The Nerve Insider
A daily pick of what's new and hot at Nerve.
Scanner
Your daily cup of WTF?
Nerve@SXSW 2006.
Blogging the Roman Orgy of Indie-music Festivals.
Coming Soon!
Coming Soon!
Coming Soon!
The Daily Siege
An intimate and provocative look at Siege's life, work and loves.
Kate & Camilla
two best friends pursue business and pleasure in NYC.
Naughty James
The lustful, frantic diary of a young London photographer.
The Nerve Blog-a-log: kid_play
The Nerve Blog-a-log: Super_C
The Nerve Blog-a-log: ILoveYourMom
A bundle of sass who's trying to stop the same mistakes.
The Nerve Blog-a-log: The_Sentimental
Our newest Blog-a-logger.
The Nerve Blog-a-log: Marking_Up
Gay man in the Big Apple, full of apt metaphors and dry wit.
The Nerve Blog-a-log: SJ1000
Naughty and philosophical dispatches from the life of a writer-comedian who loves bathtubs and hates wearing underpants.
The Nerve Video Blog
Deep, deep inside the world of online video.
The Nerve Blog-a-log: charlotte_web
A Demi in search of her Ashton.
The Prowl, with Ryan Pfluger
Nerve @ Cannes Film Festival
May 16 - May 25
ScreenGrab
The Nerve Film Blog
Autumn
A fashionable L.A. photo editor exploring all manner of hyper-sexual girls down south.
The Modern Materialist
Almost everything you want.
The Nerve Blog-a-log: that_darn_cat
A sassy Canadian who will school you at Tetris.
Rose & Olive
Houston neighbors pull back the curtains and expose each other's lives.
The Nerve Blog-a-log: funkybrownchick
The name says it all.
merkley???
A former Mormon goes wild, and shoots nudes, in San Francisco.
chase
The creator of Supercult.com poses his pretty posse.
The Remote Island
Nerve's TV blog.
Brandonland
A California boy capturing beach parties, sunsets and plenty of skin.
61 Frames Per Second
Smarter gaming.
The Nerve Blog-a-log: Charlotte_Web
A Demi in search of her Ashton.
The Nerve Blog-a-log: Zeitgeisty
A Manhattan pip in search of his pipette.
Date Machine
Putting your baggage to good use.

The Screengrab

Take Five: Movies With Lyrics

Posted by Peter Smith
Danish director Susanne Bier’s new film, Things We Lost in the Fire, is already generating a tremendous amount of indie hype. If the buzz manages to survive this opening weekend, it may result in the words "Oscar" and "Halle Berry" being mentioned without the words "fluke" or "Catwoman" appearing in the same sentence. The quiet family drama’s name may seem pretty arcane to people who aren’t as into indie rock as they are indie film – the title is drawn from an outstanding 2001 album by Duluth slowcore band Low. As more and more directors who grew up on a diet of punk, alternative and indie rock start making films, we’re likely to see more such abstractions; but while we wait for a generation raised on post-hardcore to grow up, here’s a few films from the past with musical names.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (1968)

Filmed simultaneously with the Rolling Stones' recording of the song of the same name – indeed, footage of the Stones putting down tracks for the single are featured in the film – this was one of the first movies to use a rock song as its title. Jean-Luc Godard’s documentary/agitprop/drama/black comedy/whatever is a typically brilliant, typically frustrating film, very much in keeping with his work of the era. And, like the song, the film seems to be nothing so much as an admission that the end of the Sixties were a chaotic, turbulent vortex that owed as much to the hand of Satan as they did the peace-and-love generation.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Gus Van Sant’s disorienting, dazzling, neo-Shakespearian drama about the lives of two gay hustlers (Keanu Reeves and the late River Phoenix) was a major step forward in the director’s postmodernist sensibility. Crammed with classical allusions, stunt casting, surrealism and shattered (or at least badly bruised) fourth walls, its determination to blend the sophisticated and the trashy was an appropriate tribute to the junk-culture leanings of the B-52s. "Private Idaho", a track off their 1980 sophomore effort Wild Planet, lent the movie its name more than a decade later. It’s a pretty good match, too – try dancing to the song’s frenetic rhythms during some of the movie’s more depressing moments.

THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD (1995)

Unfairly slammed as a third-rate Tarantino knockoff for no better reason than its unfortunately timed release date, this intricate, too-clever-for-its-own-good heist thriller from director Gary Fleder is really more of a second-rate film noir that somehow got made fifty years too late. Still, maybe it deserved some of the bad reputation that got it lost among a raft of hip, violent thrillers – while it drew its name from an evocative, hilarious song off of the late Warren Zevon’s 1991 album Learning to Flinch, the filmmakers (no doubt aware that you can’t copyright a title, even one as distinctive as this) neither sought not received Zevon’s permission in using the name.

BOYS DON’T CRY (1999)

The movie that put Hilary Swank (and, to a lesser degree, Chloe Sevigny) on the map was also the first major Hollywood release to treat transgender people as anything but a punch line. The story of Brandon Teena, who lived most of his life as a male before being beaten to death by friends after they discovered he was biologically female, set the tone for a spate of indie films about homosexuality and gender issues. Its deeply ironic name was drawn from a 1980 single by the Cure, taken from their debut album of the same name, but the version featured in the movie itself is a far inferior cover. Seek out the original, one of the strongest the band put out before becoming a self-caricature.

MAN ON THE MOON (1999)

It’s no coincidence that Milos Forman’s biopic of experimental comedian Andy Kaufman drew its name from the 1992 R.E.M. song of the same name (from their Automatic for the People album). The song is itself a worshipful tribute to the comic, featuring references to his most famous routines and a chorus where singer Michael Stipe imitates Kaufman imitating Elvis. What’s more interesting is that this may be one of the few times where the video for the original song is far superior to the movie the song inspired – the inventive Peter Care-directed video is much more memorable than the somewhat stodgy and predictable film by Forman.

— Leonard Pierce
+ DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
Posted Oct 19 2007, 03:00 PM
Filed under: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Comments

Bruno Forestier said:

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL isn't the name of any Godard film, but of a bastardized re-cut of Godard's ONE PLUS ONE.

October 19, 2007 3:39 PM

Margo said:

There's another noir-ish thriller with a name jacked from a Warren Zevon song - I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. The only soundtrack that I can recall the man himself showing up on is the divine Midnight Cowboy album; then there was the Shatner-writen sci-fi series, but let's not speak ill of the dead...

October 24, 2007 5:15 PM

in
Send rants/raves toscreengrab@nerve.com

Archives

  • October 2008 (33)
  • September 2008 (150)
  • August 2008 (168)
  • July 2008 (133)
  • June 2008 (146)
  • May 2008 (241)
  • April 2008 (243)
  • March 2008 (200)
  • February 2008 (210)
  • January 2008 (237)
  • December 2007 (132)
  • November 2007 (122)
  • October 2007 (106)

    • Bloggers

    • Paul Clark
    • John Constantine
    • Phil Nugent
    • Leonard Pierce
    • Scott Von Doviak
    • Andrew Osborne

    Contributors

    • Kent M. Beeson
    • Pazit Cahlon
    • Bilge Ebiri
    • D.K. Holm
    • Faisal A. Qureshi
    • Vadim Rizov
    • Vern
    • Bryan Whitefield
    • Scott Renshaw
    • Gwynne Watkins

    Editor

    • Peter Smith

    Tags

    Browse All Tags

    Places to Go

    People To Read

    Film Festivals

    Directors

    Partners

    College Humor
    The Onion
    Cracked.com
    Fark.com
    Ask Men
    Heavy.com