Paul Thomas Anderson Tribute Month: An Imaginary Soundtrack Compilation

Whether he was working with an original score (by the likes of Jon Brion, Michael Penn or Jonny Greenwood), basing his material on a group of songs by Aimee Mann or constructing his soundtracks out of unexpected rock and pop classics (who else could make Night Ranger's "Sister Christian" necessary and cool) no modern filmmaker uses music in his films quite as brilliantly as Paul Thomas Anderson. To pay tribute to his truly amazing soundtracks I thought I would concoct my list for an ideal 'best-of' compilation. I haven't timed this out but I believe this would fit on a disc, so if you have the soundtracks get to it...or better yet, construct your own.

Paul Thomas Anderson Tribute Month: Actor Profiles (John C. Reilly)

***Wow, it's so strange to go back and read this. This little piece on John C. Reilly was one of the very first I wrote for Moon in the Gutter, way back in December of 2006. While it was long before I had any real readers, this article did garner me my first email from someone I had wrote on, which was really freaking cool! In the nearly four years since I wrote this little article Reilly has continued his reign as one of our great actors, although now he can also claim to be one of our great comedians with side-splitting roles in films like Walk Hard, Talladega Nights and Step-Brothers all showing him as one of the funniest men on the planet. He also got nominated for his first Oscar and recently appeared in one of the real bright spots (so I am told, as I still haven't been able to see it) of 2010, Cyrus. I was tempted to really update this article but I thought I would let it stand as it is. Let me just say that John C. Reilly remains a major cinematic treasure and there are very few actors that I like seeing more in modern American films.***


The roles for John C. Reilly leading up to playing John Finnegan in Paul Thomas Anderson's debut Sydney (Hard Eight) were mostly just bit parts in films such as Brian DePalma's Causalities Of War and Woody Allen's Shadows and Fog. The great opening shot of Reilly in Anderson's film feels like a debut though, a major debut. Reilly's amazing performance, as the lonely Finnegan looking to win enough money in Vegas to bury his mother, is one of the great performances of the 90s. While Phillip Baker Hall's work as the mentor Sydney was rightly acclaimed, Reilly seemed to drift so far into the character that you forget it's a performance that needs praising.
The obvious comparison in looking at John C. Reilly is Gene Hackman. Reilly has that same everyman quality but more importantly, like Hackman, he is able to invest his characters with a real soul. There is never a moment watching Reilly where we aren't watching someone who is internally questioning and searching. While he hasn't yet found a leading role the equal of Hackman's Popeye Doyle or Harry Moseby one hopes the wait won't be long.
His most iconic work has been with Anderson, like in Boogie Nights where he gave Reed Rothchild a sincerity that anyone else would have missed and in Magnolia's lonely police officer Jim Kurring, a man so desperate for someone to accept the love he wants so much to give. Magnolia's final moments with Reilly telling Melora Walters Claudia how special she is is one of the most moving things I've ever seen in a film. Anderson's decision to drown out Reilly's wonderful dialogue with Aimee Mann's incredible score ranks with Scorsese's famous pan away from Travis on the phone in Taxi Driver as an example of a rare scene that is too personal to film straight on.
Reilly has continued in film after film to prove his dramatic, comedic and even musical chops. His performance as the simple well meaning husband in The Good Girl is a personal favorite, and his singing cowboy was a major highlight in Robert Altman's final film A Prairie Home Companion. A greatly underrated performance in an equally underrated film, Walter Salles' Dark Water, shows just how much Reilly can give what could have been a very flat character. Jennifer Connelly would talk of being floored by just how inventive Reilly was, and he had no problem stealing every scene he was in from heavyweights like Connelly and Tim Roth.
Whether or not Reilly ever gets his French Connection or Night Moves remains to be seen but I highly doubt that Anderson is done with him. In the meantime he stands as the finest character actor of his generation and someone we can look at as truly being one of us.

