The alternative chick flick playlist . . . .

Not much chick flick viewing this week. I’ve been on the road. Listening to a lot of music in the car. Which brings me neatly onto an ongoing project of mine: the alternative chick flicks playlist. Time to drag these classic tunes out of the closet and show the world that there’s more to chick flick soundtracks than “I've Had the Time of My Life”. This could grow and grow, and is in no particular order.

Any additions gratefully received!

“Do Your Thing” Basement Jaxx
Bend It Like Beckham
This movie's soundtrack is consistently fresh and original (including a couple of sneaky tracks from Victoria Beckham). I've chosen the impossibly infectious dance tune – with the immortal refrain “And a boom boom boom and a bang bang bang (boom, bang, boom, bang bang)” – from Brixton’s finest house music outfit.

“Moon River” Danny Williams
Breakfast At Tiffany’s
Henry Mancini’s small, sweet and perfectly formed song won an Oscar – and though no one knows for sure what it is, a “huckleberry friend” sounds like a delightful thing to have. Inextricably linked with the image of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, sitting on the windowsill in sweatshirt and jeans, looking vulnerable as she strums her guitar and plaintively sings into the night.

“All By Myself” Jamie O’Neal
Bridget Jones’s Diary
Who hasn’t bellowed along to this one, eyes screwed shut, in a frenzy of self-pity after a glass too many?

“Respect” Aretha Franklin
Bridget Jones’s Diary
And who hasn’t snapped out of it with a feisty rendition of this? (As also performed in Thelma & Louise, a version which comes a close second, for moody visuals and lump-in-the-throat context at the very least.) Aretha Franklin is the chick flick soundtrack queen.

“Just Blew In From The Windy City” Doris Day
Calamity Jane
While it was the film’s wistful “Secret Love” that won the Oscar, this rambunctious singalong has the wonderful Day giving it a little less yearning and rather more oomph – at her gutsy thigh-slapping best with every throaty “no, sir-eee!”.

“As Time Goes By” Dooley Wilson
Casablanca
“You must remember this…” – who could ever forget? Could this be the most romantic movie song ever?

“Kids In America” The Muffs
Clueless
Kim Wilde’s lo-fi mid-1980s original (cue nostalgic memories of my copycat, home-shorn short-top long-back hairdo – am horrified to find myself wondering if it was in fact a mullet?) revisited a decade later by this Californian garage-punk outfit.

“These Arms Of Mine” Otis Redding
Dirty Dancing
Nobody in the world sings about love like the Love Man himself. Wrap yourself up in his magnificent voice and swoon. (This was the first dance at my wedding,so I have a particular soft spot.)

“You Don’t Own Me” The Blow Monkeys
Dirty Dancing
This campy version of Lesley Gore’s powerful pre-Girl Power proclamation – also immortalized by Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Bette Midler in The First Wives Club – sneaks onto this list as a shameless excuse to plug the 1960s original. Female defiance has never been sexier or more stylish.

“I Want Candy” Bow Wow Wow
Marie Antoinette
Sofia Coppola takes us deftly back to the New Romantic 80s with this pouting, posturing,joyful tirade – also featured in the splendid nostalgia-fest Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.

“Unchained Melody” The Righteous Brothers
Ghost
Grand Guignol meets blue-eyed soul. You may snigger at those potter’s wheel antics,but just try and hit that high note while choking back the lump in your throat.

“Angkor Wat Theme II” Michael Galasso
In The Mood For Love
A heartbreakingly delicate string arrangement that weeps with remorse and regret.

“I Say A Little Prayer” The cast
My Best Friend’s Wedding
Penned by Burt Bacharach, this is probably the best feelgood love song ever recorded.Root out Aretha Franklin’s definitive version, grab your favourite karaoke hairbrush, and let rip.

“The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan” Marianne Faithfull
Thelma & Louise
For any woman who, at the age of 37, realized she would never drive – to Paris – in a sports car – with the warm wind in her hay-ayr…
(Best wishes to the iconic Faithfull, who is currently being treated for breast cancer, and, it is said, is doing well.)

“Playground Love” Air
The Virgin Suicides
Chick flicks come over all woozy with help from the psychedelic Gallic electronica twosome. (Try saying that with a mouthful of chocolate raisins.)

“The Way We Were” Barbra Streisand
The Way We Were
Babs at her divaesque best with this bittersweet torch song to nostalgia and loss.

And finally ...

