maestro himself, Italian soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone?

Q: With Sublime Frequencies curation and whatnot, it always slips my mind that you are an Ennio Morricone fiend of the highest order, having curated the Crime & Dissonance set that Ipecac released a few years back.

A: My Italian soundtrack collection, I’m always re-revising that and doing comps. The last two days, up until you called, I was backing up my Morricone stuff so that I can go through it again. There’s a possibility that Ipecac will want to do another Crime & Dissonance set. There are a lot of unreleased things in his back catalog, especially in the ’60s, a ton of stuff that hasn’t been heard.

Q: What movie turned you onto the Maestro in the first place?

A: As it must have been for many my age, it was The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly. I was eight or nine years old when I saw it for the first time and it was a combination of the music, the actors, and the film. I was hooked for life.

Q: Can you recall your physical reaction to his music?

A: No, not really, that was 40 years ago. It took over my mind for a while… at first it was all those Leone western themes. …When I heard them, I felt immortal. They embodied “music as a talisman” for me. Music as a psychological, mental, spiritual, and physical weapon. They still work that way for me.

Q: Is it even possible to grasp the full breadth of Morricone and what he’s done over the last half-century?

A: I’m a lot closer than most, but only the Maestro himself knows the whole deal. Many people have no idea that, along with scoring films, he spent the first half of the ’60s composing, arranging, and conducting hundreds of songs for the most famous Italian pop singers of the period like Gianni Morandi, Rita, Christy, Gino Paoli, Mina, Neil Sedaka, Paul Anka–the list goes on and on. And his arrangements for them are off the scale and much more advanced and maverick than what was happening elsewhere at the time.

Some have called him the father of the modern pop arrangement. No one was more clever at arranging pop songs than Morricone from 1962-1966. Most of those tracks are extremely hard to find (which you’d have to hear to see what I mean), but some have been reissued on BMG Japanese CD box sets–others are probably available on Italian ’60s CD comps you could still find in Italy, but they don’t always list Morricone as the arranger/composer/conductor on the inserts. Throw in his 400-plus soundtrack scores for film and TV, his improv/experimental work, chamber music, and concert music, and you’ve got an endless research project staring you in the face.

Q: I am going to presume that he is your favorite soundtrack composer, but who are some others that you like?

A: Other Italian composers from the ’60s/’70s including Piccioni, Nicolai, Ferrio, Travajoli, Alessandroni, Bacalov, Umiliani, Cipriani, to name a few. John Barry, Lalo Schifrin, Francis Lai, Asei Kobayashi, the great film composers from India, so many others. Bernard Herrmann is amazing.

Q: Who is the most underappreciated of the set?

A: Most soundtrack composers I’ve ever been interested in are supremely underappreciated. Many are still relatively unknown today. Their names get thrown around a lot as references and influences, but only a tiny fraction of each composer’s body of work is accessible, and the rest very few have heard. How many people really collect and know soundtrack music the same way they’d know pop or rock music, or even jazz? Not very many. So really, it’s a question of who’s the most underappreciated of the already underappreciated world of soundtrack composers. And that list is a long one.

Q: The past few SCG CD reissues have been soundtracks, like Dulce and Piasa, but they are somewhat imaginary soundtracks, in that-as the liner notes say–there is no longer any extant film for them. How crucial then is it for the music to offer conveyance of its own, made for images yet separate from them?

A: Absolutely crucial. Many films suck, but the music is brilliant. There is always the possibility that music created separately from the images can work as well or better than music which was made specifically for the images. There are many variables involved in the process and the decisions are ultimately in the hands of the filmmaker, not the composer or musician.

Q: Stemming from the above quote, I’m curious as to how you approached work on Mister Lonely. Were the Sun City Girls contributions to the soundtrack created in conjunction with the film’s images? Or did you guys just play separately and then had it melded together by Korine?

A: We worked on material by reading the script, asking Harmony for some basic ideas/ moods he was aiming for, and without seeing any images. Then later, we composed a few short cues for clips he sent to us he was having some trouble with musically.

Q: What is your favorite scene of the film?

A: There are many. “The Pope stinks” scene, the skydiving nuns, and the slow-motion Marilyn scene are all great.

Q: How did this experience differ from working on Korine’s film about David Blaine (for BBC2)? Didn’t you guys contribute to that short film as well?

A: On the Blaine film, he merely chose an already existing SCG track for his intro cue.

Q: Those strains of Bobby Vinton’s elegiac “Mister Lonely” are haunting and evocative, and on the soundtrack, you guys do a gorgeous instrumental take on the song with longtime collaborator Eyvind Kang. Did the Bobby Vinton cover stem from Korine originally or from your end?

A: Harmony wanted us to try “Mister Lonely” in case he couldn’t get the original, or as an experiment. We did several takes of miscellaneous instrumentation and vocals. We even had Herb Diamante sing lead on the main vocal version–it came out great and Herb will be using that version on his new record.

But Harmony ended up getting the original Vinton song after all, and who can blame him? The Polish prince must be sitting on a beach somewhere thinking to himself: “David Lynch… Harmony Korine… American directors title their films after my songs!”

Crime & Dissonance [Ipecac Records]
Mister Lonely – Trailer [YouTube]

Ed. note: It’s time for another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he travels along America’s byways with Wong Kar Wai and his first English-language feature, My Blueberry Nights:

As an act of full journalistic disclosure, I should mention at the start of this installment of VHS or Beta that in the bitterly cold winter of early 2007, I performed one day’s work on the production of My Blueberry Nights, the first English-language feature from world-renowned Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai (after two decades of acclaimed films like Chungking Express, So Happy Together, and In the Mood for Love).

I day-played for the mere sake of being able to boast in cocktail chatter that I worked on a Kar Wai film, and apparently I wasn’t alone in wanting to have such a topic for polite conversation. Marquee names like Norah Jones, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman, David Strathairn, and, uh, Cat Power, no doubt felt a similar urge to imbibe Wong Kar Wai’s secondhand-smoke brand of cool, too.

For if anything, Kar Wai is cool. Always in sunglasses, a smoke perpetually in hand, he absorbs and namechecks Western culture expertly. For those who asked me to sum up the man in a single sentiment, I explained, “He’s the Haruki Murakami of cinema.” Kar Wai’s soundtracks are infused with choice selections, as meticulously pondered as the color palettes, costumes, and lingering shots of curlicues of protagonist smoke in his films. When first sitting through In the Mood for Love, how could you not be swept up by those FO-NET-ick-lee sung Portuguese numbers from Nat King Cole? (It’s strangely fitting that Shigeru Umebayashi, whose music also appeared in that film, reappears here with a harmonica-led version of that lingering melody.)

One suspects that the opportunity to shoot in the states might also give the man a chance to fully indulge his love of American music (and hit more than a few record stores along the way). And the soundtrack for My Blueberry Nights namechecks Otis Redding, Ruth Brown, and, uh, Cat Power. Most of the interludes come courtesy of Ry Cooder, who since his soundtrack slide guitar work on 1968′s Performance has shown he can conjure bottleneck incidental music in his sleep. And here, he really does. He also pads out the proceedings with two of his producer efforts (for Mavis Staples and Hello Stranger). Standout is Cassandra Wilson’s ambient take on Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon.”

Alas, Ry Cooder’s not the only sleepwalker during said Nights. “Living Proof” and “The Greatest,” from Chan Marshall’s most somnambulant album, The Greatest, get deployed throughout the film. As for her first on-screen appearance, in the liner notes, Kar Wai talks about Marshall visiting the set: “We got along great, and immediately fell to joking about how she could play… a part that then did not even exist. Come winter 2006, Chan re-visited the set, this time in front of the camera playing that very role we once laughed about.” True, as it is pretty laughable to have the stilted Chan Marshall portray a Russian émigré ingénue, but this passage also gives the impression that Kar Wai came over to rub elbows with ‘cool’ celebrities himself.

