n the exhausting effort to keep ahead of the tides, young friends, Stylus has a new column to offer you. We’re calling it A Kiss after Supper, and in it we’ll be tracing the expert use of pop music through some of the more music-friendly films of the past thirty years. With directors like Spike Jonze, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson using their robust appreciation for music in novel ways to document their stories through music as well as cinema, soundtracking is perhaps more critical to a film’s emotional tone than it’s ever been. As such, we thought it about time we wrote a little something on the issue...

Okay okay, we’ve read all the ‘by-rights’ and ‘should-haves’ that any one emerging column can stand. The worthies have been covered, my darlings—at least to a suitable enough degree where we can all take pause to recline in our rattan rockers with dignified expressions of self-satisfaction, left alone and content to contemplate other, doubtlessly lesser films and the contribution their soundtracks have made to those genres of film I want to write about. Which is as approximate as I can get without sounding atrocious and vile in my attempts to rationalize why a film that now occupies the bargain bin at Best Buy sparked my interest before countless other films that remain, rightfully so, lofted as masterpieces not only in cinematic terms, but also in their ability to fuse the mediums of pop music and film into an integrated whole. But maybe that’s all the explanation this week’s choice needs, for unlike many of the films featured in AKAS so far, Danny Boyle and Co.’s 1997 A Life Less Ordinary fails quite miserably in one right while achieving a sort of cult-classic status all its own in the other.

Opening to a black screen with the echoing voiceover of some Detroit-sounding schlep complaining in a genuinely dismayed voice about Eve’s betrayal of Adam, God and, by extension (apparently) himself, the film begins with an ideological bang not many filmmakers would have either the balls or missing brains to invoke. A cosmic explanation by which the current state of perpetual enmity betwixt man and woman might be attributed, I suspect that had you been in theaters with the same crowds that had flocked to see Trainspotting a year and a half before (note to self: why am I not writing about Trainspotting?), the collective gasp given off by a bunch of men wearing white belts who had come to see an encore of Sick Boy shooting dogs in the ass might’ve been well worth the price of admission itself. But as the aforementioned plaintiff in God’s court traces the current difficulties between men and women back to original sin, Diana Ross and The Supremes’ “I Hear a Symphony” slowly drowns the loveless ninny out before the camera fades in to the Bonnie and Clyde of god’s angelic order, played brilliantly by Delroy Lindo (as Jackson) and Holly Hunter (O’ Reilly). In fact, it is perhaps propitious that these two were chosen by Boyle and Co. to herald us through the film, for their characters’ incongruities, playing angels threatened with expulsion from heaven should they fail at the task god has handed them, provide many of the movie’s most stellar moments.

From the monochromatic romantic simplicity that “Symphony” expresses about the sheer magnificence of love, viewers are rather violently shoved into a locker with the Sneaker Pimps, whose “Velvet Divorce”, while silkily smooth in its own lounge-inspired electro-pop way, nonetheless plays the terrestrial doppelganger to Ross and the Supremes’ heavenly expression of love’s swooning effects. Replete with the Edenic and baptismal imagery American audiences have come to demand from all cinema, viewers are soon confronted by Cameron Diaz’s stylishly-clad swimming bod while the Sneaker Pimps’ lyrics declare “I’d rather sink than swim / If I can’t walk on water / Then let the scandal in / This perfect world disorder”, a romantic ethos which much more closely echoes Celine Naville’s own pessimistic attitude towards romance than does the heavenly crooning of Motown’s original darlings.

But the song is an appropriate one with which to introduce the film’s anti-heroine, since divorce, marital dissatisfaction and irreconcilable sexual disharmony appear to be the only romantic feelings predominating on earth—at least in Utah, where the majority of the movie was shot. In Celine Naville writer John Hodge and director Danny Boyle managed to create a caricature of woman in a post-feminist world, where the ‘have your cake and eat it too’ mentality of the ice-cold, faux-independent femme-fatale ultimately proves an untenable position in a world where humans’ capacity for love is predicated on the selfless notion of sacrifice and, yes, I’ll say it, faith—all this according to the movie’s interior logic of course—I myself am an atheist.

But as Gabriel has already explained to Jackson and O’Reilly, such faith is apparently not to be found on this earth, and so it is that the soundtrack of ALLO is roughly divided between the golden oldies which are themselves becoming passé in our culture, more and more frequently replaced on FM stations by nouveau oldies artists like the Eagles, the Beatles, the Stones and Journey, and material that was in the late 1990’s still classified largely as ‘underground’ or ‘subculture’ music.

