Rocks In The Attic #1170: Various Artists – ‘Pretty In Pink (O.S.T.)’ (1986)

I knew there was something wrong when the Hollywood Avondale started advertising their screening of PRETTY IN PINK as a dress-up party. Talk about alarm bells. But I’ve been to screenings there before where there’s been a fancy-dress theme, and aside from a couple of overly self-aware people knocking about in the lobby, it’s usually mostly a normal crowd. 

So, I turn up at the Hollywood a few Sunday afternoons ago. There’s a couple of people dressed up in the lobby; so far so manageable. I take my seat in my usual spot, and the fire door out to the beer garden is flung open to show dozens of people in the middle of a party. Young kids, bored of the party, run in through the fire door, and start running around in the middle of the theatre while the pre-show trailers and music videos start. 

I immediately think about leaving. Cinema and alcohol doesn’t mix, and not only are there some annoying kids in here, there’s soon going to be dozens of obnoxiously drunk people trying to watch a film while still having conversations they just had outside in the beer garden. 

I figure out, with the help of social media, that the party is for Letterboxd Editor-In-Chief Gemma Gracewood. This makes me feel slightly better. Surely somebody who espouses her love of cinema 24/7 would make sure that the screening would be nice and quiet, right? Or maybe not…

The fire door eventually closes, the lights go dim, people rush to take their seat, and the birthday girl walks out on stage to do a speech. 

Gemma first thanks the 38 members of the public who have crashed her birthday party. She asks them to out their hands up, and I proudly hold mine aloft, while the gaggle of brightly dressed girls who’ve found a seat next to me look in my direction. 

(There’s a minor correction I should make here actually. I believe the screening was opened up to the general public, to make it cheaper for the organisers to rent for the party and film. So, really their party was crashing our cinema, not the other way around.)

Gemma goes on to talk about her love of PRETTY IN PINK. It’s something she loved during her teens, even before she was asked to study it at college, and it still exists as one of her four favourites on Letterboxd. 

She then mentions how the film was made during a different time. Some of the dialogue hasn’t aged very well and there are lots of things we can now look back on as problematic. It’s here that the screening takes a turn for the better. 

She actively asks the audience to participate in the screening, to boo at anything that sounds a bit iffy, and to call out any more appropriate words or phrases that would be better with a 21st century lens.

Sounds horrific, right? An audience participation screening. Like one of those sing-a-long screenings of THE SOUND OF MUSIC.

But fuck, it was funny. 

Lots of great comments from a crowd that was really on board with how the screening turned out. For example, whenever James Spader was on screen, being the douchebag that he always excels at, there’d be girls shouting out things like “Booo, James Spader, you sexy arsehole!”

And when Andrew McCarthy somehow sends Molly Ringwald a photo of herself, and then one of himself, on a dot-matrix computer screen, before revealing himself to be sat across from her in the library, there were calls of ‘Stalker! Call the police!”

We had a special guest cycling around the cinema in a sparkly jacket during Duckie’s cycling scene, and a shower of pink, white and black balloons unleashed from the circle when the Prom scene started. A heap of fun.

Shhh, don’t tell anyone, but I think it’s a pretty basic movie and I often wonder how different it would have turned out had John Hughes directed it instead of Howard Deutch. Still, at least it doesn’t have anything as problematic as the rape scene in SIXTEEN CANDLES…

As usual with John Hughes films, the PRETTY IN PINKsoundtrack is killer. But even the ten songs that were presented on the original soundtrack album don’t include some of the best needle-drops from the film. The recently released LIFE MOVES PRETTY FAST.boxset goes some way in righting this wrong by including tracks such as Otis Redding’s Try A Little Tenderness, Cherish by the Association, Rave Up/Shut Up by the Rave-Ups, and my particular favourite, the same band’s Positively Lost Me. 

