Desert Island CDs Blogathon

There's this desert island, see? And I'm stuck on it.

Great ideas come in pairs. So as a companion piece to Andy the Fandango Groover’s hugely popular Desert Island DVDs blogathon in April 2010, here is the Desert Island CDs blog event. The predicament is only slightly different this time: If you were stuck on a desert island and could listen to only 12 songs — all from movie soundtracks — which 12 tracks would you pick?

Below are the 12 soundtrack tunes I’d gladly listen to until I rallied the tiger blood within and swam after a passing boat, or angry seagulls pooped on my head until I went stark raving mad … for the definitive list of soundtrack selections, click the graphic above.

1. “Jai Ho” by A.R. Rahman (“Slumdog Millionaire” soundtrack) — Rahman’s “Jai Ho” may be the most infectious and joyous original composition ever to grace a film soundtrack. A little improvised Bollywood dancing — or an exuberantly bad impression — would be an excellent cure for the desert island blues.

2. “Dracula’s Lament” by Jason Segel (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall” soundtrack) — Puppet Dracula knows loneliness. He is an island. I’m stuck on a desert island. You do the math.

3. “Flowers on the Wall” by The Statler Brothers (“Pulp Fiction” soundtrack) — Nothing invites dwelling on past heartbreak like solitude, and The Statler Brothers gave the world perhaps the smartest, funniest song about coping with the minutiae of daily life after a breakup.

4. “Lift Me Up” by Bruce Springsteen (“Limbo” soundtrack) — Go through Bruce Springsteen’s entire catalogue — go on, I’ll wait; I have nothing to do but soak up UV rays in this hellhole — and you won’t find a more heart-wrenching, life-affirming and haunting love song than “Lift Me Up.”

5. “The What” by The Notorious B.I.G. feat. Method Man (“The Wackness” soundtrack) — Life dealing crack in the alleys of Bed-Stuy is hard. So is a life sentence of sand in places that don’t need exfoliating and daily sunburn. That kind of hard, mean reality demands a daily dose of F.T.W. attitude.

6. “I’ll Fly Away” by Gillian Welch (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack) — Remember how Emily Dickinson said hope is the thing with feathers? Sometimes a desert island dweller doesn’t need attitude but hope. Nobody doles out gospel-tinged, Old-Time-Religion hope like Gillian Welch.

7. “Lover” by Devendra Banhart (“Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” soundtrack) — Sometimes a sweeping love song won’t get the job done. That’s when a little playfulness (and a lot of sexual innuendo) come in mighty handy, and Barnhart’s “Lover” has both in spades.

8. “Wise Up” by Aimee Man (“Magnolia” soundtrack) — Chances are, if you’re stuck on a desert island, it’s because you made one fool choice or another. Aimee Mann’s nasal warbling and her poignant lyrics from “Magnolia” will remind you not to make the same mistake twice.

9. “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd (“The Departed” soundtrack) — Comfortable numbness, as a state of being and as a way of handling (or avoiding) the world, is highly underrated. Roger Waters and David Gilmour get that, and they communicate it beautifully here.

10. “The Book I Write” by Spoon (“Stranger Than Fiction” soundtrack) — Fatalism is the enemy of survival in a desert island stranding situation. “The Book I Write” should provide just enough make-your-own-luck energy to see me through the darkest moments.

11. “Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress)” by The Hollies (“Remember the Titans” soundtrack) — Although I wasn’t alive in 1972, The Hollie’s criminally cool “Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)” makes me feel like I was. It’s as if these guys condensed the ’70s into 3 minutes and 2 seconds of awesomeness.

12. “Here I Come” by The Roots feat. Malik B. and Dice Raw (“Superbad” soundtrack) — I’m convinced that if I listen to this song long and hard enough, I’ll sprout a superhero cape, spontaneously develop the ability to fly and catapult myself off this damn island without getting one hair out of place.

Groovers and Mobsters Present: Detective Noir

(Groovers and Mobsters Present, a column tackling the best each genre has to offer, is back! This time a number of bloggers — including this one — have made our picks for the best of detective noir. To read the entire list, visit this post on the Movie Mobsters’ website, or click the graphic above.)

“Out of the Past” (1947)

“Build my gallows high, baby.”
~~Jeff Bailey

Wherever there lurks a femme fatale with a hidden agenda and a dynamite pair of getaway sticks, a cynical gumshoe is never far behind. Think of it as The Law of Detective Noir; one cannot exist without the other. They feed each other – the femme fatale delights in escaping, and the detective cannot resist the chase. Somewhere in the chase, genuine emotions get involved. And emotions, in detective noir, are the great undoing. They have a way of making sure the past doesn’t stay where it should.

In “Out of the Past,” private eye Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) sees this coming. “How big a chump can you get to be?” he muses, finding himself besotted with Kathie (Jane Greer), the woman he was hired to find. “I was finding out.” Jeff purposely botched the job, hoodwinked his client Whit (Kirk Douglas), Kathie’s spurned ex-lover, and fell hard for the doe-eyed dame. But that’s not where Jacques Tourneur’s film begins. Actually, it’s the dirty past that blindsides Jeff, now the unassuming owner of a small Bridgeport gas station who’s engaged to a pretty local girl (Virginia Huston) completely unaware of his history. This intermingling, and then brutal collision, of past and present – told in flashbacks narrated laconically by Mitchum – marks “Out of the Past” as one of the standouts of detective noir.

There is more to “Out of the Past” than flashbacks and wisecracks, though. Noir doesn’t come more classic than Tourneur’s iconic film, which boasts shadowy cinematography that’s by turns romantic and sinister, revealing and furtive. There’s a protagonist who is not at all what he seems, who is deeply conflicted and frozen, who can’t go back but can’t quite move forward, either. There’s a woman of many faces, all of them bewitching. Most important, there’s a pervading sense of resignation, the ultimate acceptance of fate’s cruel inevitability. Jeff, in the end, accepts that his past has decided his future. But his decision to go down doing what’s right is something of an inspiration. For that’s what the best detective noir does: shows us that even if our fate is sealed, that does not mean we cannot rage against it.