Yann Tiersen Makes Good Music

I was searching for mp3s on Google one day, and stumbled upon a song from the soundtrack of the movie Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain which I've just watched days before. It all started when I was listening to the radio and heard a remix of the 80s song, Africa by Toto. I wanted to listen to the original, but I didn't have it in my collection. So I searched Google for it using this magic string:
-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 "toto africa" - Google Search

You can modify the search string to fit your needs by replacing the "toto africa" term to any song you want. However, back to that Amelie soundtrack, I downloaded the song I found, and kind of liked it. I searched around for the whole soundtrack album, downloaded it, listened to it, and it is a good album. All the songs are from Yann Tiersen.

I personally think this Yann Tiersen guy is a musical genius. Most of his songs are instrumental where he mixes sounds of the violin, piano and accordion to make exquisite music. I downloaded a few other of his albums and I like his work. It's a good alternative if you want to listen to music that has no or minimal singing apart from classical or techno. It sits in the middle between the two, not as slow classical, but not as fast as techno.

Here's a sample of what he's all about:

And about the music player above, I searched around on how to present multiple mp3 files so that the user can easily play them across platforms, and I found a Flash-based solution called XSPF by a guy called Fabricio Zuardi. This page tells you how to set it up, but the code on that page didn't work perfectly for me. It worked okay in Firefox, but in IE it loaded a different playlist. The syntax on how to create the xspf playlist showed on the site is okay, but I had to tweak the object embed code to make it work on both Firefox and IE. Here's my modified code:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="400" height="170" id="xspf_player" align="middle">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="movie" value="http://www.yourwebsite.com/xspf_player/xspf_player.swf?playlist_url=http://www.yourwebsite.com/music/playlist.xspf?xn_auth=no" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />

<param name="bgcolor" value="#e6e6e6" />
<embed src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/xspf_player/xspf_player.swf?playlist_url=http://www.yourwebsite.com/music/playlist.xspf?xn_auth=no&autoload=true" quality="high" bgcolor="#e6e6e6" width="400" height="170" name="xspf_player" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /></embed>
</object>

And about the code above, I found out in that you can't just paste code to show it or it will run the code rather than display it. You need to "escape" it or something. Here's a website that con do it for you.

Chain Of Events That Led To Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain and Beyond

It all started with a Digg post about a horse breaking free and joining cyclists on the Tour De France. One of the comments of the post pointed out that the story has already been submitted before and got frontpaged on Digg in this original post. A comment on that original post pointed out that this footage was from a movie called Amelie. Replies to the comment and other comments were in praise of the movie. I became intrigued, and did a search on this Amelie movie that I've never heard of before. IMDB gave it an 8.6, Rotten Tomatoes gave it 90%.

So, I search mininova for amelie, and the torrent of the movie with the highest number of seeds is one with around 70 seeds and 40 leechers. That's a good enough number of peers for a non-mainstream movie. However, none of the torrents from the search results had English subtitles in them. The one with the highest number of seeders only gave a link to an .srt file of the subtitles.

I've never watched a movie with separate subtitles before, so I didn't know what player to use to view it. My google search on this showed VLC can load .srt files with movies, and I tried it, it works, but another player that cropped up in my search was Crystal Player, and there was high praise for this player. I decided to check it out, and managed to find a link for it on IT Hot News. And to my surprise, it is actually a very good media player. Not only can it load subtitle files, but the killer feature of this player is its ability to control the brightness/contrast of the video being played. I've been looking for this feature in a media player for so long, and I finally found a player that can do it. It is very convenient to have this feature, because more often than not, videos that I download, especially tv series like Lost and 24 have very dark scenes where it's very hard to tell whats happening. Couple that with my crappy monitor's low max brightness, it's unbearable.

Now, for the movie review itself. The title Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain more or less translates to The Fabulous Life of Amélie Poulain, at least that's what the subtitles I downloaded said. This film is touted as a masterpiece, as one of the best romantic comedies ever, but for me, it doesn't deserve that kind of critical acclaim. It's good, but not THAT good. It's not a romantic comedy in it's traditional form, because the romance part of the romantic comedy doesn't start until about half way through the movie. Even the guy she's supposed to be romantically involved with appears late in the movie, so I don't think this movie set out to be a romantic comedy.

First and foremost, this movie is about Amelie, and Amelie alone. Even though the other main characters of the movie have their own littles stories in the movie, but the main reason for their character's existence in this movie is to illustrate who Amelie is, what kind of a person she is, and what she is going through.

The movie has an artsy feel to it. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and the camera work complements this approach. And the use of special effects to convey Amelie's emotion was done well too. Audrey Tautou, who plays Amelie is cute. She's the chick who plays opposite Tom Hanks in The DaVinci Code. She looks a lot younger than she did in the Da Vinci movie.

Overall, I feel like the movie lacked focus. There was no pre-destined endpoint to get to. The movie doesn't start out with "Amelie is a lonely woman who's looking for a guy". This is more of a slice of life / coming of age movie. It shows a series of events in Amelie's life that leads her to becoming a new person, and the other characters in the movie are there just to facilitate her (albeit indirectly) to get to that point. The movie itself doesn't stick to me, but the character of Amelie, for some reason, still lingers in my mind.

So, there it is. From a lame story on Digg, to a fairly good movie, to a very good media player.