A Movie Recommendation, Eventually

The movie / TV distribution business has been pretty chaotic over the last few years. Network TV has been losing market share pretty steadily, in spite of their commitment to copying whatever the hot new show was last year rather than trying to make something original. Cable has picked up the slack and seems to have the new hit shows, but they tend to be a little dark to sit down with the family and watch on a Sunday night. People tell me Game of Thrones, Dexter, House of Cards, Homeland, and Orange is the New Black are all great shows, but I haven't gotten into them. I miss Pushing Daisies and Life and Farscape. On the movie side, Netflix was the anti-Blockbuster. Get dvds in the mail, keep them however long you wanted, and lots of choices. Then came HULU and now there's HBO online and there are lots of choices for how to receive your movie. We still have Netflix, getting one dvd at a time, watching it almost immediately, and sending it back right away so that we are seeing a couple of movies a week this way. We also have lots of Netflix movies that can be streamed over the computer that we can watch on the big TV with the Apple TV box. We went to see the new Hunger Games 3A movie this week at the theater and realized we had forgotten most of the previous movie. So when we got home, we dialed up Hunger Games 2 on Netflix Streaming and watched it from the couch.    

I like Netflix because we have seen a number of quirky movies over the years that we wouldn't have paid to see at the theater and many of them have been very good. Our most recent watching was a movie that I would recommend to my family because I know they have some of the same sensibilities we have. In particular, I know that music is very important to them. We have top ten lists for movies and for books on our Marshmallow Fight website, but when we looked at top songs, we knew it would take at least 25 to get all the songs onto the list that we wanted. So each person there has a top 25 list of songs, which, in the case of Dave and me, expanded to top 30 because we couldn't make the final 5 cuts. They are all great songs, but they aren't all there because they are great songs. Many of them are there because they are tightly connected to important moments in our lives. Psychologists tell us that smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory. Strong smells can trigger our memory of events long gone from our conscious mind. But I think music is equally powerful. And it's not just events. When I hear some Association songs, I am taken back to my Freshman year in college some 45 years ago. My roommate was a junior who loved the Association and had a stereo. You needed a record player back then as there were no ipods or smartphones and itunes wasn't even a ka-ching in Steven Jobs' eyes yet. You went to the record store if you wanted to buy a new album. There were people there who liked to talk about music. You might have a conversation with someone standing right next to you. OK, I've gotten off track here and started shouting at the kids to get off my lawn. Sorry about that. Anyway "Along Comes Mary" just sends me off thinking about late night talk sessions in the dorm, skateboarding along the Red Cedar River at two in the morning, and many other memories of my first year away from home and family.    

There is a scene in the movie I am recommending where a record producer explains to a songwriter what a splitter does. You plug it (nowadays) into your phone or ipod, then the music is split into two sets of headphones. The producer, played by Mark Ruffalo in a wonderful turn as a jaded, declining  middle aged man recovering from a meltdown in his life, relates the story of wandering around New York with his girlfriend many years ago, listening to each other's playlists. And that is a scene that I can easily see people I know recreating. Especially people who believe their playlist is a window into their heart and their soul.  

The movie is called "Begin Again" and stars Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo, although the supporting cast is excellent as well. Ann and I both really liked it. The vocals in the movie are mostly done by Keira Knightley, Adam Levine (the front man for Maroon 5), and CeeLo Green (from the Voice) and, yes, I already downloaded the soundtrack to itunes. But the only one here to talk to during the download was Whimzy, so maybe I'll still go out to the record store for old times sake.