For the most part, though, the secondary characters give the film its wee bit of gravity. These characters (played by Strathairn, Portman, and Weisz) are addictive personalities: drunks, card sharks, the lovelorn. In their brief time onscreen, they far outstrip the Law and Jones, whose passion is about as torrid as room-temperature vanilla ice cream. There are many other structural problems to the film, the most glaring being the naturally arising question: “What sort of road movie has only two stops on it?”

Throughout, it feels as if Wong Kar Wai is caught up in the veneer of the American myth, his camera merely capturing–yet ultimately unable to penetrate–the shiny surfaces. But what gives with that diner’s perpetually uneaten blueberry pie? Given that Jones always passes out after eating a bite of it (it’s when she’s passed out that Law slips her the tongue), perhaps these blueberries are really just roofies.

Ed. note: It’s time for another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he stumbles across the Jackie Chan movie Snake In The Eagle’s Shadow on a late-night channel surf in China:

The day is fast approaching when–come 6 a.m. Chinese Standard Time–fans of both experimental architecture and government-controlled television will come together over Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture-erected China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters in Beijing. Dubbed “the twisted doughnut” by adherents and detractors alike, the 575,000-square-meter cantilevered structure, still being built, will have its steel joints from two separate towers sutured together in that magic-hour light.

Having recently visited Beijing with a few friends, I missed out on a chance to witness such history being made, though there is solace to be taken in that with Beijing’s steel-colored (and similarly opaque) smog, I couldn’t have glimpsed the damned CCTV structure anyway. As a consolation prize, our group instead whiled away many jetlagged hours in our Beijing hotel room watching CCTV 6 at ungodly times. Not that we could translate the pictographic language, but we deemed this channel “The Kung Fu Channel” because at almost any time, one could tune in to see ridiculous wire work, flurries of hand chops, a young Jet Li and/or Gordon Liu dispensing fleet feet of justice, and animal-based fighting styles of infinite varieties.

One particular Tsingtao-sodden night, our group caught a Jackie Chan flick at 3 a.m. It is here that I give thanks to the archetypal Hong Kong Kung-Fu framework: baleful kung-fu master (in this case portrayed by Hwong Jang Lee); elderly teacher who still opens cans of whip-ass (Yuen Siu Tien); Jackie Chan as a doofus who nevertheless haphazardly learns how to issue a beatdown; vengeance gained via arduous training and the deployment of ancient fighting styles. Were it not for such tropes, I might’ve never figured out this movie. There were subtitles, but a good 2/5ths of them were clipped on either side, and judging from the transfer, which was so distorted that it verged on the psychedelic, it seems that we watched a sixth-generation VHS dub from the early ’80s. It was only via the Internet that I even gleaned the film’s title: Snake In The Eagle’s Shadow, bashed out in 1978 by action choreographer-turned-director Yuen Woo-ping, who would gain renown in the West for choreographing the martial arts sequences for little films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Matrix, and Kill Bill.

Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow remains the craziest Jackie Chan movie I’ve witnessed–even moreso than Rush Hour 3 (that’s not just the Tsingtao and plum wine talking). Audacious fight scenes aside, what pushes Eagle’s Shadow over the top is its soundtrack. While the credits list Chou Fu-liang as composer, the film liberally rips off its incidental music from elsewhere. My drunken first encounter made me think of Italian maestros like Goblin and Ennio Morricone–for the better part of the flick, the soundtrack toggles between Moogy arpeggios and more poignant strings, earmarks of those two artists. A bit more research though makes me realize that rather than emulate Goblin (which may have been too much work for the HK industry), the “composer” simply bit Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene Pt.2″ unabashedly. In this training sequence (embedding disabled, sorry), the Morricone choirs give way to Jarre.

The choicest bit of the soundtrack isn’t music, but a cheap sound effect. It’s brought into the movie soon after Jackie Chan’s ne’er-do-well character, Chien, has had his Snake Fist technique falter against the malefic Eagle’s Claw fighting style. Sullen, he returns home to see his housecat locked in mortal combat with a hooded cobra. My friends and I figured that the production went through three stunt cats in shooting this sequence, though a non-venomous snake may have been the cheaper option. Surely Garfield is getting it, but it turns out that kitty’s got claws. As an astounded Chan looks on, this mere housecat slays the deadly cobra and in the process teaches Jackie Chan a new fighting style: Cat’s Claw.

Awkwardly–yet inexplicably awesomely montaged–this fight scene between snake and kitty isn’t scored by Jarre, but rather the sound of a cat. It’s no simple “meow,” but instead the cougar-screech that a cat makes when, say, you hold it by the tail over a full bathtub and shake–only layered, heavily compressed, and flanged to devastating effect. On any occasion when Chan clenches his fist into the Cat’s Claw position, that sick-ass sound rings out. Chan mows down the practitioners of the Eagle’s Claw.

Jackie Chan unveils his new style about 3:20 into the climactic final fight (a sequence so intense that Hwong Jang Lee actually kicked out Chan’s front tooth during filming). And when that cat screech gets juxtaposed with the galloping Jarre track, it’s the perfect meeting between East and West.

Ed. note: It’s time for another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he looks at the music from Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic Taxi Driver:

There’s no denying the musical nature inherent to the island of Manhattan, and musicians have always responded in homage to the Big Apple. Ace Frehley noted the “New York Groove” and Mr. Copacabana himself, Barry Manilow, seized upon that “New York City Rhythm.” When Elizabeth Street’s own son, Martin Scorsese, initiated his movie-making career, he kicked it off with a bang: that rifle-crack snare of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” (opening his debut, Mean Streets) cast Scorsese as an auteur finely attuned to Gotham’s ceaseless pulse.

By the time of 1976′s Taxi Driver, Scorsese’s ear for the streets was unparalleled. His anti-hero, cab man Travis Bickle, is surrounded by a tourniquet of sound: each click and clack ratchets up the tension. As Bickle’s descent unfolds on the screen, each sound accentuates the mounting stress: the audible thunk of street lights changing from red to green; the click of the yellow cab’s meter; the clocking of each dime; the swish of the wipers; the rattle of a pill bottle; the dry snap of an empty gun chamber. All tighten up like a snare.

Nowhere is this best exemplified than in Scorsese’s inclusion of a New York City street performer, Gene Palma. His black hair crisply plastered down, Palma was a fixture of Times Square in that era, setting up his snare and shouting out the old Drum Kings of Harlem, Gene Krupa and Chick Webb, recreating their peculiar rhythms on his rig. Go figure that Palma has his own IMDB entry, appearing as “Street Drummer” or “Street Musician” in movies like Taxi Driver, Hero at Large, and Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography.

Of course, Taxi Driver‘s soundtrack is best remembered for being famed film composer Bernard Herrmann’s final score. According to Steven C. Smith, the author of A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann, Scorsese only considered Herrmann for the film, the results being, in Smith’s estimate, “the most chilling and nihilistic of Herrmann’s career… a gray collage of muted trumpets, the chilly hush of suspended cymbal, basses ticking a pizzicato rhythm like a time bomb.” As Bickle tightens up, so does Herrmann, who emphasizes brass and drums in his score.

