Archive for the 'Movies' Category

What’s the name of that song playing on TV?

Published
by
Tummblr
on November 13, 2007
in Movies, Music and TV
. 2 Comments

Have you ever wondered about the name of a song you hear on TV? Wonder no more. Here are all the resources you’ll need to find out everything about songs you hear in TV shows, ads, and movie trailers.

As a casual music listener, hearing something new on my favorite TV show is actually a significant part of my music discovery process. In the old days, I’d scour the web, combing through forums and user comments to find out more about the song I heard. Now it takes a few seconds of research using the following websites.

Music from TV Shows

TuneFind.com is a user-maintained database of music from TV shows and movies. Users submit new data to the site, and also verify existing data by flagging entries as accurate or inaccurate. Contributors also gain or lose influence depending on the accuracy of their submissions and corrections. Very social and “web2.0″-ish. I like it. My only complaint is that the layout of the site seems buggy in Firefox.

heardontv.com is another “web 2.0″ TV music database with user-created content. However, the layout and quality of the database are both inferior to TuneFind.com.

If you can’t find what you are looking for on the above sites, you might also try TvShowSongs.com and TV Show Music. Neither of these sites have any particularly interesting features.

And just because I’m a rabid fan of House, I must include play.house, a cleanly designed House fansite which lists all the music from the show.

Music from Movie Trailers and Teasers

It’s surprising how often I stumble across great music in movie trailers. It seems to be common practice to play classics or proven pop hits or soundtrack music in trailers. For trailer music, look no further than SoundtrackNet. The site also has an interesting section, Logo Music, which lists the composers for the few seconds of (sometimes beautiful) music that accompany company logos that we see before and after movies and TV shows.

Music from TV Ads and Commercials

If you’re searching for music from a TV commercial, try What’s That Called and Adtunes.com. Neither site is a proper database as they use a blog-like format, but both sites have a search engine so you don’t have to dig through posts chronologically.

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Lions for Lambs is like medicine: you might not like it but it’s good for you

Published
by
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on November 12, 2007
in Movies
. 0 Comments

I saw the movie Lions for Lambs this weekend. Despite the generally negative critical reception, I feel it is a movie definitely worth seeing. The movie often feels preachy and uncomfortable as the characters point out flaws in our society, government, and in ourselves. Obviously, nobody feels good being made to think about one’s own shortcomings, but that doesn’t make the messages of the movie less worthy of our attention.

By the way, I especially like the name of the movie, and its origin. The title was inspired by compositions by an unknown German soldier or officer about the courage of and sacrifices made by the British soldiers during World War II. The translation is: “Nowhere have I seen such Lions led by such Lambs.” Lions referred to the soldiers and Lambs the generals. More background here if you’re interested.