Summer Movie Music and Update

I mentioned in my last post that I'd wanted to blog about my favorite movie music moments from this past summer. Music has a great influence on how much I like a movie. Basil Poledouris' score is one of the reasons that Conan the Barbarian was long my favorite movie and also the reason I first began to consider that I might like classical music. I still think you could play the music from Pirates of the Caribbean over any other movie and I would like that movie. One of the reasons I stay through the credits is to let the final music soak in while I think about the movie. That said I wanted to mention my favorite music moments from summer movies in chronological order.
1. The electric guitar during the meeting on the sandbar in PotC III. Captains Swann, Barbossa, and Sparrow face off with Will Turner, Davey Jones, and Lord Cutler-Beckett while the guitar wails. It was very much like something out of a western.

2. The choral "Spider Pig" from the Simpsons. Homer adopts a pig. At one point Marge wonders how the pig tracks got on the ceiling. She goes into the living room to see Homer holding the pig on the ceiling and singing, "Spider Pig, Spider Pig/Does whatever a spider-pig does./Can he swing from a web?/No he cant, 'cause he's a pig." Later in the movie during a vision quest scene and again at the credits there's a choral version that's kind of eerie and ethereal like the song "Something Wicked This Way Comes" in the soundtrack to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I absolutely loved it.

3. The score from Stardust, especially in the race to the wall and the dash to the witches' stronghold but I loved the score throughout the movie including the Can-Can. The part I hated was the song that played over the main credits. It was horrible. It didn't fit with the rest of the music and was just an annoying cheesy pop song. I had the same reaction to the song that played over the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon credits, but at least when I bought the soundtrack I hear how it blended the themes from Tan Dun's score. There was nothing redeemable about the marketing effort at the end of Stardust except when the song ended and was replaced by a reprise of the Can-Can. The end credits pop song that really worked this summer was the one on The Bourne Ultimatum.

In other news, our LIFEgroup hosted our Cramtastic Oktoberfest Root Beer Kegger this weekend to raise money for our friends the Crams who will be doing church planting in Germany. I was disappointed with the turnout but those who came had a good time and we had a very good prayer time after Kevin shared what they would be doing. It was fun and I'm very happy with how the group pitched in to make it happen. Since my last post we've lost three more softball games, I've lost games of Munchkin and Settlers, spoken to the youth about the benefits of Kingdom of God and am having a birthday. Today I turn 1 year less than the square of 1/2 the square root of a gross or the cube root of 42875 or 1/2 of my three score and ten. Alternately I'm turning 29 for the 7th consecutive year. Happy birthday to me.

Verse of the day:
"Teach us to number our days aright,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom." Psalm 90:12 (NIV)