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Under discussion:

I'm Not There  (2007)

At the Filmmaker Blog, Scott Macaulay points to Pitchfork’s effusive (for them) review of the soundtrack for Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. In every way, it seems to be the audio mirror of the film: it’s a two-disc set of Bob Dylan covers by (by my count) 30 artists, each with a different style of interpretation. And like the film, the soundtrack is a massive undertaking that’s by turns interesting, boring, a failure and a success. You can listen to three tracks, by Sufjan Stevens, Cat Power and Calexico, here.
I agree with Stephen M. Deusner of Pitchfork that Stephen Malkmus’ songs are pretty good, and certainly better than most of what he’s done in the eight years or so since the dissolution of Pavement. But I’ve been having kind of a reniassance of late with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I still can’t reccommend Karen O’s god-awful verson of “Highway 61 Revisited”, which you can sample here. I understand that the idea was to commission a number of artists to record covers specifically for the movie, but man … they would have been much better off recycling PJ Harvey’s version, from her 1993 record, Rid of Me, and calling it a day. See her performing it live above. And if you must, use the comments to vilify me for accusing Todd Haynes of being a 60s narcissist, while I’m clearly just as bad when it comes to the 90s.

Under discussion:

Atlantic City  (1980)

Beetlejuice  (1988)

Toy Story 2  (1999)

Musical theater legend Robert Goulet died yesterday at the age of 73, while awaiting a lung transplant. Goulet first made his mark starring in Camelot on Broadway in 1960; he was a staple of variety shows made-for-TV musical adaptations until both went out of fashion; he appeared in Beetlejuice and Atlantic City; he voiced the penguin in Toy Story 2. But most people of a certain age probably know Goulet best through Will Ferrell’s impersonations on SNL. So, in tribute to Goulet, I’ve embedded my favorite of Ferrell’s Goulet clips above. You get the idea.

Under discussion:

There Will Be Blood  (2007)

Last night, a number of music blogs reported that portions of Jonny Greenwood’s score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood were streaming on a Paramount Vantage promotional site. So this morning, we clicked the link, followed the “Score” tab…and found nothing. The streams are nowhere to be found, the page in question blank but for the teaser that something unspecified will be “coming soon.”?? Did traffic from Pitchfork overwhelm the Paramount Vantage servers? What else could have happened in the intervening 14 hours to make the stream disappear? Oh, wait — it is Halloween. Spooky!

Anyway, all is not lost. The Playlist has been on this soundtrack like John Edwards on Hillary Clinton’s inconsistencies. They’ve got the track listing for the Blood soundtrack, which reveals that two of the “songs” used in the film are excerpts recycled from Greenwood’s 18-minute orchestral composition, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, which was commissioned by the BBC in 2006. They have a link to a Real Audio download of that on the BBC’s website.

Meanwhile, The Bathysphere apparently had a chance to listen to the stream before it vanished from the Vantage site. They point to this episode of Henry Rollins’ IFC show, in which the director says he listened to “a lot of crazy Polish pirate music” like Krzysztof Penderecki while writing the film (Rollins does a wide-eyed double-take at this tidbit that’s pretty priceless). The Bathysphere points to this MP3 of Penderecki’s Threnody To The Victims Of Hiroshima, which was also used in Children of Men, and which sounds *a lot* like the music that backed the twenty-minute reel of Blood shown at Telluride.