I've never understood people mocking one-hit wonders. I'm not talking about novelty songs or awful cash-in songs but genuinely good songs, but where the artist creating them had no other hits. Often artists referred to as one hit wonders have had long and successful careers and that one "hit" was their commercial high point, for example I've heard The Wannadies referred to as one-hit wonders, a band with a lot of really good albums but many people only know them for "The You and Me Song", a song that in my opinion is not even their best. But even if a one-hit wonder is the only good song a band has that is nothing to be ashamed of - hardly anyone at all has written a good song, most of the songs that have been written aren't good. It is incredibly hard to write a good song and there is no shame in that a person has only one song in them.
Big Fan by The Wannadies - better than You and Me Song
There are bands that I have complicated feelings for because undeniably they have one good song and I hate everything else they've ever done so they are very much one hit wonders individual to me. The two that immediately spring to mind are Courtney Love and My Chemical Romance. I've never liked Courtney Love's music, and have never liked her much as a person from my admittedly third hand information on her, but "Mono" is a great song and it is hard to admit that. I have listened to the whole album and don't like it and I never liked the stuff she did with her former band Hole.
I hate all of My Chemical Romance's songs, I hate the way they act, the way they present themselves but there is one song I like and I think that if I had known it was by them when I heard it my mind would have rejected it. When I was in university I went to a rock-punk-ska night at the student union called Get Your Skates On and while a lot of the music wasn't to my taste it was always fun. There was this one song called "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" and I found it quite catchy and I was stunned when I later learned who it was by. In my Stalinist history revisionism of my own cultural life I would very much like to throw that down the memory hole but I can't...it is a good song. I have broken some stuff down so much that I would say there is a five second part of a Kaiser Chiefs song I like but I don't like the whole song.
The frustratingly good Mono by Courtney Love
The term one-hit wonder is usually just used for songs, but you get one-hit wonder novelists or filmmakers, people who make one "good" thing and never manage it again. But as I think songs that are one hit wonders are often only the high point of a good career there are films that are good but have a single flash of brilliance. The Men Who Stare At Goats was a great book by Jon Ronson that was adapted into a good film starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor. I enjoyed the film but there is one scene which is one of my favourite ever scenes. To explain; the film is about the US army trying to tap into special powers people might have - the ability to be invisible, to read minds, that sort of thing. When they look through their soldiers, however, they find few people who have minds open enough to explore these ideas, when they manage to find some candidates they are put under the charge of a genuine hippy soldier whose first order is for them to dance. One soldier, played by Clooney, explained how he didn't like to dance and the hippy soldier challenged him about this and well -
I love this scene, I think the director managed to capture something that is true for just about everyone - we don't allow ourselves to do the stuff we want to do because someone in the past told us it was wrong, for Clooney's character it's dancing and later in the film Clooney's character expressed his love for dancing. The film is good but flawed but this one scene made the entire film worthwhile.
As Good As It Gets is certainly an uneven film - although it did win Oscars for Best Actor and Best Actress - but it has a couple of scenes that are very, very good. The first is when Greg Kinnear called Jack Nicholson an "absolute horror of a human being" which is one of my favourite insults ever, how do you come back from that? The second and better scene is the odd compliment that Jack Nicholson's character gave Helen Hunt's after he insulted how she is dressed. She insisted he compliment her upon which he started telling a long story about his OCD and what this meant for his life, culminating in him telling her, "You make me want to be a better man". It's hard to think of a better compliment to give someone.
There have been a lot of films about Superman, some are very good and some are terrible, and Superman Returns is generally lumped in with the bad ones. And I can see why, the film has a lot of problems, as my girlfriend Spooky Reading Girl pointed out there is hardly any time devoted to "Clark Kent" it''s all Superman, and Kevin Spacey is a bit over the top as Lex Luthor, but anyway I rather liked it. But that was all based on one scene. There is a point in the film when Lois Lane is covering a story about a space shuttle being launched off the back of a plane, the plane flies into the sky, the shuttle detaches and then fires it's rocket. Anyway, something goes wrong with the launch and the shuttle isn't disconnected from the plane meaning they're both going to crash. Superman shows up and surprisingly saves the day. That scene is brilliantly shot, for something not being real it actually looked real. I have never heard anyone else talk positively about this film or even just this scene.
Superman Returns - great scene bad film
Perhaps the most frustrating film for this is X-Men: First Class. On the whole I have enjoyed the X-Men series of films but there have been some bad ones. X-Men: First Class is half of a great film and half a very bad film. It's really easy to split it into the good and bad parts, the bits about Magneto are good and the bits not about Magneto are bad. The film was at first intended to be a Magneto origins story but was instead folded into a larger story about Charles Xavier starting his school and how he and Magento fell out. It helped that Magneto was played by one of the best actors going, Michael Fassbender but his story of vengeance across decades and what he would do to get that vengeance was very interesting. I couldn't care less about the largely boring group of students - the exception of course being Jennifer Lawrence - and their adventures. The idea of bringing in real historical events, the film is very much centred around the Cuban Missile Crisis worked as well and it could have been a great film.
Creating anything good is really hard and people should be proud of anything good they've made even if it's just a couple of minutes long.
