The Civil Wars cover one of my favourite Leonard Cohen songs (indeed one of my favourite songs of all time):
Lissie covers Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”:
Juliana Richer Daily (is that her real name or her financial ambition?) does likewise:
Lissie seems torn between wanting to make the song her own and wanting to imitate Gaga. Juliana is more successful at escaping Gaga’s orbit. Both good, though.
4/19/12 Addendum:
You can now see the Lissie video here.
Maybe it’s not quite as iconically, surreally, perversely enjoyably awful as Leonard Nimoy’s Bilbo ballad, but the Dalek Christmas song – by the Go-Go’s (but not the proper Go-Go’s), from 1964 – is still a blight upon the face of the universe. So of course I have to inflict it on you:
The only bearable part is the bit where they’re ripping off the Peter Gunn theme.
A lot of people have noted that the musical theme for Sarah Jane Adventures sounds (unsurprisingly) a bit like the Doctor Who theme. But to me what it really sounds like is a cross between Doctor Who and Harry Potter (while not being as good as either, alas):
Why would a Dervish be dreaming of a Hindu honeymoon? I don’t get it.
a) The second season of Steven Moffat’s Sherlock has begun filming, and the titles of the new episodes have now been announced. The titles arguably count as spoilers for anyone familiar with the source material, so click at your own risk.
b) I’ve had a love-hate relationship with this song since my childhood. The music is haunting; the lyrics are imbecilic:
If you don’t remember that song from The Wizard of Oz, it’s because during the 60s and 70s Disney produced several additional Oz records; the three I had as a kid (perhaps the only three made?) were based on L. Frank Baum’s The Scarecrow of Oz and The Tin Woodman of Oz, and Ruth Plumly Thompson’s The Cowardly Lion of Oz. (One of the accompanying storybooks, I forget which, seized my youthful imagination by featuring a smoking hot Ozma who bore no resemblance to the one in the books.) [12/4/13 addendum: I misremembered; it was Polychrome, not Ozma, who was thus pulchritudinously portrayed, in the Tin Woodman storybook.] In addition to the songs from the Wizard of Oz movie, the record pictured in the video contains some, though not all, of the songs from these additional records.
c) I’ve blogged previously about Moon Europa, an intriguing indy science fiction film I first saw previewed at Asheville’s Revoluticon back in 2006. The site and trailers I previously linked to are gone now (and inaccessible even by Wayback, thanks to Killer Robots). According to IMDB, the film was released in 2009. But elsewhere I read that what came out in 2009 was a shorter version, now called Solatrium, and the makers are still hoping to “expand the story into a feature-length film, Moon Europa.”
The old trailers are frustratingly gone, but two new trailers, one labeled Solatrium and the other Moon Europa (though they are evidently the same movie), are available: