47. Dreadlock Holiday &...

Lyrics

I was walkin' down the street
Concentratin' on truckin' right
I heard a dark voice beside of me
And I looked round in a state of fright
I saw four faces one mad
A brother from the gutter
They looked me up and down a bit
And turned to each other

I say
I don't like cricket oh no
I love it
I don't like cricket oh no
I love it
Don't you walk thru my words
You got to show some respect
Don't you walk thru my words
'Cause you ain't heard me out yet

Well he looked down at my silver chain
He said I'll give you one dollar
I said you've got to be jokin' man
It was a present from me Mother
He said I like it I want it
I'll take it off your hands
And you'll be sorry you crossed me
You'd better understand that you're alone
A long way from home

And I say
I don't like reggae no no
I love it
I don't like reggae oh no
I love it
Don't you cramp me style
Don't you queer on me pitch
Don't you walk thru my words
'Cause you ain't heard me out yet

I hurried back to the swimming pool
Sinkin' pina coladas
I heard a dark voice beside me say
Would you like something harder
She said I've got it you want it
My harvest is the best
And if you try it you'll like it
And wallow in a Dreadlock Holiday

And I say
Don't like Jamaica oh no
I love her
Don't like Jamaica oh no
I love her oh yea
Don't you walk thru her words
You got to show some respect
Don't you walk thru her words
'Cause you ain't heard her out yet

I don't like cricket
I love it (Dreadlock Holiday)
I don't like reggae
I love it (Dreadlock Holiday)
Don't like Jamaica
I love her (Dreadlock Holiday)

I hurried back to the swimming pool 


10CC is one of the rare acclaimed rock/pop groups that injects quite some humor in their songs. Dreadlock Holiday is a good example of it, but so are I'm Not in Love and The Wall Street Shuffle. And I like their music too, though this is obviously their best song. I've linked the song to a movie about a holiday in Jamaica.

The Movie: Club Paradise (Harold Ramis, 1986)

Club Paradise is rated 4,5 on IMDB. Despite that I expected this to be a decent comedy, mostly because of director Harold Ramis. He made Groundhog Day after all. Well, my hopes for it were nearly crushed after an atrocious opening scene that's misguided in any possible way. It's also totally unnecessary. I could explain what happens, but that would take too long, besides it is just a reason to send Robin Williams' character to Jamaica. Anyway after this scene there is a long montage in which we see Williams live in Jamaica. This is is too unbelievably dull. Somehow though the movie recovers after these two scenes. It is pretty dumb and I wouldn't even call it a decent comedy, but I was entertained.

That's not because of the movie's main plot though. That is about Williams and Jimmy Cliff trying to run a holiday resort on the island of Jamaica, which for some reason is called St. Christopher in this movie. They have to overcome the fact that they are completely lousy at doing this and the fact that evil capitalists want to buy off their resort and put on a more luxurious resort. Which rationally would be the best for everyone involved. After all, at the end of the movie the problem of the capitalists is resolved. Williams and Cliff are still lousy at their job though. The movie kind of forgets about it. But silly plots aren't a problem in a comedy. The main problem is Robin Williams. He is often being accused of being too zany, but here he is half asleep. He seems bored out of his mind, which is not so surprising considering his dialogue. Jimmy Cliff has a bit more fun as he gets to sing a lot. And even when he is not singing on screen, we hear his songs on the soundtrack almost constantly. These songs in their music and lyrics express pretty serious ideas about (the spirit of) Jamaica. They are way too good for this movie and sometimes I was confused whether they were chosen, because the filmmakers felt that they were doing the same thing with this movie. They can't be so misguided though, can they?

Anyway while the main plot sucked, I had quite some fun with the small plots involving the guests on the island. Rick Moranis and Eugene Levy play two bro's (only that word wasn't invented yet then) who act cool, thinking that every woman will love them. Except, they are total losers, who are oblivious to how pathetic they are. These aren't original characters, but they get some good lines and Levy and Moranis play them to perfection. Their interactions are some of the best moments of the movie. So naturally the filmmakers choose to separate them, by letting Moranis go wind surfing and getting lost at see. Than there is a couple that is completely unfit for each other. The movie milks some laughs out of the contrast between the enormously energetic wife and her lazy husband. The movie is stolen though by Peter O'Toole who has the best lines of the movie, some of them genuinely satiric and funny. He plays the British ambassador on the island, who is mostly enjoying his easy life there, not doing much work. O'Toole has fun with his lines and his role. And why shouldn't he be? He is overqualified for this role and he gets millions of dollars to have some fun on a warm Jamaican island.

Still, the movie isn't very good. And it's a shame, because it is mostly out of laziness than out of a lack of talent. The movie could have been a really good comic satire on globalization politics. Peter O'Toole's lines show that the filmmakers really know how to say interesting stuff on this subject in a funny way. They show this in other cases too. They raise questions about whether globalization is a danger for national and traditional values and cultures. They show there a lot of different parties and nations, having an interest in the new luxurious resort. First we think it's the island's elite that needs this luxurious resort. Than we find out that the British are the ones in charge. And even later we find out that it are actually the Arabs who are the main stakeholders. Lastly it is interesting that the people of St. Christopher don't do anything directly to stop the luxurious resort. They just rebel against the mayor. While the Arabs and the Britons see the unrest from a ship fat at sea and leave. The movie explicitly states that foreign investors are scared away from investing in a nation, if there is unrest in that nation. These are all not only interesting ideas that show that the filmmakers are really knowledgeable on this subject. They just don't care to explore it any further, rather focusing on the stupid plot.

46. With or Without You &...

Lyrics

See the stone set in your eyes
See the thorn twist in your side
I wait for you

Sleight of hand and twist of fate
On a bed of nails she makes me wait
And I wait without you

With or without you
With or without you

Through the storm we reach the shore
You give it all but I want more
And I'm waiting for you

With or without you
With or without you
I can't live
With or without you

And you give yourself away
And you give yourself away
And you give
And you give
And you give yourself away

My hands are tied
My body bruised, she's got me with
Nothing to win and
Nothing left to lose

And you give yourself away
And you give yourself away
And you give
And you give
And you give yourself away

With or without you
With or without you
I can't live
With or without you

With or without you
With or without you
I can't live
With or without you
With or without you


U2 proves here that they don't need to make some serious (political) statement to make a good song. This is a fairly simple love song, but it is one of their better songs. In fact it is so simple that I had quite some trouble finding a movie to link it to. So, um, I decided to seek out a movie involving SM, considering the lyrics 'my hands are tied my body bruised' and 'on a bed of nails she makes me wait.'

The Movie: Secretary  (Steven Shainberg, 2002)

I expected Secretary to be a slightly above the average romantic comedy with all the usual romantic comedy  cliches. I thought it would have some decent performances (Maggie Gyllenhaal got a Golden Globe nomination for it and James Spader is always fun) and that it would be about a couple who finds out about sadomasochism and has some awkward fun with it. I hoped the movie could perhaps milk some funny jokes out of this concept. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong. This is one of the most unusual movies I've ever seen. It is also one of the best movies of the last decade. It is flawlessly executed and it had to be. It took balls to make it. I can imagine that getting only one small thing wrong, could've made this a disgustingly sick disaster.

Why you ask? Well, this is a movie about a masochistic, shy woman, Lee (Gyllenhaal) who cuts herself since 7th grade. One time she accidentally cut herself too much in front of her mother, so she had to go to a mental institution. As the movie starts, she is just being released from this mental institution, trying to sort her life out. She attends a typing course, where she passes easily as the best in class. Turns out she is a damn good typist. Looking for a job, she finds an ad for a secretary to a lawyer, Edward (Spader) with a small office, specializing in paralegal cases. After one of the oddest job interviews ever, the lawyer gives her the job. The lawyer turns out to be a shy sadist, in the sexual sense. Meaning he gets of at hitting women in their ass and handcuffing them, not necessarily during sexual activities. He also enjoys bossing them around for no reason. Thus he has found a perfect secretary in Lee, who, considering she is a masochist, enjoys being hit and handcuffed and bossed around. The movie follows the development of their relationship and is totally uncompromising. In the end, they are in a relationship, without having changed. And the movie present this as an a totally unambiguously healthy and good relationship for this two people. And well, it has made us believe that this really is the case.

It is one thing for a movie to argue for SM. But this movie argues for the kind of SM in which the man is dominant and the woman is submissive, and willing to undergo the pain the man inflicts on her. It argues for something I and most (rational) people would claim is sexual and physical abuse of a woman. And in most cases we'd be right. But the movie manages to make us sure that in this case we wouldn't be right. I am kind of in awe by how this movie achieves this. And it is probably beyond my ability (I'll try anyway) as a writer to convey why this movie works and is so good. And how this movie can be so kind-hearted and such a simple joy to watch. But in the end maybe no written review of this movie can do that without seeming at least a bit ridiculous. I may have never seen a movie that is a better example of Roger Ebert's famous saying: It's not what's a movie is about, it's how it's about it.'

