Yeah, we just visited the Ferris Bueller soundtrack in one of Kelly Stitzel’s excellent Soundtrack Saturday posts — but one good turn deserves another, and Zack Dennis returns to the musical themes of the noted ’80s rapscallion with his latest edition of Motion Picture Soundtrack.
Welcome, fans of the Vampire Diaries! In episode 3, the closing moments of the show featured a cover of the classic New Order song “Temptation,” as envisioned by Moby and vocalized by Laura Dawn. If you’re here, you probably enjoyed the cover version of the song quite a bit and might be surprised to find that it’s older than you think – it was originally released on Moby’s 2005 album Hotel. Anyhow, please stop by the main site (www.popdose.com) to see if we’ve written about any other subjects you might be interested in.
A couple weeks ago my girlfriend and I took a trip to Chicago for the weekend. The weather on Sunday was practically identical to that during Ferris Bueller’s legendary day off: mostly sunny with a high temperature of 69 degrees. It was the kind of weather that inspired Ferris (Matthew Broderick) to remark thoughtfully to the audience, “how could I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?” before taking off for a day of surprisingly wholesome adventures in downtown Chicago with his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) and his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara).
“Breaking the fourth wall” is an expression that refers to the imaginary “fourth wall” of a theater – the portal through which the audience watches the events of the story. Breaking the wall occurs when one of the characters acknowledges the fact that an audience exists, and speaks to them directly (or refers to them indirectly). This happens copiously in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) – in fact, it’s probably the most familiar example of this technique. Ferris talks about all kinds of things; he provides a tutorial on how to fake an illness, gripes about his lack of a car, and explains his disdain for authority – and of any ideology in general. Having Ferris speak directly to us is an important part of the movie’s charm, as Matthew Broderick’s smarmy charisma floats off of the screen and makes it clear why everyone in his high school – even the teachers in the English department – simply adore him.
“The only place I get hurt is out there. The world don’t give a shit about me.”
I. Well, I’m Frustrated and Outdated
The first voice you hear is a dead man’s scream. It’s one of those full-throated primal belts, like Roger Daltrey’s in “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Here it’s Kevin DuBrow, his scalded screech busting the floodgates for “Bang Your Head (Metal Health),” the second single from Quiet Riot’s landmark Metal Health (1983), the first slab of fuzz ’n’ meedley to ever reach #1 on the Billboard Albums chart.
The band was at its mainstream zenith then. Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) was probably just getting started, years of toil finally paying off as professional wrestling graduated from the sweathouse din of high school gyms to respectable arenas in metropolitan cities. It came with a price, of course. Regional territories were swallowed by ambitious, growing monoliths. But that wouldn’t matter for a while, not even to the Ram. Luckily, he was in his prime, synchronous with the era. He was the ’80s.
Someday that would come back to haunt him, but someday was just a harmless, nebulous future. For now we’re in his past. Wisely, director Darren Aronofsky (on a Robert D. Siegel script) never shows us this past except as a collage of scattered magazines and handbills against the ghostly chatter of ringside patter and a raucous anthem that rocked a long-gone summer, growled by a man who in 2007 was silenced forever.
But Ram still struts to this hoary buzzsaw, having plucked it during its popularity and transformed it into his ring-entrance music. When the riffs kick in to summon his fist-pumping form, the crowds respond as they would at a concert. They know what’s coming: a classic blast from their childhoods, riding into town with a near-suicidal need to entertain. And the outcome is always predetermined. Once their faded hero climbs the ropes and drops that old-school Ram Jam finisher — his greatest hit — it’s over, brother.
The soundtrack to Danny Boyle’s film Trainspotting (1996) is widely considered to be one of the best soundtracks ever. The songs Boyle selected for the soundtrack fulfill two primary goals – showcasing artists that the characters themselves adore, and setting the mood of the situations the songs accompany. Music plays a huge part in the lives of the characters of Trainspotting, and very little of the music on the soundtrack was created specifically for the film – in fact relying heavily on musicians mentioned in the Irvin Welsh novel on which the film was based. By contrast, the soundtrack of Boyle’s most recent production, Slumdog Millionaire (2008) was written entirely by A.R. Rahman to fit the visual material that had already been produced, with the exception of a single song.