Art Decades: Dianna Dilworth's Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie (2009)

One of the best documentaries in recent memory, Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie (2009) is director Diana Dilworth's engrossing, fascinating and surprisingly moving look at the history of the truly game-changing instruments the Mellotron and Chamberlin. Dilworth's remarkable film, featuring insightful interviews with everyone from Brian Wilson to Fabio Frizzi to Jon Brion to Michael Penn, is everything a great documentary should be and it is never less than completely engrossing.
Chronically the rise and fall (and rise) of what was essentially music's first 'sampling' machine, Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie (2009) is a film about an incredibly important subject that hasn't been explored anywhere near as much a it should have been. While, the Mellotron's place in musical history is often overlooked, Dilworth's striking film puts it in its proper historical perspective and makes clear that Harry Chamberlin's invention (originally designed so middle-upper class families could recreate the glorious sounds of a big-band without leaving their suburban homes) changed the way we listen to and hear recorded music. Far from just a dry art-history lesson though, Dilworth's film ultimately becomes a work about a seemingly unconnected group of musicians and music-lovers quest to rediscover and re-introduce the sound that they heard on so many pop and rock records of the sixties and seventies.
And what about that sound? Featured unforgettably on records from the likes of The Beatles, The Bee-Gees, King Crimson, Goblin, Abba, Black Sabbath, Elvis Costello, Aimee Mann, Jon Brion, Radiohead and Fiona Apple, the sound of both the Mellotron and the Chamberlin is ingrained deep in many of my psyches; mine certainly included and I found myself responding emotionally to Dilworth's film in an extremely deep and profound way.
Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie (2009) is available from Bazillion Points in a gorgeous fold-out DVD featuring many bonus interviews as well as a booklet. A stirring soundtrack is also available and I highly recommend both to music and pop-culture lovers. More information on the DVD can be found at the link above and more info on Dianna Dilworth can be found at her official site, located here.

Paul Thomas Anderson Blogathon: Scott Nye on the Soundtracks of P.T. Anderson

***I was really hoping someone would submit a piece concerning the remarkable music that has graced Paul Thomas Anderson's films so I was really happy when Scott Nye, author of the excellent The Rail of Tomorrow, told me I could repost this article he originally wrote for Film Babble's September of '09's Soundtrack Blogathan. I can't think of P.T.A. without having the music of Jon Brion, Aimee Mann and Michael Penn rushing through my head and this splendid piece really captures why music is so important to his films. Thanks to Scott for letting me add it to our Blogathon.***



Music is Cinema: Scoring Paul Thomas Anderson
Scott Nye


At first glance, music and film seem so terribly disconnected, joined together more by the convenience of having to keep an audience entertained on multiple levels than by the feeling that music and images simply belonged together (and just to get our terminology correct, a “soundtrack” for a film is ALL the sound going on in a motion picture, not just the music). Now, of course, the idea of music existing totally separate from a moving image is archaic – any major musical creation requires an accompanying video. Similarly, it’s rare to the point of nonexistent for a major motion picture to exist without music. In our modern conscience, the two are of a piece, though rarely regarded as such.

When Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood came out, a surprisingly large number of critics found fault in the overwhelming nature of Jonny Greenwood’s score. I found that it enhanced the picture tremendously, leaving us teetering on the edge of, ideally, our very sanity, certainly our hold on reality, a struggle familiar to Daniel Plainview. Its dissonance reflected and created the uncertainty and fear Anderson laid the groundwork for. More pointedly, it represented a continuing development in Anderson’s work that is often discussed film-by-film in a sort of throwaway sense (“oh, and the music’s great”), but, to my knowledge, never considered as essential to his oeuvre from Boogie Nights onward – for Anderson, music isn’t there to simply enhance or underline something created separately in the film; music is as essential to the image in the creation of cinema itself.

To be sure, this didn’t come to fruition until his last two films, but his understanding of it was clear in Boogie Nights, a period piece that takes place in the 1970s and 80s, but couldn’t be more of a piece with 90s cinema. Certainly taking many visual cues from Martin Scorsese’s incredibly influential Goodfellas, Anderson expands upon and deepens the way Scorsese used music in his film to create so many different things in Boogie Nights. Many of the musical moments we remember – the explosive opening and “Best of My Love,” the pool party set to “Spill the Wine” that reaches its climax visually and musically when the camera follows a girl underwater, or the wildly diametric “Sister Christian”/“Jesse’s Girl” two-shot that is absolutely essential to the most tense scene in the film – are, like so many other musical moments in cinema since Goodfellas, lifted from pop music. True, these are among the best applications of the form, but uses of popular music, and our familiarity with those pieces, to create something that isn’t there otherwise is now such a crutch that, with the exception of the “Sister Christian”/“Jesse’s Girl” stand-off, most of the music, and the ways it’s used, date the film far more than the 70s clothes and hairstyles ever could.

