Lost: "There's No Place Like Home, Part 1"

"Wow, I felt really bad for Kate and Sayid when the other members of the Oceanic Six were greeted and embraced by their loved ones at the tarmac, while no one was there to wait for Kate or Sayid. As Morris Day once said, ex-cons and ex-torturers get lonely too."

The rest of my post can be found on Metroactive's Movie & Television Arts blog.

Even-numbered Indiana Jones movie curse?

I'm a fan of the first and third Indy movies, but I don't like the second one for obvious reasons, so what does that mean for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which is already getting mixed reviews? I probably won't like Crystal Skull, even though Harrison Ford is reunited with his Raiders of the Lost Ark co-star Karen Allen, my favorite Indy leading lady, and Steven Spielberg promised to keep those dreaded CGI FX to a minimum.

Or I might like it. I don't know. In the meantime, from the out-of-print and currently pricey Raiders and Temple of Doom soundtracks, here are the subdued and eerie Raiders main title music, the rousing "Airplane Fight" and "The Mine Car Chase," which accompanies one of the 1984 prequel's few enjoyable sequences.

John Williams, "Main Title: South America, 1936"
From the expanded Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack (4:10, DCC Compact Classics, 1995, mp3)

John Williams, "Airplane Fight"
From the expanded Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack (4:36, DCC Compact Classics, 1995, mp3)

John Williams, "The Mine Car Chase"
From the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom soundtrack (3:38, Polydor, 1984, mp3)

Lost: "Cabin Fever"

"'Cabin Fever' reveals that Alpert's even older than we think. He visited Locke shortly after he was born and then again a few years later, when he tried to recruit the kid while he was in foster care...

And what's the reason for Batmanuel's inability to age?

I don't think Alpert is even alive. My theory is that he's like Christian Shepherd (John Terry), a dead man who's been resurrected by the island to serve as one of its mouthpieces, to lure those who will listen--like Locke and Claire--to some sort of purpose or mission that has yet to be fully explained and has been hinted at in those trippy final words: 'He wants us to move the island.'

Here's an even wilder theory: I think Alpert is Locke's real father..."

The rest of my post can be found on Metroactive's Movie & Television Arts blog.

Winehouse quits Quantum of Solace

Amy "Spill the" Winehouse is officially out of the running for the theme to the next 007 movie (did her latest bender arise from her inability to handle the pressure of writing a Bond theme?).

Oh God, I hope Eon doesn't go with some emo D-bag a la the closing credits of the Spider-Man movies.

Here are my dream choices for the singer(s) of the Quantum of Solace theme:

-Editors (their introspective lyrics are perfect for the darker tone of the Daniel Craig movies, plus this band, which has been called "an edgier Coldplay," rocks)
-Interpol
-Portishead

Other dream choices (these artists either have been past David Arnold collaborators or would make for perfect Arnold collaborators--but they won't be hired by Eon because of their CD sales in America):

-The Cardigans (Nina Persson sang the single version of Arnold's Randall & Hopkirk theme)
-David McAlmont
-Chrissie Hynde
-Shirley Bassey

Hynde contributed two great original songs to the Living Daylights soundtrack (and should have sung that film's opening credits theme instead of a-ha frontman Morten Harket) and covered "Live and Let Die" on Arnold's Shaken and Stirred tribute album. I wouldn't mind hearing Hynde or Bassey record another theme for the series. I know Bassey's voice doesn't sound like it did in the '60s, but she's still quite the belter, and it'd be cool to see her croon another Bond theme before she plays her golden harp.

In other blockbuster franchise-related news, I just couldn't resist... Yahoo! News has made it sound like The Dark Knight will depict a romance between Batman and the Joker a la the late Heath Ledger's most popular movie:

Cloverfield "Roar" theme disappears from iTunes

Fans of either Cloverfield (which I haven't watched yet) or the music of composer Michael Giacchino have been looking forward to downloading the '50s monster movie-style "Roar," Giacchino's nearly 10-minute Cloverfield closing credits theme, ever since the iTunes Store announced that it would release the full-length 12-minute version of "Roar" for $1.99 on Tuesday, April 29. ("Roar" was made available only to American iTunes customers. Sorry, limeys.)

Apparently, the availability of "Roar" was short-lived. Even though "Roar" skyrocketed to #13 on the iTunes album sales chart, the iTunes Store removed the track after only a couple of days, without letting any of its customers know. It's as if "Roar" never existed.

On Wednesday night, I tried to buy "Roar," but the download was taking too long to finish. I thought maybe the iTunes Store was down at the moment, so I gave up on the download and quit iTunes to reopen it at a later time, hoping that the store would be up and running by then and the download would automatically resume.

