Category Archives: film music

Superfriends

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Star Trek rolled up in 2009, a year without a serious Marvel movie (the useless X-Men Origins: Wolverine does not count), so the chance to directly compare two current juggernauts in the same space didn’t come up. Now it has, with results not so much striking as… well, what is that sensation? Relief, perhaps, that for all the multiple TV-derived weaknesses of this crop of writers and JJ Abrams’s odd faith in Simon Pegg, someone with a grasp of the Spielberg section of the manual is prepared to put up not shut up. Abrams doesn’t have his inspiration’s touch for actors at rest who aren’t really resting, but he shares the feel for how the technological sublime works, and the inclination to use colour and sight-lines to guide a viewer onto tracks rather than pummel them in the face until they opt for loving submission.

For the most part Star Trek Into Darkness fizzes, shoved along jointly by Dan Mindel’s cinematography and Michael Giacchino’s score. The look of the thing is even more rigidly controlled than last time; all those supposed excesses and pointless lens flares and scintillating surfaces plainly working as the tight Soderbergh-ian motivational tactics they always were. While you’re chewing on that lot, Giacchino gives Benedict Cumberbatch a more versatile villain theme than the guy in the last film got, and earns his wage almost immediately with a track that nearly builds some Nyman-esque piano motion. Both departments are so innately cinematic, rather than just run-of-the-mill dramatic, that I’m sticking with my theory: the JJ Abrams trick is a grafting of tv onto cinema, unlike Joss Whedon’s instinct to try and make the converse procedure fly. Abrams’s ability to use the fences to his advantage rather than smack into them is almost radical, compared to Marvelution’s current stiff template and conservative restraint. (Marvelution’s previous incarnations are a different matter, especially Bryan Singer’s semi-detached contributions; ten years on, X2 remains better than any Star Trek.)

Savvy enough to make the Federation’s war room look like Dr Strangelove‘s while they cook up a remote drone-attack battle plan, Into Darkness is also a late reminder that Star Trek was never knowingly apolitical. The film is many miles from flawless: Alice Eve looks a bit embarrassed; Cumberbatch is the Bad Brit from a template even older than Marvel’s; and the modern theory that momentum can take the place of story rather than serve it is in the end a terrible error. But hiring a director who can do pastiche properly now looks an even smarter move than it did four years ago. It gifts New Trek with a natural glance backwards at its roots even while it roars forwards into some drastically well-lighted future; Marvel’s more ambivalent attitude to its own past would short-circuit that kind of maneuver even if they showed much sign of being interested. Abrams will be lucky to get away with this approach many more times, and some new iteration of the counter-culture Feds will be along tomorrow to throw the manual away. But today, this one will do.

High lives

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Pedro Almodovar's I'm So Excited: Do the time warp.I reviewed I’m So Excited, the new film by Pedro Almodóvar, here at Critic’s Notebook. Although I didn’t hate it, it’s possible that Pedro and I might be through (again). However, those keen to spare me from it by having the film cast out of polite society for romanticising rape can kindly stop doing me favours. No one ever killed an idea by leaping in front of it every time it drove around the corner, having dug out their Censor’s hat and cape for the occasion. Ideas become extinct precisely because people are allowed to see them, think about them, and decide them to be toxic. To be even having this discussion about a Spanish film maker such as Almodóvar seems somehow very Anglo-Saxon.

Also at the same venue, a review of The Look of Love, whose recreation of Soho and the Revue Bar seemed skin deep at best – presumably for a reason.

And while we’re here: Iron Man Three. Ten years after I decided that Brian Tyler was the key to any decent DC Comics movie, there’s real juice in seeing the Marvel universe operate under his characteristic muted string layers; he even gives the hero a memorable theme tune, which neither of the previous composers seemed very bothered about. But seeing these stories squashed into this tiny inviolable template is now officially a chore; myths cheapened, rather than soap-operas elevated. Marvel’s movie juggernaut, gurning Stan Lee and all, has become a vast engineering project devoted to hollowing out America’s electric mythology and turning it into crack. At some point the cost becomes too high, even while the Brian Tyler big-band plays you off at the end.

Mental architecture

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I reviewed Danny Boyle’s Trance and also Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion for Critic’s Notebook.

And briefly noted:

Proving that it’s probably better to have an eye for genre and approach fantasy material from a certain detachment, rather than just build on remembered youthful delight and some kind of weird faux-nostalgia, Bryan Singer’s Jack The Giant Slayer beats Sam Raimi’s Oz all ways up. The sound of a big fantasy film with a pretty fine John Ottman score answers the same question from a different direction. Surely Singer saw this as a training exercise, a way to try the toolbox on for size before returning to the X-verse? A relatively risk-free excuse to run the current template up the flagpole and see if he could bring himself to salute?

