skip to main |
skip to sidebar
When I was a kid discovering music, I would pinch my father's CDs that I liked the most. My father listened to a lot of jazz and classical music, so that was where I started. Henry Mancini made an impression on me. I loved "Baby Elephant Walk" and "Pink Panther". There was another song on the same album called "Main Title from The Great Mouse Detective".
Being a child, and therefore prone to come up with my own definitions for things, I thought it cool that a composer my father liked had written a piece of music about an imaginary mouse detective. I thought it was just an idea that had occurred to Mancini one day; "Suppose there was this detective, but he was a mouse... I think his life would sound like this..." After all, he'd written music about baby elephants and pink panthers, so for me it wasn't much of a stretch. I loved the piece of music and was satisfied with my explanation for it.
Years later, I discovered the film Basil, The Great Mouse Detective at the video store. It had animals in it, so of course I hired it. When the opening credits started and the theme played, I froze. I knew that music! I scrabbled through my CDs to confirm that I was right, and sure enough, there it was on the track listing. I'd been listening to it for years and never learned that it was the theme music for a Disney film before that day that I'd hired it on a whim.
After I'd watched the film, I pulled out my CD and listened carefully to the title music several times. I heard it so differently having seen the film. I could picture the characters and their world. The piece seemed more emotive to me, knowing what it was created for. This was a piece that was part of my discovery of music. It wasn't something that I was told was good, it was a piece that I decided myself that I liked. I had made that choice independent of outside influence. I had listened to that album so many times growing up, I knew every little nuance of every track. And then, out of the blue, completely unwittingly, I'd discovered a whole new meaning to a piece that I thought I knew so well. It was an amazing experience to listen to a piece of music that I knew intimately, and hear it as though I was listening to it for the first time. Because it gave me that feeling, this film will always be special to me.
Final Thought: Hooray for mice with Scottish accents.
Up Next: Batman Begins (2005)
There's a chance that the first time I saw this movie, I was sober, so I didn't quite get why it was "kind of a big deal". It was quickly forgotten.
The second time I saw this movie, I was drunk with my two lovely housemates of the time (The Sasquatch and The Bunny), and it became The. Funniest. Movie. Ever.
For the rest of our six month rental agreement, we probably watched this movie once a fortnight. With wine. It most likely began as a way of cheering someone up after a bad day, but before long, any excuse would do, and then it just became habit. And quite honestly, any day that we didn't watch it would still be filled with quotes from this incredibly quotable film.
Not having learned from my mistake, the first time I made The Bassist watch it, he was sober. He didn't think it was terribly funny. He did, however, appreciate the out of the blue, surprisingly well harmonised, a cappella rendition of "Afternoon Delight"
So, several months later, I got him drunk and made him watch it again. Success.
I have to make a note of how great Christina Applegate's comic timing is. Across anything I see her in, I really appreciate it. It seems a weird thing to make a point about, which I guess indicates to me that there's a lot of comedians out there whose timing just doesn't work for me. Too many comedians seem to resort to "LOUD NOISES" and think that equates to funny. Not if your timing isn't right.
I also admire performers who can hold a deadpan face. Steve Carell is the king*. I cannot keep a deadpan face if my life were to to depend on it. I have been challenged often, and I fail every time. Every goddamn time.
Final Thought: When The Bassist realised that I was up to watching this film for my writings here, he asked "Does this mean we need to get drunk again?"
I have the flu, so we did not.
Up Next: Any Questions For Ben? (2012)
*This
is a title I afford to him within the current crop of comedians. Out
of all time though, seriously, Leslie Nielsen. How did he do it?? The
man's face was made of stone!
It has been such a long time since I've posted and life has changed dramatically.
But, I've missed writing. At the moment, in order to have the motivation to write, I need a reason. Something to write about. I've been waiting for a project idea to come to me, and, as I passed my shelves this evening, it finally did.
I'm going to watch all the movies I own. In alphabetical order.
It's not a groundbreaking project, I know.
But it's an easy place to start, and it should give me a fair bit of fodder for writing.
It's easy to feel connected to movies. It could be that you watched it after a bad breakup, or that you watched it every weekend as a child, or that it was introduced to you by someone who had an impact in your life.
I guess, in this project, I'm looking to entice these memories back to me, and use them as material to get myself writing again.
I have a policy that I don't tend buy DVDs that I don't feel I'd want to watch over and over again. That means that I only buy movies that have grabbed my attention in one way or another. Although, I must admit, there's some gambles in there as well. Some left me pleasantly surprised, and some left me not entirely convinced.
So that's my simple idea. I plan to write a post for each film I watch. I have a lot of DVDs... I don't even know how long this will take, what with having a full time job. Let's see how it goes.
For the last two years I've been meaning to gather some things from my parents' house. Two days ago I finally got around to it.
This rainbow of 72 coloured pencils was one of my prized possessions as a kid. I assumed that I'd brought them with me when I left home, until last week, when it was suddenly essential for me to do some colouring and I discovered that they were nowhere to be found.
I miss having animals around. I'd love to have a pet dog, but the way my life is at the moment, that wouldn't be fair on the dog. I'd love to have a cat, but I'm allergic. A mouse is too small to cuddle. So last year I decided that getting a rabbit would be a brilliant idea (and, since then, my friends haven't heard the end of it). For lack of a real rabbit at the moment, I retrieved Monica, one of my favourite childhood toys.
I haven't touched my violin for over ten years. I've always loved it as an instrument, but unfortunately I resented the part where I had to practice and be assessed on my playing. I've been meaning to start playing again for a long time. Now that I actually have my violin, that should be easier to accomplish.
The interesting thing is, for quite a while I considered myself to have grown out of these things. So it wasn't supposed to matter that I'd left them behind. I haven't missed them, but now that I have them again, I feel a bit more like myself. They were such an integral part of my growing up. Their presence is comforting.
