You Only Live Twice -Sometimes when you least expect it, from the most unlikely of sources, comes something to smile about: Freddie Wadling on SVT's 'Go'kväll' and "Skavlan'

SVT video: Freddie Wadling - You Only Live Twice (Live Go'Kväll 2011) December 14, 2011. http://youtu.be/LN_ISU_wMQY


You Only Live Twice -Sometimes when you least expect it, from the most unlikely of sources, comes something to smile about: Freddie Wadling with Fläskkvartetten on SVT's Go'kväll and Skavlan.

At 46:35 below, the title song from the 1967 James Bond/007  film "You Only Live Twice," by John Barry and Leslie Bricusse, originally sung by Nancy Sinatra, here with vocals by Freddie Wadling and music by Fläskkvartetten

SVT video: Skavlan, Episode 13 of 13, Christmas Special

Originally aired December 31, 2011

http://svtplay.se/t/102974/skavlan_julspecial

This video is available on the SVT website until Monday January 30, 2012.

Here is what in my opinion is the best and most-recent homage to this great song, from 1998:





Robbie Williams -  Millennium

http://youtu.be/BJ5uIkJDb6o

In a word, brilliant!!!

"You Only Live Twice" opening with vocals by Nancy Sinatra

http://youtu.be/PDitUVMMzE0

As always, watch for the ingenious camera dissolve from the blood on the mattress to the red that forms the red disk that represents the rising sun on the Japanese flag, Hinomaru.

Definitely among the three best opening-credit sequences of any Bond film, along with On Her Majesty's Secret Service and The Spy Who Loved Me.

Freddie Wadling's new collection of James Bond film songs -and other secret agent songs- is available on his new EMI Music Sweden CD titled, "With a License to Kill"
http://www.jamesbond007.se/events.asp?id=2890

http://svt.se/gokvall

Fredrik Skavlan:

http://svt.se/2.102111/start

http://svt.se/2.102096/1.1883339/likheter

Gloria Estefan climbs windows during Dolphins-Jets game, but Hugh Grant was The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. Winner: Grant!

Gloria Estefan climbs windows during Dolphins-Jets game, but Hugh Grant was The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain.
Winner: Hugh Grant!

Did you notice my increased sensitivity by not declaring Hugh Grant the landslide winner?
Nobody who lives in a valley wants to ever hear the word "landslide."

I loved this 1995 film set in Wales co-starring the always wonderful Colm Meaney and the delightful Tara FitzGerald, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112966/
which I saw at a studio sneak preview with some friends, and then saw again two weeks later on a date with an LA for a well-known Senator, pretending I hadn't seen it before.
You know how that is!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112966/

There was a period of time in the mid-Nineties when I was living in Arlington County when I was seeing 5-6 new films a month, plus taking in a Saturday or Sunday retrospective film at the National Gallery of Art if I didn't have tickets to the Orioles game, and reading nearly a dozen film magazines a month, when I really thought Tara FitzGerald was, in fact, the bee's knees.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001216/
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000538/

And this charming film was one of the principal pieces of evidence, along with Brassed Off.
Ironically, I was working at the time with someone who was from Cymru -Wales- who even had a flag decal on his car.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2L6GH8Yy9s

Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/28/1846061/gloria-estefan-climbs-windows.html
Gloria Estefan climbs windows during Dolphins game
The Associated Press
September 28, 2010

Singer Gloria Estefan made a daring climb out a window after getting locked into a stadium suite during a Miami Dolphins game.

The musician was watching the game against the New York Jets on Sunday from her suite at Sun Life Stadium and was set to introduce Latin singer Enrique Iglesias during the halftime show.

But Estefan was locked inside. A locksmith, security officers and firefighters tried unsuccessfully to unlock her door. So Estefan took matters into her own hands.

WPLG-TV reports that Estefan kicked off her Dolphin green Yves Saint-Laurent pumps and climbed out the window into the suite next door. She ran out the door and across the field and made it onstage just in time.

Reader comments at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9Ll1xaxGd4

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A clip from the beginning of the film immediately sets the mood...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbwBB61laOw



In case you were wondering, the fabulous music in the film is by the ridiculously talented Stephen Endelman.
Listen to some of his past efforts at http://www.stephenendelman.org/
and you'll notice that you really have heard his music before, you just didn't know it.

Endelman's music in the film is everything a period film is supposed to sound like, instead of cheating by having the characters play music on a Victrola!

(1985's Sydney Pollack classic, Out of Africa, being the exception that proves the rule, in that it had Meryl Streep and Robert Redford playing coy by turns with a Victrola, plus some of the most genius music ever heard in a film, composed by John Barry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKlA15b0Unc



I have had the John Barry Soundtracks CD for quite a long time and it never ever disappoints, especially on long multi-day drives across the country by yourself when you are NOT in the greatest of moods. It's like your own traveling theme music as you drive thru one Midwestern town after another, unable to leave your troubles behind in the rear-view mirror.

See more of Barry's genius here:
http://www.amazon.com/John-Barry/e/B000AQ0AW2/works/ref=ntt_mus_teaser

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCXlTXUdX40



I'm a big Hugh Grant fan and have been ever since he started in the business, having seen nearly every film he's ever done, with one of my favorite being 1995's Love Actually, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000424/ with him cast as the new British Prime Minister, who gets the measure of dastardly American president Billy Bob Thornton in one of the greatest comeback put-downs ever seen in a film.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfLKPyM_M2o