When Bickle finally snaps, making a bloodbath of a Lower East Side whorehouse, the climax is silent, with a migraine throb of drums and harp arising only as Scorsese’s camera surveys the grisly aftermath. A jazz theme that Herrmann deployed at every appearance of Bickle’s contorted love interest (played by Cybill Shepherd) returns in hideously distorted fashion. “Benny explained that the reason he did it was to show that this was where Travis’ fantasies about women led him,” co-producer Michael Phillips told Smith. “His illusions, his self-perpetuating way of dealing with women had finally brought him to that bloody, violent outburst.” Recorded in just two days, with all but one cue wrapped by Dec. 23, 1975, Herrmann went to dinner then passed away from congestive heart failure later that night. His work ignored for decades by the Academy, Herrmann was posthumously nominated for an Oscar for this soundtrack (though he lost out to Jerry Goldsmith).

The funniest thing about Taxi Driver, watching it again in a packed New York theatre, is how black its humor is. When Bickle gets to his famous “You talking to me?” diatribe, the audience bursts out in laughter and cheers. Bickle, anticipating ’77′s punk uprising, is an everlasting emblem of that style and attitude, from the fatigue jacket to the Mohawk. Walk down St. Mark’s Place today and every punk clothing store has a shirt of Bickle brandishing two guns, cracked smile on his face. And yet, the film’s main song is not by the Dolls or the Stooges; it’s the sniveling “Late for the Sky” by Jackson freakin’ Browne, the absolute antithesis of punk. It’s the weak whiny singer-songwriter crap that spurred on punk and an entire generation of men who would not take it.

Even more hilarious is when Shepherd’s character compares Bickle to a Kris Kristofferson song, which sends the disturbed vet to go and pick up a copy of Kristofferson’s debut LP in a Times Square record shop. Relishing in that brief glimpse of another vanished relic of yesteryear, I couldn’t help but wonder how the film might’ve played out if Bickle had bought another record prominently on display: that of Disco-Tex & his Sex-O-Lettes.

Had Travis Bickle instead fallen under the spell of Sir Monty Rock III’s classic “Get Dancin’” perhaps Taxi Driver would’ve taken yet another turn:

Ed. note: It’s time for another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he looks at the Jonny Greenwood-composed music that scores Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood:

Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood has more in common with Radiohead’s In Rainbows than merely the presence of guitarist Jonny Greenwood as the film’s soundtrack composer. Both were long-incubated pieces released in 2007, but Radiohead’s album and Anderson’s Upton Sinclair-based period piece are far more underwhelming than the laborious work and surrounding press would lead you to believe. Thinkpieces about the former all but killing the record industry conveniently leave out the fact that the band’s worldwide platform was built by EMI/Parlophone, and from auditioning the low-fidelity digital files that made up the first release of the album, one wonders why a band uploading its glorified demos onto the Internet was such a big deal at the end of the day.

Between Blood, The Darjeeling Limited, and No Country For Old Men, 2007 was filled with detail-obsessive American moviemakers emphasizing parables set in non-arable, inhospitable land, detailing worlds decidedly masculine and wholly bereft of femininity. The trend no doubt reaches a head in Anderson’s Blood, a story about lone-wolf prospector Daniel Plainview, who graduates from chiseling out silver to tapping into reservoirs of crude oil. From previews alone, the story looks to be a harrowing one, a long-simmering, accusatory movie about how Christianity and capitalism collude and collide. Alas, running at nearly three hours, it fizzles just when it should combust.

That’s not exactly Greenwood’s fault, as the guitarist’s neo-classical turn here is surprisingly strong. Composer-in-residence for the BBC Orchestra (no doubt bringing in an audience of green hairs to mix with the blue hairs), Greenwood deploys orchestral music judiciously throughout. In the voiceless opening sequences, Greenwood uses a range of string timbres, sharpening them into piercing, vertiginous drones. While Arvo Part is no doubt a touchstone for the young composer, the soundtrack here is not unlike Toru Takemitsu’s soundtrack for Woman of the Dunes in that out of the massed strings, Greenwood teases out disembodied choruses and ethereal tones. It mirrors how Plainview gleans oil out of the ground like a straw in a milkshake (an image that comes back during a spittle-flecked monologue at movie’s end).

Come the second act of the film, suddenly the sonic palette widens, with Greenwood deploying piano trios and introducing more melodic elements, the themes especially poignant as the relationships between Plainview and his family members–his surrogate son H.W. and his estranged brother–are explored. Still, though, a dread lurks beneath the surface. As the conflict between church and business intensifies, the derrick suspiciously like the similarly-erected church steeple, so too does the bass section of the orchestra pit grow more anxious in its motifs. And when oil is finally struck, only to burst into a towering inferno, an intense battery of percussion thunders for minutes on end (perhaps another homage to Takemitsu?).

As the movie passes the 120-minute mark, it becomes apparent that the long-anticipated showdown between the oil magnate and the Church of the Third Revelation (fact check) will never quite come to a head. Instead, we get to watch as Plainview’s curmudgeonly, heart-blackened ways crystallize for another fifty minutes, the long-building intensity ebbing away. Greenwood’s music too slowly recedes into the arid backdrop, drying up like an oil well.

Ed. note: It’s time for another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he listens to the long-out-of-print–yet oddly of the moment–score for the 1971 bioterror thriller The Andromeda Strain.

I’m not one to linger on being burned by record deals, but it still stings to think that I allowed my copy of the soundtrack for The Andromeda Strain to be taken by a record-collector-scum “friend” of mine back in the mid-’90s. (It’s so bad, I can no longer recall what I even received in trade, only lament what was lost.) To this day, I have never seen another copy of its shiny silver sleeve, much less the arduously assembled hexagonal edition that came out around the same time as this 1971 bioterror flick. That version of the soundtrack, released by Kapp Records, only had 10,000 copies produced; the records and their sleeves, which were produced under the supervision of Andromeda director Robert Wise, were hexagonal. The album was released as a conventional LP the following year.

But it’s never been re-released since then, which is infuriating, as it’s a landmark of electronically composed soundtracks. Based on a pre-Jurassic Park book by Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain details an Area 51-esque stretch of American desert and a town that has been wiped out by some mysterious virus that dropped from outer space. For all of the film’s doomsday dread and very real scenario of a supervirus scything the human populace, the movie was rated G, and I recall watching it in junior high. Screening it again so as to hear the electronic score (composed by the forgotten Gil Mellé), I’m actually appalled by the amount of animal vivisection that takes place in the film. There are some cruel shots of monkeys in death throes that still make me squeamish. That said, I also reverted back to my 13-year-old self, tittering at the one scene when a contamination suit-clad scientist yanks down a dead man’s trousers, bends him over a desk and shouts to his partner: “Have a look at his buttocks!” Comedy gold.

That snippet of dialogue, alas, isn’t heard on the soundtrack; instead, a dizzying array of electronic oddities prevails. Mellé is a curious cat: he not only designed the cover art for records by jazz men like Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis, but blew horn alongside the likes of Max Roach and Zoot Sims. There’s an early record he did with Verve merging jazz and electronics, but as the sixties wore on, Mellé started exclusively composing the latter, composing the first electronic theme for TV show (Rod Serling’s post-Twilight Zone show, Night Gallery).

His score for The Andromeda Strain is by turns haunting and gnarly, and it sounds right at home in the 21st century, whether alongside the similarly handmade malevolence of Wolf Eyes or the drugged dronescapes of Tim Hecker. For the film, Mellé built his own electronic studio on the Universal lot and a slew of one-of-a-kind electronic devices. He re-processed the recorded sounds of buzzsaws, bowling alleys, and orchestral instruments for the film, creating a remarkable score that anticipates future electronic music. Mellé captures the sound of booping radar, red light-triggered epileptic seizures, satellite transmissions, weather pattern feedback, scanning microscope whirrs, and mutating super-germs. The ever-pressurizing pulses and oscillations only heighten the film’s biological warfare anxieties and–much like the noisy music itself–such fear continues to riddle us in the present.