The first time I realized I was driving by one of the locations used in The Big Lebowski (1998)- Johnie’s Coffee Shop – I thought it would be great fun to host a Big Lebowski Tour. You’d rent a big, comfortable bus with video players, and show the film as you drove to the spots where pieces of the movie were filmed – Johnie’s, the “Big” Lebowski’s palatial residence, Jackie Treehorn’s home in Malibu, the bridge where the kidnapping exchange was to have taken place, Donny’s final resting place, etc. You’d serve white russians (or as The Dude refers to them, Caucasians) and maybe provide a smoke break for those suitably inclined. Finally, you’d end the evening in a starry bowling alley, knocking down pins.
It would never work, of course. To begin with, the locations are too far apart – The Dude’s home is in Venice, The Big Lebowski’s house is in Beverly Hills, Donny’s final resting place is down in San Pedro, Johnie’s is in the Miracle Mile, and the bridge is somewhere up north beyond the far side of the San Fernando Valley. To make matters worse, the bowling alley Hollywood Star Lanes no longer exists – it was closed and torn down in 2002. Apparently some of its decorations have been preserved at the Lucky Strike Lanes nearby, but it just doesn’t seem like it would be the same. It’s a shame. It would have been a brilliant tourist trap.
When it was released in 1988, Die Hard set a new standard for action movies. For a decade afterward, pretty much every single action movie was unable to avoid a comparison with John McTiernan’s film, which delivered such a memorable dose of pure entertainment on a number of different levels, including the use of every conceivable weapon outside of a genuine war zone. The writers of the film, Jeb Stuart and Steven de Souza (adapting Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever), contrived plot elements that enabled the film’s characters to use pistols, machine guns, a sniper rifle, a missile launcher, and enough C-4 explosives to blow up several stories of a building. It wasn’t until 1999, when The Matrix came out, that the bar for action sequences was truly set at a higher level. While The Matrix didn’t use any of Die Hard’s trademark humor, it built an intriguing universe for its characters to inhabit that served as a suitable counterpoint to the film’s unforgettable action sequences.
Recently I’ve been gnawing away at Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited, a series of ruminations on the state of modern society (modern as in 1958, the year the book was published) and its relationship to the themes in his dystopian novel Brave New World, which had been published 26 years prior. One of the chapters, title “Chemical Persuasion,” addresses existing and newly invented psychotropic drugs and compares them to soma, the hypothetical substance used by the denizens of Huxley’s new world to medicate themselves, and more insidiously used by the scientific overlords of this world to maintain order and complacency within the population.
In Brain Candy, the troupe of comedians known as the Kids in the Hall provided their own satiric take on the subject, postulating a new compound called GLeeMONEX, which encapsulates its users in the frame of mind they experienced during their happiest memory. Ultimately, the theme of this film echoes that of Brave New World, that eternal bliss can come at a steep price, and that it is a fundamental perversion of human nature for a person to be blissfully happy all the time.
This past weekend I was the best man at my friend Rodger’s wedding. I spent a long time working on my toast, which went well, but there was something I was thinking about that I didn’t get to include in my speech.
A lot of times, our ability to feel joy for others is constrained by our own status – if you’re having a horrible month, it’s hard to be happy when you find out that one of your friends just scored a huge raise. That’s why it’s a bad idea to gamble as a group – for every person that hits it big, there’s going to be at least one other who takes a bath. But what’s always been interesting about my friendship with Rodger is that I’m always rooting for him – regardless of what’s going on with me. I can spend two hours bobbing about in freezing water without catching a single wave, but if I see Rodger pick up a long right and stroll out onto the nose, I’ll be hooting for him as loud as I can.
I’ve always tried to resist being jealous about having friends chase after my ex-girlfriends, but Rodger’s the one guy I was actually disappointed in when he passed up his chance when my ex Suzon turned up at his New Year’s party in a pair of tight leather pants.* Doug Liman’s independent film Swingers (1996) features a similar sort of friendship between its central character Mikey (Jon Favreau) and his libertine friend Trent (Vince Vaughn).
