DISH ON DISH

Owen Gleiberman weighs in on a lot of things at rockcritics.com, including this comment on pop in the movies:

I've always lived for those moments in movies that are musical-dramatic epiphanies. The form, if that's what it is, was really born in Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising--both Scorsese and David Lynch were hugely influenced by its fusion of darkness and Top 40 beauty--and the great filmmakers are still out there doing it. Wes Anderson, as much as I deplore his synthetic irony, is a wizard at using songs to conjure a mood. I'm haunted by the way that he used the Elliot Smith song "Needle in the Hay" in The Royal Tenenbaums. There are just too many examples to count. At this year's Sundance Film Festival, there was an experimental biography called Tarnation that does for Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman" what Blue Velvet did for "In Dreams." I love movies that tap the kind of hidden rapture you can feel for pop--like, say, the musical collage that Trent Reznor helped orchestrate for Natural Born Killers, which turns that entire movie into a pure acidhead opera. It should have started a whole Leonard Cohen revival. Incidentally, there's a song on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, "Allah, Mohammed, Char, Yaar," that in the context of the climactic prison riot is like a bizarre omen of America's war with Islam. It's an embodiment of the chaos we were about to face.

Tarantino, of course, is the ultimate modern maestro at meshing music and image. I thought he did an inspired job of that in Kill Bill--Vol. 1, where he reconfigured all those great ‘60s and ‘70s soundtracks so that the whole thing played like a B-movie dream. Nancy Sinatra singing "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" cast this incredible mood over the whole movie. One of the disappointments, to me, of Kill Bill--Vol. 2, much as I liked the film, is that the use of music wasn't nearly as revelatory. This year, what may be my two favorite moments in movies are both centered on music: that great last scene in Before Sunset, in which Julie Delpy seems to bring Nina Simone back to life before your eyes, and the moment in Garden State where Zach Braff and Natalie Portman kiss for the first time to the sound of Simon & Garfunkel's "The Only Living Boy in New York." What can I say? I'm a deep-dish sap, and that moment was just so gorgeous and perfect that the movie soared.

I would have followed up the section on the Kaelettes with a question on how her death affected the whole scene...