Chewsday

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #2)

From October 4, 2011: The reason for Chewsday

Air grafted a nifty new score onto the silent classic A Trip to the Moon, or as it's known to your brain-damaged little brother who gets all his historical facts from Wikipedia, that movie that ripped off the "Tonight Tonight" video

When a rare hand-colored print of Georges Méliès' Jules Verne-inspired 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon was meticulously restored and shown for the first time at Cannes in 2011, the cleaned-up imagery wasn't the only upgrade A Trip to the Moon received. The restored print also contained a new original score provided by the French electronica duo Air of "Surfing on a Rocket" and Virgin Suicides score fame.

Air

Air members Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel have said that they found the restored Trip to the Moon to be a more liberating film project than The Virgin Suicides. "I don’t think we like doing soundtracks... We are not film composers. It’s a really intense job," said Godin to IFC. "You can’t go on tour, you are at the service of someone, and you are not the boss. You have no freedom. But on this project we were completely free. Basically we were writing the music the day before Cannes, so no one could say a word about it. It was a blank screen. We could do whatever we wanted."

The Trip to the Moon score sounds as futuristic and whimsical as past Air tracks like "Kelly Watch the Stars," "Sexy Boy," "Mer Du Japon" and the Alessandro Alessandroni whistle-inspired "Alpha Beta Gaga." But there's a timelessness to this Trip to the Moon score that makes it a great fit with Méliès' surreal lo-fi visuals, which are an integral part of Martin Scorsese's Méliès tribute Hugo(*) and were famously referenced 15 years before by the husband-and-wife duo of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris in the steampunky video they directed for The Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight Tonight."



Earlier this week, Godin and Dunckel released their Trip to the Moon themes on the Le Voyage Dans La Lune album from Astralwerks. Because the Méliès film is only 14 minutes long, the release expands upon Air's score material and adds guest vocals by the Brooklyn trio Au Revoir Simone and Victoria Legrand from the Baltimore duo Beach House (the album is twice the length of the restored film, which Astralwerks has also included in its entirety in mp4 form on the release).

The album's Legrand-sung highlight, "Seven Stars," isn't part of the restored film. But like much of the rest of the album, "Seven Stars" is a nice and richly crafted companion piece to the most famous "astronauts fly to moon and commit genocide by poking most of moon's native population with their umbrellas" story ever told.

CBS Sunday Morning's Trip to the Moon-style sun logo for a recent segment about Hugo (Photo source: The Faces of Sunday Morning)

(*) Several years ago, I wrote down an idea for a fantasy movie script that would have presented an alternate history in which there was a top-secret trip to the moon at the turn of the century, and one of the astronauts was Méliès, who, to me, is a fascinating figure and a silent-era genius, even though his films contain yellowface and unseemly French lady armpit hair. This script would have shown how his lunar experiences ended up being the actual inspiration for A Trip to the Moon, even though Méliès would embellish (or simplify) elements of his lunar experiences because real life is far less fanciful (or cost-effective) than the universe Méliès created in his films. I wanted the moon to have facial features like it did in Méliès' film, but this planetoid-sized creature was going to be depicted through modern effects technology and appear as large and craggy as the actual moon. This script idea never went past being an idea on a napkin, or as some people like to call it, a Word document. But Brian Selznick's 2007 graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Scorsese's Oscar-nominated adaptation of the Selznick book have told a better story about Méliès than whatever I envisioned in my head.

Chewsday

Random Chew page of the week (from Chew #13)

Terence Blanchard's Red Tails score swoops into "AFOS Prime" on A Fistful of Soundtracks

George Lucas and Terence Blanchard (Photo source: Jessica Drossin)

Even though TV spots for feature films flash the cast and crew member credits so quickly you have to pause the DVR to read them, I was able to make out the name of Aaron McGruder in the split-second credits at the end of a TV spot for frequent CSI: NY and Treme director Anthony Hemingway's Tuskegee Airmen flick Red Tails, which came out just in time for Black History Month and was a longtime pet project for George Lucas, who produced it.

"Hold up," I thought. "The Aaron McGruder? The same Aaron McGruder who made Red Tails star Cuba Gooding Jr. and George Lucas such frequent punching bags in his Boondocks comic strip?"

If someone told me 10 years ago that Lucas and McGruder, the most vocal lapsed Star Wars fan outside of Simon Pegg, would work together someday, I would have said, "Sure, they will. When pigs fly."

Life should just be a nonstop Soul Train line

Though it stopped airing in first-run syndication in 2006, Soul Train, whose influential creator and longtime host Don Cornelius died earlier today, will never stop rolling, thanks to YouTube.

The news of Cornelius' death made me go look up clips of Soul Train lines on YouTube. Goddamn, there are so many clips. No wonder Spike Lee concluded his bittersweet 1994 coming-of-age film Crooklyn with a montage of vintage Soul Train line clips. The fly dance moves in those clips can really cheer you up when you're down. (You can also trace the history of African American dance and fashion in those clips.)

I usually avoid posting several YouTube videos at once because I never know when one of them is going to be removed from the site, and then your post looks stupid when it's left with this rotting carcass of a dead embed. Below are several of my favorite Soul Train clips that I've run into today, and they're presented in chronological order, from the '70s to the '90s. Many of these videos have been on YouTube for awhile, so hopefully, there won't be one that will vanish.

Interspersed between the clips are two of the show's various original themes. Those two chunes are the Soul Train themes I remember the most from my childhood: O'Bryan's "Soul Train's a Comin'" and George Duke's "TSOP '87," a cover of a previous Soul Train theme, MFSB's "TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)."

The Soul Train dancers get down to Curtis Mayfield's "Get Down," so that means this clip comes from the show's first season in syndication (1971-72).



In 1972, special guest Stevie Wonder made up a song on the spot about Soul Train. He would have been an awesome in-house musician on Whose Line Is It Anyway?

There's video footage of Wonder's "Soul Train" song on YouTube, but too bad it's attached to Wonder's lip-synched performance of "Superstition." If there's one thing I dislike about Soul Train, it's Cornelius' Dick Clark-style requirement that the musical guests had to lip-synch their tracks (as I've said before, lip-synching on a music show looks so dumb). But Cornelius allowed Wonder to break that rule for this one number that's more genuine and exhilarating than most Soul Train performances simply because it's sung live and improvised.

New York magazine's Nitsuh Abebe called Wonder's improvised number "One of the warmest moments I've ever seen on television... it'd make as beautiful a eulogy [for Cornelius] as anyone could ask for."



The track during this Soul Train line is Earth, Wind & Fire's "Mighty Mighty," which places this clip in 1974. Hey, guy in the Afro and gray tux at 1:35, duck!



During this Soul Train line to The O'Jays' 1975 hit "I Love Music," YouTube commenters claim that they can see Jody Watley, who started out as a regular Soul Train dancer, at 0:17 and President Obama at 2:17.



Electronic R&B from the '80s rules. O'Bryan's "Soul Train's a Comin'" is my favorite of the many original themes that opened Soul Train.