Elvis Presley - Can't Help Falling in Love
1961
Blue Hawaii is the fourth soundtrack album by the American singer Elvis Presley, belonging to the 1961 film of the same name starring Presley. In the US, the album spent 20 weeks at the number one slot and 39 weeks in the Top 10 on Billboard's Top Pop LPs chart.
The songs "Can't Help Falling in Love" and "Rock-A-Hula Baby" were pulled off the album for two sides of a single. The A-side "Can't Help Falling in Love," which became the standard closer for a Presley concert in the 1970s, went to number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and it topped the British charts in 1962, spending four weeks at number 1.
The melody to "Can't Help Falling in Love" is based on "Plaisir d'amour", a popular French love song composed in 1784 by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini. The song was initially written from the perspective of a woman as "Can't Help Falling in Love with Him", which explains the first and third line ending on "in" and "sin" rather than words rhyming with "you".
The song has been recorded by many other artists, including the British reggae group UB40, whose 1993 version topped the US and UK charts.
"Can't Help Falling in Love" received a total of 84,5% yes votes!
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My goal for the year was to watch & log 100 movies. Shorts count, didn't matter whether I had seen them before, but they can only count once for the year. I logged 117!
First & last watched: Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969)--the reason I cared about movies so much this year, just an obvious life-changer for me--and Ken Russell's The Rainbow (1989)--Westlin's suggestion for the perfect round out. Surprised to be surprised by how good it was. Great films! Totally on the program! Questions to this day unanswered! Let's go!
Shorts (everything short of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story) watched: 16
Favorite shorts: Nuit et Brouillard (Alain Resnais, 1956) (decided this year one of my all-time favorite films); Un Chant d'Amour (Jean Genet, 1950); Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947)
Next year my shorts watching will be more programmatic
Films I watched twice in 2023: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987) (another film I realized this year obviously belongs in my top ten--more specifically I decided finally that this is my favorite non-Texas Chain Saw film); Beau is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023); The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993)
By decade:
Before 1900: 0
1900 - 1910: 1
1910 - 1919: 1
1920 - 1929: 1 bro come ON what the FUCK
1930 - 1939: 1 im literally evil
1940 - 1949: 7
1950 - 1959: 3
1960 - 1969: 24
1970 - 1979: 14
1980 - 1989: 16
1990 - 1999: 17
2000 - 2009: 13
2010 - 2019: 9
2020 - 2023: 10
By nation/language roughly:
uk/english: 6
us/english: 66
canada/english: 6
france/french: 10
italy/italian: 4
italy/france/french: 1
italy/english: 1
czechoslovakia/czech: 5
palestine/arabic: 3
soviet/russian: 2
russia/russian: 1
austria/german: 1
austria/french: 1
spain/spanish: 1
japan/japanese: 1
poland/yiddish: 1
poland/polish: 1
senegal/wolof: 1
brazil/portuguese: 1
sweden/swedish: 1
eur/farsi: 1
south africa/afrikaans: 1
numbers not adding up there but w/e
By director:
Not sure if this is surprising or totally unsurprising, but in spite of my auteurial talk (and all the thematic/completionist plans I like to make), I very rarely watched more than two movies by the same director. I can't decide how I feel about this, nor do I know how to proceed this year given that my goal is to discover who my top five directors might actually be. How do you go about investigating that?
Overwhelmingly the director I watched the most was Adrian Lyne, with five films. I have a few more things to work on but I'm close to done with my shakedown/theory. Neither my favorite director nor favorite guy, I would say I probably 'enjoy' and 'personally get more out of watching' his films more than most. In second place, I watched three Kenneth Anger films--all shorts of course. I watched two films each by the following directors: Ken Russell, David Cronenberg, Stanley Kubrick, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Schrader, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ti West, Todd Haynes, Michael Haneke, Jan Švankmajer (both shorts), and Billy Wilder (one of which being a war department documentary short).
I have mixed feelings about this approach (let me watch man movies if i I want to!) but a quick skim suggests I watched about 15 films directed by women (12%)--lower than expected and probably low for me typically. I always have a romance habit on the backburner so it's never hard for me to watch a lot of movies by women, but obviously my focus on revered directors I never previously wanted to spend time on has had an impact here, meaning I should make an effort with Great women directors in 2024 to keep that in check. I will also say that I specifically recall having a hard time getting my hands on things I wanted to watch by women in a few different cases, including by Great women directors (Barbara Hammer and Akerman), and especially also soviet women directors. There's an overlap here with difficulty accessing short films!
I'm not an active or thoughtful starrer, but these are the films I watched in 2023 that I've given five stars to:
Women in Love (Ken Russell, 1969) (upgraded from four after the year of appreciating it)
Mandabi (Ousmane Sembène, 1968)
Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1987)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1956)
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975) (demoted Teorema [1968] to four stars to prevent Salo is A Perfect Film deflation)
Un Chant d'Amour (Jean Genet, 1950)
Least favorite films watched in 2023: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019), Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023), All My Good Countrymen (Vojtěch Jasný, 1968), Zahrada (Jan Švankmajer, 1968), the one streaming true crime doc I watched that I then had to log (will not repeat in 2024)
Loved/treats for me: Barry Lyndon, Crossing Delancey, Unfaithful, The Cremator, The Night Porter, Cabaret, talking to people about Funny Games and realizing I love it more than I think I do
Recommended for the romance girls as a thank you for the good romance you have recommended me: Habibi (Susan Youssef, 2011)
Most incredible movie experience of the year by miles and I can only hope 2024 has something this good to offer: House of 1000 Corpses (Rob Zombie, 2003) anniversary screening my birthweek
The otherwise defining film of 2023 for me: Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005)
Onward! Back to work! On the Terror and Violence line! The Family is out there, comfortable, in relative peace…
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