Concluding my rundown of personal 2023 Oscar nominations, today I’ll look at the Best Director category.
Great movie direction is even harder to assess than great movie acting. How do you weigh the wide range of skill sets needed to successfully helm a movie, whether it’s working with the actors, deciding where to put the camera and when to move it, or setting the overall tone of the piece?
Today we throw back to the week of May 4, 2013, the most recent year I’ll cover in Throwback Weekends (at least until we hit 2024). Next week I’ll loop back around to 1963.
Pink’s ‘Just Give Me a Reason’ was the third single from The Truth About Love, one of the best albums of that year. The song was initially planned as a solo performance, with Nate Ruess of the band fun. as a co-songwriter, but Pink felt the track would work better as a conversation between two performers.
Our final song to reach #1 by two different artists is also the one with the longest span between releases — 27 years.
‘Lady Marmalade’ first reached the top spot in 1974, recorded by the girl group Labelle (Patti Labelle sang the lead vocal). Patti later claimed to not know the French-language refrain (“Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?”) meant “Would you like to sleep with me tonight?”
My final 2003 album wasn’t a major commercial success, or musically groundbreaking. It’s just the third studio album by an artist I really like but don’t feature very often: Pink.
Try This was Pink’s follow-up to the smash 2001 hit Missundaztood, which went 5X Platinum and remains her best-selling album, with 12 million copies moved worldwide. That album marked a shift from pop to rock, and Try This continued the evolution of her sound.
I started listening to Pink sometime in the late 2000s, when her latest album Funhouse was charting well and receiving a lot of critical acclaim.
I also enjoyed her next album, 2012’s The Truth About Love, but after that I stopped keeping up with her releases. She has dropped two studio albums since then that struggled to find an audience. Last year’s Hurts 2B Human hasn’t even cracked 100,000 U.S. sales, while most of her earlier releases were in the millions.
Meet Me In Montauk 