Carlos Reygadas has confounded me before, and he still seems too keen to deny his characters grace for my liking. Post Tenebras Lux is easier to swallow than some of his films – for one thing it’s oddness is mostly text-book surrealism rather than holy terror – but it still resonates with his colossal indifference towards things that don’t deserve his disdain.

Meanwhile Olympus Has Fallen resonates with the screams of innocent tourists mown in half by gunfire and a national gnashing of teeth. The whole thing is wall to wall self-flagellation, not least when a plane cuts the Washington Monument in half and Castrates America. Gerard Butler’s producer credit makes this look like a calculated attempt to un-rom-com himself by ripping a North Korean’s arm off and hitting someone with the wet end, but then I always liked him as emo-Dracula and won’t be heard complaining.

All the troubles in the world

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Tales of the city: Anna Paquin in MargaretFor a minute there, a discussion kicked off in 2012 about whether film culture was dead, dying, comatose, reviving or healthy. But this is a vast, indigestible, daunting topic, the kind of sprawling landscape that only shows its true nature from thirty thousand feet, the same way climate change doesn’t depend on the weather forecast. And so the conversation took the easy way out and turned into list-making instead.

Trying to assess film culture by ranking the current films and forgetting the culture is looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and lists aren’t the tool for turning it around. It’s understandable that list-making is currently the proof-of-life ritual by which movie commentators show their potency, but diminishing returns set in once the number of lists on offer passes the first five thousand or so, not least since it swamps the casual audience clear out of the conversation and leaves us talking to ourselves. A better analysis will have to account for the fact that while we were waving our shopping lists at each other, mainstream movie escapism squirmed and morphed again in its role as the biggest cultural drug-delivery system on the books, and $365-million-worth of real people went to Taken 2.

In other words, a snapshot of film culture in my neck of the woods will need to include that my favorite film of the year was twelve years old and shown at a festival to a few hundred people; and that I read reviews of Killer Joe which thought it was written by a woman. Let’s not even get started on how Project X is not a teen comedy.

My shopping list for the year:

Anna Karenina
I had my say here.

Cosmopolis
Some earlier thoughts here. I like it more now than I did then.

Damsels in Distress
In which Richard Strauss composed the waltzes and the twist was popularized by someone named Chubbard Checker. Having belatedly spotted that Last Days of Disco is a stone-cold masterpiece, Damsels strikes me as quirk of a high American blend and another examination of Whit Stillman’s favorite people, those caught on the horns of doubt vs certainty. Once again the static is eventually released as song and dance; no surprise that for someone as perfectly attuned to verbal wit as Whit, musical numbers are a superior form of discourse, communication at a pitch so pure only dogs can hear it.

Dredd
Reviewed here.

Elena
Andrei Zvyagintsev’s piece of needling unease about a homely well-meaning wife who finds herself in need of her older husband’s money and ends up pondering the poisoner’s handbook has subtexts that are not exactly opaque: weep for Mother Russia, again or still. Exquisitely acted, especially by Elena Lyadova as a spark of brunette fire in the gloomy landscape, the magic touch is the addition of existing Philip Glass music, a cerebral way to generate unease without cheapening the mix with anything as superfluous as authentic noir. Any film operating under Glass has actual respiration going on, and this one breathes deeply.

Haywire
Up the amazon, says my notebook. Haywire is very knowing about what transpires when performers who ply their trade in other physical disciplines turn up as actors. In this case what transpires is Gina Carano’s posture and the striking balance of her running action, which Steven Soderbergh features in long uncut shots as the camera-car tries to keep up. Plus the film is fascinating to watch, full of space and light and color planes that prove what skilled cameramen like “Peter Andrews” can do with the RED, and expertly paced thanks to the subtle editing finesse of “Mary Ann Bernard.” What a team they make.

