Best Music Movies II

2. That Thing You Do! (dir Tom Hanks, 1996)
Four kids from Erie, Pennsylvania (not Eerie, Indiana) write a hit song in the 1950s and embark on a whirlwind tour with other acts on their record label. In between times, the drummer falls in love and the guitarist falls in lust.

I really think every drummer in the world must love that movie. The drummer adds the part that makes the song a hit. The drummer impresses everyone on tour. The drummer gets the girl. What's not to like? The cool thing about this film is that they hired actors to play all the parts and then trained them to play their instruments...which they all do very, very well. I couldn't see through any of their performances and their characters are even evident in the way they play their instruments: Guy's jazz/rock hybrid drumming, Lenny's cocky lead guitar moves, Jimmy's stay-at-home brooding rhythm guitar.

Best Song: "That Thing You Do" (The Wonders)

Best Dialogue: PHOTOGRAPHER: Hey, you in the Linettes [sunglasses]. Are those prescription or are you just trying to look cool?

GUY: Uh, well, I am the drummer.

Star Spotting: Where to begin? Lots of actors I love in this movie. Liv Tyler and Ethan Embry of Empire Records fame are reunited here. Tyler plays the smart yet somewhat naive Faye in a departure from Empire's smart yet somewhat naive Rory. Embry does a total 180 from Mark's goofy stoner vibe as the nameless and quiet bass player. Tom Hanks is fantastic in his role as the Wonders' manager. I have a serious man-crush on Steve Zahn, mostly because of this movie. I would never watch him in a lead role but he never disappoints in a supporting role. A pre-Monster Charlize Theron plays Guy's soon-to-be ex girlfriend, while Giovanni Ribisi has a small role as the Wonders' ex-drummer. The only other major cameos of note are Tom Hanks' wife as a cocktail waitress who flirts with Guy, and his son Colin in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it apppearance escorting Faye into the television studio.

1. Once (dir. John Carney, 2007)

I have yet to find anyone who didn't love this film, but since I hang out with mostly musicians and this is definitely a musician's film that isn't surprising. Once details the creative synergy and budding romance between two unlikely and unremarkable people -- a busker in Dublin, Ireland and an eastern European expatriate who plays piano. The audience never finds out their names, but we do get to watch them write and record some fantastic songs.

What's really interesting about this film for me is how the movie was shot. The two leads ar eeplayed by Glen Hansard (remember The Commitments?) and Marketa Irglova, neither of whom are actors (if you saw The Commitments, you know of what I speak). In order to create as natural a space as possible for them to feel comfortable, Carney uses mostly long shots (like, across the street long shots) and it gives the film an odd voyeuristic quality.

The songs are fantstic. After seeing this movie on a Thursday, my fiancee and I went to the mall early Friday to pick up the soundtrack for our road trip the net day, even though it made us late for our soundcheck (sorry Jon!).

Best Song: "When Your Mind's Made Up" (Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova)

Best Dialogue: Actually, it's hard to remember any. Lyrics maybe? "The little cracks, they escalated/And before we knew it was too late/For making circles and telling lies".

Star Spotting: None. None whatsoever.

And that's it! Honourable mention has to go to A Mighty Wind.

If you feel I missed one, let me know.

Best Music Movies

In the spirit of my Nick and Norah's review, I thought I would post my top five music-related movies of all time (in no particular order).

5. Empire Records (1995, dir. Allan Moyle)
Ah, the 90s. What a time to be alive. Cell phones were the size of surfboards, The Simpsons were funny, and people bought their music in disc-or-tape form. This day-in-the-life record store movie is wildly unrealistic (case in point: when I worked in a record store one of our first questions was “why do you want this job?” If the interviewee even mentioned this movie, they were shown the door), but so much fun to watch. The plot careens between ridiculously corny to ridiculously overdramatic, the characters are more like caricatures and you can totally tell that guy doesn’t know how to drum, but in spite of its deficiencies it’s extremely endearing.
It also suffers from that interesting mid-90s disease where the soundtrack was so much better than the movie: Gin Blossoms, Better Than Ezra, Evan Dando, Cranberries, and so on. It’s a perfect period piece, and I like to think it would be made the exact same way today if someone was making a movie about a mid-90s record store.
Best Song: "Sugarhigh" (Coyote Shivers)