Ed. note: It’s time for another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he listens to the music behind John Cassavetes’ 1968 “expression of horror at our society in general” Faces.

Trolling about eBay the other day, I sought in vain a VHS copy of American independent filmmaker John Cassavetes’s 1971 masterpiece Husbands, since it criminally has never been released on DVD (though you can sign the online petition for its release here). And while I still haven’t had any luck tracking down a copy, a YouTube search turned up a 4-part segment of The Dick Cavett Show with the movie’s main men, Cassavetes, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazzara:

Perhaps a trio of Harmony Korine, Courtney Love, and Crispin Glover could equal this level of late-night belligerence?

I wound up buying the LP soundtrack for Cassavetes’ 1968 film Faces. Originally released on Columbia Records, it bears a pullquote from Life: “A film that is truly and deeply an experience!” It’s a curious item, as I can scarcely recall hearing a soundtrack.

Re-watching the iconic film, I don’t hear a single strain of music until nearly 40 minutes in, but even then the lion’s share of its two hours is given to long interactions between sodden industry executives, unhappy housewives, call girls, and the like. Considering all the headaches and heartaches that Cassavetes had to grapple with his entire career–working outside the major studios, the film distribution system, even SAG and unions–there must have been a boondoggle of sorts behind the soundtrack to Faces. So from where did the long-player cull its sound?

Faces deals with, in the director’s words, an “attack on contemporary middle-class America, an expression of horror at our society in general, focusing on a married couple.” Film scholar Ray Carney, in his crucial Cassavetes on Cassavetes, notes that “the reason the film has so little outside music is that Cassavetes had intended to use the music of Jimmy Reid but got into an argument with him and had to rely on [actor Seymour] Cassel’s singing to fill in.” I presume Carney means bluesman Jimmy Reed, as there is an instance in the film when Cassel’s surfer lothario Chet throws Reed’s “Life is Funny” on the hi-fi as he shimmies and shakes, attempting to bed down a couple of martini-loosened MILFs.

Reed’s assured slink and growl is nowhere to be found on the LP, but it does contain a good number of swirling, vibraphone-heavy arrangements by in-house Columbia producer Teo Macero. Of course, none of this music appears in the film anywhere. The version of “I Dream of Jeanie” here is a swinging instrumental, but in the film, it is a tune sung between drunken businessmen as they fight over a call girl named Jeanie (played by the then-preggers Gena Rowlands), each character teasing out his own rendition of “I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair.”

The Julliard-educated Macero is rightfully renowned as the man behind Miles Davis’ impeccable recording run at Columbia, from landmarks like Kind of Blue to Bitches Brew to On the Corner, and he was responsible for bringing Miles, as well as jazz titans like pianist Thelonious Monk and bassist/ composer Charles Mingus, to the label. It seems entirely plausible that Macero might’ve even been familiar with Cassavetes’ work, in that while working on Mingus’ album for the label, Mingus Dynasty, they re-recorded a piece that Mingus had performed for the soundtrack to Cassavetes’ debut, Shadows. It sounds like Macero was simply doing his job here, slapping a few charts together in the studio, perhaps to create a product that might sell, considering how Faces became a sensation of sorts.

Cassavetes is rightfully deemed the father of independent cinema, but he’s an equally iconic figure in the music world, name-checked by the likes of Fugazi, Le Tigre, Sleater-Kinney, and Chicago jazzman Ken Vandermark. Cassavetes taught us that just like music, movies are made best in your own living room. Much like his characters and their moments, the music in a Cassavetes film is harrowingly intimate. Recall the arias sung at the dinner table in A Woman Under the Influence, or the soused renderings undertaken at the wake in Husbands. The real music of Faces is not on the soundtrack, but it’s clearly audible in the dirty limericks, the “Peter Piper” tongue-twister routines, the drunken dances, and the lusty serenades between men and women, delivered in the wee hours.

Ed. note: It’s time for another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he checks out Todd Haynes’ look at Bob Dylan’s multiple personalities, I’m Not There.

It must be tough being a baby boomer. On the one hand, you’ve got “The Ken Burns Effect” going on for the generation preceding you and hearing about how “great” their war was, while you lost your war. On the other side, you’ve got them young’uns with their Internets, their ringtones and their Britney Spearses. Who’s going to remember your generation and your music? Remember how great that music was? (Oh, wait, if you do remember how great the music was, then you couldn’t have been there; damned “Freedom Rock” conundrum.) But go onto iTunes, and they don’t even have The Beatles, who were the greatest band ever. If even they can be forgotten, who will remember you?

Thanks to the diligent efforts of directors like Julie Taymor and Martin Scorsese, in the 21st century we can now know about bands like The Beatles (Across the Universe) and The Rolling Stones (Shine a Light). And then there’s Todd Haynes, who has not only reminded us of the awesomeness of the Carpenters (Superstar), David Bowie (Velvet Goldmine), and Douglas Sirk (Far From Heaven), but now unearths this folksinger named Bob Dylan, who was once called “the spokesman for a generation.” But having found Jesus (or was it Judaism?), the now-forgotten Dylan DJs for Sirius Radio and pays his bills by shilling for lingerie.

OK, I’m being slightly facetious here, but I don’t see the point of an already-dominant mythology continually being recapitulated and crammed back down the throat anew. (Then again, the gospel passages read at church don’t really change either.) Haynes’s recent entry in the baby boomer self-thrown fete I’m Not There is better slightly shorter and less confusing than both of Dylan’s movies, 1978′s Reynaldo and Clara and 2003′s Masked and Anonymous, and easier than reading his book Tarantula. And it’s far more fun than trudging through the recent three-disc set Dylan (which Douglas Wolk aptly quipped was “a sarcophagus for an artist who deserves a bazaar instead”), but deconstruction or not, it’s still doctrine, even we do get the bazaar this time out.

Instead of a Behind the Music about Dylan, we get seven fractured fairytales of the man, played by the likes of an 11-year-old African-American kid, a linebacker-necked Heath Ledger, American Gigolo Richard Gere, and–most successful of all–Cate Blanchett, who has the strung-out, nerve-burnt, trembling act of ’65 Dylan down so cold that I’d love to see her do a one-woman show of Eat the Document. None of these characters are nominally “Dylan” and the facts of his life are readily rendered into fables and myth, stratagems the man himself deploys. “I’m not there, I’m gone,” he bays over the end credits, The Band behind him, the lone instance of his voice on the soundtrack and film.

Haynes follows a similar tact as Taymor did for Across the Universe, in that his subject too is transtheistic, absent from the world (save for a glimpse of the man in the waning seconds of the film) yet fully steeped in it. Which is a curious way of suggesting that these artists and their music were so profound as to alter the world they were in. Even if Dylan and the Beatles vanished tomorrow, their influence could never fully disappear.

And yet there are some whoppers in the film (and no, I’m not talking about Dr. Tobias Funke portraying Allen Ginsberg). It takes quite a humble fellow to equate his dissolving marriage with the war in Vietnam and in the sequence involving Gere, the dialogue is lamely cobbled from The Basement Tapes, replete with characters named Mrs. Henry and references to “Chickentown.” We get to see My Morning Jacket’s Jim James in full Reynaldo and Clara whiteface wailing in a gazebo here, but do you mean to tell me there was no way to work in a small scene wherein the fellow playing the snare drum gets hit with a pie that smells?

