This Will Clear Out All the Bad Toxins: The Solute July 2021 Movie Gift Exchange Soundtrack Mix

The Solute is a site about film, TV, music, and literature run by fans of The Dissolve, a film review site that was shuttered by Pitchfork, its owner, in 2015 after only two years of terrifically written reviews and sharp Nathan Rabin jokes about the most wrongheaded Hollywood creative decisions. Folks from The Dissolve's comments section transferred the community they formed over there to The Solute and its comments section. In July and December, the Solute comments section does a movie gift exchange I've been a part of since 2020. (My Disqus handle in that comments section is "Accidental Star Trek Cosplay," the name of my blog.) Each member of the group of movie gift exchange participants is assigned another member by The Solute. Member A picks out a movie Member B never saw before and tells Member B to go watch it. Then Member B does the same to Member C, and so on. Secret Santa sucks. The Solute movie gift exchange is better than a Secret Santa. We don't have to spend any damn money on our gifts!

"This Will Clear Out All the Bad Toxins: The Solute July 2021 Movie Gift Exchange Soundtrack Mix," the second in a series of Solute mixes, compiles original music from several of the movies we gifted to each other in The Solute's July 2021 gift exchange. The selections range from Jerry Goldsmith's fantastic Star Trek: The Motion Picture score to really old Bollywood.

The title of this mix is a line uttered in Mandarin by Nai Nai to her granddaughter Billi during the tai chi scene in director Lulu Wang's The Farewell, "the most exciting hit movie of the summer," according to IndieWire's Eric Kohn in 2019—its popularity during summer 2019 made it a fitting choice for the July 2021 gift exchange—as well as one of the movies whose scores are featured in this mix.

Key art: Awkwafina and Zhao Shuzhen in The Farewell

My full liner notes about this mix: the-solute.com/this-will-clear...nd-the-farewell

The Solute's July 2021 gift exchange list: the-solute.com/movie-gifts-jul...y-2021-the-list

Our thoughts on the movies we received: the-solute.com/summer-2021-mov...gifts-unwrapped

"Playing Hot Peas and Butter," the previous Solute movie gift exchange soundtrack mix: hearthis.at/dj-afos-ny/dj-afos...peas-and-butter