Matt Marks Music

So I saw The Watchmen last night. I was a big fan of the comic, so I had been eagerly anticipating this film for a while. I haven’t seen 300 or the Dawn of the Dead remake, so I didn’t really know what to expect from Zack Snyder. Overall verdict: a success. Visually it totally works. The actors were for the most part pretty effective, although comic book dialog and film dialog are very different and it shows. They didn’t fuck with the story too much (except the ending, WTF?) and most of the thematic material was present and clear.

Ok, so now to the achilles-fucking-heel of the movie: the soundtrack.

Holy crap.

The movie starts as the comic starts, with the dramatic murder of the character known as The Comedian (not really a spoiler, the film is based on this event). Shot very well, very stylish. Soundtrack: Unforgettable by Nat King Cole. Hmm… The ironic use of a touching old-timey ballad to contrast with the disturbing on-screen content. It worked when Terry Gilliam used What a Wonderful World at the end of Twelve Monkeys, but the dramatic effect of this technique has lessened ever since. But, fuck it, it’s the beginning of the movie, I’ll give it a shot, fine.

Next, opening credits. Song choice: The Times They Are A’Changing by Bob Dylan. In its entirety… Ok now. This is getting kinda Gumpy. Please tell me this isn’t going to be one of those Time Life soundtracks where they use blatantly iconic songs from the 20th century in a lazy attempt to give weight to the scenes…

That’s exactly what the entire movie was.

Every time I would be digging the film’s many awesome qualities, they’d plug in these tired movie music clichés.

Here’s a sampling:

Sound of Silence – Simon & Garfunkle: during a wistful ponderous scene

All Along the Watchtower – Jimi Hendrix: during an intense suspenseful scene

Ride of the Valkyries – Wagner: During a war scene

Mozart Requiem: After a main character dies…

Guh… and the rest. 99 Luftballoons, Me and Bobby McGee, KC and the Sunshine Band…

The absolute worst though: Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah during a graphic sex scene. No, not one of the many awesome, sexy covers of this song. The Leonard Cohen version. Now, I love this version, but it’s anything but sexy. It made the entire audience view the sex scene as a joke. It was almost grotesque.

It was possibly the worst music I’ve ever heard for a film. It made Forrest Gump’s soundtrack seem subtle and obscure. Some of the more scorey music was ok. Music from Koyaanisqatsi was used somewhat effectively, but you kinda got the idea that Zack Snyder was like, ‘Who’s a famous living composer? Philip Glass? Let’s use something by him!’.

In all seriousness, during the moments when these songs were used (usually in their entirety!) it brought this highly polished professional film down to the level of a high school class project. They were an awkward blight that pulled a well-crafted film into the depths of banality. I found myself basking in the moments of the film that didn’t have an iconic song forced over it, but I knew that the following scene would be ruined by another Time Life hits-of-the-20th century-ass tune.

Maybe it’s because I’m a musician, but the selection of a song to complement a scene is part of the craft. Don’t take it lightly or, as Gurf suggested, let Warner execs pick your songs for you.

Here’s a few examples of the masters of song choice at work:

Jackie Brown opening credits – Music by Bobby Womack

A great example of a song choice that is lively but doesn’t compete with the visuals and vice versa.

Barry Lyndon – Franz Schubert

Not only is this simply one of the most beautiful scenes in film history, it’s also an example of perfect pacing between film and music. He lets the piece breathe and patiently edits the film to meet it.

Punch Drunk Love – He Needs Me from the Popeye Soundtrack

Totally unlikely but it completely works, gives the great vibe of that silly ignorant exuberance that accompanies new love.

Badlands – Blossom Fell by Nat King Cole

This is how you use Nat in a film. It’s not quite ironic, not quite serious, yet emotionally totally honest. Hell yeah Terrence Malick. (start around 3:00)

I really wish I could post something from The Watchmen, but it’s still too early. Go see it. It’s a good movie based on a great comic. You’ll absolutely see what I’m talking about though.

UPDATE:

I found the infamous (and quite NSFW) clip of the sex scene with Cohen’s Hallelujah. Watch and cringe.