I’m Not There marks the first occasion that Dylan’s back pages are turned into soundtrack, and despite the tedium of sitting through its two-hour plus runtime there’s still a rush to be had hearing “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” and the boot-shuffling “Nashville Skyline Rag” play over the early scenes. When the covers do start cropping up, they sound–if inconsequential and entirely too reverential–at the very least like they were a blast to record. Who wouldn’t want to belt out Dylan karaoke backed by the likes of Calexico (one hopes that this isn’t the lone song they laid down with Willie Nelson), Joe Henry, or the Million Dollar Bashers (comprised of noiseniks like John Medeski, Lee Ranaldo, and Tom Verlaine)? But who needs to hear Stephen Malkmus whine three freakin’ times?

As the baby boomers verily swear, their era was a fun, idyllic, stoned and crazy time (see “Freedom Rock” conundrum), and yet their reverent remembrance of things past is stifling. I’m Not There‘s Dylanfest goes on so long that by the time the Monkees’ “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” comes on at full-crank, it’s refreshing and downright edgy. “Live your own time, child,” an elderly woman tells that young, gifted, and black Dylan at one point (who is nostalgic in the McCarthy era for the Depression), but neither in the film nor on the soundtrack is such advice ever heeded.

Ed. note: It’s time for another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he looks at the early works of Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu.

Earlier this year, New Yorker critic Alex Ross discussed the music of Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, focusing on his classical oeuvre and the “exotic tones that almost brush the skin, hazy melodies that move like figures in mist,” or else a “loveliness (that) vanishes into darkness before it can be fully apprehended.” Through the forty-plus years of his output, it is hard to apprehend Takemitsu’s breadth as both a 20th-century avant-garde composer and one of the most prolific and profound movie soundtrack composers, easily in the upper echelons with the likes of Ennio Morricone and Bernard Herrmann.

Good luck tracking down many of these crucial soundtracks, though. The most thorough look at his work, a six-CD compilation on the Japanese JVC imprint, went out of print in the early 21st century, and even that just barely skimmed the surface; the IMDB web entry for Takemitsu lists nearly 90 composer credits. If you’ve trolled through seminal Japanese cinema, you’ve no doubt heard Takemitsu’s music, as he provided the soundtrack for such staples as Akira Kurosawa’s Ran and Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain. Yet with these two later-period titles, Takemitsu exhibited a classical, lyrical side that he often eschewed early on in his career.

Three of his most audacious and jaw-dropping soundtracks can be found on the Criterion Collection’s box set Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara. You wouldn’t know it by the cover, as the set instead emphasizes the collaboration between filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara and angsty post-war novelist Kôbô Abe, but Takemitsu completes the creative triumvirate behind the works, and of the three men, his contribution is the both the most technically assured and physically evocative throughout the three films.

The centerpiece of the boxset is 1964′s Woman of the Dunes, an epochal art house film and classic of world cinema with all the earmarks of that peculiar strain: existential premise, abstracted just enough so as to be open to endless discourse, an erotic charge. Pianist Glenn Gould purportedly watched it a hundred times. A story about a man from the city indulging his amateur entomology out in the rural countryside, he becomes the prisoner of a widow who lives in a sandpit, doomed to a “Sisyphus on the Beach” task of shoveling out the ever-encroaching stuff. Throughout the film, the sand transmogrifies within Teshigahara’s lens into the tiniest of crystals, looming mountains, walls, waterfalls, rivulets; it breaks like a ceramic plate, dribbles like milk, corrodes like acid, becomes a second skin, crumbles away like time itself. In the film’s commentary, James Quandt notes how such sand served as metaphor for the critics: representing Taosim, fate, society, time, the eternal, and–for Arthur Schlessinger Jr.–totalitarianism.

“But what does the sand mean?” isn’t really for me to answer, but that 1/8-millimeter grain influences Takemitsu’s intense soundtrack. While no doubt indebted to the works of Western composers like John Cage and Claude Debussy (Ross notes a circularity in that both of these men “had been heavily influenced by Japanese music and Japanese thought”), here Takemitsu renders his instruments’ timbre at their most visceral and elemental. The film opens with a sound collage of urban clamor–train, intercom, horns–then such density drops away altogether. The most spectral aspects of scraped strings, piercing flute tones, jags of harp and relentless Japanese drums comprise the movie’s entire sonic palette, matching up with the creaks of wood and gusts of sirocco winds in the sound design.

(This clip is borderline NSFW.) For the charged love scene between the man and the woman, Takemitsu takes something intimate and familiar–Teshigahara shows extreme close-ups of granules embedded in the couple’s skin–and renders it into something primal, grimy, and skin-prickling via a painfully slow rattle and astringent drones.

(Another nearly NSFW clip.) Animalistic and tactile as the previous scene is, it’s nothing compared to the movie’s climax, where the local villagers appear around the rim of the sandpit and bid the man and his woman put on a show for them. Grotesquely masked, pounding on giant Japanese drums, there’s no need for avant-garde strategies here, as the ritualistic rhythms are blood-boiling in their intensity, urging the man to rape the woman for the audience’s entertainment.

The woman vanishes into darkness before she can be apprehended, but the blatant horror of the act reveals an irreversible shift: rather than fight it, this civilized man has acquiesced to the demands of this rural society. Entrapped, he perversely feels free. The noise of the city has given way to the sound of these drums; is there really any difference? Melding East-West atonality or simply deploying a thunderous tribal beat, Takemitsu’s harsh, caustic soundtrack embodies throughout the film the effects of sunstroke, of disintegration, of animal violence, of sanity slipping through fingers like sand.

Ed. note: It’s time for another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he watches the Anton Corbijn-directed Control, which opens in select cities on Wednesday:

Nothing on the posters and lobby cards for renowned photographer Anton Corbijn’s directorial debut Control tips you off about the movie’s central premise. It’s not subtitled “Joy Division: The Movie” or “The Ian Curtis Story,” much less addled with inanities like “Would You Sacrifice Everything You Love to Follow Your Dreams?” or “Based on a True Story,” and in a way none of those tags, while all basically true, apply here. Control is essentially a high-wire act. In presenting a film about a beloved cult act and its messianic frontman, were a single inane detail left out of the story it might make its disciples wail, yet Corbijn expertly pulls it off, alluding to record-collector minutiae–but never quite wallowing in it–while crafting a story engaging enough so as to draw in initiates and indoctrinate them.

Corbijn has built a multi-decade career as both top-tier “rock photographer” (he has shot U2 since the beginning) and “rock video director” (for the likes of Depeche Mode, Nirvana, Roxette, At the Drive-In, etc.), yet both careers stem from a single event: hearing the music of Joy Division. The siren song of Unknown Pleasures led Corbijn to abandon Holland for England. He even shot his idols, capturing the doomed group’s members with their backs turned in a tube station. And while the film bears little of Corbijn’s well-worn video tropes (Christian crosses, lip-synching fowl) it does bear his instantly recognizable photographic style: a granular yet sumptuous black and white, expertly framed.

Whereas a similar tale of JD is enfolded into the freewheeling 24 Hour Party People, the story here is more austere, reverential. Corbijn and cinematographer Martin Ruhe’s intoxicating grisaille is both enveloping and consumptive, somehow both warm and clammy, with Corbijn’s particular brand of shadowplay in full effect throughout the film’s duration. The Macclesfield rendered on screen is miserable indeed, as if under a fine soot, to where that grit becomes part of the celluloid itself. The film presents Ian Curtis (played by Sam Riley, who incidentally played Mark E. Smith in Party People) in the removed manner of a kitchen-sink drama, as a dead-end youth bursting with inchoate energy and the attendant existential dread that accompanies it. He scratches IAN into his desktop, then adds another line, so that it becomes IAM.

