Word: manns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Rarely does a movie soundtrack focus on a single artist. Simon and Garfunkel's work on The Graduate is one of the few that come to mind. Former Bostonian Aimee Mann takes on the task with nine tracks for Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. Why Aimee Mann? According to his liner notes, Anderson, a friend of Mann, felt that she "is the great articulator of the biggest things we think about." On the Magnolia soundtrack, Mann's songwriting cuts to the core of human emotion, exploring the intricacies of love and pain with a catchy quality that locks the songs...
...album's haunting first single, "Save Me," ponders emotional rescue, with Mann begging to be liberated from "the ranks of the freaks who suspect they can never love anyone." Mann's folk-pop provides an appropriate backdrop for her deep, probing lyrics. The soundtrack also contains two gems from Supertramp, a flashback to the early '90s with Gabrielle's "Dreams," and the movie's instrumental theme by Jon Brion. But, in the end, it is Mann's work that carries this disc to greatness. Anderson's movie has quite a task in living up to the expectations created by this...
...attempts at concluding thematic uniformity among the various stories are confounded by Magnolia's desire to let the characters develop naturally and with the complexity of their construction. Their pursuits of love and redemption are echoed plaintively in the music of Aimee Mann, which is interwoven throughout the film and which, in one disarmingly effective scene, assumes a lead role. But the music, too, is simply a bittersweet tribute to modern and everyday insecurities; it's as if Anderson feels so intensely what it is to be alive today that he can't help but burst into song. Which...
Relativism brought the underground man into his own--in Europe, with Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Aichinger, Sartre, Mann and Pirandello; in America with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Ellison, Capote and Salinger. The antihero, too, searched for unified meaning, but the narrative that held him was all about divisions, schisms and self-inspection. He sought to be by himself, like a god. In Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Richard Wright's The Outsider, protagonists become serial killers out of the desire to be alone...
This month the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter gets his chance to be heard. Brion, 35, composed the introspective instrumental score to Paul Thomas Anderson's film Magnolia (Anderson is a longtime friend of Brion's) and produced five songs on the sound track (including Aimee Mann's intimate cover of the Harry Nilsson standard One). Brion also produced Fiona Apple's terrific...