TV Recap: Glee – Ballads and Crushes

Remember those awful high school days when each important stage of your pubescent life is marked by a song? Menarche, pimples, crushes, first loves, heartbreaks, and so on? Yes, traumatic days, I know. But there is a new TV show that has succeeded in making the exercise of reminiscing about high school life less traumatic, and more entertaining.

Yep, I’m talking about “Glee”.

So, in this episode of Glee, the crisis each of our Glee Club heroes go through are elevated to stressful heights: when Mr. Schuester (Matthew Morrison) introduces ballads to the club and in pairing up the members end up being paired to fame-hungry Rachel (Lea Michelle), aforementioned Rachel falls in love with him in the middle of singing “Endless Love”.

Finn (Cory Monteith) is paired with the ever loveable, flamingly gay Kurt (Chris Colfer), who has had a crush on him ever since he defended Kurt’s honor against Puck’s (Mark Salling) bullying, and is busy hatching a plan to pry him away from the arms of his pregnant girlfriend, Quinn (Diana Agron). As the two try to search for a ballad that they can each sing to each other in the heartfelt way that Mr. Shuester intends them to sing it, they bond over Finn’s fears of being a dad and Finn ends up singing his way through his fears, via The Pretender’s “I’ll Stand by You”.

While singing the song to a sonogram of his unborn child on his laptop, his mother,who up to this point, does not know about his impending fatherly responsibilities, finds out that his girlfriend is pregnant. Pregnant girlfriend, Quinn, meanwhile, is intent on keeping her pregnancy from her very wealthy, conservative, devout, chastity-loving, abstinence and celibacy-advocating parents, a secret. During a family dinner with Quinn’s parents, in which the quarterback is invited, the quarterback sings Quinn’s pregnancy into the dinner via the song “Having my baby”.

 

I must say, during the song, the look on the clueless parents’ face, as the condescending, indulgent, self-satisfied smiles are wiped off and replaced by wonder, then confusion, fear, realization, then finally a mixture of anger and disappointment, is priceless. Say what you will about TV shows, teen shows, musicals and corny, cheesy love songs, this TV show gets points in my book for originality and pulling off a pretty heavy scene with great delicacy. Anybody who’s had to drop a bomb on their parents (be it being pregnant, being gay, planning a sex-change operation, or even just planning to move out) know how difficult it is to do so infront of them, and I give kudos to the people behind this show for succeeding in making this scene emphatic. Of course, there is no happy ending for this revelation – Quinn is thrown out of the house and she has to crash in her boyfriend, quarterback’s house. Meanwhile, while Kurt is busy plotting how best to wrest the quarterback from Quinn’s loving clutches, he still finds time to look for the perfect ballad to sing to the quarterback: Olivia Newton-John’s “I Honestly Love You” – which of course freaks the quarterback out. On the other side of the crush divide, Rachel is busy trying to win Mr. Shuester, through ballads, via Jennifer Paige’s “Crush”. Mr. Shuester replies via The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and that song, “Young Girl, you’re out of your mind, you’re much too young girl”.

Rachel doesn’t get the message of the song, and instead is impressed by the ballad and by her teacher’s singing that she intensifies the gift-giving and ballad-singing for him. Her unrequitted infatuation (Mr. Shuester seems unhappily married to an unsympathetic wife who takes advantages of the girls who have crushes on her husband) would have ended up tragically, had not another scorned girl, Pepper, confronted her with her own experience. She realizes she is right and thus decides to deal with the unrequitted crush in the only way unrequitted crushes should be dealt with: by accepting that the object of her affection will never return her love and by letting him go in the process. The episode ends with the club singing a nice rendition of “Lean on Me” for the benefit of Quinn and Finn. Verdict: Who can resist cheesy 80s songs mixed with the equally cheesy songs of the 90s with some rock ballads and soul thrown in? Points for including “The Pretenders” “I’ll Stand by You” and The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”. The show gets points for including “Endless Love”, too, which brings back childhood memories of adults making an ass of themselves crooning the tune to their love ones. Must say, this might be the cheesiest song ever produced – up there with “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, both of which are karaoke gems, but both of which none of the 80s babies with ever be caught dead singing. Hence the fun in listening to it being sung with the kind of camp and amplomb it so rightly deserves.

Can’t wait for the next episode!

Guerilla Geek recommends: Animation!

Stressed over the SONA?

Watch animation! Great for escapism:

1. Blood + – reluctant vampire hero must uncover her past in order to battle with the forces of evil: an evil corporation and its powerful minions, and an arch-nemesis whose has a mysterious connection with her. She is aided by a chivalrous “chevalier” (a kind of vampire knight), her brothers and government agents who have their own agenda.

