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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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In Reply to: RE: Now I'm depressed... posted by jimbill on March 2, 2010 at 14:39:34:
jimbill,
It was years ago plus I haven't seen the entire movie, "The Saddest Music in the World" but I liked what bits I saw. It's a good premise: there is a contest? -or is it an assignment?- -or government project? -to find the "saddest music in the World" . We follow the delegated one or two or three or twenty people as they seek out the titular tunes. There's the sense that it's similar to those real WPA- Depresssion-era programmes to use musicologist and musician's spare time - uh, talents and record the venacular songs. They did this with architecture and they measured a lot of Colonial House and built amazing structures in National Parks.
That, combined with "Prospero's Books", "Eraserhead", and "Zelig"
"Saddest Music" fades in and out of a kind of grainy, shaky camera documentary style, occasional deliberately bad lighting, variable contrast, a lot of noise on the image- you know- applied negative scratches, and the sound quality varies to imitate Antediluvian recording gear.
It's a musical "Zelig" -but with a very dark timbre, more eccentric, and without overt gags.
The music I heard was interesting as it was a good catalogue of the range of "sad" music. The examples began to fall into categories somewhat like the ones I mentioned for melancholic music, plus there were a goodly number of bittersweet, sentimental ones. I do not include the sentimental in the "melancholic" as they only make me depressed instead of inspiring contemplation. Again, melancholic music is not necessarily sad- but it does need to be contemplative.
It's very ambitious artistically and I like a good quirky movie, but reserve the question of whether I like to the time when I've seen it all. It's movie on the edge of being so disjointed and with so many photographic techniques that it could be exhausting to watch- or maybe it's genius- or trying too hard. It was difficult to discern the characters- there seemed to be only two people that were ever seen twice. That may be a brilliant technique for depicting alienation- the "coldness" of being sad- or only make the movie slightly unsatisfying- sadness is very personal and so you need to know the composers' qualifications to write about it.
I'd say "Saddest Music: is worth a try if it doesn't crowd out something important on your Netflix queue. It entirely possible too that it's really interesting when seen as a whole.
Cheers,
Bambi B
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- "The Saddest Music in the World" - Bambi B 03/2/1015:21:10 03/2/10 (1)
- Guy Maddin - plantsman 16:07:51 03/2/10 (0)
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