In With Six You Get Egg Roll, Doris Day’s final film, the Grass Roots show up and, taking their cues from the Stones’ “Under My Thumb,” sound more weirdly alluring than they ever would again. Curiously, Arthur Lee’s Love, who used to be called the Grass Roots but had to change it thanks to these LA rivals, toyed with the melody line from the verses of “Feelings” for their verses in “A House Is Not a Motel.”
The original one runs to 1:35 and appears on the official 1966 soundtrack album. The definitive version, which is sublimity itself and features Hancock on piano, runs to 8:15 and appears on Bobby Hutcherson’s Oblique album, recorded in 1967 and not released until 1980. In Japan.
OK, one last medley for the road. This Beatleflick tribute single (devoid of any sort of musical nod to Yellow Submarine) was a disjointed Frankenstein pastiche, but it did quite nicely, hitting #12 in ’82.
posted by Stanislav
The time machine now takes us back to the mid-80s, when the movie Top Secret was considered the greatest movie of all time (at least for me and my friends). This was a silly parody of several different movies (much like Scary Movie is today) set in East Germany about a US rock singer stopping the East German government from taking over West Germany. Or something like that. Kim’s Beach Boys medley reminded me of the opening sequence of this movie and I was (un)lucky enough to find that scene on the Internet. Now we can continue to celebrate the (luckily) faded medleymania. If you ask me, modern day mashups are much better, but this is all about “nostalgia,” not quality.
Top Secret (opening sequence)
posted by Stanislav (Pepperland, OH)
So, thanks to Kim I have the “Day Tripper” riff ringing in my head all night and this morning. One of the funniest movies ever is Blake Edwards’ The Party, with Peter Sellers and a killer soundtrack by his regular collaborator Henry Mancini. I probably saw that movie about 50 times in my life and my chest never fails to hurt from laughing. But is it just me or am I hearing the powerful “Day Tripper” riff in the title sequence of this film?
Henry Mancini – “Party Theme”
Posted by Stanislav (Planet Earth)
The most recent Werner Herzog movie “The Wide Blue Yonder” is delicious brain candy. It’s about an intergalactic trip from the Milky Way to Andromenda. What’s fascinating about it is the way that Herzog pulls it off by using nothing but documentary reels linked together with several sequences narrated by one single actor (the wild-eyed Andromedian Brad Dourif reminds me of Kinski). Of course, the farthest humans ever reached with their bodies was the Moon, a ‘mere’ 2.9 million light years short of Andromeda and there is no documentary footage of extragalactic landscapes. Everything in this movie was shot either on Earth or in its immediate orbit. Herzog uses his cameraman’s footage of a polar underwater expedition as landscapes of a planet in the distant (although closest to us) Andromeda galaxy. The Earth spaceship on its way to Andromeda is nothing but a spaceshuttle and mathematicians are actual NASA employees. This film works on at least three levels for me:
Enviromental: The fact that we have places on Earth that look and sound so outlandish that they seem like they’re millions of light years away shows just how much we know about our own planet. The underwater scenes accompanied by voices of Sardinian singers do not look convincingly extraterrestrial, but that was not the point anyway. They are amazing and shocking. Most viewers of this movie have probably never seen anything like this before unless they are polar divers and live on Sardinia. In his highly sardonic way, Herzog serves up The Wide Blue Yonder as a requiem for our dying planet. The solution for our planet, which somehow gets squeezed out by linking oceanic footage with NASA footage, is that humankind needs to leave the Earth and move to some other planet. On the other hand, Herzog clearly does not believe that intergalactic travel will ever be possible, although he’s attempting to convince us, even mathematically, that it is. Which brings me to the next level of this movie…
Mathematical: I can only think of several popular science shows where mathematics and mathematicians are represented the way they truly are. In fictional movies, mathematicians are mad scientists, deeply disturbed, egotistical people without any sense for community. Just watch Straw Dogs, Pi, Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind or most recently, Proof. Not only do these movies fail to show the way mathematicians’ thinking processes work, but you can’t even learn any mathematics from watching them because there are no mathematics in them. But Herzog has finally found a way to put mathematics in a fictional movie. Three mathematicians “act” as themselves, with one of them giving a mini-lecture on a blackboard on how people utilize planetary pulls to accelerate vehicles inside the solar system. The lecture is fun and contains completely accurate mathematics. While the mathematician talks, the other one is listening. This really is one of the ways mathematicians communicate their results within their community. The third mathematician speculates on how the existing theory could be extended to interstellar trips farther away. The concept of completion and generalization is possibly what defines mathematics as a distinct science, and we see it here for the first time ever in a fictional movie!
Economical: An idea that you can make a movie recycling footage from previously shot reels is not new. B movies utilized this technique many times and even mainstream cinema has done it (Trail of the Pink Panther), but the results (and reasons) for “patching” are usually questionable. In Herzog’s case – the recycling is the starting point that gives birth to everything else in this movie. It’s the whole point, and you especially see this in the context of its enviromental aspects.
http://www.wildblueyonder.wernerherzog.com/
Here’s a slithering organ riff to creep into your skull. This aired on French TV in 1963 and I don’t think it ever saw official release until it showed up on a 2000 compilation. Gillian Hills was a British actress/singer who worked the Paris circuit during the early ’60s. Would a native French speaker pick up on her accent, I wonder, and would that give this particular clip starring the predatory Gainsbourg an edgy “lost girl” aura? Hills and future Gainsbourg duet partner Jane Birkin would later share a tumble with David Hemmings in Blow Up (1966).
And Soon the Darkness is a UK stalker film featuring two nurses who bicycle in France, snazzy colors, and an alternately moody and brassy theme song. When its horn section breaks in for the closing credits, it has a “ha ha, you thought you had it all figured out” effect. Laurie Johnson (male), one of the great British TV/movie composers, did this one.
This plays right after James Coburn learns he’ll be analyst to the president of the U.S. He walks down the DC city streets with a big smile and eventually enjoys a soft-lit roll with his lady friend by the song’s end.
This UK bouzouki classic was banned by certain US stations for being too suggestive. The band responded with a new version that apparently spelled out how they were actually introducing a new dance craze, but the mood was already lost.
These pop geniuses had UK top ten hits:
“Hold Tight” (#4, 1966)
“Hideaway” (#10, 1966)
“Bend It” (#2, 1966)
“Save Me” (#4, 1966)
“Okay!” (#4, 1967)
“Zabadak!” (#3, 1967)
“Legend of Xandadu” (#1, 1968)
“Last Night in Soho” (#8, 1968)
Update (12/07): Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof includes a scene where a group of Austin girls get mowed down by a lunatic racer to the sounds of “Hold Tight.” These are some seriously dimwitted girls anyway, but I can’t figure out if (1) all of them are being symbolically punished for their leader’s unconvincing geek-speech about how “Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mitch and Tich” were better than the Who, or (2) they were just working with a bum script.
