Movies based around the songs of a particular artist are a bad idea. Exhibit A: "Muriel's Wedding". The director claimed that he'd have seen no point in making the movie if they hadn't gotten permission to use the ABBA songs. The first thirty minutes or so were great but things went rapidly downhill after that. The final hour was nearly intolerable and I've successfully blocked it from my memory. No really, I literally can't remember a single damned thing about the final hour of "Muriel's Wedding".

Exhibit B: "I Am Sam". I haven't seen this one, but anything precious enough to feature a Hollywood Cute Kid (TM) isn't likely to draw my money anyhow. In this case, they were dumb enough to assume they'd be able to use any Beatles song they pleased, even to the point of filming the scenes so that events on screen unfolded were synced in a specific way with the music. So when they didn't get the song rights after all, it presumably ruined some of the movie's message, so an 11th hour collection of songs by other musical artists was recorded as a hasty Beatles Tribute Record. Except that the songs had to still synch up to the film, so everyone had to perform note-by-note renditions of the tracks, meaning the soundtrack was completely devoid of inventiveness and musical interpretation.

I watched Exhibit C last night, I present to you "Magnolia". I actually heard the soundtrack a few weeks previous, so I knew the songs but obviously not their context. In the liner notes, director P.T. Anderson of bloated "Boogie Nights" fame writes about how he'd long conceived of a film based around songs by Aimee Mann. The first eighty minutes absolutely flew by and I was deeply engrossed in his intricately linked characters. Then, I began to notice the Aimee Mann songs creep in, then I noticed the drawn-out, panting soliloquies, then I started getting bored and the time started dragging on. I mean really, somebody get Anderson an executive editor whose sole job is to take the director's cut of his films and chop one hour of total length -- no matter how long the film. One hundred forty minutes in, every character (all in separate locations) started singing "Wise Up" simultaneously. At this precise point, I gave up all hope of this movie recovering and pulling it all together for a strong ending. He may have been striving for the bored, contemplative glamour of the George Michael "Listen Without Prejudice" videos, but it came off as a light farce more in tune with the opening number in "Rocky Horror Picture Show". Even worse, the scene with Philip Seymour Hall and a seemingly comatose Jason Lombard singing was downright goofy (and certainly unintentionally so), recalling George Harrison's "Got My Mind Set On You" video. All the Aimee Mann songs in this film are great, but I refuse to buy into the cinematic "concept" having ten people all so haunted by the awesome power of "Wise Up" that they instantaneously start behaving completely different for the remainder of the movie and throw away almost two and a half hours of character development as a result.

And the ending, which is the most outrageously nonsensical final ten minutes of a motion picture that I have ever seen, leaves us with Mann's "Save Me". It leaves a pleasant hum in the ears but I can't be expected to leave on a moderately high note and forget that the writer/director didn't have the balls to write a proper ending that runs deeper than "they lived (relatively) happy ever after".

Basing a movie around an artists' music must be a hellaciously difficult job. My theory is that it rarely works because the directors have close connections with the songs or the artists. That makes them no different from anyone else, but trying to recreate this appreciation on the big screen is their failure. Trying to tell their audience what a song means to them by projecting their close personal feelings through their characters is their failure.

I have never been a big fan of Cat Stevens, and I have never seen "Harold and Maude". I've been told that I should. After writing this, maybe I will.

At its heart, [American Idol] is an old-fashioned talent contest, in the mold of "Ted Mack's Amateur Hour," "The Gong Show" and "Star Search." But it added a few twists for the new millennium, noted Robert Thompson, head of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.

"This is to 'Star Search' what modern quantum physics is to Newtonian gravitational equations," he said. "It's big, so much more sophisticated and so much more conscious of how you gather an audience." -- from cnn.com

Physicists will understand why that last quote is asinine. For the rest of you, sorry.

But I did succumb to pop culture temptation and watched the finale of "American Idol". The public and the judges choices notwithstanding, I think the wrong person won. Kelly is by far the better singer, although her voice doesn't offer me anything new that we all haven't heard from Christina, Mariah and Whitney. These days, everyone is dead bored of Christina, Mariah and Whitney, so I guess Kelly qualifies as something new in that respect. But Justin is the "American Idol". He's an average singer at best, but the guy should teach a "Teen Idol 101" course in university. Effortlessly, and without seeming the least bit forced, he has every wave, smile, hand shaking with screaming girls, playing to a rabid crowd -- every last damned thing that you need to be a nice guy pretty boy teen idol, the magic that has impelled 14 year old girls from the 50's to the '00's to run to the nearest mall to buy posters of their favourite boy toys. Kelly has the voice, but to paraphrase Paula Abdul, she doesn't have "it". She's less congenial than Justin. Watching her reach out to the outstretched arms of her "fans", acknowledging the cheers, every smile -- it's as if she's following a checklist. In short, Kelly performs these nuances as though she feels she NEEDS to do them, whereas Justin does it because he WANTS to. Whether this accurately represents their true inner selves is not the point. This is the image they convey, and conveying a pop star image is what the show is all about.

And for a double bill, I watched "Josie and the Pussycats" immediately afterward. A more appropriate pairing of viewing enjoyment could not be possible. "Josie" is the best music satire film ever. With all the in-jokes, cool one-liners, and wonky characters, it boggles my mind that this film wasn't heralded as the new "Austin Powers" immediately upon release.