“Existence, well…what does it matter?” he asks, forlornly dragging on a smoke in his skivvies and emulating the drag of glam rock. Curtis rears himself on a steady diet of Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and David Bowie, along with Wordsworth, Roxy Music, and assorted pharmaceuticals, their kicks foreshadowing the anti-seizure meds he’s soon forced to ingest to stave off his epileptic fits. The film encapsulates that sacrosanct act of teen listening, the solace found when simply brooding, smoking, daydreaming.

Lord knows how it mirrors that own hopeless time of my life, when back in high school I too became enthralled with Joy Division. But their discography occupies an obscure corner of my life now. Quite honestly, listening to Unknown Pleasures or Closer for, uh, pleasure feels nigh-on impossible and I honestly can’t think of any other music that can mire me in such a despondent, inconsolable pall as the second side of Closer. It’s not just mentally trying, but physically burdensome, the sound of Curtis’s phantasmal voice fully enacting that awful weight on his shoulders come closing song “Decades.”

Throughout Control, the soundtrack is hushed, cropping up only when music naturally occurs, through the tinny speakers of shite record players (with attendant shots of Curtis-beloved platters like Lou Reed’s Transformer and Bowie’s Aladdin Sane) or else deafening in live settings, Joy Division pistoning and hissing in raw power. Perhaps moved by such “celluloid pictures of living,” I only realized after the lights went up–and right before the Killers’ cover of “Shadowplay” (replete with Brandon Flowers’ dead-on impersonation of Ian Curtis Glenn Danzig) began to blare over the credits– that I had missed occurrences of Roxy Music’s “2HB” and Iggy Pop’s “Sister Midnight,” both of which appear on the soundtrack, alongside incidental music from New Order, John Cooper Clarke reading “Evidently Chickentown,” and forgotten Dutch prog group Supersister. The soundtrack’s inclusion of movie dialogue is a headscratcher, though: must we hear the band calling up its manager?

Having witnessed Joy Division and countless other punk and post-punk acts of the era, Corbijn proves especially adept at rendering the live beast on the screen. Scenes of Joy Division in action have all the sweat, crackling electricity, involuntary twitches, and claustrophobia of underground rock shows from any era. He captures just how Ian Curtis combusts, changing from withdrawn and soft-spoken to the spasmodic baritone that would voice the confounding quandaries of existence for generations of forlorn teens.

There’s a remove inherent in the Ian Curtis story though (as with the unanswered questions of any suicide, really). The film draws on Touching From a Distance, the book by widow Deborah Curtis, yet emphasizes the other woman, Belgian journalist Annik Honoré (all but unmentioned in the book). Neither woman though seems to know much about the man, nor do we. We in the audience are left to occupy a position similar to that of Honoré, wedged amid the fans, gazing up admirably at this figure, enthralled yet forever riddled by the slim but inscrutable music that Ian Curtis continues to haunt.

Ed. note: Here’s another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he travels back to the ’60s with Julie Taymor, the Beatles back catalogue, and the Fab Four-created world of Across the Universe:

I saw a film today, oh boy. About how a working class-band from the industrial town of Liverpool–a borough of Merseyside, England–soundtracked the American experience for countless privileged suburbanites who were totally innocent before they learned life lessons about love and death and stuff like that and grew up to make lots of money so as to dictate the listening habits of all subsequent generations.

Well, Across the Universe, the second full-length film from Tony Award-winning director Julie Taymor, isn’t quite as described in the sentence above, in that there is actually no British band extant in the film, yet their presence is inescapable. From the songs heard on the radio to those sung between people, from the inane snatches of dialogue exchanged between characters to the very names of these people (Jude, Maxwell, Lucy, Prudence, Sadie, Rita, Jojo, etc.), this group simultaneously is infused in the world, transcends the world, and is absent from it, making for the most extreme example of Transtheism glimpsed in popular cinema. Which is to say that these Liverpudlians are more popular than Jesus.

To best appreciate Across the Universe, an intimate familiarity with this British group’s discography, lexicon, legacy, and mythos is crucial, lest you miss a stack of rib-rattling wink-wink nudges-nudges, such as when Prudence (a Vietnamese lesbian) comes in through the bathroom window, gets greeted with “Hello Hello” and says she comes from “Nowhere, Man.” Later on, when Prudence is trapped in the closet (sadly there’s no R. Kelly in this world) and her roomies sing “Dear Prudence” to her, it’s coupled with a visual component that feels like some counter-culture episode of Friends. On acid, naturally.

Weirdest is how the film must dance around the issues of the sixties while scrubbing itself to a PG-13 façade, making NBC’s 1999 miniseries The ’60s seem like a gritty, street-level documentary in comparison. Here’s what was “evil” back then: record execs, the war, SDS SDR radicals, “The Man.” When Jude and Maxwell bond during the dance sequence of “With a Little Help From My Friends,” they pantomime taking drags off of an invisible joint. As the stresses weigh on singer Sadie (who, it should be noted, is both “sexy” and a dead ringer for Janis Joplin), she deals with the mounting pressures not by snorting mountains of coke and smack, but by having another sip of whisky.

Across the Universe does note the seeming cultural clashes in the beginning of the film, jumping between idyllic American sock hops in white satin and the grimy black-leather drinking spots of Liverpool, showing that both worlds are united through music. When “Let it Be” plays during a race riot and a white soldier’s funeral, we’re meant to realize how this music unifies, no matter the skin color. Or, to take the words of token black righteous soul brother African-American representative Jojo (who wraps Sadie’s scarf around his afro and conspicuously plays electric guitar like the only other African-American guitarist in the history of the world, Jimi Hendrix): “Music’s the only thing that makes sense anymore.”

And yet the film not only interprets these vivacious pop songs with all the subtlety of a soused blues bar band, but constantly makes this music act as sheer adherent for its confusing montages. After Jude fails to sketch a green apple for his friend’s record label, he resorts to squishing produce to the sound of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” said berries becoming cluster bombs, grenades, blood bags, and the Strawberry Jamz record logo (which must’ve really steamed the B**tles-averse Animal Collective). Elsewhere, a homeless man (played by Joe Cocker), a pimp, and some hoes sing “Come Together” to welcome the characters to the East Village. Dr. Robert (played by Bono) rocks a cowboy hat and hideous Fu Manchu while sneering out “I Am the Walrus” as the characters take a polarized, fish-eyed school bus ride out to a hallucinatory puppet show helmed by Mr. Kite (Eddie Izzard), all of which serves as some sort of send-off for Maxwell, about to get shipped off to Vietnam.

Here the most telling appropriation of said band’s back catalog appears. A Big Brother-esque poster of Uncle Sam screams out “I Want You” and Max undergoes a nightmarish dance sequence right out of The Wall: square-faced soldiers strip him down, check his teeth, collect his piss, dress him for deployment. Boots squash the foliage of Vietnam underfoot, the camera pulling back to reveal the troops lugging a cumbersome Statue of Liberty, her torch acting as battering ram as they scream out: “She’s So Heavy.” It explicitly comments not just on America’s foreign policy in war, but also in culture. Anyone younger than fifty might feel similarly oppressed, while the bald men who hummed (in the wrong key) throughout the film might not know what my complaint is.

Simple: I too got indoctrinated into this religion, I too came of age to the same soundtrack and subsequently embraced its iconography and symbolism, despite it being some thirty years on. I fell in love with a girl while singing the lyrics to “Run For Your Life,” lost my virginity to “Revolution #9,” had my mind blown by “Dig It,” and–when a dear friend (who similarly worshipped such deities) took his own life–I found solace in the strains of “Blackbird.” There is a profound enlightenment to be found within this pop band’s career, in how youthful uniformity gives way to discovery of self and the subsequent onset of adulthood and its attendant responsibilities, but that’s not how Across the Universe plays it. Instead, the film opts for knee-jerk nostalgia and an immature (rather than childlike) look back through a glass onion.