“I Will Always Love You” Whitney Houston
The Bodyguard
...Because every playlist has to feature a guilty pleasure. (I’m talking about the song here, not the film, throughout which I slept like a baby.)

Marie Antoinette: Coppola's candy-coated revolution

So much hatred has been spat at Sofia Coppola and her latest movie. Jonathan Ross, speaking on his TV show, said sniffily that he wasn't sure there was a guiding intelligence behind Marie Antoinette (this from the man that raved about Adam Sandler's latest turkey, Click. Not sure where you find the "guiding intelligence" in that one).

Time Out London, with a poker firmly lodged where the sun don’t shine, tells us that this "grand folly of style over substance" "leans heavily on decor, shoes and various superficial confections", and concludes that it is "hip – but never history." I’m sorry? What? Time Out London has the final say on what makes history? Who says it’s not history? Whose history is it anyway?

Nina Caplan, meanwhile, in the free London newspaper London Lite (the name speaks volumes), is also concerned with cutting Coppola down to size, huffing about the “narcissistic writer-director” and her “lofty indifference to the cinema-going public” – and she, too, is quick to criticize the movie’s historical credentials (apparently there aren’t enough peasants in the movie for Caplan’s taste; it’s just not *realistic* enough).

Not everyone is so consumed by bitterness, however. One critic who isn’t worried about realism is Pam Cook, who has written a superb article about Marie Antoinette in the November 2006 issue of Sight and Sound. Cook takes a refreshingly original and intelligent angle on the movie, defining it in terms of travesty, with all the pleasure and subversion that involves.

Over in the US, Roger Ebert is also excited by the movie, giving it four thumbs up out of four, and stating, beautifully, that “Every criticism I have read of this film would alter its fragile magic”.


Turning to rottentomatoes.com, a quick glance of the reviews there shows that among audiences, opinion is dramatically divided. And this is one of the fascinating things about this movie; just how worked up people get about it, whether they love it or hate it. I’ve seen it twice now, and I’m still struggling to decide.

Something, apart from its sheer, undeniable gorgeousness, keeps drawing me back. I can’t quite pin it, or how I feel about it, down – and that intrigues me, gets under my skin. I loved Virgin Suicides, was less keen on Lost in Translation (I’m allergic to Scarlett Johannsen), was seduced by this latest film and yet also felt vaguely critical.

And for me, too, I’ve come to see, it’s about Sofia Coppola. Deep in my heart, I suddenly realize, I’m envious of this successful, confident, beautiful young woman. Her style, her aura, her privilege, her brains, her pregnancy, her Oscar. I don’t come out of this admission very well – but I can’t help but think that my secret pricks of resentment are reflected and writ large, without any heartsearching, by the vast majority of film reviewers. There’s something rotten at the core in the way in which Coppola gets picked on – a lifetime of bitching that started when she appeared in in Godfather 3 and was slated for her performance, and, far more disturbingly, for her looks (not pretty enough, apparently. Big nose.)

Partly born from that mean streak in us Brits that needs to put down the success of others in order to feel better about ourselves, this vitriol is also, I think, tinged with misogyny. (And the bitchy voices were certainly not limited to this side of the Pond.) That a young female director should take the brave step of breaking free from the grip of her father (a man hailed as a god in the eyes of many cinephiles), making her own movies according to her own very distinctive aesthetic, becoming, heaven forbid, an auteur in the meantime; that’s outrageous enough. That she should take the story of a female historical figure and play with it, experiment, imagine, dream – apply with cool confidence her own, personal and impressionistic take on historical “fact” – this is not only shocking but actually terrifying to some.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian offers a considered and interesting take on the movie, but perhaps inevitably misses some of it. Intrigued by this “anthem to doomed youth”, he pays due respect to Coppola’s consummate skill as a risk-taker, but frets at the fact that we never really know what is going on in the young queen’s mind. Personally, I’d disagree. The moment when the still childless Marie runs to her room and breaks down in floods of anguished tears after having congratulated her sister-in-law on the birth of her new baby, for example, is a shard of real, raw pain that reveals the young queen's fragility and frustration.

This is a ravishing, enchanting movie – and somehow that fact is seen as irrelevant, a sideline. But in Coppola’s work the visuals are never a sideline. The visuals tell the story – dreamy, seductive, mysterious, troubling – and in that, she is an artist. Why should visual pleasure be seen as shallow? Why is costume, and décor, seen as superficial? And why should Sofia Coppola, in painting a portrait of a shallow world, be judged as shallow herself? Could it not be seen as a supremely bold move to put herself and her privileged world under the microscope – to reach out and communicate and lay herself bare? To make art out of what she knows?

