Get back to where you once belonged.

I heard this morning that vaccines are going to be available for people in my age group starting tomorrow.

While idly checking the Regal website, I saw that theaters in my town are going to re-open May 7th.

Lord only knows if food festivals will open back up, but I'd assume not. Conventions may be even more of a pipe dream. (And really, San Diego Comic-Con? Thanksgiving?) Still, the experience of going to (and sitting down at) a restaurant is one I've missed.

I'm feeling good about this year.

Listening to the extended soundtrack of A Nightmare on Elm Street on YouTube. Given the Varese Sarabande Club releases that have been cannibalized from the various box sets over the years, it is mind-blowing that a Deluxe Edition hasn't come out.

If you were to poll 100 film music fans on their 50 favorite Jerry Goldsmith scores, not a single one of them would mention Along Came a Spider even as a joke. Are you fucking kidding me with this? Bottlecaps. Isn't that what the man said?

Townson would never have let this shit happen.

I love deviled eggs. I love potato salad. Who'd have thought that some mad genius (or geniuses, if Google search is to be trusted) would think to combine them?

Picked at random...

Something else I need to try when I get my own place.

I swear to God, I can't believe we're coming up on a year since everything we knew, everything we've appreciated, everything we've held dear and taken for granted has been upended by this virus. 

And he knew. He knew the shit was going to hit the fan even before the fan was turned on.

The day he dies (and it's coming soon; I just know it) will be a day of celebration for the world...and a day of planning for me.

- Find out what city he's buried in

- Book a flight there

- Make my way to his cemetery

- Chug a bottle of that stuff they make you drink the night before a colonoscopy on the way there

- Take a good, watery shit all over his grave

It's pretty much what he deserves. Hell, maybe more than he deserves.

For the longest time, I'd been hoping that Elmer Bernstein's score to National Lampoon's Animal House would get a release. Sadly, I'm still waiting. (2022 is the centenary of Bernstein's birth, so if it doesn't happen this year, it goddamn well better happen next year.)

As both projects came out from Universal and under the auspices of Ivan Reitman, I'd fantasized about a shared release of Animal House and 1986's Legal Eagles. The latter score was just released by Intrada...but, sadly, it's a straight re-release of the original LP. The red tape must've been insane to have precluded a combo LP/complete score release...at least, that's what I'm hoping. I doubt that it couldn't have happened because no one felt like it.

Anyway, I did some track listings for Legal Eagles, the complete score.

1. Birthday 0.57
2. Scuffle 0.06
3. Arson 0.49
4. Breakfast 1.31
5. Street 0.14
6. Speech 1.30
7. Forrester 0.45 
8. Gallery 1.16 
9. Blank 0.58
10. Followed? 3.04
11. Exhibit 4.14
12. Shooter 0.22 
13. Cold Case 0.34 
14. Evidence 0.57
15. Traffic 2.30
16. Invitation 0.49 
17. Exit 0.36 
18. Records 0.39 
19. Explosives 0.37
20. Survival 0.44
21. Love and Hate 2.40
22. Stranger 0.19
23. Sleepover 1.18
24. Pandemonium 0.29
25. Partners 0.43
26. Good Points 0.47
27. A Great Team 1.13
28. Aspersions 0.15 
29. Flashback 0.14
30. Morrison 2.20
31. Bugged 0.33
32. Wallet 3.00
33. To Taft's 0.57
34. Brock 0.33
35. Take a Whack 0.20
36. Struggle 1.56
37. Escape 0.33 
38. Fire and Rescue 2.15
39. Case Dismissed 2.10

The LP has been uploaded piecemeal over the years on YouTube and I haven't seen the film in four and a half years, so...you figure out what's missing.

Oh, and P.S.: this new Blogger interface (which results in the track listings having spaces between them no matter what you try to do) fucking sucks.

ETA: Shift + enter. Choke on that, causality!

One of the newest specialty soundtrack releases (and - just maybe - an early contender for one of the best of the year) is Christopher Young's Hard Rain from La La Land Records. The cast and crew really shot on flooded sets; no CGI to be found. I get the strong sense that the movie's box-office failure had a ripple effect on another Paramount release from that year: Snake Eyes.

Hear me out: Water, water everywhere on Hard Rain. Around this time, Brian De Palma is cashing the blank check he received following the massive success on Mission: Impossible. He wants to make another Hitchcockian thriller. Snake Eyes. A giant globe and a massive monsoon are just outside the Atlantic City arena/casino where the movie takes place. The plan is for the tunnel under the arena to be flooded and the villain to be crushed by the globe underwater (a disturbing payoff to one hell of a speech). At least, that's the plan.

Hard Rain comes up dry. Could it have been the so-so script? The cooling on Christian Slater's post-Broken Arrow heat? Or the fact that they actually flooded a soundstage? One can only assume the latter. 

"Holy shit. Did you see the numbers on Hard Rain? We're really taking a bath on this one."

"Well, there was a lot of water involv--"

"Don't! Just don't."

"Say, wasn't there another project we were doing with its characters ending up underwater?"

"No."

"Yeah, with De Palma and Nic Cage--"

"No. There is no underwater ending for that movie. There never was."

That's just my read on things.