Wave goodbye, say hello

A couple of new pieces in this week's Time Out New York: a review of Yoko Ogawa's middling novel, The Housekeeper and the Professor, and an interview with director James Gray, whose latest film, the rather wonderful Two Lovers, comes out next week. Gray was such a good talker that the web version includes outtakes from the interview. Make sure you catch him at BAM on February 10, when he'll introduce a sneak preview of Two Lovers.

As it turns out, these two articles are my last for Time Out. As some of you may know, I'm going off to the New York Post, where I'll replace Clive Barnes as chief drama critic. Big shoes to fill, I know, I know. My first review will be the revival of Guys and Dolls on March 2.

I'm taking some vacation before starting the new gig. I may do some road reports in the coming two weeks, but mostly I'm planning to catch up on my reading.

Sweet on Hugh

Hugh Jackman is hosting the Oscars! Yay! I hope this means the producers will finally bring back the musical numbers that have been sorely missed in recent years. What better way to celebrate the infamous Snow White Debacle of 1989 than have Hugh let loose in a huge floor show? It would be the 20th anniversary, too. You cannot call yourself a lover of Tinseltown flakery if you haven't seen this magnificent disaster, which I believe was choreographed by Debbie Allen.

Hugh did a fantastic job hosting the Tonys, but then Tony is a lot looser than Oscar when it comes to swishing. "Dancing makes studio executives really, really nervous…" Omigod, I just adore him!!!

Credits in the straight world

Catching up with the Self-Styled Siren and her always-enlightening takes on classic Hollywood, I finally read her post about credit titles. Since the post and most of the comments focus on American movies, here are a few European titles that I particularly love:

• Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen (1991), which matches names and objects referring to the job at hand.

• Laurent Brett's retro-minimal titles for OSS 117: Le Caire Nid d'Espions (2006). The clip starts with the very end of the pre-credit sequence. The film, a spoof of the 1960s action series OSS 117, was a huge hit in France.

• Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can couldn't be any more American—except for its title sequence, designed by the Parisian team of Kuntzel + Deygas. Although you could of course point out that they're paying cheeky tribute to Saul Bass.

• Pedro Almodóvar: so much to choose from! Here are High Heels (1991) and Bad Education (2004). The latter channels the Hitchcock/Bass/Herrmann trinity to great effect.

• best TV credits ever? The Avengers. Amazingly, the quality remained high season after season; check out a sample here. Even the much-maligned New Avengers had decent credits, which says a lot. They also had lengthy end credits, which are pretty much gone from modern series.

• Okay, The Avengers win on style, but The Persuaders' credit sequence was narratively astute as it used split screens to give the background story of this early-70s series' main characters, played by none other than Tony Curtis and Roger Moore. Plus, music by John Barry. Strangely, this show seems pretty unknown in the U.S., whereas it was hugely popular in France.

The fairest one of all

Like many people, I have a thorny, love-hate relationship with Disney. It's hard not to admire the craft that goes into many of the films while at the same time being repelled by their message and the image of the company as a whole. Having absurdly enjoyed the soundtrack to Enchanted (yes, that'd be the one that clogged the Oscars with three performances), I finally caught the movie on DVD. If only it could have ended after 45 minutes…

The premise is simple: a typical animated Disney princess falls in love with a prince after knowing him for about five seconds, and is dispatched to real-life Manhattan by his power-hungry stepmother; she leaves behind her meadow of singing animals and talking chipmunks to enter a city of precocious six-year-olds and Crackberry addicts. The best part is that the irrepressibly perky Giselle still acts in NYC as if she was living in animated la-la land. This is where the movie is really inspired, and I'm not sure it's entirely on purpose (whatever: I'll take it). You see, Giselle behaves as if she's clinically insane, and thanks to the comedic chops and natural charisma of Amy Adams, who plays her, the viewer is torn between feeling sorry for nutso Giselle and being totally charmed by her. In that part of Enchanted, you're watching a delusional woman act out her fantasies of a rose-colored world—like someone who's watched too many Disney movies and started believing their noxious subtext. She gets the local fauna to help her in a musical number, for instance, except of course it's rats and roaches and pigeons. Giselle is the most beautiful bag lady you've ever seen, spouting crackpot wisdom and surrounded by vermin. Needless to say, I loved that bit.