Margaret
Broadly speaking, Margaret looks exactly like what it is: a film by a playwright kept awake by 9/11 who wrote a script with a million words in it, found himself unable to complete, got sued, got depressed, and watched Martin Scorsese wade into the footage until something emerged that had all the rhythms and cross-cuts and rapid jags of the Scorsese experience. But broadly-speaking is no way to tackle this thing. Margaret is a New York film to the core, wracked with the dire unease of a city undergoing a painful crisis of existence but not knowing what to do about it, which is exactly what its lead character endures too. Kenneth Lonergan’s efforts have yielded my favorite type of movie, the kind powered by the belief that actors talking to each other is the sweetest sight of all. And no praise is too high for Anna Paquin, screaming and scheming and self-deluding in a fog of personal confusion. It never occurred to me before how well Ms. Paquin’s off-kilter air would suit an elliptical editing style in the Scorsese manner, but she seems to be jerking with life’s electricity. (The biggest disappointment of the re-edited longer version is that this current is largely quenched.) The mind boggles at what might have happened if Margaret had come out on schedule just a few years after 25th Hour, in which Ms. Paquin incarnated an entirely different pole of the post-Ground Zero experience with equal fire. She could have written her own ticket to the Moon.

Room 237
The tendency of documentary makers to be coolly aloof on matters of pop culture lets Room 237 adopt a serious expression without ever actually presenting a coherent position on its own topic. But more to the point, and pace Jonathan Rosenbaum, the film perfectly explores one vein of modern film reviewing: the idea that art should not be allowed to ripple outwards and become internalized to influence and cajole, but is instead something to burrow into and unlock and nudge in the ribs about its cool in-jokes. Much cobblers to that.

Rust and Bone
The state-of-the-art in CGI limb removal is impressive, but it’s Marion Cotillard’s physicality, heaving and hauling her useless body across the floor and the look in her eyes when she does it, that stings. Plus the film syncs neatly with Jacques Audiard’s earlier The Beat That My Heart Skipped and the frustrations of Romain Duris’ disobedient fingers.

Silver Linings Playbook
Not a great film, but clearly Jennifer Lawrence’s time has come. I guess not many people saw The Burning Plain, or her time would have come in 2008. Her kohl-eyed petulance is the second-best thing seen in Silver Linings Playbook; the best thing is the brief glimpse of a cinema marquee advertising Midnight Meat Train, which makes me think I’ve misjudged someone in this film’s chain of command completely.

And my Film Of The Year, the year in question being 2000: Kaza-hana
Courtesy of the Edinburgh Film Festival’s Shinji Sômai retrospective this year, another humane tumult, but an interior kind, with more compassion and less dread. Kyôko Koizumi, bracelets jangling, dances around her depression on a gorgeously photographed cross-country jaunt before finally succumbing to the void next to an icy river. By that point you would have given a lot to stop that from happening. Luckily Tadanobu Asano takes care of it instead, thus getting his atonement for Battleship in twelve years early.

Other films deserving mentions honorable and otherwise:

John Carter: Barsoom blitz. All sympathies to Lynn Collins, stuck with invoking Dune for an in-joke.
Holy Motors: bonjour tristesse.
Killer Joe: malice, texas. Reviewed here.
Flying Blind: for featuring my neighborhood at its most cinematic.
Le Havre: for featuring Jean-Pierre Darroussin as an individual somewhere between Inspector Clouseau and one half of George and Mildred.
The Avengers: Operation Galactic Shit-Storm. Paging Bryan Singer, again.

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And fair’s fair: one place to be for discussion of film culture that included the culture was the Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival, covered this year here and here.

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Bodies, rest and motion: Gina Carano in Haywire

USS Effingham

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I said it made more of an attempt at storytelling than the average Transformers film, true. But I also suggested it pipe down with the ridiculous noise and get off my lawn forever; so there’s that. I’m still figuring out whether its quoting of the Pink Panther is radical or risible.

But how’s this for an odd place to find a claim to posterity. The way the film uses its double-amputee veteran, and for that matter the calls it makes on the soldier-actor involved and the presentation of his disability, is worthy of a serious look. Or at least, of something more than dismissal as a further helping of tub-thumping jingoism, served up for a particular constituency that’s squarely in the film’s dugout. Not that it isn’t kind of that too. But let’s give the film the benefit of the doubt; partly since it has quite the sense of humour, and partly since so much else about it is doubtful as hell.

All this and Village People references in the Battleship review over here, at Critic’s Notebook.

On the opposite side of the moon: Carol Morley’s film Edge deals in fragments from some well-mined seams of English drama. Tea-cups and stoical suicides and wry monologues about heartbreak are the currency. The director films the daylight scenes at a calm, considered distance; and then starts cutting at a rapid click, swiping back and forth between the parallel stories in the middle of the night at a much faster pace than a Play For Today would have dared back in the old days. The technique adds as much cinematic juice to the story as it can stand, wisely or not. The design and textures in the production are a different matter; Edge is a fine entry in Awful Wallpaper cinema, and the ratty outfits speak volumes. So does Nichola Burley when she loses her temper, which luckily happens in her films a lot.

