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Drooling on the Pillow

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Fool Rushing In 

Two bits of good news today.

First, even though Grace's game was rained out, I was able to assemble enough plausible small projects around the house that I successfully put off replacing the wax gasket in the terlit until tomorrow. And, yes, I'm aware that the fact that I consider this good news is a strong indicator that I'm not going to hit my childhood dream of becoming a pirate.

Secondly I stumbled on to a bit of information that I had been pursuing in a lackadaisical way for at least six or eight years.

One of my favorite movies is The Snapper, certainly in the top twenty. It's an Irish movie, if you haven't seen it, and Roddy Doyle wrote the screenplay from his novel. It has the great Colm Meaney and is directed by Stephen Frears. Girl living at home with a huge, struggling, eccentric family gets knocked up and refuses to name the father. It's very funny and very touching.

Before you go out and rent it, though, remember I've stated in these pages before that I have a deeper than normal tolerance for Irish whimsy. This is more what I would call knock-about whimsy, though. No fairies flitting about or anything, but it involves rough people in dire circumstances whose problems sort themselves out almost magically by means of the one knucklehead standing in the way seeing the light. Some call it junky screenwriting, but when its done with good humor and a certain sweep, I call it whimsy and I love it.

One of my favorite things about The Snapper was the opening and closing credits music; an Irish, very Irish, cover of Can't Help Falling In Love With You. The song is a pit into which any number of performers have fallen, usually with results unequal to what's under the link above. In fact, I was thinking of posting a few versions I found at the iTunes store, but that would involve digging up six country, one Latin Hip-Hop and one Hawaiian version and I don't think you would have stood still for it.

Anyway, the version in The Snapper is my favorite (after The King, of course), a peppy, yet edgy Irish version complete with whistle and bodhran. It's got kind of a skittle sound. I do like Irish music. I'm a big fan of the early recordings of The Chieftains before they became the Kofi Annans of music. Come to think of it, though, their forays into Country were pretty good.

Here's where they got together with Ricky Skaggs on one of the best Wabash Cannonballs I've heard. Put on the headphones and crank it up for this.


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Back to The Snapper. The opening music just made my heart sing and I lusted for it. No information on the DVD cover or INDB or anywhere I could find on the web. But I would look for it every once in awhile. Today I stumbled on it by accident. It's a group called Lick The Tins that released one album of 18 songs in 1986. I immediately assumed you pronounce it 'Lick the thins" on the evidence that you pronounce the Irish group Thin Lizzie "Tin lizzie". But then that wouldn't make sense, would it?

They apparently have something of a cult following, however, as Amazon is able to ask $80 dollars for their only album or $70 used. Can't afford that, of course, but the same cover was used in Some Kind of Wonderful which I never saw, but you can get the soundtrack album of that for around $10, which is a bargain to nail a track you've been looking for going on a decade.

When I get it, you'll get it, but you can get an Amazon sampling here.
Posted by: Sluggo / 3:22 PM
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