I’d be remiss in not admitting that I teared up during Across the Universe, as certain chord progressions stirring up deep-seated memories, but Sounder and Old Yeller get me all misty-eyed too, and I wouldn’t subject myself to two hours of psychedelic pet-offing either. It’s a cheap trick to use such “universal” music to simply trigger the audience’s personal remembrances of such things past. Seated in the theatre, I felt like a fool on a hill.

Ed. note: Here’s another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he turns on the radio in Vanishing Point‘s Challenger:

I didn’t quite realize it during the ’90s, but I now cop to being a staunch fanboy of Quentin Tarantino’s peculiar brand of movie mixtapes and esoteric music mash notes. But his most recent film, Death Proof, tested my faith. If you had told me beforehand that I would nearly walk out of a movie that coupled a soundtrack comprised of 45 sides from the likes of lifelong musical obsessions like Jack Nitzsche, Joe Tex, and T. Rex to loooong, sumptuous tracking shots of female posteriors jiggling in short-shorts, I might’ve sliced off your ear. And yet the first 7/8ths of Death Proof were some of the most boring hubris I ever sat through (God only knows how the two-hour “director’s cut” will be, but at least there’s the fast-forward button), while the last eighth was some of the most exhilarating footage ever committed to tape.

For those who did walk out (or didn’t even bother walking into the three-and-a-half hour twofer of Grindhouse), Death Proof‘s great race hinges on four gals (played by Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thomas, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and stuntwoman Zoë Bell) happening upon–as Zoë and gearheads gush–an immaculate replica of an Alpine White 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T hardtop powered by a supercharged 440 cubic inch “Magnum” V-8 engine that was driven hard and put away wet in the ’70s cult classic Vanishing Point. The girls (and QT) are huge fans of the movie, and they’re not alone. (There was even a clueless Viggo Mortensen-Jason Priestley 1997 remake.)

Vanishing Point has been a touchstone for musicians like Guns N’ Roses (who sampled it on Use Your Illusion II‘s “Breakdown”), Primal Scream (see 1997′s Vanishing Point), and Audioslave, whose video for “Show Me How to Live” shows the band puttering about in a Challenger amid hefty amounts of footage from the original movie:

(Editor’s note: This will be Idolator’s first and last posting of an Audioslave video.)

Like its similarly supercharged car-obsessed celluloid twin, Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop, VP exists in the median between the counterculture co-opt (in part due to the financial/ cultural successes of Easy Rider) and the instituting of the Interstate Highway System, which paved over the arid landscape of that old, weird America soon after shooting. It could be seen as the connective tissue between On the Road and The Dukes of Hazzard.

Its driver anti-hero, a Joe Namath-looking pill-popper named Kowalski, has quite the resumé: Vietnam vet, disgraced cop, demolition derby driver, dopehead, gearhead, screwhead, and–as his interstate chase with cops intensifies–counterculture hero. Kowalski’s co-pilot for the duration of the movie–who never sets foot inside the Challenger–is a blind deejay named “Super Soul,” played by Cleavon Little (better known as the black sheriff in Blazing Saddles). “Super Soul” uncovers some other roles of Kowalski: “the last American hero, the electric centaur, the demigod.” He in turn talks back to the radio (surely a result of being up for three days on uppers) and the enclaves of burnt-out hippies and Christians he encounters along the way embrace Kowalski as well. “Super Soul” mans a freeform FM radio station (conveniently with the call letters KOW) spieling about how Kowalski is a “soul hero in his soul mobile” trying to escape the “blue blue meanies.” KOW also, apparently, plays nothing but Delaney & Bonnie & Friends 24/7.

Conveniently, I’ve spent lots of time of late spinning Delaney & Bonnie’s 1971 masterpiece, Motel Shot (which Robert Christgau once deemed “a seamless delight, the most unflawed listening music I’ve heard in a long while”), especially their ramshackle top-twenty hit “Never Ending Song of Love.” That song doesn’t appear in the movie, but the couple’s vision of music-making permeates throughout; they even appear on a makeshift stage singing to a clutch of snake-handling faith healers under the moniker “J. Hovah Singers.”

Much like Kowalski, Delaney & Bonnie had a varied career, and wound up stuck in the no-man’s land between Stax southern soul and British blues-rock, straddling both yet never crossing over. Delaney Bramlett was the house guitarist on Shindig!, while Bonnie Lynn O’Farrell was the first white Ikette. Hitched out in LA, the couple cut a record on Stax and toured with their band of “friends,” which could include the likes of Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Duane Allman, Dr. John, Jim Dickinson, Billy Preston, Bobby Keys, and Leon Russell on any given night, before most of their backing band wound up as either Derek’s Dominos or Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen. The couple divorced by ’72 and cut middling solo discs, both finding Christ somewhere out on life’s highway. Bonnie perhaps had the more noteworthy career, decking Elvis Costello after he dissed Ray Charles out on tour in the late ’70s before going on to play “Bonnie” on Roseanne in the early ’90s.

Much like Easy Rider did with its soundtrack of au courant acid rock and psychedelia, so too does Vanishing Point‘s soundtrack reflect the sound of the post-’60s hangover, with a return to “roots”–soul, blues, folk, bluegrass, country, and gospel, with hard-rock pit stops like Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” and the J.B. Pickers’ roiling jam “Freedom of Expression,” which soundtracks this chase sequence.

Jimmy Reed and Big Mama Thornton appear, and you get the first recorded appearance of Kim Carnes, who appears on the Vanishing Point soundtrack under the name Dave & Kim. There’s also the Doug Dillard Expedition, whose quicksilver bluegrass breakdown soundtracks–what else?–a getaway scene. “Speed means freedom of the soul,” Super Soul portends as Kowalski speeds towards his fate. A man of few words, Kowalski would no doubt take the present-day advice of Rihanna to heart: “Shut up and drive.”

Ed. note: Here’s another installment of “VHS Or Beta?”, where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he looks at the 2006 documentary Fabricando Tom Zé, which looks at the life of the Brazilian musician.

Fabricando Tom Zé (Fabricating Tom Zé), directed by Decio Matos, Jr.
Brazil, 2006, 89 min.

I was a high school punk, all but guaranteeing that whatever music I liked, the parents would hate. (Wait, think that just meant I was a teenager.) Guitar feedback, tonsil-ejecting screams, caveman drumming–I reveled in such ejaculatory noise, as did all of my high school friends. We were quite smug in our urbane embrace of all sorts of sonic offal, be it the Swans or the Geto Boys. That is, until that fateful day when my best friend’s father played us a disc of “world music” called Brazil Classics Volume 4: The Best of Tom Zé, as compiled by Talking Head David Byrne (who was never punk enough for my tastes).

It seemed pretty bland at first, jerky acoustic guitars, those hand drums that Paul Simon liked in the ’80s, untranslatable chants. At least until the third track, “Toc,” came on. The guitar sounded like someone in need of a sugar fix, and the track kept tightening, twitching like a rubber band, getting weirder, more nerve-wracking, until I heard my best friend’s mom start vacuuming in the next room. No, wait … that was the music itself! This Brazilian guy had made an instrument out of that?

