Posts Tagged ‘Jeff Daniels’

Blu-ray Review: “The Answer Man”

51RIJwGA8VL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]As anyone who takes spirituality seriously knows, it’s only natural for a person to experience ebbs and flows in his relationship with whatever higher power he believes in. But what if your career was founded on that relationship? What if you were famous for it? And what if…it ended? Badly, even?

That’s the premise at the heart of writer/director John Hindman’s The Answer Man, which stars Jeff Daniels as Arlen Faber, a sort of cranky cross between Neale Donald Walsch and J.D. Salinger whose 20-year-old book, God & Me, became the kind of hit that enables an author to take the rest of his career off — which is a good thing, because even though God & Me was inspired by a supposedly personal connection with the Almighty, Faber doesn’t have another book in him; he hasn’t felt anything but anger toward God, and contempt for his fellow human beings, in many years. It’s really a pretty interesting idea for a movie, which is why it’s such a pisser that Hindman decided to turn it into a thuddingly obvious romantic comedy.

The Answer Man is the kind of movie that tells you almost everything you need to know — about its characters, about its various plot arcs, and about the likelihood of tripping over the movie on Lifetime six months from now — in its first 15 minutes. And even worse, it tells you even before it tells you: Watching Lauren Graham in her opening scenes as an overprotective mother who feeds her son soy bacon and plays classical music as she drops him off at school in her Saab, you just know she’s going to rev the engine and crank up some rock & roll as soon as the kid is in the building. And lo, she does. Hindman makes it clear from the beginning that he doesn’t trust his audience to draw its own conclusions, drawing with the kind of broad, dumb strokes you’d expect from a Matthew McConaughey movie. How do we know the struggling bookstore owner played by Thumbsucker’s Lou Taylor Pucci is an alcoholic? Because he tells us with his very first lines. So on and so forth. (more…)

(Vinyl Record Day) Mix Six: “Soundtrack Sounds of the ’80s”

DOWNLOAD THE FULL MIX HERE

When you’re a young adult and trying to find your way in the world, it can be a very liberating period.  It’s a time when your tastes aren’t solidified, and your mind is open to musical forms that people older or younger than you may find utterly abhorrent.  The science of this phenomenon is detailed in the book This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin, but I’m fairly certain we’ve all experienced what Levitin writes about:  the music of our teen years (and early 20s) is just so much better than the crap that’s produced today.

I was going through my LPs the other day and found an inordinate number of soundtracks.  Yeah, the Footloose soundtrack was in there, but I started to find others that reminded me how intently I listened to the music used in films.  If I heard something I liked, I would usually drive down to Tower or Rasputin Records to see if I could get a copy after seeing the movie.  That was back in the days when, despite making just a little more than minimum wage, I had a disposable income for things like records.  Nowadays, while I still have a disposable income for music, there’s a kind of “download and forget” mentality that’s crept into my listening habits.  Sure, it’s more convenient to buy music as a digital download, but I would argue that it comes at a price.  And that price is the loss of anticipation and excitement about a record you bought at a brick and mortar store.

Dropping the needle on a new LP meant that you had to do more than just click a button.  It meant tearing off the cellophane wrapping, taking out the inner sleeve of the record (pausing to eye the cover art, if there was any), gingerly extracting the LP from the sleeve, placing it on the turntable, and carefully putting the needle on the vinyl.  For me, it was a ritual that reinforced the importance I placed on really listening to music.

While the music was playing, I would pore over the credits, liner notes, album art, and lyrics (if any).  I would file away nuggets of information gleaned from those notes, which would enhance the experience of listening to the music.  I can’t quite explain why, but knowing that composer X scored a film for director Y was important to me.  Somehow I think it made me feel more connected to the movies I was watching because I was able to enjoy the film on multiple levels. It is that total devotion to the music experience I find myself missing these days.  You know, getting completely lost in the music as you either cranked it up on the stereo speakers, or cranked it up on your headphones.

Alas, I find myself doing that less and less these days. Rediscovering the soundtracks presented here, however, has rekindled those memories of listening to music back in the day.  And the lesson learned is that I have to slow down and really start to listen again.

Because it’s Vinyl Record Day today, here we go with six selections from soundtracks that have all the snap, crackle, and pops that you may remember from those days of LPs and 45s. Oh, and this time I’m offering this mix in the usual “full mix” format and as individual mp3s. (more…)