Twas inevitable that my alphabetically constrained series for #SoundtrackSunday would require addendums along the way. So when I came across two titles at DTLA’s treasure-filled Last Bookstore (@lastbookstorela) earlier this week, both in solid condition and at appealing prices (snagged ‘em for under $10 total), I didn’t hesitate to alter the trajectory while I’m still in the A’s. (This is the first of two such posts today.)
Like any lifelong Talking Heads fan, I was thrilled to see ‘Stop Making Sense’ return to theaters last year along with generous but expectedly awkward promo appearances from the permanently fractured group. I never saw the real thing live, missing what turned out to be their final tour in ’83, when I was 14 and only beginning to see shows.
If you peek at my story from time to time, you might have noticed we had a family screening of this the other night; I shared clips from the breathtakingly beautiful ballet sequence, still so stunningly staged and shot 70-some years later. (I’ll always be convinced the finale is why it won the top Oscar over ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and ‘A Place in the Sun.’)
This flick is still a wicked knockout a decade later, a near-epic with Scorsese-level aspirations that quite often measures up to the master’s flashiest sagas, ‘GoodFellas’ and ‘Casino.’ The reason why, however, ultimately has less to do with director David O. Russell’s consummate skills, even if this was his strongest work since the startlingly funny war drama ‘Three Kings’ in ’99, concluding a superb three-picture run of vivid realism begun by ‘The Fighter’ in 2010 and extended with ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ two years later.
There’s a really great film to be made about the influential rise and payola-plagued downfall of seminal rock ’n’ roll disc jockey Alan Freed. This well-intentioned yet utterly incoherent mess isn’t that flick any more than the ’99 TV movie that miscast Judd Nelson as the ingenious impresario.
Half a century later this is still the oldies set par excellence, a prescient feat all the more astonishing given this curated compilation was merely a decade removed from the pre-Beatles limbo it resurrects.
Pop quiz: Do you recognize the following verse? ‘Take me out and show me off and put me on the scene / Dress me in the fashions of the 1980s / You’re a man, no in-between / You know what your words can mean.’
This was the first Fellini film I ever saw as a young impressionable teen curious about international cinema — and the promise of sex. What I watched that day was undoubtedly a cropped-and-chopped print muddled by woefully incomplete subtitles, broadcast on proto-cable, probably ON TV.
This one is too serendipitous to keep from fulfilling dual purposes. Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical ‘Almost Famous’ is not only his finest film and one of the very best of its era (or in rock-flick history), it also yielded one of the mightiest compendiums of compiled classics this side of ‘Forrest Gump.’
The way I alphabetically see it, this toppermost Beatles parody falls not under R for the Rutles but A for ‘All You Need Is Cash,’ as that’s the actual title of the mockumentary that premiered on NBC and then BBC2 five days apart in March ’78. Just as easily could file under B, however — for bloody brilliant.
