I'm so excited. Celine Dion owns. I remember being on an Elliott Smith kick a while back and watching this performance of "Miss Misery," at the 1998 Oscars, at which was nominated for best original song. It's just him alone up there, with the orchestra behind the curtain, hammering out his quiet, reserved little number, looking terrified and like he didn't want to be there, and nobody in the audience knew who he was. Contrast that with the performance of the song he lost to.
Because off shuffles poor Elliott Smith, who was just trying to mumble through a couple verses, and up goes the curtain to reveal the orchestra and on go the fog machines. And on comes Celine Dion, the world's most famous pop soprano in the interregnum between the primes of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, wearing the Heart of the Goddamn Ocean. And in the fog and the orchestra swelling and knowing that she was singing a song that would cakewalk to an Oscar, a Golden Globe, four Grammys and 15 million copies sold worldwide, Celine Dion was feelin' it.
She stars making the crying face and swinging her arms around like Moses trying to part the Red Sea, and it all made for a frankly ridiculous spectacle.
But that's also the point of Celine Dion, isn't it? Go big or go home.
Celine Dion was the second artist to record "It's All Coming Back to Me Now," which turned out to be (I believe, obviously) her best song, not only because it kills at karaoke, but because every single detail about this song turns out to be more ridiculous than the last.
For instance: One of the other artists to record this song was Meat Loaf, which makes perfect sense and sounds exactly the way you'd expect it to. Meat Loaf was joined by Marion Raven, whose name I realized sounded familiar because she used to be in a Norwegian girlpop group with Marit Larsen, whose song "I Don't Want to Talk About It" I like a great deal and I think you will too, even though it sounds absolutely nothing like this one.
But getting back to "It's All Coming Back to Me Now." This song is a preposterous power ballad that's roughly one hour and 42 minutes long, every second of which is soaked with the most maudlin, desperate sorrow and heartbreak. Celine spends most of the music video spinning around in a flowing white dress (Nightgown? I dunno, I sort of assume that when you're Celine Dion you sleep in something out of the Marie Antoinette collection) in a castle in the Czech Republic.
And as if that weren't pouring it on thick enough, it takes place at night, during a thunderstorm, mostly under candlelight. And the thunderstorm is so violent it blows open one of the huge castle doors, which serves two purposes. The first is to knock Celine to the ground, where she can appropriately roll around and wave her arms while covered in leaves and sweating anguish. The second is--I'm sorry, I've been waiting my whole life to write a sentence like this--to allow her Ghost Husband to enter the castle so he can ride his motorcycle down the staircase.
And every note matches, if not tops, the comprehensive self-indulgent insanity of the video. I once put this song on in the car and by the time it was over I was driving 15 miles an hour faster than when it started. This song is a monument to what can be achieved when bombast is the goal and all other concerns are of trivial importance.
This is the Cadillac of power ballads.
