It does start a bit quiet…
There oughta be a term for when you can’t find a video on Youtube due to the original being drowned in spoofs, remixes and other examples of poor production values. I was trying to find a video of Lux Aeterna, aka the arpeggioey theme from Requiem for a Dream, because I was gonna say that:
- “I just watched the film for the first time … blah blah blah … depressing depressing … but not quite as much as with David Lynch.” (That is, “his movies have more of an emotional impact on me.” Not: “Requiem would be more depressing if I watched it with David Lynch”. Though that’s probably true too.)
- “Those crazy kids in the Kronos Quartet played a lot of the soundtrack … blah blah blah … why gosh golly, they sure do get around a lot don’t they?”
HOWEVER. Instead of that happening — which is good, because in retrospect that sounds like an pretty boring blog post — I discovered that:
- The piece has been used in fifty-thousand different trailers, TV shows and adverts. Most famously in the trailer for Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
- Every fanboy (or fangirl/fanperson; we are equal-opportunity makers of derogatory remarks) on the internet has used that piece to put together their own horribly “deep” trailer for their favorite movie, which is usually Lord of the Rings.
- The version they use is inevitably the re-orchestrated score for orchestra and choir, because it sounds more — cough — “epic”.
Which all adds up to it being vaguely impossible to dig out a video of the string quartet orchestration. Or at least one that isn’t filled Hobbits, or have “It does start a bit quiet LOL” (seriously) whacked on the front of it.
Oh well, it turns out after all that I kind of don’t want to hear it again anyway. We can call that the Pachelbel effect.
Busyness
Well well well, what a busy little weekend we’ve been having over here. There’s been a fancy mix of things which are required (such as shipping g back and forth to Syracuse for exams) and things which are fun (such as spending g’s one hundred dollar gift certificate on copious amounts of alcohol.) In fact, just ten minutes ago we arrived back from an exclusive wall-size movie viewing session. One of the perks of being a grad student is that we can “borrow” things such as HD projectors from the lab.
Given the huge-assed nature of the screen we can spray out of the projector, the film choice was a toss-up between Aliens (one of my absolutely favorite movies of all time) and Children of Men (which most of us had not yet seen). We ended up choosing the latter, and saving the former for when we have some surround-sound action.
So CoM is a somewhat harrowing watching experience, but a pleasurable one. It’s pretty kick-arse, to use the technically correct critical language. Its also rammed full of sneaky highbrow type references, which most of us probably failed to pick up because the cultured parts of our minds have been corrupted by all the science we do daily.
I did manage to pick out a couple of the classical music references though, particularly the Shostakovich 10 and Prokofiev violin concerto which get about half a minute of airtime when they run into the Russians in the refugee camp. Like I mentioned last week, when you know a piece of music well it really jumps all up in your grill. My non-classically inclined friends probably didn’t notice anything much about the music during those scenes, but for me it was like doing that snapping awake thing when you are falling asleep in a lecture. A bit of your brain goes from fuzzy to focused after a few familiar notes.
Oh yeah, it also had “Omgyjya Switch7″ by Aphex Twin. Extra awesome.