The review of Edge is here, at the same venue.

Immigrant song

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A Better Life

The absence of grit in A Better Life is more about director Chris Weitz taking a thought experiment out for a spin than any lack of nerve. All the space that a story of migrant workers and familial strife would normally fill with hand-held camerawork and hard-core frowning gets used instead for deliberately lush photography of some very un-lush bits of East Los Angeles and a sweeping score by Alexandre Desplat. Much of the rest is occupied by the very fine Demian Bichir, honest self-sacrifice oozing from every pore in exactly the way it didn’t when he played Fidel Castro as a self-propelled agent of revolution in Steven Soderbergh’s Che a while back. Weitz’s tactic of addressing the immigrant experience through colour and music and high production values rather than friction and noise and aggression is clearly deliberate, the work of a man who knows whose shoulders he stands on. So naturally he’s getting some stick for it.

My talk with Chris Weitz about the film and why he made it the way he did is now online at Little White Lies.

Reefer sadness

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Rhys Ifans and Chloe Sevigny make nice

Last year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, which now looks a lot like a warm-up for this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, showed a retrospective of British films of the 1960s and 1970s. After the first couple, the trick to avoiding depression was to go and look at the posters for Four Lions or Black Death, and dream of a world where they were now the rule rather than the exceptions.

Another exception was Mr. Nice, which popped up in the festival proper and proved once more that the industry is in better shape if director Bernard Rose is happy and healthy and employed. Its timid opening in New York gives me the excuse to review it again over at Critic’s Notebook, and point out that no one hires Philip Glass if they’re not engaged in a spot of world-building, or casts Chloë Sevigny if they’re not aiming for mild disorientation in the male mind.

Survival of the shiftiest

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Written for The Film Talk.

Chelsea Field in Dust Devil

The trick to being a good troublemaker is to lob your brick and then vanish, so it’s entirely fitting that Richard Stanley had made his two recognized feature films by 1993 and has found other fish to fry ever since. Stuck as we are in a drought of troublemaking directors, that’s a shame. But it does leave his authentic piece of brilliance to stand in splendid isolation.

Hardware isn’t it. That movie has its admirers, and the filmmakers work wonders to create dystopia in sets that look about as big as a closet, but the very British late-1980s flavor of civilized anarchy has curdled a bit and drags like an anchor. Kudos to William Hootkins for delving so deep into sleazebaggery as a voyeuristic pervert that his sweat runs off the screen and pools on your carpet, but he and the other supporting cast wouldn’t be out of place in BBC’s The Young Ones. The tone of the UK comic 2000 AD is pretty clear too, even before the lawyers got into an argument over the story’s origins.

Stacey Travis in Hardware. A girl and her art.What does work, and well enough to signpost Stanley’s great gift, is the not-very-sub-text. Stuck in a land of sterilization and birth control, restless artist Jill, played by Stacey Travis as a ballsy flame-haired Final Girl, builds a surrogate child out of black market junk and gets an uncontrollable killobot for her troubles. The sequence where she builds the machine is a great piece of montage, with the beast watching the endless violence on television while Jill gifts him a body and paints it with the Stars And Stripes. Weaned on war crimes and punk rock, the kid duly goes after his mom with a phallic drill bit very close to the one last seen heading for a tender area of Julie Christie in Demon Seed. Close, but no cigar.

But Dust Devil is the real deal. The best kind of horror film, in that it’s a sprawling, political, metaphysical fable cooked up by a production team clearly half out of their minds, it throws any hint of self-parody out of the window and delves deep into psycho-geography instead. Technically it’s about a shape-shifting hitch-hiking serial killer, played by Robert Burke in an outfit owing a debt to both Sergio Leone and Stanley’s old comrades in Fields of the Nephilim, who murders young women and then does very unpleasant things to them afterward. But the film is really about its setting, the Namibia/South Africa border in the early 1990s, where some strange and powerful magic is stirring. Sorcery envelops everyone, but especially the rootless and significantly-named Wendy, played by a convincingly frazzled Chelsea Field. As unsettled and paranoid as any white South African of the time, Wendy falls into the arms of her particularly lost boy in a suicidal swoon, the two of them dancing to Hank Williams’ Ramblin’ Man while the earth shifts under them.

Chelsea Field and Robert Burke in Dust Devil. Ramblin'The second-best thing about Dust Devil is this whole social dimension that Stanley frets away at patiently while the serial killer has his fun. Only Clive Barker, another fine troublemaker, has this knack in this genre to the same extent. (And Barker’s last film as director before he too tired of the struggle, Lord of Illusions, post-dates Dust Devil by only a few years and shares a producer and a composer. They make a fine double bill.) Dust Devil’s feeling for the land of its birth, for desert and ruin and isolation, is right up there with Witchfinder General‘s empathy for English evergreens. It shows a whole country swimming up through the last throes of a nightmare and apparently calling up a demon in the process, with everyone caught at the moment that the fever breaks.

John Matshikiza and Zakes Mokae in Dust DevilThe best thing about Dust Devil is two of those people, the shaman Joe played by John Matshikiza and the cop Ben played by Zakes Mokae; two actors not demeaned in the slightest by the film’s wild mix of social witchcraft, playing two characters long since battered into shreds. The social document of these two South African performers playing out this story, both of them as freighted with past experiences as the characters they portray and both now gone, is not short of power. Mokae’s voice sounds like creaking shelves of history books. Dust Devil’s delirium finally crests when poor tormented Ben gets an inkling that he just might be a character in someone else’s film. Hypnotized by a vision of his wife as the Black Madonna, he lurches sideways out of his own movie in a flurry of sprocket holes. Free at last.

Tough to top that. And barring the disastrous miseries of Stanley’s attempt to film The Island of Dr Moreau, he hasn’t tried. Instead he turned that same eye for montage and illusion to documentaries, and if ever there was a convincing argument that the best documentarians are anthropologists, Richard Stanley is it. All his documentaries are worth the effort, but inevitably the humdinger is Secret Glory, a wild old girl of a doc taking in Nazism, mountains of crystal in the Tyrolean Alps, and the Holy Grail being carved out of a meteorite. Made in 2000 it fits neatly into the millennial vibe of the moment, while also looking askance at Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles and backwards towards Illuminatus!. Watched today, it also looks as if Stanley preempted the folks now thought to be reinvigorating the documentary form by a decade or so.

a resident of the Sea Of Perdition.And he’s still out there somewhere, although for now it looks like the man’s puckish glee in getting behind the camera has displaced his analytical eye. Maybe Dr Moreau has to take the blame for that. But go and find Sea of Perdition anyway, to see what a self-aware director can do when at play in a nine minute short, and how a Martian temple and some shape-shifting Solaris-style manifestations can be created down one end of a beach in Iceland if a filmmaker has the nerve for it. Watch it for its female astronaut (niftily named Sly Delta Honey, a sign for any Lucius Shepard readers that this particular wanderer probably isn’t exactly in the land of the living either), stumbling around to John Barry’s music from Moonraker. Take the opportunity to see a fish-man space traveller saunter off to the strains of Paul Williams singing We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted To Be from Bugsy Malone. More troublemaking like this, please.

Right into the thick of things

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As part of Damian’s very fine Film Music Blogathon, some things I would absolutely love to know:

Whether I was imagining things when I heard David Shire take the opportunity to nod toward The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives in the music to Zodiac, a score already engaged in harking back to 70s film music and plaintive solo trumpets over dissonant strings. How sly a musical joke is that?

Why all the shrieking of most horror scores doesn’t produce so much as a twitch in me, while the uncoiling of Christopher Young’s waltz in Hellraiser lifts me out of my chair as soon as the intro strikes up. And whether the appearance of Young’s music in Spider-Man 2 is the best demonstration yet of how far Danny Elfman has slipped into providing sound effects rather than scores.

How many directors hiring Howard Shore do so in the full realization that he brings the air of Cronenberg with him.

Why my first film memory is a musical memory, the Ligeti choral pieces in 2001. Wonderful, awful music which still induces a meltdown of pure existential dread. Play it now and watch me quail.

How a director as cinematically inclined as Ridley Scott can have such a tin ear for film music and a blind spot for its effects.

Which of the two credited composers wrote that sinuous 10 minutes at the end of Last Of The Mohicans, a chase sequence which any Grand Theory Of How Film Music Works must accommodate or be worthless.

Whether the death of Basil Poledouris robs cinema of the most humane voice it ever had, and leaves a gaping hole in the viewing experiences available to us now he’s gone. And why his score to Les Miserables affects me deep in my chest cavity when played without the movie.

And whether it’s a coincidence that one of the most criminally underrated films of the last two decades has my favorite score of all. I think I was the only person in the world to pay to see Hoffa when it came out, but right from first viewing I was transfixed and transported by David Newman’s score, a flawless synchronisation between composer and director. The eight-minute end credits/overture is just a perfect thing, sweeping and melancholic and deeply American, drenched in the same slightly dislocated theatricality which Danny De Vito put into the movie. It still moves me every single time I watch it.

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