Friday's Ways... To Musicalize, My Way

Howdy everybody, JA from MNPP here! It's well-documented - even here at The Film Experience - my troublesome relationship to the musical genre. I hem and haw, but there are plenty of musicals I do like... I just tend to be drawn in by the less straight-forward takes on the genre - the self-conscious attempts to deconstruct always seem to draw me in.

Hence my like of Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, a film which I paid some death-scene mind to yesterday with my Thursday's Ways Not To Die series (as noted by a commenter there, I suppose the post is spoilery if you haven't seen the film... but honestly, I take eight years as being well past the spoiler-expiration-date, and the series is really a celebration of spoilers in itself... I digress). Put together one the most talented, weirdest musicians out there (well two of the most talented musicians, although we're getting ahead of ourselves there) with a fearless button-pusher like Lars von Trier and something interesting is bound to spark, right?

Well it did. And down the You-Tube'd rabbit-hole we go. The inspiration for Dancer was, of course, Bjork's video for her song "It's Oh So Quiet," which was directed by Spike Jonze, off of her 1995 album Post,

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Genius, that. So Lars sees that, and wants to make the movie, or so the story goes. Five years later, ta-dah, movie. The stand-out song, the one that gets nominated for an Oscar, is called "I've Seen It All," which comes in two flavors. There's the movie version, where actor Peter Stormare sings the male part:

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And then there's the album version, where my personal God, Radiohead front-man Thom Yorke, sings the part:

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I don't know the exact politics of why Bjork got Thom to sing on Selmasongs besides the fact that it resulted in a track I've listened to more times than any other single song she's ever produced, but good on her. As a semi-connected, sorta-random side-note, Radiohead recently did a live cover of a Bjork song, "Unravel":

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Loveliness. Anyway, one thing that's always bugged me was Thom's absence at Bjork's swan-dress-clad rendition of the song at the Oscars in 2001. I would've melted into a puddle of happy goo if the two of them had taken to the stage... but no:

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Not that Bjork didn't give a terrific performance on her own. She most certainly did, and as much as I love the movie Wonder Boys, Bjork deserved the damn Oscar here too. Bob Dylan couldn't even be bothered to show up! Touring in Australia my ass. Priorities, Mr. Dylan.

Of course, that was hardly the largest injustice that evening... that was busy going down over in the Best Actress category...
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