From January 1, 2013
OK, I was up rather late last night. Couldn’t be helped. Our town has a midnight fireworks extravaganza that makes our building jiggle up and down.
Breakfast: a nice bowl of New England clam chowder. I like to sprinkle a bit of pepper on it. But I absent-mindedly screwed off the top and a whole bunch of pepper spilled out. So my soup was quite a bit hotter than I like it.
On the radio comes a blurb for the new movie version of The Great Gatsby. It “stars” Leonardo DiCaprio: sort of like casting a monkey in the title role. It also has a “music” soundtrack created by a couple of rappers screaming bloody murder while throwing their instruments down a long flight of stairs. You can hear it on youtube. I thought at first that it was the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald coming to take vengeance, with legions of demons at his back. This is cinematic crime of a very high order.
Then, when the wind outside died down, I thought I’d smoke a nice cigar outside. My habit is to poke a little hole at one end of the cigar with a knitting needle, so it will draw smoothly. I butchered the job; now the cigar won’t smoke at all. Couldn’t even get it lit. *sigh*
The rest of the year has just got to be better than this. As General Custer famously said, “We’ve got ’em now, boys!”
DiCaprio was flavor of the month, for a while, and cast in everything. An OK actor in my book, but vastly overhyped. I did like him in The Aviator, a somewhat fanciful biopic about Howard Hughes.
As to these soundtracks, and “music” in general over the last few decades, IMHO most of it stinks. I remember being in a local BBQ joint and the sound system was blasting out music which its creators would have identified as Rhythm & Blues, but it just sounded like a bunch of clichés strung together, with no heart, no soul and certainly no true creative process. It sounded as if it were written by a computer, and may well have been. Music is, at its core, math, but real composers can bring it to life, while computers, or committees of marketing people splicing ideas together cannot. That is how most commercially recorded music is now made; a committee of people who claim expertise in what the public wants will splice snippets together and usually hire someone with a strange haircut and likely dubious talent to record their creation.
One of my favorite movies that were never made fantasies is The Great Gatsby starring James Franciscus. He was born to play that role and never did.
That would have been a very good fit.
He was a very under rated actor.