Comedy Music Cellar

While music and movies are two of my most favorite things in the whole world, asking me to choose between the two is incredibly difficult.  I can’t imagine a world without movies, and I can’t imagine a world without music.  If I can watch movies online, that’s even better. What I really enjoy most, is doing both at the same time if I can.  But “Wait” you say, “Isn’t that incredibly distracting”.  Well use it would be, if you had the big screen TV fired up, and the stereo blasting at the same time, but there is a way.  Essentially what movies are in their simplest forms is stories.  You could say the same thing about music as well.  At least some forms of music.  I particularly like songs, that tell stories, and their are plenty of them.  Not many artists do that these days, but if you go back a few years, you’ll find plenty.

Artists like Jimmy Buffett,  Billy Joel, Meatloaf, Harry Chapin and others are just a few of my favorite.  Many of their songs seem to combine the best of both music and movies into the same medium.  Another nice thing about movies today is watching them online.  I watched a few good ones the other day.  You can watch Sex and the City 2 movie online or choose from several others.   One great television show from my younger years,  has been made into a movie.  I can watch the A-Team movie online or even watch killers (2010) movie online if I wanted to.  It’s a great time to be both a music and a movie fan.

Who says, that wearing glasses isn’t cool.  Who ever they are, they’ve obviously never been introduced to either Buddy Holly or Elvis Costello.  Personally, I think even Roy Orbison would fit into this category, but I’m not sure my aunt would agree.  It’s true, that for some reason she’s just never had a fond place in her heart for the man, so for her sake I’ll leave him out of this story.  I always grew up thinking that wearing eyeglasses was a cool thing to do.  My wife always thought that was kind of weird, but she’s mostly gotten used to it by now.  You know, I’ve never admitted this to anyone, but I never really thought it was the “wearing” of prescription glasses that was cool, it was the taking them off and putting them on that made you cool.  I can’t remember which movie it was, but sometime during the eighties I remember seeing an actor take off his glasses during a very cool moment in the movie, and it stuck with me.  As I write this, I’m thinking it could have been Tom Cruise in Top Gun.  There was a scene where he peels off those aviator glasses and says something really cool to one of his adversaries.  I’ll have to watch it now to figure that out.

Music has played a major role in cinema since the first films were displayed in theaters. Up until the 1930s, music was used to convey ambient mood, emotion, and provide background music for silent films. Silent comedies featuring actors such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton benefited greatly from music and musical effects. A particular music keyboard instrument known as a theater organ played a major role in the history of these films. Read more…

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved going to see the movies.  I still remember to this day, the first move I went to see in the theater.  I even remember specific details about the theater itself.  I thought the ceiling looked like a hockey rink.  It had multiple raised sections that were oval shaped, and under lit, that looked to me like a hockey rink.  I must have been around eight, or nine at the time, and the movie was Jeremiah Johnson starring Robert Redford.  My dad was a big fan of movies as well, and would often be watching movies once or twice a week at the theater.

So, when shortly after high school age, you could start renting videos and watching them at home, you can just imagine how thrilled I was.  For a period of time, I even worked in a video rental store, that was owned by a friend of the family.  It was a cool gig, and I was even able to take home movies that hadn’t rented to watch at home.  I owned a video player, which was of course a Beta movie player as opposed to VHS.  It was one of the first things I bought, when I had a bit of money.  Which was of course that start of another hobby of mine, buying electronic gadgets.

Now, to anyone who is under the age of 15, this stuff probably sounds like ancient history.  With computers, the internet, blu-ray, and the ability to watch movies online, it’s hard to imagine what it must have felt like to only see movies in the theater, or when the major networks decided to play one on television.   That was usually quite an event, watching movies on television.  The networks really had a strangle hold on the business back then.  You would actually mark the day and time of your upcoming favorite movies in your schedule calendar, so you didn’t miss them.  There was no renting, buying, or watching the movies on your computer any time you felt like it.  As well, there were no PVRs, or Tivo machines back in those days.  Not like you could just go down to BlockBuster, and grab a copy of Percy Jackson & the Olympians The Lightning Thief off the shelf.  That looks like a pretty cool movie by the way.

So, pardon my digression into ancient history, but it’s interesting to see how far we’ve come when it comes to technology, and how it makes our lives better.