When I reopened iTunes the next day, the download never resumed. I did a search for "Roar" in the store, but the track's gone. It no longer exists.

What the hell, iTunes?

Lost: "Something Nice Back Home"

"The Jin/Sun scenes depict a romance between two characters who usually aren't paired together like this on prime-time, where, as Joyce Millman has said, 'younger, whiter, unmarried people seem to have all the romantic fun.' Their relationship is way more interesting than the Jack/Kate/Sawyer/Ana-Lucia Juliet quadrangle. The only viewers who would find triangles, quadrangles and sextangles interesting are viewers who like to frequently use the word 'squee.' God, I hate that word."

The rest of my post can be found on Metroactive's Movie & Television Arts blog.

New AFOS episode: "The Inmates Are Taking Over the Asylum"

This week, the United Artists 90th Anniversary Film Festival hits both the Castro Theatre in San Francisco and the Nuart Theatre in L.A., so the next episode of A Fistful of Soundtracks will feature my favorite selections from scores to films that were distributed by UA. "The studio without a studio" thrived during an era when rival studios couldn't keep up with their audiences--and the social changes of the period--and kept releasing dull and staid product. UA's smart and daring films during the Arthur Krim/Robert Benjamin regime and Krim and Benjamin's championing of filmmakers--they let them do their thing--are always worth celebrating. Oh yeah, and most of these flicks had terrific original music too.

"The Inmates Are Taking Over the Asylum" (WEB96) will begin streaming tomorrow (Thursday, May 1 at midnight, 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm). I've included themes from some of UA's most popular releases (The Great Escape, 007), but I also wanted to fill most of the episode with music from cult classics (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) or soundtrack albums that are out of print (The Long Goodbye).


Pelham, a thrilling caper movie with Walter Matthau at his sardonic best as a cynical transit cop who's the perfect disheveled hero for an even more disheveled New York, and The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's clever reimagining of Philip Marlowe, are two '70s UA flicks I instantly fell in love with. I first caught Pelham on TCM a few years ago and discovered The Long Goodbye on DVD last year.

Pelham composer David Shire and Long Goodbye composer John Williams achieved so much with what little they had. Shire wrote each Pelham score cue under the 12-tone method of composition to evoke "organized chaos"--in other words, the funkiest film score not written by a black dude ever.

Williams' Long Goodbye score--one of the shortest he ever wrote--is equally off-kilter. It consists of nothing but different variations on the same melody. Wherever Elliott Gould's Marlowe goes, the Long Goodbye theme follows, whether it's as bar piano music or as a doorbell ring. I don't know exactly why Altman asked Williams to write the score like that. (Jaime J. Weinman says Williams' score is a spoof of the incessant pimping of movie title songs in the '60s and '70s--an issue that caused the previously stable working relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and the less pop-minded Bernard Herrmann to fall apart during the making of Torn Curtain. The Something Old, Nothing New blogger theorizes that Williams' score could also be an homage to Roy Webb's similarly structured score during Out of the Past.) But whatever the intentions were, the Long Goodbye score nicely reflects Marlowe's sense of displacement--he's a '40s guy in a '70s world.

Whereas UA was a '70s studio in a '50s Hollywood that struggled to keep up with the '60s.


WEB96 also covers UA's recent art-house phase, before Tom Cruise took over the company. One of my favorite films to emerge from UA's art-house years is Roman Coppola's CQ, a fun little film about filmmaking in the mold of Day for Night and Ed Wood. It contains a great loungey score by the French trio Mellow, which evoked the likes of Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni and Ennio Morricone during the cues for the movie-within-the-movie Codename: Dragonfly, a mash-up of Barbarella and Danger: Diabolik (the source of Angela Lindvall's sexy rolling-around-in-cash scene).

A Half-Assed History of UA's Logos


The '70s logo

A WEB96 extra: My favorite of the UA logo jingles, the '90s logo jingle:

I remember the first appearance of the '90s UA logo when I saw GoldenEye in 1995. The logo actually received cheers from GoldenEye's opening weekend audience--they were just so happy to see Bond again after a six-year absence. The sadly discontinued jingle was composed by Jeff Eden Fair and Starr Parodi, who recalled to SoundtrackNet that "We did that with a 90-piece orchestra at the Sony Scoring Stage... Our instructions were, 'We want something that represents the past, present, and future of United Artists.' So we started with classic orchestral instrumentation, moving to futuristic sounds and concepts at the end."


The '00s logo


Defamer's funny idea of what the UA watertower now looks like

Next AFOS episode: I'm taking a break after five consecutive eps. I don't know when I'll stream the next new ep.

Now playing on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel: