The Sound of Music

How do you solve a problem like choosing the best shot from a movie? How do you find one image that best represents a movie? In only the rarest of movies will one shot be designed to be, or over time grows into being, THE definitive image. Movies by their nature celebrate the beauty of multiple shots in successive motion. Sequences scroll by, images build upon images, dialogue layers over songs and music. The beauty and power of that one crescendo moment is really the cumulative result of numerous previous moments.

I find that there are always so many beautiful shots that define any movie, including The Sound of Music. So many shots and sequences have become iconic and ingrained into the collective consciousness. The amazing helicopter shot zooming in on Maria as she sings the opening lines of the movie. The children on Maria's bed during My Favourite Things. All of the images from Do Re Mi.

The beauty of this excellent HMWYBS series is that it allows us to revisit movies, to rediscover what drew us in in the first place and to allow us to find new hidden gems to be thankful for. What is the best shot may be the best shot always, or it may only be the best shot right now, changing in the future.

Growing up, I only watched this film on television. Punctuated by advertising, I could only stay up until around the wedding scenes. My memories are mostly of the joyful first half, full of song and dance. And while the more serious, Nazi filled second half gives the film a lot of weight, it will always be the infectious exuberance of the von Trapp family, led by Maria, that fills my heart.

So it was perfect that, upon this viewing, I discovered this glorious reaction shot:

Within the film, this shot captures Liesl's glee upon experiencing her first kiss with the seventeen-going-on-eighteen messenger boy. But that same unbridled glee could also belong to Maria in her celebration of life and music, or the children upon learning to sing and being able to play again, or the Captain upon watching his children during the Lonely Goatherd performance.

For many of us, it's also the same unbridled joy that we get from doing over favourite things, listening to our favourite songs and watching our favourite films. This shot may not be the most beautiful or well known from the movie, but it's the one that best encapsulates the run-into-the-rain-and-jump-for-joy-in-your-wet-clothes kind of glee that I feel when I watch it.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Live theatre is a bit hard to come by in the wicked little town that is Bangkok. There is an abundance of live music, but the ‘shows’ that people come to here are more of the sex variety. So it was with some optimistic hesitation that my boyfriend and I went to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the RCA Mongkol.

The night began with a rocky start. Although scheduled for 8pm, we had to wait until 8:20pm before we could even move from the un-airconditioned hall and to an even smaller, but thankfully air-conditioned waiting room inside the venue. We listened to sound checks for about 15 minutes, before being ushered into the performance space. The space was set up like a bar, so that there several rows for sitting and some tables for standing. Luckily we managed to get a seat, because it was another 20 minutes until the band appeared, and then maybe another 10 minutes until the show started.

By this time, we had grown impatient and were ready for something amazing. Hedwig entered the stage, and while her wig was drag-tastic and the music was loud, something was amiss. The sound was warbled and the Thai-accented English was inconsistently intelligible such that we were distracted by needing to read the English surtitles above the stage. This was not looking good…

Happy Independence Day

Happy Friday, happy weekend, and oh yeah, Happy Independence Day America! To celebrate, I present to you this drag-tastic-'whether you like it or not' mini-rendition of America the Beautiful from the current Broadway version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

This last week, I just recently saw an amazing Bangkok performance of Hedwig, and I was hoping to write about it in time for today, thinking that the musical's treatment of the construction of gender and self-identity and Hedwig's search for her manifest destiny was a perfect way to salute the story of America. But alas, the best laid plans of mice and men etc... hopefully it'll be ready by next week.