The soundtrack composed for this movie may be its most important asset. It is composed by Angelo Badalementi, who sounded familiar to me, but I didn't exactly know why. Turns out he is the composer of every David Lynch movie since Blue Velvet. He also scored The Comfort of Strangers, another movie about sexual abuse. It makes sense to choose him. The score very much adds to the Lynchian vibe this whole movie has. It takes its characters and their problems seriously, but has simultaneously a very light touch. It flows like a breeze and is often morbidly funny. It is also both simultaneously realistic and taking place in a hyper-stylized, slightly unreal seeming world. This is all held together by Badalamenti' score which is comforting, joyful, inviting and mysterious, often at the same time. It conveys that interesting and fun will happen in the movie and it assures us that we should relax and have fun. Nothing awful is gonna happen to this characters. I smiled from the opening credits and the opening scene which is a wonderful long take in which we follow Lee doing secretarial things, only she is in a weird SM-device (Yeah, I don't know how these things are called or how they work). All of it set to Badalamenti's score.

There are two more things adding to the mysteriousness of the movie, making it seem slightly off. First of all is the design of the interior of Edward's office. It doesn't seem seem to align with the exterior. It feels much bigger and richer than it should be. There seem to be more rooms than expected. It feels very weird. About 80 percent of the movie takes place in that office. Thus when we are not in the office, in what you might call the ordinary world, that too feels weird. The second thing is Edward's behavior. We only gradually realize that this is a sadist who is ashamed of his sadism and would like to hide it, but can't control it. When we first meet him, his office is a mess and his previous secretary is leaving, slightly befuddled. During the first weeks he too is befuddled by Lee, who does anything he says to her, even the most demeaning tasks. We understand why she listens to him so compulsively, as the movie has established her character pretty good by then. But we don't understand why Edward behaves the way he is behaving, sometimes being nice, sometimes being amazingly rude to Lee. As both we and Lee realize what's going on, we come to realize that both of these people have serious problems, and that they might seriously be good for each other. And it is to Shainberg's enormous credit that his movie manages to look seriously at their problems, while keeping its style of a light comedy. This is one of the best fusions of comedy and drama I've ever seen. The substance is dramatic, while the style is comic. This shouldn't work, but it does here, seamlessly even. None of this would probably work if it wasn't for James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, who give truly great performances, always conveying what is necessary, without giving away too much about their characters. They also manage to come over as very sympathetic and eventually normal people.

In the end I guess it's possible to make the argument that this movie is anti-feminist or something like that. Or you could make the argument that it is more feminist than ordinary romantic comedies, because it gives more power to its female characters. It is also possible to try to determine whether Edward is a good or a bad person and it is also possible to make the claim that at the end of the movie Lee made the wrong decision to stay with him, instead of her shy lover she was supposed to marry (I didn't even mention this hilarious subplot). But it would be pointless to make these arguments. The movie doesn't care about such things. It doesn't work on a rational level, nor does it really want to. You can't put the movie in the context of the wider world around us, when it is totally uninterested in the wider world around us. Shainberg only wants to tell this exact story, about these specific people in this particular style. He does it and it is a great movie

45. Another Brick in the Wall &...

Lyrics

Daddy's flown across the ocean
Leaving just a memory
Snapshot in the family album
Daddy what else did you leave for me?
Daddy, what'd'ja leave behind for me?!?
All in all it was just a brick in the wall.
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall. "You! Yes, you! Stand still laddy!

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall. "Wrong, Do it again!"
"If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding. How can you
have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?"
"You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddy!

"The Bulls are already out there"
Pink: "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh!"
"This Roman Meal bakery thought you'd like to know." I don't need no arms around me
And I don't need no drugs to calm me.
I have seen the writing on the wall.
Don't think I need anything at all.
No! Don't think I'll need anything at all.
All in all it was all just bricks in the wall.
All in all you were all just bricks in the wall.


I've once read that all music is contextual, meaning that whether you like a certain peace of music or not depends very much on the context you hear that particular peace of music in. I love that statement and it is certainly true in this case. I am not a big fan of this song, but it really works well in the movie Pink Floyd The Wall. (obviously, I've linked this song to that movie). And I can say the same thing about pretty much every Pink Floyd song that appears in the movie.

