| Director Mike Mills first made his mark on the silver screen with the Academy Award-winning film Beginners, but his back catalog is also filled with a number of music videos, including those for songs by Everything But The Girl ("Temperamental"), Moby ("Run On"), Air ("All I Need"), Mansun ("Legacy"), Pulp ("Party Hard"), and Air ("Sexy Boy"). His appreciation of music also extends to the soundtracks of his films, and with 20TH CENTURY WOMEN, his latest cinematic endeavor, he's managed to put together one of the most musically diverse compilations in recent memory. This is not praise derived from a desire to play up new product. This is simply the reality of the situation. How else to describe a compilation which sandwiches "Basin Street Blues," by Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five between tracks by Talking Heads and The Raincoats? We're talking about a musical landscape which finds Fred Astaire, Benny Goodman, and Rudy Vallee rubbing elbows with Siouxsie and the Banshees, Devo, and the Buzzcocks. It shouldn't work, and yet somehow it does. |