I am very pleased to announce that my new erotic Post-Christian pop opera, The Little Death Vol. 1, will be performed at The Tank on March 20th and 21st, each night at 9:30PM. The Little Death Vol. 1 is the largest project I’ve ever worked on and it has pretty much consumed my life for the last year or so. It would make me incredibly happy to see as many of you there as possible! :)

It features soprano Mellissa Hughes (of Newspeak, Signal, Ensemble de Sade) and I in the two singing roles, and one hell of a band:

Caleb Burhans – Vocals
Wil Smith – Organ, Keys
Nathan Koci – Accordion
James Moore – Guitar
Peter Wise – Drums

Here’s the description as The Tank has it:

“Someone walking with someone, going somewhere, feeling something.” –
We meet two characters, Boy and Girl. Boy then shoots Girl, and she sings an erotic Christian pop anthem through her pain.

Welcome to The Little Death Vol. 1, a new opera by Matt Marks that blends New Music, Christian pop, and breakbeats into a show that will leave you singing his twisted pop creations in your head for days. Using decidedly limited, hypnotic lyrics, The Little Death Vol.1 tells the story of two clichéd, yet bizarre, teenagers, their journey through the world of Fundamentalist Evangelism, and their attempts to keep their relationship pure in the eyes of the LORD. How does one repress their sexual energy in such a chaste life, and where might that energy inevitably manifest itself? In Marks’ referencing of classic gospel songs (He Touched Me, When God Dips His Love in My Heart) along with original songs (God is My Hero, Come Boy) we soon find out where that repressed sexuality finds its new home. What else might this fervent repression unearth?

Please come join us for one (or both!) of the two nights we’ll be rocking it. Tickets are a mere 10 dollars!

If you’re still not convinced, listen to this track and tell me you wouldn’t like to hear it live!

Here’s that info again:

March 20th and 21st, 9:30PM
@ The *NEW* Tank – 354 West 45th Street (in between 8th and 9th Ave.)
Tix are $10

Hope to see you there!

Assuming you’ve been following the recent Rush Limbaugh news, here’s a collection of comments on the phenomenon, and spectacle, of Rush Limbaugh taking the helm of the Republican Party. I’m mainly including responses from the right, for whom it’s obviously much more of an issue. For the rest of us, it’s just rather fun:

David Frum:

And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

Daniel Larison on the Battlestar tip:

To use a pop culture analogy, Limbaugh and most conservatives believe he is something like the conservative movement’s Laura Roslin, but he is, in fact, their Baltar. As the plot of that story suggests, however, even if he were Roslin the destination to which he is leading conservatives may be a barren wasteland rather than the far green country they expect to find.

Andrew Sullivan:

There was a difference with Reagan and it is one, critical aspect of Reagan that is sorely missing today in the GOP: civility. The man was tough and ideological at times – though pragmatic enough to raise taxes, withdraw from Lebanon, do a deal with Communists, and invade Grenada rather than Iraq. But he was always civil. He would never have spent half his speech lambasting, ridiculing, demonizing, hating and riling half the country he knew he needed to persuade. He was interested in promoting ideas to address the problems of his time – not regularly naming and smearing anyone who disagreed with him. He had class.

Jonathan Chait:

I think it’s pretty clear that the Democratic comeback since then has had next-to-nothing to with developing “new ideas” and almost everything to do with Republican failure, the state of the economy, and a really effective presidential nominee. yes, Democratic ideas proved more popular, but they really were the same basic ideas the party had advocated for years.

Limbaugh, then, is narrowly right. The GOP’s fortunes are essentially an inverse function of the Obama administration’s fortunes, which is turn depends almost entirely on the state of the world economy.

Where Limbaugh is wrong is that he thinks Americans inherently approve of the conservative agenda, and that Republican defeats can only be explained by deviation from the true faith.

Bobby Jindal:

I’m glad [Michael Steele] apologized. I think the chairman is a breath of fresh air for the party. As I said before, I think Rush is a leader for many conservatives and says things that people are concerned about.

(White House Press Secretary) Robert Gibbs:

I think maybe the best question, though, is for you to ask individual Republicans whether they agree with what Rush Limbaugh said this weekend. Do they want to see the President’s economic agenda fail? You know, I bet there are a number of guests on television throughout the day and maybe into tomorrow who could let America know whether they agree with what Rush Limbaugh said this weekend.

Yours Truly:

These propagandists are not going away just yet. They have yet to complete their destruction, which is why I still fear them, and why it is difficult to marginalize them. Limbaugh is still a source of horror, despite attempts over the last two decades to caricature him (including one on The Simpsons!), because he will still be doing damage in the years to come. The real acute pain and shame I felt over these last eight years was primarily watching my fellow countrymen and women, and in some cases friends and family of mine, fall prey to the propaganda of these evil people

As much as it may make me sound like a typical alarmist liberal (“I’m not a liberal!”, I shout.), I do think that Limbaugh is pretty evil, if you define evil as one who chooses to further ones own interest with little or no interest in the well-being of others. I tend to agree with David Frum in this, a deep-red Republican I actually enjoy reading, it is in Rush’s interest for the right to stay weak. His success lies in his ideals – if indeed they could be called ideals, and not merely theater – remaining peripheral and purely oppositional.

Andrew Sullivan posted a letter from a reader who works in in the arts, complaining that Obama’s tax increase on the rich will negatively impact donations:

I work for a small, 5-year old non-profit arts organization in Illinois. A couple of our usual big donors have indicated we should be prepared for smaller donations this year, and possibly none in the next couple of years. The are mentioning Obama’s tax plans and their need to save money now in anticipation of that. A lot of my colleagues in the not-for-profit world are really scared right now, and we are not happy with Obama.

Look, it is very convenient for rich donors to claim that Obama’s tax increase on their income is the reason they are scaling back this year, especially in light of the economy crashing. Wouldn’t you think it would have more to do with the recession/depression than Obama’s modest tax increase? I’m anticipating this becoming a common excuse. If I’m correct – and I’m far from an economist – Obama is rolling back tax cuts that Bush gave the upper class. Donations weren’t down before the cut, and they certainly didn’t skyrocket as a result of those cuts, so it seems like a pretty invalid excuse.

One of the nice surprises I look forward to is seeing what new films have been added to Netflix’s Watch Instantly list overnight. I get them as an RSS feed, so it’s easy to stay updated. Every once in a while there’ll be a day where there’ll be a feast of new additions.

Here’s a few of the fifty or so they added overnight:

Twilight Zone: The Movie

A Farewell to Arms

American Movie

Police Academy 6: City Under Siege

Anna Karenina

UHF

The Animatrix

Before Sunset

How Green Was My Valley

The Magnificent Seven

I thought about linking them all, but I’m lazy. Happy viewing!

Do you remember that odd little Katrina story Jindal told as you watched him, half-listening, wondering why he was talking to the camera as if it were a three-year-old who’d just wet their pants?

Well, keeping in the spirit of the whole thing, it was basically a fairy-tale. Or, to put it a bit more harshly, a flat-out fucking pile of horse-shit lie:

a Jindal spokeswoman has admitted to Politico that in reality, Jindal overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone “days later.” The spokeswoman said she thought Lee, who died in 2007, was being interviewed about the incident at the time.

This is no minor difference. Jindal’s presence in Lee’s office during the crisis itself was a key element of the story’s intended appeal, putting him at the center of the action during the maelstrom. Just as important, Jindal implied that his support for the sheriff helped ensure the rescue went ahead. But it turns out Jindal wasn’t there at the key moment, and played no role in making the rescue happen.

I do not feel sorry for the Republicans. I feel pleasure at their continual failure. Call it sadism, schadenfreude, whatever. I’m just in it for teh lulz with these guys.

One of the more interesting cultural differences that I’ve noticed between New York and Los Angeles is the use of the car horn – and by extension, the middle finger. In L.A., where I grew up, traffic laws are much more strict. As opposed to New York, traffic lanes are not merely a suggestion, people are ticketed for cruising through stop signs, and jay-walking is actually punished – as is the use of the car horn. You see, the car horn is technically only supposed to be used to avoid an accident. I’m not sure if that is specifically the law here in NYC, but it is in Cali – they’ll ticket your ass if they feel like it.

In L.A. use of the car horn usually means one of three things:

1. “I don’t want to die.“

2. “OMG I just saw my friend on the street.“

3. “I’m outside your house, let’s go where we need to go.“

Recently, the increased use of the cell phone has drastically lessened the need for the horn in the latter two scenarios, leaving the language of the car horn a primarily alarmist one. Drivers in L.A. will, if given enough provocation, use the car horn in anger (if, for example, a car has been waiting at a green light for 30 seconds or so), but a more powerful, muted expression of anger and frustration is much more commonplace, the middle finger. I’ve seen every member of my family use their middle fingers while driving. I’ve seen sweet old ladies flaunting theirs, doe-eyed children, middle-finger bumper stickers and mudflaps; it’s a powerfully silent – and legal – method of telling another driver to fuck off. I’ve waved my middle finger to tens of cars behind me. I’ve pointed it in fury at drivers who dangerously cut me off and I’ve used it with a smirk at people who were driving 10 miles under the speed limit. No one has ever been shocked to see it, and in fact they are usually flipping me a bird of their own. We each forget the instance within minutes, if not seconds. These are, of course, the L.A. rules.