Weird, enervating noises emanating from both instrument and mouth continue to inform Tom Zé’s music. For example, check out this South Park-esque video from last year. Without reservation, the Brazilian madman had a profound impact on that mental gatekeeper in my head who determines what is and isn’t music, and it continues to this day, much to the chagrin of roommates and girlfriends alike. So when a recent survey of Brazilian film at New York’s Museum of Modern Art included a screening of the 2006 documentary Fabricando Tom Zé, I was in attendance. Here’s the trailer (in Portuguese, alas):

Director Decio Matos Jr. (of no relation to our own Jackin’ Pop editor) is a close friend of Zé’s, no doubt giving him unguarded access to the man. We get a glimpse into the classroom he attended as a small boy (one of the instances in the film where a snatch of superfluous animation appears) and Zé boasts to the camera: “What saved me is I’m a terrible singer, composer … (seeing) no difference between a piano and a vacuum cleaner.” Throughout the film, which mostly captures a world tour in 2005, Zé’s self-deprecating to a fault, laundry-listing his shortness, bad skin, ugliness, lack of talent, and illiteracy. Yet he doesn’t mind making bold announcements about his body of music: “When the geniuses come, they will have something to work with.”

As his music attests, Zé is a lively, erratic, combustible sort of fellow, creating new songs in the language of the country he’s playing (in Italy, he makes like Lil’ Wayne, in that he too has a song about “Giorgio Bush”), or spontaneously composing numbers during soundchecks, or on the tour bus en route to the venue. One classic scene involves a performance with an orchestra of industrial buffers shaving down go-go bells, producing rhythmic sprays of sparks.

Yet all of Zé’s intriguing quirks and outlooks on life don’t necessarily make for an interesting film. Despite Zé’s natural ability to rub both people and ears the wrong way, Matos seems hard-pressed for some grist, resulting in a sense of overstaking conflict between Zé and fellow Tropicalia founders Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Zé was crucial to the movement, penning the classic “2001,” which garnered Zé some notoriety when it was performed by Os Mutantes at the Parabelo Festival in São Paulo in 1967:

There certainly may be some truth to the fact that while Veloso and Gil remain the face of Brazil’s most popular musical export (even serving as cultural ambassadors) Zé resorted to taking a job as a gas station attendant to pay his bills, but it seems at most to be the result of a fussbudget who proudly embraces being acerbic, reclusive, and embittered, not some conspiratorial attempt on the part of Gil or Veloso. Or else it’s an example of what Morrissey once sang: “We hate it when our friends become successful.”

The film’s most tense moment occurs during a soundcheck at the Montreux Jazz Fest in Switzerland, when Zé decides that an unsympathetic soundman is yet another example of the “the Man” oppressing him and freaks the fuck out. In some small way, he erects a mountain out of a molehill, much like the film does, making this encounter out to be an ongoing conflict between First and Third World, rich vs. poor, white vs. black. Uh … hate to tell Tom, but I could walk into any bar right now, either around the country or around the world, and witness that “eternal struggle” between a self-serious musician and a douchebag sound guy.

It’s not as if Tom Zé hasn’t had his comeuppance. The film finally touches on how David Byrne’s discovery of Zé became a phenomenon right before it ends. Byrne called his discovery of Zé’s brilliant 1975 record Estudando O Samba akin to finding “a message in a bottle,” and its brave juxtapose of rural samba forms to urban noise remains jolting even today. By releasing Brazil Classics Volume 4: The Best of Tom Zé in the early ’90s, Byrne didn’t just bring international acclaim to Zé (creating fans like Beck, Tortoise, and Cibo Matto in the process), he also re-introduced Zé to his native land, which had long ago forgotten his peripheral presence in the Tropicalia movement.

A revisionist sense of history, sure, but the movie title does translate as Fabricating Tom Zé. And now Zé enjoys being a cultural icon of his country (well, as much as someone built for lifelong misery can actually derive pleasure from such status). While peers like Veloso and Gil long ago became pampered by success, by scrabbling all these decades, Zé’s music remains vital, bursting with new ideas. Unable to rest on his laurels, he puts it best in the film: “I have to make an invention every time.”

Bonus footage:

Ed. note: Today, we introduce “VHS Or Beta?”, a new column in which Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies–from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In his opening column, he takes on the soundtrack to the Andy Samberg comedy Hot Rod, which, alas, is “Dick In A Box”-free.

The perils of going to a movie bearing the disclaimer “A Lorne Michaels Production” should be well-known by anyone who dared see A Night at the Roxbury or It’s Pat: The Movie (though Mr. Michaels scrubbed his hands clean of the latter). While Saturday Night Live skits max out at one joke, such a whole number gets decimated for the full-length feature films of the show’s alums. Until our nation’s leading screenwriters can yank “Dick in a Box” into 79 minutes worth of screen time, we are forced to watch Andy Samberg taking on a role even Will Ferrell wouldn’t fuck with someone else’s dick–the brain-damaged, glandular-challenged stuntman Rod Kimble, a.k.a. Hot Rod.

As an admitted fan of both Jackass and Super Dave Osborne, bearing witness to physical calamities befalling doofuses in jumpsuits effortlessly dislodges “OOF!”s with machine-gun outbursts of pained laughter, a formula as tried, true, and All-American as a crotch shot on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Alas, today’s focus isn’t on the foreboding sight of a wee child wielding a wiffle-ball bat as he nears his khakied father, or Samberg’s Rod Kimble caught mid-air in trajectory towards the business end of a plywood ramp, but Hot Rod‘s soundtrack itself.

Emblazoned with a sticker that screams “Cool Beans! 23 smokin’ tracks from this summer’s c-c-coolest flick!”, should you miss that inane phrase from the ’80s, the stuttering cut-n-paste movie dialogue over a processed mac-n-cheese beat (track 16: “Cool Beans”) will make it stick. While weighing in with only eleven real tracks, a sure sign that said decade has been strip-mined of comedic gold in Hot Rod is the inclusion of not one, not two, but four songs from hapless hairsprayed pussies Europe.

Before you respond with “Wow, that’s three more Europe songs than even I remember!” realize that none of the Europe songs within is “The Final Countdown.” No less an expert on hair metal than Idolator’s own Maura K. Johnston decried the band’s over-indulgence on synths to prop up their pomposity and dearth of crunchy hair-metal licks. That said, we will cop to the cultural ubiquity of “The Final Countdown,” its canned-horn fanfare being deployed both by international spies on The Conet Project and as a sign that one of Gob Bluth II’s awesome magic tricks is coming on Arrested Development. (The woeful guest appearance of Will Arnett in Hot Rod only accentuates the agonizing void left by that show’s cancellation.) But what malfunctioning of the irony machine over the past twenty years suddenly makes “Danger on the Track,” “Cherokee,” “Rock the Night,” or “Time Has Come” into rockers? And why leave off “Ninja”?

Perhaps that over-reliance on Michael Michaeli’s synth work that wussifies Europe does bolster other crucial aspects of the soundtrack. In one befuddling non sequitur of a scene wherein Rod Kimble’s cronies bust a move in a parking lot, Stacey Q’s “Two of Hearts” pumps in the background; the song is seemingly included for no reason other than to have this Hi-NRG classic on a CD released this year (though Stacey’s glitchy refrain of “I-I-I-I-I need you” does echo “Cool Beans”). The pinnacle of the soundtrack, though, comes when Kimble trains for The Big Jump to the epic arpeggios of Giorgio Moroder’s “Chase” (itself pilfered from the soundtrack to Midnight Express). It’s also the most plausible scene in a movie otherwise stuffed with unfunny inanities like Rhodesian fighting sticks, tai chi moves that cause pants-crapping, AM radio tattoos, and an appearance from Ebenezer Scrooge–if only because I too train to this particular jam.