AFI song list
Jun. 22nd, 2004 11:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmI'm not sure I should be proud of this but I have seen Every. Single. Movie. that spawned the songs on the AFI 100 Songs list. The program was mostly a boring piece of crap, as these things go, but I had lots of fun being nostalgic and crying over every little thing.
When I was growing up, my father and I always watched all the Sunday movies on WPIX. The Morning Movie. The Afternoon Movie. The Late Afternoon Movie.... and so forth. They really did have little title graphics for each of these random installments from their vaults, which were generally either Abbott and Costello films or old movie musicals (I do feel cheated that The Andrews Sisters didn't wind up anywhere on the list).
My parents don't know much about film. They don't even really like it very much. I bought them a DVD player recently that they never use. But I think they've always appreciated the wonder of film's emotional shorthand, which makes sense in a family with a lot of emotion and really peculiar communications skills. Making sure I saw every movie ever was one of the ways in which they did the best they could brilliantly. Which I suppose is why I get go a little nuts when they won't go see the films I push them towards now, but I suppose as the girl who was always called too emotional, my own shorthand is rather too much information.
Lot of very strange memories tonight, including Working Girl of all things, which has that sort of "one day I want to play this song for _my_ moment" sort of cheesy theme song. I saw it in the theatre with my parents when it came out, remember thinking of it often when I temped on Wall Street and bawled like a baby just now because if you remember that film it was _all_ about shots of the Twin Towers.
My grandfather used to sing I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy to me on the phone. And my father always tried to get me to like Mel Brooks movies but it never happened and I don't think it ever will.
And oddly, all of this started with me watching an episode of West Wing that I'd never seen before and is probably the best one ever because it is so about moral ambiguity and how sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing and that it is your friends who lead you into and out of those moments. And then CJ's crying on a bench in Times Square and they're playing Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah and there was a theatre subplot, and oh... I just dissolved.
Hallelujah is a lot of things as a song, and has a lot of resonances with some pretty terrible, powerless times in my life, but what it will always be about in my mind is this need to be destroyed and for that to be a relief, just to be simple again.
I guess it's for the best to know that sometimes the feelings songs tell you about can only be found in songs, because you live life stupid until you know that one, but God, putting that knowledge off as long as you can (or being forgetful) is a fine, fine thing.
When I was growing up, my father and I always watched all the Sunday movies on WPIX. The Morning Movie. The Afternoon Movie. The Late Afternoon Movie.... and so forth. They really did have little title graphics for each of these random installments from their vaults, which were generally either Abbott and Costello films or old movie musicals (I do feel cheated that The Andrews Sisters didn't wind up anywhere on the list).
My parents don't know much about film. They don't even really like it very much. I bought them a DVD player recently that they never use. But I think they've always appreciated the wonder of film's emotional shorthand, which makes sense in a family with a lot of emotion and really peculiar communications skills. Making sure I saw every movie ever was one of the ways in which they did the best they could brilliantly. Which I suppose is why I get go a little nuts when they won't go see the films I push them towards now, but I suppose as the girl who was always called too emotional, my own shorthand is rather too much information.
Lot of very strange memories tonight, including Working Girl of all things, which has that sort of "one day I want to play this song for _my_ moment" sort of cheesy theme song. I saw it in the theatre with my parents when it came out, remember thinking of it often when I temped on Wall Street and bawled like a baby just now because if you remember that film it was _all_ about shots of the Twin Towers.
My grandfather used to sing I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy to me on the phone. And my father always tried to get me to like Mel Brooks movies but it never happened and I don't think it ever will.
And oddly, all of this started with me watching an episode of West Wing that I'd never seen before and is probably the best one ever because it is so about moral ambiguity and how sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing and that it is your friends who lead you into and out of those moments. And then CJ's crying on a bench in Times Square and they're playing Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah and there was a theatre subplot, and oh... I just dissolved.
Hallelujah is a lot of things as a song, and has a lot of resonances with some pretty terrible, powerless times in my life, but what it will always be about in my mind is this need to be destroyed and for that to be a relief, just to be simple again.
I guess it's for the best to know that sometimes the feelings songs tell you about can only be found in songs, because you live life stupid until you know that one, but God, putting that knowledge off as long as you can (or being forgetful) is a fine, fine thing.
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no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 09:44 pm (UTC)I stopped watching -- what ended up being the number one song/movie?
no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 09:57 pm (UTC)Singing in the Rain was number two.
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Date: 2004-06-23 08:33 am (UTC)But Leonard Cohen's words just completely rock my world. I bought a book of his poetry once and it is just perfection. I need to own more of his music.
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Date: 2004-06-23 08:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-06-23 01:54 pm (UTC)