Randomiser #23: 23 January 2007
Today's song: Bjork, "Overture"
This is the opening track from Selmasongs, the soundtrack album to Lars von Trier's musical Dancer in the Dark. If you haven't seen it, it's an insanely over the top drama in which Bjork stars as a low-paid seamstress with failing sight, who struggles to support her son, and uses Hollywood musicals as an escape, leading to various daydream scenes where she imagines the scene around her as a musical number. Hence, you get an entire album of Bjork songs based, in theory at least, around samples of sound from the environments, which Selma is supposed to be building into the rhythm track in her head.
Depending on your point of view, this is either tearjerkingly intense, or (bearing in mind that it's Lars von Trier) sniggeringly melodramatic. Or both. I rather like it, and suspect that even if von Trier is playing his usual formal games, he's still basically sincere about wanting to make a real melodrama.
Also:
- My December Marvel sales column at the Beat. (Yes, December. Yes, I know it says November.)
- At the Onion AV Club blog, Nathan Rabin announces a year-long series of posts celebrating cinematic failure, and takes the opportunity to insist that this is not just an exercise in cheap mockery.
- Google unveils pretty floaty bubbles thing, which has something to do with statistics.
This is the opening track from Selmasongs, the soundtrack album to Lars von Trier's musical Dancer in the Dark. If you haven't seen it, it's an insanely over the top drama in which Bjork stars as a low-paid seamstress with failing sight, who struggles to support her son, and uses Hollywood musicals as an escape, leading to various daydream scenes where she imagines the scene around her as a musical number. Hence, you get an entire album of Bjork songs based, in theory at least, around samples of sound from the environments, which Selma is supposed to be building into the rhythm track in her head.
Depending on your point of view, this is either tearjerkingly intense, or (bearing in mind that it's Lars von Trier) sniggeringly melodramatic. Or both. I rather like it, and suspect that even if von Trier is playing his usual formal games, he's still basically sincere about wanting to make a real melodrama.
Also:
- My December Marvel sales column at the Beat. (Yes, December. Yes, I know it says November.)
- At the Onion AV Club blog, Nathan Rabin announces a year-long series of posts celebrating cinematic failure, and takes the opportunity to insist that this is not just an exercise in cheap mockery.
- Google unveils pretty floaty bubbles thing, which has something to do with statistics.
posted by Paul O'Brien at 7:44 pm
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