The song coverage is more varied than I’d thought. For example, Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy has all three levels of coverage. “Johnny Strikes Up The Band” has line-by-line lyric tracking, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” has no lyric tracking, and “Werewolves of London” has syllable-by-syllable lyric tracking.
“Werewolves of London” is in the Sing: Classic Rock playlist, for what it’s worth.
It seems more and more like the process that generates a Sing-compatible track is either manual, automatic but time-consuming, or costly in terms of licensing. Otherwise surely you’d want every album with a playlist song on it to be fully enabled, to give explorers like me the sense that there’s a ton of coverage?
Movies reviewed this week: They Call Me Trinity, Day of Wrath, Arsenic and Old Lace, Bullet Train, A Matter of Life and Death, Unfaithfully Yours, Bay of Angels, Felicia’s Journey, and Infernal Affairs III.
I am not a karaoke aficionado, for the record; I just like singing loudly to the music of my childhood.
So I updated my Apple devices today, as one does, and with the updates came Apple Music Sing. It’s pretty cool; like it says on the tin, for songs it works with, you can turn the vocals way down and the lyric display shows you where you are in the song — down to the syllable — and you can sing along. Nice.
You do not get any cool mixing, which is a shame. You kind of want to be holding a microphone and you want your vocals to get mixed into the backing music and maybe add a little autotune? I don’t know how that stuff works but I know I’m always flat. But it’s still fun. I just lost half an hour to it.
The question on my mind, of course, was “what songs work with this?” For starters, Apple has a bunch of playlists:
They’re what you’d expect. Popular fare, nothing too weird, certainly enough to make me pretty happy.
What about your own library? Not the streaming stuff, the actual library that only weirdos who used to buy CDs have? Welp, nope, this is an Apple Music feature so it doesn’t work with your antique library, even if you have Apple Match and you’ve synced with the cloud and all. I checked a couple of Boston songs which worked when streaming but not when looking at my library. Fair enough.
What about more obscure streaming stuff? It apparently depends, but here’s something interesting: there are two classes of song that support Apple Music Sing. More popular stuff supports the syllable-by-syllable tracking of the song lyrics:
But, say, “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” from Fairport Convention’s Unhalfbricking only goes line by line.
And coverage is spotty: Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out The Lights doesn’t support Sing, but their I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight does. The former is licensed through Rhino and thus Warner, while the latter is by way of Universal — maybe that’s the difference? No, because Hokey Pokey is on Universal and doesn’t support Sing. So who knows?
There’s no way to tell whether or not a song supports Sing without popping it open, and you can’t tell whether it’s syllable by syllable or line by line without playing it.
I was writing this up elsewhere and I thought it’d be worth saving here too. This particular version is prompted by the release of the 2022 Sight and Sound poll results.
The Master — my favorite PTA. Is it the best? Easy to argue that one, but it’s messy and sprawling which I love, and it has my favorite actor of all time, who I still mourn.
Tokyo Story — what an incredibly heart-rending movie. The sadness lies in the stillness. It is as calm as The Master is messy.
In the Mood for Love — the greatest visual director of our time (I kindly assume he’ll make another movie some day) and two of the best actors I’ll ever see. Nostalgia. Coincidence. Sadness.
Crash — my favorite expression of Cronenberg’s thesis statement: mankind will evolve into something else some day and we’d best be ready for it. I love the chilly violence of the Toronto highways in this.
Beau Travail — not just for that final scene, although I will happily explain why Denis Lavant is remarkable for hours, just ask me, see if I won’t. If there’s a common theme to these first five movies (and there is), it’s desire. Claire Denis knows how to put desire on screen.
The Third Man — I swear I didn’t notice until I was making this post, but this list can be divided into arthouse and genre, and we’re now in the genre section. For a long time Casablanca was in this slot but The Third Man replaced it for me. Vienna as a haunted house.
Brazil — this is the movie that taught me there was more to life than the multiplex, and I still love it for the messy excess of it all, plus it’s about rebellion and I find that still resonates with me.
The Big Sleep — yeah, the plot makes no sense, but I’m not in it for the plot. I’m in it for Bogart and Bacall and a poisonous toxic Los Angeles and the snappy dialogue. And for Dorothy Malone.
City of God — did you hear about the time a couple of Brazilians took the pyrotechnic effects from The Matrix and the disjointed narrative that Tarantino didn’t invent anyhow and bent them to their whims to tell a story about their homes? It’s really good.