In New York City the car horn has a much more rich vocabulary. In addition to the L.A. phrases, here the car horn can mean:

1. “Please move out of my way, I don’t really feel like moving around you.“

2. “The light just turned green and I’m letting you know in case you didn’t see it.“

3. “Hi cab driver, I’m also a cab driver.“

4. “Hey pedestrians crossing the crosswalk, I just wanted to let you know that I’m here.“

5. “Your ride to the airport is waiting outside.“

6. “I don’t like traffic.“

When I first started driving in New York, I didn’t understand the breadth of the language – I understood the car horn more as a means of communicating shock and anger – so I would answer these casual cries with my own means of expressing petty annoyance. As you may know if you’ve spent time in New York, a middle finger is anything but petty.

The language barrier was illuminated during my first couple trips in New York by instances like this:

Mafoo waits at red light in front of seven cars.

Light turns green and immediately six of those cars begin blaring their horns.

Mafoo thinks, “What is the holy hell is wrong with these people??” and gives 1/5th of a wave goodbye to the screaming chorus behind him.

Mafoo calmly drives down the street and notices a car driving alongside of him, he looks over.

Deeply offended and irate New Yorker stares at Mafoo with fire in his eyes and tells Mafoo he would like to fight him.

Mafoo has to think for a second before he realizes that this driver is angry because of one of Mafoo’s fingers.

Mafoo ignores driver and drives on, quite confused.

This happened several times before I retrained my left arm from automatically shooting out the drivers-side window. I can understand the interpretation of the middle finger as primarily a symbol of offense, but I cannot understand the attempt at expressing any nuance with a car horn. The car horn really has only two settings: on and off. Perhaps New Yorkers, known for their penchant for chatter, feel the need to express themselves more often while in their cars. But the problem is this: the restriction of the syntax into essentially a binary system, and the added restriction of an extremely limited time-frame in which to arrange said system into anything meaningful (i.e. the window of time one has to communicate with another vehicle is usually a matter of seconds), makes for a fundamentally dumb language – one that consists of the choice between shrieking or not shrieking.

Just as the naked sound of a gun firing will never be adequate at expressing, say, serendipity, a blaring tone will never be adequate at communicating, “Look, I’ve had a rough day. My boss is on my ass about a deadline, I’m worried about making rent this month, and I’m worried about my Grandmother’s health. If you could pay a little more attention, it would help me get home more quickly to deal with all of this.”. The translation will be, “Fuck you!“.

Being an artist, I am often confronted with the question of the utility of art, or the function of it. In my opinion, the most that art can ever do is attempt to communicate that we are all of infinite complexity and worth. Things that increase our empathy and awareness of others are good, things that decrease or limit our empathy and awareness of others are bad. When I’m high in a Manhattan building listening to the polyphony of car horns in the streets below me, I don’t hear an uniquely urban harmony, I don’t hear ancient mating calls. I hear a big chorus of “Fuck you!”.

I’m over car horns. I’m so glad I don’t drive anymore and my speech is no longer limited in such a terrible way. Now I take the subway, and I hear actual phrases such as “excuse me” and “could I just get by you?“. It is really just so much nicer than a blaring “Fuck you!“. Usually the closest thing to a “Fuck you!” I ever get is the usual “could you move that tuba on your back?“. I don’t even really feel the need to tell them it’s actually a french horn, I just appreciate the fact that they used actual words.

This chart is fucking retarded:

(click link for full version)

It’s bullshit and totally based on class. Notice how the music gets whiter as you move to the right? I love soca, gospel, Sufjan Stevens, and Beethoven, where does that put me? According to my SAT scores, I’m supposed to like The Shins. Fuck that.

While I’ll agree that Lil Wayne is pretty much the worst music out there, I think that Counting Crows is a close competitor. Apparently I’m wrong though. Counting Crows is what teh smart people listen 2.

Get crackin’ geniuses:

Guh… thank God the 90s are long gone.

She sounds like she doesn’t really need it, odd that they would feel the need to use it.

Highlight: The auto-tune glitch mordent at 2:22.

Unintentional Ornamentation FAIL.

UPDATE:

The Academy has forced YouTube to remove the video of the performance (thanx for the tip Bandicoot), and are apparently pushing this studio version, which is conspicuously free of the glitchy live auto-tune.

If anyone finds the original, please send it my way!