The Movie: Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982)

This movie caught me by surprise. I was expecting to see a musical consisting of Pink Floyd songs. That's not what this movie really is. It is pretty much an experimental movie. It basically consists of 95 minutes of video clips of Pink Floyd songs, with at its center Another Brick in the Wall. There is a very loose narrative thread that holds all this clips together, but the best way to put it is that this is a slightly propagandist video essay about Roger Waters' ideas on society. It is one of the rare movies I've seen that relatively often employs the editing technique developed by the Soviets for their propaganda movies. In their movies they didn't always cut to drive the plot forward. But they cut to associate a certain thing with another thing. So they showed for example people exploiting the workers and then they cut to images of pigs, implying that the workers were treated like pigs. These cuts are not connected to each other chronologically. This movie does this very often too. At the beginning for example we see fans knocking at the door of Pink, the rock star protagonist (or antagonist) of this movie and nearly attacking him. Then we cut to a bunch of soldiers in the World War attacking the enemy. This association can be read in two ways. First of all it implies that Pink finds his idolization incredibly irritating, feeling as if he is being attacked by a war squad. Secondly it implies that the blind idolization of rock stars is as stupid as blindly trusting a government or loving a nation and going to war for it.

Both of those readings aren't really an example of great intellectual thinking. In fact, one could call them pretty silly. Unfortunately the movie has quite a lot of such observations. During the Another Brick in the Wall song for example, through Soviet-style cutting, children going to school are associated with people going to concentration camps. As you can see from the lyrics of the song Pink Floyd doesn't have a high opinion of education. Education according to Pink Floyd is just another brick in the wall. And the wall is basically the whole of modern society that makes us conformist and incapable of critical thinking. Pink Floyd sees us as prisoners of that society. And this movie is a call to non-conformism and critical thinking, hoping that in doing so we'll be free. The movie does not really know what then it would mean to be free. It just knows that we now aren't free. I can sympathize to a certain extent with this kind of ideas, but this movie does push them a bit too far and it doesn't always present them very intelligently, to say the least. Having said that, I actually liked the movie very much. The movie is refreshingly earnest, it takes its ideas very seriously and it is fully committed to them. Besides that, this movie is pretty much perfectly edited. Not only does its Soviet-style editing work very well, the music also fits the images rather perfectly. It is pretty much a joy to listen to and watch this movie.

I once read a criticism of  Dead Poets Society saying that the movie is asking you to conform to non-conformism. That is kind of what many movies about non-conformism do, even better ones than Dead Poets Society. And only are they asking you that, but they aren't really following their own message. Many of these movies are made in a conventional style, conforming themselves to the familiar rules of narrative film making. That makes sense. That style works and there have been too many great movies made that way to abandon it. But by being such a weird, experimental movie Pink Floyd The Wall, it is a rare movie that not only propagates non-conformism, but also 'behaves' in a non-conformist way. It puts its money where its mouth is. It is also the rare movie that states that we should think critically and actually allows for criticism of that statement. Throughout the movie, we are being constantly bombed with messages that modern society is bad and that we should think and act as individual people with a critical mind and stuff like that. And it is always obvious that this is Pink Floyd's message. But than at the end of the movie protagonist Pink becomes a fascist dictator, with countless fans blindly following his message and hurting and killing people. The parallel is obvious and quite daring. These final scenes are what to me made the movie really good. Not many movies are willing to look so critically at itself and act upon it.

It is unfortunate that a movie like this won't be made any time soon. This movie truly is a product of its time when people seriously believed that rock music could present serious ideas about the world we live in, and maybe even change it. Three years after this movie came out Bob Geldof, who plays Pink here, organized Live Aid, hoping that through rock music something substantial could be done about the poverty in Africa. These ideas were/are of course quite silly and naive. And it is probably for the best that we don't think so pretentiously any more about rock music. But this change hasn't necessarily been good for the quality of rock music. You are probably much more likely to make great, original and daring music (or art) if you truly believe that what you are doing can be of some great importance to society. This movie (and the four Pink Floyd songs I've discussed as part of this blog) made me appreciate Pink Floyd much more. So it is quite unfortunate that I won't be discussing Pink Floyd much more here. After having four songs in the top 50, there are now only four more Pink Floyd songs left in the whole rest of this list. And it will be a long while before we meet them again.