Word: plangent
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...Storytellers from antiquity knew the power of star-crossed romance, and so did Audrey Niffenegger. Her 2003 best seller The Time Traveler's Wife is so plangent a tale of fatal love, with two adorable people fighting to beat the odds against them, that it's surprising it took six years for it to get to the big screen. Maybe prospective producers were reluctant to buck the prevailing wisdom of a conventional happy ending. Anyway, here is the film version, directed by Robert Schwentke. It's soppy enough to suit the requirements of the weepie genre, and there...
...since become a recluse in the most photogenic part of Philadelphia. He crawls out of his shell to meet a single-mom chiropractor (Lauren Graham), befriend a recovering alcoholic (Lou Taylor Pucci) and make a public display of vulnerability - all staples of the genre, as is the plangent piano score that indie films employ to tell viewers what to feel. (Sometimes watching a sweet movie can rouse the dormant grouch...
...However Arabic or Russian the orchestrations, Jarre's music fit the plangent mood of French postwar pop: the mordant, worldly-wise chansons of Gilbert Bécaud, Marguerite Monnot, Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour. The simple melodies follow a clear ascending or descending line, and sound either inevitable or predictable, depending on the extent of the listener's fondness for the form. Jarre didn't write pop songs, exactly; "Lara's Theme" was his one Top 40 hit. But the sound was marketable in movies, and after Lawrence, Jarre's tinny, tinkly, discordant music was in high demand by directors searching...
...Look at Me," Clark is flirtatious and embarrassed as she meets Ben (whom she's always loved) after all these years. "In Buddy's Eyes" is an expression of the love she tries to feel for her husband. Her Loveland number, "Losing My Mind," may sound like a standard, plangent torch song ("You said you loved me / Or were you just being kind? / Or am I losing my mind?"). But Clark's rendition makes it clear Sally is so desperate and deluded, she is near madness; she is losing her mind. Clark lifted this Follies into the stratosphere of indelible...
Like many young jazz singers nowadays, Dobson, 26, is trying for a mellow pop-jazz groove à la Norah Jones. Her plangent, almost vibrato-free voice rides over a mélange of island rhythms, bossa nova and folky acoustics, mostly in new songs she has co-written. They go down as easily as frozen margaritas, never more beguilingly than when she slips in scat syllables like "dit-doo, die-yah-da-doo" in Four Leaf Clover, or simply "ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh" in Cold to Colder...