Hit: Wouldn’t It Be Good – Danny Hutton Hitters

Hidden Gem: Bring On The Dancing Horses – Echo & The Bunnymen

Rocks In The Attic #1169: The Kinks – ‘Face To Face’ (1966)

Four studio albums in and finally the Kinks get to a full album’s worth of Ray Davies compositions. After the patch of uneven albums leading up to this point – 1964’s KINKS, and 1965’s KINDA KINKS and THE KINK KONTROVERSY – there’s an air of consistency here that starts to give the band their own unique sound – social observation and commentary – that sets them apart from their beat music contemporaries. 

Buoyed by their third UK #1 single, Sunny Afternoon, the album has an autobiographical air that is missing from its predecessors – perhaps influenced by Ray Davies’ recent nervous breakdown. Sunny Afternoon itself is a forerunner to the Beatles’ Taxman, coming a couple of months before the release of REVOLVER. 

I don’t buy the suggestion that FACE TO FACE is an early example of a concept album though; that seems hard to swallow especially as you could say similar things about pop albums filled with love songs. Save it for THE VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY. 

Hit: Sunny Afternoon

Hidden Gem: Party Line

Rocks In The Attic #1168: Fernando Vélázquez – ‘Crimson Peak (O.S.T.)’ (2015)

Wait, so this isn’t about menstruation?!?

Oh, Guillermo…

I’m in the middle of a mini del Toro season, watching the last couple of films I haven’t seen of his. I’m quite glad I missed CRIMSON PEAK back in 2015 – a frankly dull gothic horror that seems really misguided at what it’s trying to do and who its for. Is it for young adults? If so, why does it seem to be written for old people? It’s horror for grannies. 

I’ll say one thing about del Toro though – he really does understand the Spielbergian power of ‘less is more’. There are a couple of frankly terrifying shots of dead things peering out from doorways and shadows; just the right amount of creepiness. It makes me wonder what he could do with a full-on horror film – something I think he’s got closeto in the past, but always seems to hold back from going in with two feet. 

More than anything, I think the one thing that I disliked the most about this film is its truly unlikable main cast. Tom Hiddleston is great in a supporting role such as Loki in the MCU, where he can trade snarky comments with the heroic types he shares scenes with. But he’s so bland and unpleasant in a leading role, it really sours the film around him. I have a similar reaction to Jessica Chastain; she’s great in some roles, but there’s just something about her that I find hard to connect it. And really, is anybody ever ranking the best films of Mia Wasikowska? She was great in 2013’s TRACKS, a little-seen one-hander about a solo-trip across the Australian desert, but I don’t recall seeing her in any of the 12 or 13 films that appear at the top of her filmography. An instantly forgettable presence. But don’t worry, we have Charlie Hunnam – the king of nameless, faceless actors – here to save the day. 

Nice soundtrack score by Fernando Velázquez though. Solid work. This first-time-on-vinyl pressing by Waxwork Records is the second of their 2023 subscription titles, and is by far the one title I was looking forward to the least from them (this film doesn’t hold a flickering candle to the other titles in this year’s subscription: Winner’s THE SENTINEL, Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD, Hooper’s THE FUNHOUSE, De Palma’s BODY DOUBLE and Fincher’s SE7EN). The artwork on this release, by Jérémy Pailler is stunningly beautiful, and I got far more out of as a piece of art than del Toro’s wasted film. 

Hit: Edith’s Theme

Hidden Gem: Buffalo

Rocks In The Attic #1167: Super Furry Animals – ‘(Brawd Bach) Rings Around The World’ (2001)

As this collection of b-sides come from my favourite Super Furrys album, RINGS AROUND THE WORLD, this was a very welcome release last year for Record Store Day. Another standalone release from a boxset in the vein of the recently released Pink Floyd live album. More of this please!

Not too sure if I bought any of the singles off RINGS AROUND THE WORLD. I definitely bought some off GUERRILLA, as I used to play Northern Lites and, to a lesser extent, Do Or Die, when I was DJing in the early 2000s. Maybe I just stopped buying 7” singles by the time RINGS AROUND THE WORLD came out. 