But about forty-five minutes away from the film’s end, wrapped around a sequence of Jack Horner surveying his crumbling empire, is a slight piece of music by the film’s composer, Michael Penn, that does more to create the overwhelming, penetrating sadness of this moment than a similarly-toned track from the 70s could never have accomplished. The hopelessness and depression these characters face isn’t epic, and hardly profound – it’s melancholic.



The warring impulse between the created score and the insertion of popular music came to a head in Magnolia, oddly appropriate for a film as scatter-brained and dissonant as Anderson’s 1999 near-masterpiece. The film opens with Aimee Mann’s cover of “One,” which will set us up for Mann’s voice to accompany us through this journey, to the point that a full-on musical number to one of her songs will provide the bridge at a key emotional turn in the film. And, indeed, Anderson's use of her music almost exclusively is one of the more inspired uses of pop music in film, as it at once creates those moments we love so much while still keeping the film personal. In the end, the film seems to belong to Mann as much as any cast member; she becomes a second narrator. Further, Strauss’ "Also Sprach Zarathustra,” better known as the theme from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey will accompany a revelation and a sex seminar, and Supertramp will introduce us to an environment in which unrequited love is felt more desperately than many of us would be prepared for.

However, I remain fascinated most with Jon Brion’s heartbreaking accompaniment that rises and falls, but is always pervasive, as Stanley refuses his call to an absolutely decimated Jimmy, Donnie begs for some outlet for his love, Jim thanks God for one opportunity before squandering another one, Claudia settles down for a familiar night, Phil anticipates the completion of a nightlong quest, Frank conquers a created foe, and Linda finally snaps all over again. It’s a long sequence, and a long piece of music that might begin much earlier or end much later (the music is that locked in with the film), but when one thinks of Stanley’s final declaration, Phil turning around to hear Linda arriving, or Frank storming down the hall as Anderson's camera brilliantly falls in and out of focus, separating these elements from Brion’s work is impossible.



This accomplishment was clearly on Anderson’s mind as he went into Punch-Drunk Love, the epitome of what I’m getting at here. Various uncited sources claim that Brion began working on the score at the screenplay stage, so that throughout production, it would be the music that would unite the film thematically and emotionally. Throughout the film’s preparation and formal production, Anderson would hum little tunes he felt appropriate, and Brion would work from those. Like I said, these are uncited, but while viewing (and listening to) the film, this collaboration is palpable.

Indeed, the film plays very much as a musical without lyrics (save for the “He Needs Me” sequence) or dance numbers; certainly no characters break into song. If Anderson’s earlier films feel connected to Scorsese or Altman, Punch-Drunk Love is pure Jacques Demy, the director of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort. In Cherbourg, music is so pervasive that every line in the script is sung. The music in Rochefort isn’t quite as pervasive, though unlike many musicals, the song-and-dance numbers don’t feel like separate creations inserted into a story. They feel instead as though they arise naturally, are truly part of the total cinematic experience.

So it is with Punch-Drunk Love. Though a character actually breaking into song would feel a tad forced, the music is as much the film as the cinematography, the performances, or the dialogue. Listening to the score on its own (an easy practice to fall into), you can feel the film happening around you, and if the film has its intended effect, the score is largely responsible. It can be melancholic, overwhelmingly frantic, joyful, pleasant, even a little jazzy, all emotions created inside the film, often through the music. Jean-Luc Godard once said, “To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated.” Never has that quote meant as much as it does when reflecting on Punch-Drunk Love.

Ingmar Bergman said that Cries and Whispers started with the image of women dressed in white standing in a red room, and the rest of writing and preproduction was spent figuring out why they’re there. Music and the moving image represent the same creative process. They both start with an idea – an image or a sound that flutters by our consciousness. From these humble beginnings, films can be made with a single camera with no cast and a crew of one, or by a team of thousands. Music can be created by the simplest of instruments or the largest of orchestras. In most cases, each requires that initial, singular vision to be carried out by a team of people working towards a similar goal – the move its audience. It’s not so unnatural, then, that cinema and music be as intertwined as they now are, that the collaboration between the two forms could reach the heights it does in Anderson’s films.