And it is in this split that the movie achieves its greatest success, and perhaps is ultimately the only reason it still holds any water at all with fans. An urbane mix of soothing, romantic tunes, both new and old, well-known and unsung, is constantly contrasted with more grinding, less melodic fare that becomes synonymous with the jaded world the earth has become and which Robert and Celine now inhabit. One of the movie’s most idyllic scenes sees the emergent couple walking down a mostly-deserted country highway in the late afternoon, surrounded by autumnal foliage, with Faithless’ “Don’t Leave” acting as a sort of gospel-tinged, drum-track laden intermediary between heaven and earth, asking at one point “Where has all the love gone / Where’s the love gone to?” and as if to reply to the same query god is apparently asking, answering “You know it’s never been easy / To love someone like me.”

But while this shared moment of intimacy between the two finally allows viewers to believe in the burgeoning relationship developing between them, it soon enough gives way to a scene whose sheer preposterousness betrays any sense of credibility Boyle might’ve been building. Though the unusually-cutting guitar of REM’s “Leave” proves to be one of the film’s best uses of pop-music, the song is playing background while the audience is tilted back and forth between Robert’s countdown to execution and Celine’s bland question-and-answer with O’Reilly. The proceeding Terminator 2-inspired car chase seems to rise out a plotline written mostly on cocktail napkins sometime approximately an hour before bar time, in effect ruining what was potentially a very dramatic buildup of real tension with comic-book shenanigans.

Which is not to say that the England-based production team doesn’t have moments when one or another of the talents they so auspiciously displayed in Trainspotting don’t reemerge, it’s simply that they tend to be tied rather intimately to either a clever bit of dialogue (which can only be inserted every so often) or the use of pop-music. And while Boyle historically seems to be a man with a staunch disapproval of silent films, sheer necessity demands that a film not be laced wall to wall with music, though he certainly seems to give it the old college try, including multiple songs by Orbital, Faithless, and The Prodigy. They even manage to squeeze in an Oasis song that apparently couldn’t really make it into the movie (or its commercially-sold soundtrack for that matter) not once but twice, first by having McGregor’s character whistle “Round Are Way” when coming back from grocery shopping one morning just after kidnapping Celine, and later using the entire Beatles-inspired ditty to accompany the animated cartoon that plays while the credits roll.

But to be sure, the scene that shows sparks of previous accomplishments is the long series of botched ransom calls placed by Robert to Mr. Neville. While fumbling around with wrong numbers and incoherent demands, Beck’s “Deadweight” plays in the background, the camera moving back and forth and finally giving audiences the same kinds of gorgeous upshots, complete with rolling, picturesque clouds in the background, that served as the meat and potatoes of previous movies (think of the subjective camera used with Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” playing, how the sky seemed to stand still and give viewers a real sense of the character’s space at that moment), it stands as a rare instance amidst a plotline and interior logic which are so bumbled as to be almost incomprehensible.

Though the movie employs a host of other songs, those which contribute most noticeably to it as a whole, but have so far gone unmentioned, return viewers to that lost moment in time that popular music so effectively captured in its first several decades. Elvis’s “Always on My Mind” provides the inspiration that allows Jackson to write a sincerely touching love-poem which reunited Robert and Celine, if but briefly; Gladys Knight’s “If I Was Your Woman” celebrates Celine and Robert’s simultaneous faith in love and humankind’s timely success at the task God set it; Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea” becomes the musical background for Celine and Robert’s official coupling.

Ultimately this film continues to be of interest for movie and music buffs alike because it serves as perhaps the best example of a film that seems to put music first, ahead of conventional and oftentimes nagging cinematic benchmarks like script, which likely explains why the soundtrack has retained so many diehard fans and the film very few. While those Irvine Welsh sycophants were perhaps wrong in hoping for another Trainspotting, for producer Andrew MacDonald and, more importantly, director Danny Boyle, ALLO seems more like their Howard the Duck to Trainspotting’s preceding Star Wars than anything else. Perhaps this was simply a well-intentioned fuck-all blowout Boyle and the boys from Manchester had to have before they finally return to those cinematic roots which, after nearly a decade have achieved almost Holy Writ status in both the pop-culture (Boyle largely being credited with introducing America and the world to electronica at large) and cinematic worlds, and those of us looking forward to his next sweet-ass project should be content to suckle for a while on those gems that the movie undoubtedly possesses, the most memorably doubtlessly spoken by Tony Shalhoub, one of the great character actors the movie is littered with, who says to Robert (after Robert explains that Celine is not his type) “What are you talking about? Look at yourself. You’re nobody. You’re nothing. You’re wanted in connection with a violent crime. You’re cleaning the floor of a diner. She is an intelligent, passionate, beautiful rich woman. The issue of whether or not she’s your type—not one that you’re likely to have to resolve in this world or, indeed, the next, since she will be going to some heaven for glamorous pussy, and you will be cleaning the floor of a diner in hell.”