An album of b-sides can be a wonderful thing though, particularly if you love the album or era it comes from. Certain bands would release quality b-sides, when standard record company protocol would be to put any old crap on there like live versions or remixes. The Super Furrys were always a band that cared about their b-sides, as were the Wildhearts and Radiohead and many others, and although I’m not a fan of Oasis, imagine leaving something as strong as Acquiesce off (WHAT’S THE STORY) MORNING GLORY?

These RINGS AROUND THE WORLD b-sides are a nice addition to the studio album they’re adjacent to. That album in particular represents a widening of their influences and musical styles, particularly as they have the canvas of a double-album to play with, and so the many genres and styles these seven songs cover fit nicely with a bunch of songs that are gloriously all over the place to start with. 

Hit: Tradewinds

Hidden Gem: The Roman Road

Rocks In The Attic #1166: Katy Perry – ‘Teenage Dream’ (2010)

“Daddy, what’s à ménage-a-trois?”

“Umm, go ask your Mum”

Embarrassing questions from my kids aside, I love this album. Not only is it chockfull of bangers – four  massive ones in Teenage Dream, Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.), California Gurls and Firework – but Katy Perry herself was absolutely banging during this era. 

I don’t want to claim that I saw her talent early on, but I could tell she was something special when I saw the music video to I Kissed A Girl. Then, if ever a music video could be constructed with elements from the deepest darkest parts of my brain, the sight of Perry spraying whipped cream out of her tits while she’s wearing lingerie in California Gurls absolutely ended me. 

It’s hard to see how she got to this level of laser-sharp smut. She was peddling Christianity on her eponymous first album (under the name Katy Hudson) in 2001. Something must have happened between then and 2007 when she released an EP called UR SO GAY, before her first studio album as Katy Perry, ONE OF THE BOYS, landed in 2008.

If the ménage-a-trois line in Last Friday Night and the whipped cream thing in California Gurls wasn’t enough, there’s a song called Peacock on 2010’s TEENAGE DREAM where she’s essentially asking to see somebody’s penis. You’d think that Perry might not be familiar with the concept of metaphors, but at least she was clever enough to disguise her song about female ejaculation as a female empowerment song called Firework. 

It’s definitely a front-loaded album, with the 1-2-3 smash of Teenage Dream, Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.), and California Gurls opening things up. Pop albums can get away with that more easily than rock albums, I think, as everybody wants to get to the good stuff. The non-single album tracks aren’t actually filler either. They just doesn’t have that same lightning-in-a-bottle appeal, and songs like Who Am I Living For? and Pearl have a darker edge that’s more in line with how her career went after this record. 

I’m just here for the smut. 

Hit: Firework

Hidden Gem: Circle The Drain

Rocks In The Attic #1165: Pink Floyd – ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon – Live At Wembley 1974’ (1974)

Well this is bloody lovely. I wish this sort of thing – ‘exclusive’ content from expensive boxsets given their own standalone release – would happen more. It happens with David Bowie and Fleetwood Mac, and now the mighty Floyd are doing it.

This LIVE AT WEMBLEY 1974 LP recently appeared on their 50th anniversary boxset, but who can afford such a lavish thing (in this economy!)? And even if I could, I’m not particularly interested in anything in the box other than the live album. I don’t want another copy of the studio album, I don’t want the hardcover book (though I’m sure it’s very nice) or the songbook, and I’m definitely not interested in 5.1 surround sound or Atmos mixes of the album on Blu-Ray. 

Just give me the shiny ‘new’ thing.

And so here we are. 1974’s Wembley Arena run-through of their landmark 1973 album, THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. I wouldn’t call myself a huge Floyd fan, but I do love them a lot – particularly the Roger Waters era. I can leave the Syd years and the post-Roger years. They have their highlights but it’s this gold in the middle that’s just so rich. 