Maybe many, men and women included, find themselves embarrassed by the sheer overblown femininity of Marie Antoinette’s world. The responses to it bear a strong similarity to those to Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, another audacious visual spectacle that plays with “historical fact”. Marie Antoinette is a movie of parasols and plumes and ribbons and bows and flowers and shoes and hairdos and hats and chokers and candy and corsets and corsages and cakes. Lots and lots of cakes. Mountains of fondant fancies and cream buns, pretty fruit tarts and rainbow-coloured macaroons. And these cakes aren’t just “superficial confections”. As Marie Antoinette becomes more claustrophobic, more trapped, more miserable, the candy and the conspicuous consumption increases.

It’s been repeated ad nauseam that the movie was booed at Cannes. What is less commonly told is that it also, at the same screening, received a standing ovation. And that many movies showcased at Cannes get a similarly mixed reception. So much for historical verisimilitude. When it comes to slagging off Sofia Coppola, it seems, it’s not so important to stick to the facts.

Incidentally, the macaroons, as key to this movie as the ravishing Manolo Blahnik shoes, were ordered from French patissier Ladurée; you can buy them from Harrods.

They are, literally, divine.

Superficial? Moi?

The Devil Wears Prada: footless tights, yes or no?

What a surprise – The Devil Wears Prada has received none of the critical acclaim of The Departed or Children of Men. I won’t rant . . .it’s not quite a good enough movie for me to get all hot and bothered. But it’s far more interesting than most reviewers give it credit for, and that does bug me.

Most pundits have grudgingly allowed that Meryl Streep carries the movie, which is indisputable. She’s an actress who improves with age, I think, mellowing and deepening and losing some of her early nervy affectation – and she gives a subtle, very complex performance. It’s striking to me that I identify with her character, the older woman who has given up a lot by making the choices that have got her where she is today, and not the slip of a thing played by Anne Hathaway, the striving modern miss with all her life ahead of her.

Devil isn’t as anti-fashion as I thought it was going to be, and for that I applaud it. Streep gives a great speech explaining, with terrifying, razor-sharp intelligence, that Hathaway’s “choice” not to follow fashion is no choice at all; that her frumpy blue jumper is in fact as conscious a style statement as her co-worker’s Chanel handbag. If I hadn’t been stuffing chocolate raisins down my gullet I would have applauded. It used to drive me mad when a certain ex-boyfriend of mine would dismiss my concerns about his sludgy cardigans and ill-fitting Gap chinos as shallow and insignificant. “I just don’t care about clothes,” he’d insist loftily, as if that somehow made him superior to me. It’s not like I wanted him to deck himself out in designer T-shirts and ridiculously priced jeans (I’m an anti-label snob; a hangover from growing up in the punk years). I was just asking him to care about himself, I think, and ultimately, to care about me.

Am currently wondering whether I’m too old to wear footless tights. I loved them the first time around, worn with 1950s jumble sale skirts, cheap Woolworth’s plimsolls and men’s cardigans; but it feels just a little weird to kit myself out in the clothes I wore twenty years ago. (I’d ditch the baggy cardis today, but the skirts and plimsolls look is one I still hold dear, and explains my current enchantment with Lily Allen.) Perhaps I should watch The Devil Wears Prada again. I don’t think The Departed is going to help me out much.

The Departed: damaged men and mobile phones

I loved The Departed, because I have a soft spot for Martin Scorsese, and even though his women are always appalling or disappointing (except, of course, for Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More) his men are complex and damaged and conflicted enough for me to find them deeply interesting. I’ve recently cracked and finally got my first-ever mobile phone, too, so all the shenanigans with top secret texting in terrifying life-and-death situations tickled me no end.

Oh, and it features two of my favourite songs: Sweet Dreams by Patsy Cline and Gimme Shelter by the Stones. You can always depend on Scorsese for a supercool soundtrack.

Children of Men: puppy dogs and pretension

Unlike the rest of the world, who seem to be universally singing its praises, I thought Children of Men was a bit tiresome. Pretentious, portentous and far too worthy for its own good. As a childless woman, watching the tragedy of a world without babies – along with the Jesus Christ allusions – played out in a dystopian war zone wore a bit thin after a while. I entertained myself counting the many dogs and cats swarming all over the screen – the point, presumably, being that in a world without kids adults instinctively turn towards other forms of small, dependent beings to look after and to love.