Best Dialogue: MARK (answering phone): Empire Records, open til midnight. (pause) MIDNIGHT!
Star Spotting: Renee Zellweger and Liv Tyler are the two biggest names associated with this one. Second tier names include Ethan Embry (credited as Ethan Randall) and Rory Cochrane. GWAR cameos. Tobey Maguire had a part but requested during filming that he be released for health reasons, so all his scenes were cut.

4. DiG! (2004, dir. Ondi Timoner)
This is a documentary detailing two “brother” bands, the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. They start out being pals and doing shows together, but the Dandies ascend to international rock stardom while the BJM repeatedly fail to reach the same heights, usually as a result of drug-induced meltdowns from their lead singer and musical hub, Anton Newcombe.
I have watched this movie over and over. I watched it with my fiancée a few months ago and she enjoyed it, but she couldn’t understand why I’d want to see it more than once. It’s the same reason I don’t ask a certain band who I haven’t worked with in months to take me off their email admin list: I love observing the inner workings of bands, and to see to stark contrasts in styles of band management is very interesting.
For the record, Newcombe has distanced himself from and attacked DiG! at every opportunity, calling it “"at best, a series of punch-ups and mishaps taken out of context, and at worst, bald-faced lies and misrepresentation of fact”. Of course, this is the guy who also said “people talk about Eric Clapton. What has he ever done except throw his baby off a fucking ledge and write a song about it?” and called Chris Carabba “the poster child for legalized abortion”, so find truth where you will.
Best Song: "The Ballad of Jim Jones" (Brian Jonestown Massacre)

Best Dialogue: ONDI: Is that blood on you?
ANTON: Yeah.
ONDI: From where?
ANTON: From other people’s FACES!
Star Spotting: Not a lot. There's a quick sequence at the Glastonbury festival with a bunch of performers talking to the Dandies, including Kim Deal of the Breeders and Scott and Patrick from Weezer. Harry Dean Stanton also shows up at a BJM house party. And, uh, Mercury Rev? Yup.

3. The Commitments (1991, dir. Alan Parker)
Based on a Roddy Doyle novel of the same name, The Commitments traces a group of 20-something Dubliners in the mid-80s as they decide to form a 60s-style soul band. That was alot of decades in that last sentence. They play, they suck, they get better, they fight…it’s a pretty honest representation of being in a band. The acting is somewhere between passable and awful (they decided to get musicians who could kind of act instead of actors who could learn how to play: the opposite of That Thing You Do) and the dialogue is pretty rigid in parts, but it's still fun. Espcially if you're Irish. And in a band. You can see why I like it.

Best Song: "Try A Little Tenderness" (The Commitments)
Best Dialogue: OUTSPAN: Where'd you get the piano?
STEPHEN: It's me granny's.
OUTSPAN: That was nice of her.
STEPHEN: She doesn't know I took it.
OUTSPAN: Won't she notice?
STEPHEN: She doesn't use the front room much.
Star Spotting: Colm Meaney, better known as Chief O'Brien from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space 9 plays Jimmy's father ( or "da" in the local parlance). 18 year old Glen Hansard plays Derek "Outspan" Foster; he would later go on to form the Frames and the Swell Season. He later starred in the movie Once (more on that later). And Bronagh Gallagher, who plays Bernie, later played the starship captain who gets blown up in the first 10 minutes of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
Andrea Corr of the Corrs got a small part as Jimmy's sister. Her siblings, who form the rest of the Corrs, also cameo as musicians auditioning for the band. The relationship they established with the music coordinator on The Commitments later helped them secure their first record deal. Finally, the skateboarding kid who tries to audition from the street is the same kid on the cover of U2's Boy and War albums.


Wow, that's a lot. I'll save my other two for next time.