As I’ve mentioned before, I’m thrilled by the use of a good pop or rock song on the big screen. And as a lover of both film and music, I have often listened to a song and imagined exactly how I would use it in a movie.
I’m sure this is something a lot of us do, matching images to the music we hear. Is it more prevalent for the generation that grew up on MTV and was conditioned to see music accompanied by videos? Or did my parents listen to Frank Sinatra and invent movies in their minds?
What, exactly, is a guilty pleasure?
Is it something you genuinely think is good even though it’s not considered “cool” to like it? If that’s the case, John Mayer and Counting Crows are guilty pleasures. But I don’t look at those acts that way — not at all.
Is it something you liked once upon a time and now you’re a little embarassed to admit you liked it, but not embarassed enough to get rid of it? That makes a little more sense to me, although I did a major CD purge a few years back and probably cleared out any candidates for that category.
So looking at my current collection, I’d define a guilty pleasure as something even I don’t really think is any good but somehow I enjoy listening to it anyway. And I have just the CD in mind.
Like every good yuppie, I rushed out and bought Nick Drake’s Pink Moon album after loving the title song’s use in that Volkswagen commercial. I suppose the real good yuppies rushed out and bought Volkswagens.
I was a little ashamed of not knowing who the hell Nick Drake was before he turned up in a car ad, but glad nonetheless to finally get on the bandwagon. I definitely saw the comparisons to one of my favorite artists, Elliott Smith (even before Smith completed the connection by dying early).
Here’s a great obscure Simon & Garfunkel song from the Bridge Over Troubled Water album.
As least it was obscure until Zach Braff put it in Garden State and every 17-28 year-old in America gobbled up the soundtrack because it made them feel as languorously cool as the characters in that movie.
(This is the first in an occasional series on movies that never got the recognition they deserved)
1990 was a landmark year for one of my favorite genres — the crime film. Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing, Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita and Stephen Frears’ The Grifters all hit screens that year to massive critical acclaim.
But lost in the pack was George Armitage’s stylish, funny and violent Miami Blues, an adaptation of Charles Willeford’s novel and one of the very best films of the 90s.