Lawrence of Arabia — I have been lucky enough to see this in 70mm on a high quality screen three times, and if I could only ever see one movie like that again it’d probably be this one again. For my money, there has never been a better epic. Those dunes.
Holy Motors, Hiroshima Mon Amour, 8 1/2, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Three Colors: Blue could very easily be on my top ten as well.
Sarah Polley haș some absolutely wonderful thoughts about making a movie (Women Talking) with a mostly female crew. If you’re really fretful about assigning any behaviors to genders in particular, consider it as a piece about how much value there is in challenging norms. “They crafted a budget based on 10-hour days, shot in and near Toronto, so everybody could be home for bedtime.” Can’t wait to see this one.
EA patented a technique for detecting in game cooperation by mapping out of game social connections. Well, they say collusion, but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work in the general case. Back when I was playing competitive Ingress, I could sometimes figure out which agents from other regions were close by paying attention to who followed up on whose Reddit posts. Lack of in-game communication between cooperating players is also a sign of an out of game communication channel. It’s not totally surprising that this can be automated, but it’s a good reminder that privacy is tricky.
See also this Bellingcat piece on identifying the location of a far-right extremist from a single photo plus knowledge of his allies.
Back to movies! In a previous notes post I linked to a Scott Adkins interview about direct to video action movies. As a follow-up, check out this article on French action thrillers and Sara May, the Netflix exec who acquires them. This is great stuff. When people complain about a lack of mid-budget and low-budget movies? This is where some of those movies are. It’s sort of a publicity article for Lost Bullet 2 but that’s OK, cause I likedLost Bullet a bunch.
We’re gonna lose so much culture… well, no, that’s not the right lesson here. We’ve already lost immense amounts of culture. When I read articles about Syrian cassette tapes vanishing or lost movies, what I should remember is that this is still better than the days when nothing could be recorded. It’s like lost languages, right? We preserve them better now than we ever did.
Movies reviewed this week: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Dragon Inn, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, if…., Shaolin Temple, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Kes, The Meetings of Anna, Bones and All, Decision to Leave, and Down Twisted.
In September 2022, the Criterion Channel added a British New Wave collection, which made me quite happy because I’d been interested in those movies ever since I listened to a Filmspotting series on the topic. Wow, back in 2008. I didn’t actually wind up watching any of those at the time, but 14 years later isn’t too bad, right?
I’ve been watching them in order as the spirit moves me since September, and since a few of them are leaving at the end of November — Criterion Channel collections aren’t necessarily permanent — I got into higher gear and finally finished off the collection today. My capsule reviews are here.
It was a really satisfying way to dive into the psyche of a specific time and place. My overall impression was that Britain was well overdue for a bunch of directors to escape their formalist constraints, and that most of those directors weren’t quite as free from the stereotypes of class as they thought they were. The seventeen movies were too varied for any universal statements but an awful lot of them centered around lower class men who badly wanted to be upper class and just weren’t well suited for it.
I enjoyed most of them. Particularly notable: Room at the Top, mostly for Simone Signoret’s performance. It’s the second movie I’ve seen of hers but this is the one where she really registered. She’s been in some great stuff, so I’m looking forward to more of her. Billy Liar was one of my two favorites: I hadn’t felt much emotional connection to John Schlesinger in the past, but wow, this one was good. And Kes was just beautiful and harrowing. I knew it wasn’t going to end well but that couldn’t stop me from delighting in those scenes of Billy training his bird.
A couple of them left me cold. Not to beat up on Richard Lester but wow, The Knack… and How to Get It is a misfire through modern eyes.
I also really liked seeing some of the actors who I think of as aged veterans in their prime. Lawrence Oliver, Albert Finney, Julie Christie, Richard Burton — all wow. And actors who were new to me, too; Dirk Bogarde was really something.
For whatever licensing reason, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner didn’t make it into the collection but I’ve got a date with S. to watch it in, um, looks like March based on our Thursday night date list for 2023.
I grabbed Battle of the Linguist Mages from the library the other day (thanks, Libby!) and it wasn’t bad. It’s enjoyable reading Ready Player One from the anarchist point of view, even if it’s a bit broad. Don’t look for well-architected laws of magic here or anything — it’s more that a bunch of stuff happens in ways that amp up the fun factor.
But it’s really fun! The role of punctuation is top-notch and had me pausing midway through to do some Web searching.
