SOME MOVIE NOTES
Earlier this week I saw the new Ryan Gosling movie, Lars and the Real Girl, in which the impressively versatile Gosling turns in a sweet, utterly convincing performance as socially regressed young man who finds a novel way of reintegrating himself with the world at large. Though the movie’s central idea is a bit of a stretch, Gosling’s sincerity in the role wins us over, and there is a particularly charming moment when he is lying in a treehouse in the woods, crooning an old fashioned love song. I was surprised how virtuousic his vocal performance was, but it turns out that Gosling is, like an alarming number of Hollywood’s leading men, a keen singer who has quietly been pursuing a minor pop career on the side.
I couldn’t find any mp3s of Gosling’s warblings to post here, but I am going to take the opportunity to round up a few music-related movie tidbits that I’ve been meaning to mention. Firstly, there’s Southland Tales: Richard Kelly‘s fear of the sophomore slump has kept the movie off our screens since its infamous premiere at Cannes in 2006 but, after a year of recutting, a new version of the movie played to a much more positive response at Austin’s Fantastic Fest earlier this week, and will be on release from November 9.
The trailer (embedded above) makes the movie look sprawling, lavish and pretty out there, and but I think the trailer works particularly well because of the smart use of music. Things start out with the Pixies‘ seminal Wave of Mutilation, and come to a rousing finish with an epic song by the superb British band, Elbow, Forget Myself. (Click on the song titles to hear those tracks in full.) Moby has written the soundtrack for Kelly, and other musicians whose work appears include The Killers, Blur, Louis Armstrong and, um, Ludwig van Beethoven.
A band I’ve written about before is Ola Podrida, who are fronted by David Gordon Green‘s regular composer, David Wingo. Wingo has recently been recruiting indie directors to make promos for his songs, which started off with Michael Tully‘s video for Run Off the Road is now online, starring one of our current 25 New Faces, Kentucker Audley. It’s well worth checking out, and I’m also looking forward to seeing the next commissioned video, from The Guatelmalan Handshake director Todd Rohal. I bumped into Rohal last week at the IFP awards lunch, and he told me he expects it to be finished sometime in the next few weeks.
