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?

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.