Lavonardo

Missed last week’s installment of Movie Monday, so here’s an early entry for the newest challenge.

This week’s assignment is to name a movie with an unforgettable song, a song that always comes to mind when the movie pops up in the discussion.

I had two good candidates.

And the one that fell by the wayside was the Glorious Ninth, by Ludwig Van, as made famous by Alex DeLarge’s obsession in Clockwork Orange.

But even the ode to joy takes a second place to the ultimate piece of well-integrated soundtrack. That of Walkürenritt that accompanies a helicopter attack on a VC outpost on the Nung River. The time is sometime in the troubled early seventies, exactly the moment for Apocalypse Now.

Unfortunately the full scene from the movie is unembeddable from youtube, but there’s a good slice thereof around the 1:35-point in the attached trailer.

And as a spontaneous advertisement – a newly minted release of the film is available, a print that finally includes the elusive Hearts of Darkness documentary that describes the hardships the film crew endured in the jungle.

Late, hence short: Shawshank Redemption, over and over again (also: Babe, the Gallant Pig, but for a completely different reason).

Movie Monday #4: Crybaby.

I’ve never been a Takashi Miike fan – some of his movies have been interesting, while others tread on implausibly across lines of common sense.

Izo falls into the latter camp, and counts as the worst movie I recall having spent time and money on (two hours and a R&A-ticket, respectively). Massacre after massacre interleaved with quasi-philosophical platitudes does not an interesting movie make. I kept on waiting the movie to get started, but it reached the credits roll before that…

Movie Monday #3: Wasted hours.