A number of months ago, Darren Robbins posted a column discussing how brazen arrogance seemed to be the most valuable asset in a playboy’s pickup arsenal.If this is true, then how come neither Beavis nor Butt-Head has ever scored?
I don’t want to sound pretentious here, but the seduction approaches of this dramaturgical diad are actually diametrically opposed. Butt-Head takes the proactive approach of the alpha male, making demands under the expectation that his (imagined) status and audacity will ensure their fulfillment. Beavis, on the other hand, creates a totally outrageous paradigm by adopting the more relaxed stance of the beta, trusting that his good nature and casual self-deprecation will win sympathy, and thus boobs. Neither has ever worked, and in a magnificent outpouring of angst at the end of the film, after they had traveled “a hundred miles” across the country in a desperate attempt to score, Beavis insists that both of them are “just gonna get old,” but that “it’s just not gonna happen.”
Butt-Head epitomizes the arrogance envisioned by Darren, that severe narcissism bordering on the delusional. Of course, as is summarized brilliantly in Beavis’ final speech, neither of them is ever going to score, or else one of the major driving forces of the show would be destroyed. But how would things work out for Butt-Head if he existed within the real world? Would his supreme arrogance trump his braces, and lisp, and slouching posture? My own experience has taught me that absolutely nothing matters more than self-confidence. But self-confidence can’t be feigned – when it is, it becomes that which Butt-Head dispays – bravado. The difference between the two can sometimes boil down to a simple question: do you truly believe your own bullshit?
I tend to make a lot of allowances for films that translate classic literature into high school settings.If nothing else, I respect the ambition of such an endeavor.And there are plenty of examples where this has been done successfully.Clueless (1995), based on Jane Austen’s Emma, was a delightful bit of fluff.I’m told that Cruel Intentions (1999), based on the French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, is quite entertaining (I’d seen the John Maklovich version shortly before Cruel Intensions came out, so I skipped the modern version).And Brick (2006), although not based on any specific piece of hard-boiled crime fiction, is one of the most memorable films I’ve seen in years.With a title as specific and intriguing as Crime and Punishment in Suburbia, I was prepared to like this film before I’d even started watching it.
A couple weeks ago my girlfriend and I took a trip to Chicago for the weekend. The weather on Sunday was practically identical to that during Ferris Bueller’s legendary day off: mostly sunny with a high temperature of 69 degrees. It was the kind of weather that inspired Ferris (Matthew Broderick) to remark thoughtfully to the audience, “how could I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?” before taking off for a day of surprisingly wholesome adventures in downtown Chicago with his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) and his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara).
The first time I realized I was driving by one of the locations used in The Big Lebowski (1998)- 
When it was released in 1988, Die Hard set a new standard for action movies. For a decade afterward, pretty much every single action movie was unable to avoid a comparison with John McTiernan’s film, which delivered such a memorable dose of pure entertainment on a number of different levels, including the use of every conceivable weapon outside of a genuine war zone. The writers of the film, Jeb Stuart and Steven de Souza (adapting Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever), contrived plot elements that enabled the film’s characters to use pistols, machine guns, a sniper rifle, a missile launcher, and enough C-4 explosives to blow up several stories of a building. It wasn’t until 1999, when The Matrix came out, that the bar for action sequences was truly set at a higher level. While The Matrix didn’t use any of Die Hard’s trademark humor, it built an intriguing universe for its characters to inhabit that served as a suitable counterpoint to the film’s unforgettable action sequences.
Recently I’ve been gnawing away at Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited, a series of ruminations on the state of modern society (modern as in 1958, the year the book was published) and its relationship to the themes in his dystopian novel Brave New World, which had been published 26 years prior. One of the chapters, title “Chemical Persuasion,” addresses existing and newly invented psychotropic drugs and compares them to soma, the hypothetical substance used by the denizens of Huxley’s new world to medicate themselves, and more insidiously used by the scientific overlords of this world to maintain order and complacency within the population.
This past weekend I was the best man at my friend Rodger’s wedding. I spent a long time working on my toast, which went well, but there was something I was thinking about that I didn’t get to include in my speech.
I tend to make a lot of allowances for films that translate classic literature into high school settings.