Fox Searchlight’s latest pop-indie festival pickup, (500) Days of Summer, is promotionally packaged, as is typical for the distributor, with a hip soundtrack featuring multiple songs from The Smiths and Regina Spektor, as well as tunes from Feist, The Doves and the obligatory Simon and Garfunkel. Though heavily dependent on music, the movie is not a musical, yet like other Searchlight releases it has that one moment where the line between non-musical and musical is just barely crossed.
In the past we’ve seen this moment restricted to diegetic circumstances, whether a dance performance or an in-scene duet of a Moldy Peaches song. But this year Searchlight’s titles have been venturing even further, first with the non-diegetic, Bollywood-influenced song and dance in Slumdog Millionaire and now with an equally fantastical sequence in (500) Days, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt struts about to Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams,” joined by a surplus of extras and an animated bluebird.
Musical numbers in non-musical movies can certainly work, as is evident in Citizen Kane and many David Lynch and Adam Sandler films, but there’s something very forced and cliché about the sequence in (500) Days. Never mind that it seems lifted out of Enchanted, a movie we very much despise, and never mind that we prefer our Zooey Deschanel movies to feature musical interludes performed by the singer-actress herself rather than lip-synced by her costars (director Marc Webb acknowledges the mistake of not including her in the scene); this number is just completely over-the-top and unoriginal.
In response to the scene, we’ve selected five of the worst musical numbers from non-musical films to show what kind of horrible company (500) Days of Summer is in. …Read more
If Southland Tales is to survive its Cannes drubbing and crap box office to become the cult classic that it has the potential to be, it will be thanks to two primary factors: in-depth, after-the-fact considerations of the film’s power to seduce even those who want to resist its sloppiness and vulgarity, like this one from Steven Shaviro; and the Justin Timberlake musical number at the center of the film, which is the target of much of Shaviro’s swoon.
Shaviro’s certainly not alone in this–virtually everyone I’ve talked to who finds themselves unable to entirely dismiss Southland Tales talks of that scene, set to “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers. I’ve thought that it was the final image of the scene that really did it for me–Timberlake’s facial expression when the hallucination starts to fade is maybe the only truly felt moment of acting in a film that’s otherwise pretty much about bad acting–but Shaviro nails something about the whole cocoon of it:
We haven’t done an installment of The Micro Five in a couple of weeks, so let me give you a refresher: the basic idea is not to create a definitive (read: totally subjective) Top Five list, but to pick a super-specific topic and examine how five films handled it differently. You can read previous installments here, here, here and here.
This time out, we’re looking at musical numbers of the 80s. The Hollywood musical is thought in some quarters to have lost its way in the late 70s/early 80s (although recent reappraisals have been kinder to the era that produced curiosities like One From the Heart.) Still, the influence of MTV on all aspects of 80s culture (but especially youth culture) by the end of the decade led to an normalization of song and dance scenes (but especially dance scenes) in non-musicals. See my take on five numbers involving John Hughes, Spike Lee and Christopher Walken, after the jump.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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