I hadn’t heard this before I bought it, so I wasn’t sure how faithful it would be to the studio album. I know they play the album in its entirety on 1995’s PULSE, but it must be twenty years at least since I last heard that. I’m happy to report it sticks to those original recordings, but there’s still a loose-ish element of improvisation in some of the pieces. It’s just different enough to be interesting.

I recently watched the DELICATE SOUND OF THUNDER live film on YouTube, and just seeing that version of the band – all dressed in suits like they’re all wanky London stockbrokers by week, and musicians on the weekend – really makes me pine for the Roger Waters era of the band. He may be a bit of a cranky old bastard, but boy, did that version of the band put their head and shoulders above everything else, either before or since. 

Hit: Money

Hidden Gem: Time

Rocks In The Attic #1164: Justin Hurwitz – ‘Babylon (O.S.T.)’ (2022)

The Oscars are a funny thing sometimes. Well, every year, I guess. Something’s always snubbed in place of something less deserving. 

Take this year’s 95th Academy Awards, celebrating the films of 2022. Damien Chazelle’s fifth feature, the absolute hot mess that is BABYLON, snubbed for a Best Picture nomination, and forced to look on while Baz Lurpak’s visual diarrhoea ELVIS and James Cameron’s sludgy AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER got nods in that category.

That one sequence in ELVIS where the jumpsuited Big-E first plays Vegas showed the skills of a master director, but it displayed a certain amount of control that was missing from the rest of the picture. The rest of Luhrmann’s film was full of Tom Hanks’ dodgy-sounding Colonel Tom Parker narrating from a casino afterlife in what looked like the VFX equivalent of a Life Insurance TV commercial, while we were subjected by shot after shot of the camera entering Austin Butler’s eyeball before exiting his diamond-encrusted oesophagus while he vomited up cheeseburgers. Or something. 

And James Cameron’s long-awaited AVATAR sequel – that nobody was actually waiting for – arrived on our screens just to show us how much VFX work has plateaued into mediocrity over the last decade. Even if you ignored the video game cut-screen aesthetics of the visuals, you were left with a soap opera-heavy narrative that was such a struggle to get through, we had to cut in half and watch it over two nights. And, unbelievably, this is now one of the highest grossing films of all time, proving that that metric is worthless when not adjusted for inflation…

In comparison, BABYLON hit cinemas relatively swiftly, in and out, with little fanfare. I saw a preview screening here in Auckland, to a fairly big crowd, and I loved it. Is it my favourite Chazelle film so far? Nope, definitely not. I’d put WHIPLASH, FIRST MAN and LA LA LAND ahead of it, and only his film school thesis film GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH (notable only for the sound of Justin Hurwitz hitting the ground running with a brilliant musical score) behind it. 

Yet, it’s still a far stronger film than Luhrmann’s or Cameron’s. 

I wondered whether Hollywood had rallied against BABYLON because of its ‘here’s the history of cinema and here’s this very film right here with all these other classics’ finale, but Hollywood usually laps that shit up. In fact, a Hollywood film about Hollywood itself is usually a sure-fire way to get the Academy voting for you. 

Chazelle’s film isn’t perfect, but it’s thoroughly entertaining with a gloriously melancholic streak that pervades throughout, and Justin Hurwitz’s balls-to-the-wall soundtrack score perfectly echoes this. When I first heard those two or three main themes on the score, I immediately thought he had just recycled some of his themes from LA LA LAND, and while they do sound similarly childlike, I do admit that there’s more going on in them than you first suspect. The whole oomph of the score reminded me a great deal of the instrumentation and arrangement on Ben Fold Five’s Steven’s Last Night In Townfrom WHATEVER AND EVER AMEN, which aims for a similarly raucous big band blowout style. Despite most of the soundtrack sticking to a single brief – old-sounding music with a contemporary beat – the track Toad even sounds like something Muse would put out, and Blockhouse sounds like something Nick Nightingale would play at the ceremony in EYES WIDE SHUT.

