Meme with music sharing.

[amanuensis1]

Tagged by dien!

List five songs you are currently digging.

a. Confrontation With Count Dooku and Finale, John Williams, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones soundtrack. John Williams rules. The AotC soundtrack is the only one of the six SW films whose finale does not end with the traditional "Dum, DUM! Da-da-da-dum!" notes of triumph. Go listen. It ends with the softest slip of Princess Leia's Theme, and underneath is the deepest, you'll-miss-it-if-you-have-the-wrong-settings-on-your-sound-system bass line of those nine distinctive notes of Darth Vader's Theme. It stays in a minor key. Goosepimples EVERY time.

b. Royal Courtship, by Al Stewart, A Beach Full of Shells. Yes, "Year of the Cat" Al Stewart. He just put out this album earlier this year. It sold itself to me when I heard a snippet of Gina In the King's Road (and that's really the one you should go hear)--but this track has a word in it you rarely see outside a few texts--and I've certainly never heard it as a lyric. The song begins: "I sent my major-domo to your amanuensis/ To ascertain your feelings, and strip away pretenses..." Yes, I was totally tickled.

c. I'm Still Here (Jim's Theme), John Rzeznik, Treasure Planet soundtrack. A lot of people have heard me lament how underrated this film is, in the canon of Disney films. It's marvelous, and this sequence featuring Jim and Silver (and Jim's flashback to his absent father) works perfectly for this song.

d. If Only, Fiction Plane, Holes soundtrack. Those of you who read the Newberry-award-winning Holes by Louis Sachar and then saw the film may know that it's one of those book-to-film translations that works wonderfully. Helps that Sachar wrote the screenplay himself. I love this reworking of the little folk song that runs through Sachar's story.

e. The Drunken Piper, Natalie MacMaster, Women of the World: Celtic II. I never get tired of modern Celtic music. This one's the first track on the album for a reason.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

You thought Holes worked? I thought the book was a hoot, but the movie was pure Hollywood: get rid of the awkward fat kid and replace him with the slick, slim, acne-free Nick-at-Niter of the week. The only way that could have been more insulting is if Stanley was played by Gary Sinese and had Amazing CGI fat.

[rectpropagation.livejournal.com]

the slick, slim, acne-free Nick-at-Niter of the week

Shia is not a Nick-at-Niter of the week! Shia LaBeouf was Disney! Ya betta recognize!

I know that was random but I couldn't resist.

[(Anonymous)]

My bad. Holla!

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Here's what was up with that. (This is on the DVD extras in interviews.) Sachar realized, along with the director and who-all, that the role of Stanley was quite physically demanding. Ideally to stay true to the book, they'd have had to cast a young actor who was overweight and make him slim down and shoot all scenes in sequence, or have a slim actor bulk up and shoot in a reverse timeline. Owing to the ensemble cast's needs and such, shooting in sequence was not feasible and because of the difficult physical demands Sachar decided to discard Stanley's weight issue as a plot point. He did not sound, in the interviews, as if it was a casual decision for him, but he did think it would have made the creation of the film difficult if not impossible.

So if the issue of Stanley's weight rang especially key for the reader, I agree that that's going to bias a viewing of the film. Might make one think the translation of book to film failed. I felt much more at peace with it after I heard Sachar's interviews.