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Song of the Day #4,471: ‘The Time of Your Life’ – Randy Newman

Continuing my countdown of every Pixar movie…

#18. A Bug’s Life (1998)
(up two spots from previous ranking)

When you talk about Pixar’s amazing early run, it’s easy to forget that their second film was actually pretty ordinary. A Bug’s Life certainly didn’t live up to Toy Story and was a let-down three years after that groundbreaking release.

It’s a sweet movie that feels like Pixar Lite. It’s not as laugh out loud funny or hold-your-breath exciting as its brethren, and it doesn’t have the thematic weight of the studio’s best films, but it does each of those things a little bit.

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Song of the Day #4,470: ‘Touch the Sky’ – Julie Fowlis

Continuing my countdown of every Pixar movie…

#20. Brave (2012)
(down one spot from previous ranking)

As a follow-up to the disappointing Cars 2, Brave wasn’t exactly a sign that Pixar had righted the ship.

It took 13 films for the studio to finally feature a female protagonist, but the result feels more in line with Disney’s traditional princess lineup than Pixar’s work.

A thin plot and an overreliance on slapstick humor take away from an otherwise touching story about a mother-daughter relationship.

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Song of the Day #4,469: ‘Collision of Worlds’ – Brad Paisley & Robbie Williams

My first quarantine movie challenge was to watch all of the films on the American Film Institute’s list of 25 essential musicals. I ranked those movies in a series of posts a month or so back.

For my next COVID-era cinematic trick, I have rewatched (or watched for the first time in a few cases) every Pixar movie in chronological order, ranking them as I went. I already had a Pixar ranking, so part of the fun of this exercise was seeing how these films moved up and down the list.

The movies don’t change, but we do, and sometimes we experience something differently years later based on any number of factors. As I offer up my list over the next three weeks, I will note how much each title shifted from my previous ranking.

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Song of the Day #4,468: ‘The Morning Fog’ – Kate Bush

When this song popped up as today’s Random Weekend selection, I realized that as much as I love Side One of Kate Bush’s 1985 album Hounds of Love, I’ve never paid much attention to Side Two.

In fact, until I read about today’s SOTD, the album’s final track, I didn’t know that Hounds of Love was conceived as two individual suites: Side One, ‘Hounds of Love,’ contains five songs, while Side Two, ‘The Ninth Wave,’ contains seven. The album’s four hits (‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God),’ ‘Cloudbusting,’ ‘Hounds of Love’ and ‘The Big Sky’) all appear on Side One, along with a favorite of mine, ‘Mother Stands For Comfort.’ I guess that explains why I know that half of the album so well.

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Song of the Day #4,467: ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown (Witmark Demos)’ – Bob Dylan

Between 1962 and 1964, Bob Dylan recorded a few dozen tracks for the publisher M. Witmark & Sons, with a plan to shop those songs to other artists.

Those songs, along with eight tracks he recorded for Leeds Music, were released in 2010 as the ninth volume of Dylan’s Bootleg Series. The collection features some of the earliest versions of beloved classics along with lesser-known and previously unheard tracks.

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