I’m spinning a limited edition expanded pressing of the soundtrack with an insert of the cover art signed by Justin Hurwitz, which I was able to snag with the help of a fellow soundtrack lover. 

Hit: Manny And Nellie’s Theme

Hidden Gem: Champagne

Rocks In The Attic #1163: Gil Mellé – ‘The Sentinel (O.S.T.)’ (1977)

This year I signed up for the Waxwork Records annual subscription. It’s only the second year I’ve done it, but this year the titles are so great – George A. Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD, Tobe Hooper’s THE FUNHOUSE, Micheal Winner’s THE SENTINEL, Brian De Palma’s BODY DOUBLE, Guillermo del Toro’s CRIMSON PEAK and David Fincher’s SE7EN – I couldn’t pass it up. It’s expensive, but for five double-LPs and one triple-LP (plus a load of other bumf like a hoodie, a t-shirt, a beanie, a slipmat and a calendar), it works out pretty good for value for money. 

Weirdly, this year, some of my retro cinema screenings have started to sync with Waxwork’s subscription titles. In February, I caught DAWN OF THE DEAD on a double-bill with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (one of the other Romero titles that Waxwork have released in the past), a few weeks later I saw a welcome rewatch of SE7EN on a Friday night, followed by THE SENTINEL on the following Monday night. It’s not out of the question that I might get to see BODY DOUBLE and CRIMSON PEAK projected before the year is out. Fingers crossed for the De Palma!

Despite having THE SENTINEL in my ever-rapidly-growing watchlist of movies to watch at home, I’ve never managed to get around to it, so, as always, it was great to experience it for the first time on the big screen. 

And…like a lot of Michael Winner films, it’s a solid, yet mostly unremarkable watch. 

Funny goings-on in a Manhattan brownstone, and it plays out like a mixture of THE EXORCIST and Polanski’s THE TENANT. The soundtrack score by Gil Mellé is a nice mixture of creepy percussion and choir, with a central theme on the oboe that fits the mystery aspect of the film well. 

The film is mostly notable though for a couple of appearances by actors that went on to bigger and brighter things in the following decade: Jeff Goldblum (working with Winner again after DEATH WISH), Christopher Walken, a topless Beverly D’Angelo (is there a film where D’Angelo doesn’t get her tits out?), and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him Tom Berenger. 

Hit: The Sentinel – Main Title

Hidden Gem: Prospective Tenant

Rocks In The Attic #1162: Various Artists – ‘She’s Having A Baby (O.S.T.)’ (1988)

If 1987’s PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES proved that John Hughes could successfully make the leap from teen comedies to middle-aged people comedy, the following year’s SHE’S HAVING A BABY proved that not everything he touched turned to gold. 

Ever since my good friend Karl Lock helped me snag one of the Tarquin Gotch-curated John Hughes boxsets last December, those six red discs have been in constant rotation on my turntable. I managed to snag this beautiful first US press of the SHE’S HAVING A BABY soundtrack recently – one of only a couple I’m missing of his soundtracks. 

The film’s a bit of a duffer, but as usual, the soundtrack is great. 

Kevin Bacon (possibly playing the same character he appears as in his PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES cameo) and Elizabeth McGovern are having a baby while they negotiate their journey into middle-age. It’s not funny enough as a comedy, and it’s not interesting enough as a drama. 

Yet, of course, it has its moments. 

The big choreographed musical number while everybody’s mowing their lawns is great, and the film has a couple of interesting visual flourishes, but it’s that beautiful Kate Bush song over such a monumentally gorgeous scene that exists as the film’s highlight. 

Hit: This Woman’s Work – Kate Bush

Hidden Gem: Crazy Love – Bryan Ferry