This being Disney 2008, Enchanted goes on to 1. indulge in a ridiculously over the top battle with Susan Sarandon as a giant dragon (shades of Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent of course, but boring as hell, like a cheesy outtake from Ghostbusters), 2. have Giselle save her new prince instead of vice versa and 3. have Giselle become a fashion designer, ’cause she's not a stay-at-home princess (and her helpers are animals, not Chinese people in sweatshops). Sigh.

P.S.: This is a musical in which Broadway pros like Idina Menzel and Tonya Pinkins (and Julie Andrews, who narrates) don't even get to sing!

Sundance music

Over the past few days, I've taxed my brain cells with an onslaught of movies on TV and DVD and in theaters. I'll single out Little Miss Sunshine, Juno and Dan in Real Life not because they're my favorites but because they're thematically and aesthetically similar (even if Juno thinks of itself as a little hipper—it's not really), and because their soundtracks are pretty much interchangeable. Those scores say as much as the films themselves about a certain type of Hollywood aesthetics circa now. All three movies attempt to evoke a certain type of quirkiness (one that glorifies a palatable idea of individualism without actually offering any serious critique of the American social order), and in all three the music is a very specific type of indie rock/pop that translates that quirkiness into naiveté—a word meant as a compliment for many, but not necessarily a good thing in my mind.

This is most flagrant in Juno, which prominently features several songs by Kimya Dawson and in which a Moldy Peaches tune plays a rather big part. When you know that Jason Bateman plays an artiste manqué whose old band once opened for Melvins and who now writes music for commercials, you know you're in for indie-rock references as shortcuts for actual character development.

DeVotchKa did the music for Little Miss Sunshine and Dan in Real Life sports an extensive score plus a few songs by Sondre Lerche. In both, another type of indie sound is called up to help out potential deficiencies in screenwriting—this time, bouncy horns and jaunty melodies suggest that we are not in James Newton Howard or Hans Zimmer territory. Every time something meant to be unconventional, fanciful or touching happens, we get a bleating trumpet or a serious tuba instead of the 1,001 strings of the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra. That'll stick it to the man!

As an alternative to all these tubas, here's the nouveau-retro collaboration between Nouvelle Vague and director-screenwriter-actor Julie Delpy that plays over the end credits of Delpy's 2 Days in Paris (a movie with a successful first half about French-American cultural differences and a frustrating ending about Delpy and Adam Goldberg's couple trouble).

Nouvelle Vague featuring Julie Delpy "LaLaLa" (from 2 Days in Paris soundtrack, 2007)

Mamma Meryl!

My love for Abba is no secret but I can't say that I'm a fan of the Mamma Mia! musical: Yes, there is such a thing as too much cheese, even for me, and having an artificial context and a fixed meaning forced upon these songs is disconcerting.

That said, I'm kinda psyched about the movie version (out summer 2008) because it stars Meryl Streep, with whom I'm in love all over again these days. If you're familiar with La Streep's career, you know she can sing—she started in musicals at the Public Theater in the 70s and has sung in some movies, most notably Postcards from the Edge and A Prairie Home Companion; and of course she sang in Mother Courage in Central Park a couple of summers ago.

There are two trailers for the Mamma Mia! movie online right now. Typically, the American trailer shows a lot less Meryl than the English one, as if the movie was all about the pretty young thing. It also does not show Meryl dancing or singing, while the British one does. It's as if they were afraid of letting Americans know that the older woman has a pretty sizeable part, and that it's not all about the young blondie.

The British trailer also includes Meryl's follow-up to her line "You sound like you're having fun already" (a muttered "I used to have fun"), while oddly the American one doesn't; it's really a one-two punch, so leaving the second part makes no sense. It's not like we needed more evidence than American trailers are terrible but, well, there it is.