Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Dear Anonymous

Last June Anonymous asked me just when the song Fallen for You by Sheila Nicholls can be heard in the movie High Fidelity. Well, Anonymous, this is your lucky day! Whilst untangling and winding up strings of Christmas lights for storage this afternoon I had High Fidelity on in the background. Because the whole light string thing is a highly tedious process that requires entertainment to move the task along. So I kept my ears pricked for the song in question. Fallen for You can be heard briefly at the beginning of the scene where Laura meets Rob for a drink just past halfway into the film. This scene, where Rob wants to know the specific meaning of Laura's use of the word yet in regard to her having said earlier that she hadn't slept with Ian. Yet. Though Rob, immediately after that exchange, dashed out and slept with Maria De Salle. Rob, played with amiable and grungy desperation by John Cusack, whom I adore, actually admits the irony of his behavior. But I'm not here today to examine character motivation, I'm here to locate a song! If you have the dvd, Anonymous, go to Chapter 16, Sleeping Around, to hear it for yourself. At the end of the movie I took a closer look at the music credits and discovered a few, well, anomalies. Like Elvis Costello's Shipbuilding. Which is credited at the end of the movie and appears on the soundtrack cd, but I have yet to identify where exactly it is playing during the movie. Another song, I'm Wrong About Everything by John Wesley Harding, is included on the soundtrack cd, but is nowhere to be found in the body of the movie nor in the closing credits. Two songs clearly heard during the movie, Queen's We Are the Champions and Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves, are omitted from the cd. I know. Music licensing agreements can be tricky. Maybe the film's producers wish to have a certain song in the movie, but don't want to pay the extra for having it appear in the soundtrack cd. Or pay the fee for a song but the scene it plays over doesn't make the final cut of the movie that is released. Details, details. All I know is, High Fidelity is one of my top five fave movies. And one of my favorite movie soundtracks. I have definitely fallen for it.

No comments: