Tuwa's Shanty and The Roots Canal

Friday, February 17, 2006:

DJ Shadow -- Six Days (Soulwax mix)

DJ Shadow -- Six Days (6 MB .ogg)
DJ Shadow -- Six Days (Soulwax mix) (10.4 MB .mp3)
I first saw Harold and Maude about six years ago, when living with a Muslim roommate who didn't much care for it. As an agnostic I had fewer compunctions about it; I found something wonderfully liberating in watching the relationship between them and its effect on Harold. It's one of the few romances I love (along with Tootsie and, well, Tootsie), mostly because I loved the quirky tone of the film: dry, macabre, satirical, with the occasional broad humor (the policeman and the gun) and the points where the director abandons verisimilitude altogether (the yodeling, the piano playing).

Over the years I've changed a bit and my appreciation of the film has waxed and waned with it. I've gone from finding Maude's philosophy liberating to finding it vapid and silly to finding that it's not especially important what I think of it, that what's important is what Harold thinks of it.

And then there are some of the details that more observant people caught much sooner:

• Why Harold is faking so many suicides, and why he goes to funerals for fun
• The relevance of the lyrics to the film (Cat Stevens wrote some of the songs specifically for the soundtrack, and left them available only in the film for decades)
• Harold pulling out his pocketbook to bribe the policeman (this after Mrs. Chasen's opening story about Harold's father floating nude down the Seine and the enfluence and d'argent needed to take care of things afterwards)
• Bud Cort (not Harold--I doubt this was in the script) dinging himself in the head with the shovel when he gets on the motorcycle
• The Romeo and Juliet inversion in the dating scene, with Harold lifting his head up after his staged suicide, and its ties to the ending: Juliet with the poison, Romeo again "awakening"
• Maude's story about Frederick--"so serious," she says, smiling, her eyes brimming with tears. "A doctor at the university. In the government." In Vienna. And then, later: this shot less than two seconds long in a ninety-minute film:
  

It's masterful work: the story, the acting, the direction, and especially the editing at the end.

Its use of Romeo and Juliet puts me in mind of the richness of story, of source material, of Ebert's frequent adage that it's not what a movie is about but how it's about it. Expanding outward: it's not what art is about but how it's about it. And it's handy to have rich samples to work with.

The "Six Days" from Private Press is in .ogg format because I converted it years ago when I was using WinAmp; since then I've misplaced the CD (no doubt to find it whenever I finally move--cowering, or perhaps armed and ready to pounce, underneath some stack of papers). The remix is from Private Repress, which is about what Private Press is about in much the same way that Romeo and Juliet and Harold and Maude are both about a man and a woman having a hard time of things.
[Private Press]
[Private Repress]

Labels: hip-hop, movies

posted by Tuwa @ 05:05 | permalink |