2. Aio Hana – New “Yuri” anime from Japan. Yes, Yuri exasperates with its cliched stories always set in all-girl schools. But it seems promising. At least less exasperating than “Strawberry Panic!”.

3. Justice League Unlimited – I swear I cannot get enough of Justice League. Wonderwoman and Hawkgirl are perennial favorites as is Batman. Flash grows on you. And it is well worth the time just watching Wonderwoman come on to Batman, with frustrating results. Check out “Kids Stuff” for full-on flirtation and another episode where Wonderwoman turns into a pig (one of the best episodes ever!).

TIME lists best soundtracks that isn’t such a soundtrip (to me anyway)

TIME just gives me more reason to rant and rave! Earlier today it was their top 100 list of greatest novels (from 1923 to present), now it is Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel’s list of best soundtracks. After looking at their “Best Sountracks” online, it is safe to assume that they are a bit stuck in the Middle Ages and might need our help in ushering them into the new millennium.

Their list includes:

1. The Adventures of Robin Hood: by Erich Wolfgang Korngold

2. Citizen Kane: by Bernard Herrmann (Hangover Square, Psycho, Taxi Driver).

3. Laura: by David Raksin

4. On the Waterfront: by Leonard Bernstein

5. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at RKO: by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and the Gershwins.

6. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut: by Marc Shaiman.

For full discussion, go to time.com or click the address above.

Though I do not want to argue with the list, I think it needs a bit of sprucing up a bit,  because  a lot of great soundtracks have been made since the dark ages, in which the authors live in. ^^ Consider my list:

1. Star Wars Prequels and Sequels – Need I say more? When composer John Williams infused this franchise with his Wagnerian-style operatic music (a request that George Lucas himself made) it elevated Stars IV to VI  to not just mere sci-fi genre film, but a space opera, it gave it a sense of epicness and depth.

2. Requiem for a Dream - Most probably do not know or remember this 2000 film, but composer Clint Mansell made the soundtrack that you hear later in the last parts of the sci-fi film “Sunshine”. Then again, I think pretty much every Clint Mansell work rocks. He makes music that combines a sense of heart-pounding urgency with a sense of tension and apocalyptic doom.

3. Braveheart – because James Horner fused Celtic-sounding ancient music with modern music. There is debate on his other works (he tends to be repetitive – I agree) – but Braveheart is beautiful.

4. The Fifth Element - Eric Serra made such funky grooves and combined it with an orchestra to make a kick-ass soundtrack which upped the coolness factor of a movie that would have been dismissed otherwise.

5. Higher Learning - John Singleton’s ambivalent 1995 movie about race, class, sexual orientation and violence in a fictitious university boasts of a cool soundtrack that includes rock, hip-hop, rap, metal. I choose to include it because it introduced me to artists I would not have learned of otherwise. I thus got to listen to Ice Cube, Mista Grimm, Raphael Saadiq, Toni!Tony! Tone!,  Meshell N’degeocello, Tori Amos and Liz Phair, and of course, Rage Against the Machine, for whom I would develop an allegiance to.

6. The Beach - The Beach may have received mixed reviews, but I love the soundtrack. It has such a unity of purpose, an organic unity to it, that when you listen to it, it is like listening to one continuous song. Very trippy, this. It is not award-winning, but it sure as hell is great to listen to when you just want to chill (and perhaps smoke some weed. ^^ It is a movie about weed afterall).

7. The Crow - The first “The Crow” movie established a new kind of cool: the hero was a murdered, would-be, undead rock star out for revenge and justice and the soundtrack reflected that. It had Nine Inch Nail, The Cure, Pantera, Rollins Band and Rage Against the Machine (my personal favorite), plus the added bonus of Jane Sibberry, who sings at the closing credits in such a haunting, heavenly voice, with so much pain and yearning, it is too hard not to fall in love with her voice.

Oh, and by the way, they don’t do soundtracks, but you have to check out E.S. Posthumus, if only because they made that great background music you hear during the trailer of the Diane Lane/Richard Gere movie “Unfaithful”.

I may have left something out, I know. But my alternative list merits some consideration, don’t you think?

My own infinite playlist

My own playlist (inspired by “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist”

1. Clint Mansell – Requiem for a Dream (epic style music. Awesome!)

2. Van Morrison – Brown-eyed girl

3. Explosions in the Sky

4. Mum – Green Grass of Tunnel

5. Sigurd

6. Grace Potter and the Nocturnals – There Ain’t No Time

7. Duffy – Warwick Avenue

8. Korean rock and jazz

9. Chinese pop

10. modern Jewish music – Ofra Haza

11. E.S. Posthumus – because they believe in the Pythagorean Philosophy which states that “music is the harmonization of opposites; the conciliation of warring elements”. ‘Nuff said.