The 2021 List: April

So there goes April. and I watched all of eight ‘new’ films/TV shows. Yeah, I’m still re-watching ‘old’ stuff, but my general apathy/weariness continues.

Books are good. I’m currently reading J W Rinzler’s excellent ‘The Making of Planet of the Apes’, which I bought from Amazon for £18 a week or so ago- at that price its almost giving it away, considering what magazines cost these days. With its on-set photographs and old-fashioned (pre-2001/Star Wars) pre-production paintings/storyboards, its really evocative of the 1960s and something of an escape to the myth of simpler times. I’ve really enjoyed the fascinating story of its long gestation period. I’d never really appreciated what a hard sell it was in the early 1960s to sell a film project featuring talking apes. In hindsight it seems a perfectly natural premise for a series of films but when one considers it in an time pre-Star Trek, even, its quite remarkable the film ever got made. Great book- its a lovely reminder of those retrospective articles in Cinefantastique, Fantastic Films and Starburst that I enjoyed reading (albeit with its 300 pages, this book is much more detailed, Cinefantastique‘s in-depth articles notwithstanding).

Hey, we had the Oscars this month. More nauseating than ever. Privileged and pampered millionaires preaching some more. I’m not sure they ‘get it’, after the year so many of us have had. I suppose its all true that the rich just get richer and the poor poorer because looking at their expensive gowns and suits and haircuts the pandemic and its economic woes doesn’t seem to have affected them very much. Instead I rather think it has put into sharp focus just how much of another country/planet Hollywood really is, and how increasingly distant it is. Those Planet Hollywood restaurants have a very apt name indeed, indicative of a truth I didn’t really appreciate. 

Or maybe I’m just getting old, and tired of the game.

Television

46) The Flight Attendant

Film

41) Chelsley Bonestell: A Brush With The Future (2018)

42) Secret Behind the Door (1947)

43) The Tunnel (Tunnelen) (2019)

44) Anti-Life (2020)

45) Stowaway (2021)

47) Voyage of Time (2016)

48) The Heist (2013)

The Heist (2009/2013)

The Heist has a curious history- released in 2013 here in the UK, when it passed me by (as I’d never heard of it until yesterday), it appears it was actually first released a few years prior, in 2009, which is usually a sign of a troubled production that a studio doesn’t know how to release (or even want to). These days, I guess this is where a streamer such as Netflix usually steps in, and an indication of how much things have changed in the past several years regards how films are distributed and how we access them. In The Heist‘s case, its troubled history was actually a result of its film company going bankrupt (like Dredd and Solomon Kane, it seems some films just can’t catch a break). As it turns out, sure, The Heist is not high art, or profoundly dramatic- its not even hysterically funny, but it is very pleasant, light-hearted and undemanding fun.

I suppose that The Heist is for heist movies what Space Cowboys was for space movies. Morgan Freeman, Christopher Walken, and William H. Macy play art gallery security guards who are horrified to learn that three of their beloved art works are being shipped off to Denmark thanks to a revamp of the gallery. Roger (Walken) spends most of his shifts standing opposite a painting called The Lonely Maiden; Charles (Freeman) is obsessed by a painting of a woman with a cat, and George (Macy) has a strange preoccupation with a bronze statue of a male nude. Aghast at losing these works of art that they are so deeply attached to, they marshal a plan to steal the artworks and save them from the Danish infidels (or something like that) so that they can enjoy them themselves forever.

Its daft fun, a very light-hearted caper that chiefly rewards thanks to the lovely performances of the three leads. There’s certainly a place for something as light and fluffy as this film, particularly in times such as these. Its a warm, life-affirming film that is possibly the perfect Sunday afternoon matinee. What’s wrong with that?

The Heist is currently streaming on Amazon Prime and is available on DVD/Blu-ray.

Voyage of Time (2016)

Sometimes we can be such loyal fools, enthralled by past glories and ever hopeful of their return. I keep watching each new Ridley Scott film with such anticipation, and for decades was just the same with each new Prince album, or John Carpenter movie. Terrence Malick has made such genuinely great films, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line are amongst my all-time favourites and I really do like The Tree of Life: there is something endlessly fascinating about it, if only because it aims so high and just falls short. The idea of a section of that film, which depicted the formation of the universe/Solar System and the beginnings of life on Earth, including the Dinosaurs and the cataclysm that wiped them out, being turned into a full-length documentary film was just so enticing. But…sadly I must say it should have all just remained within that film. Sometimes less is more: funnily enough, that’s possibly very true for much of Malick’s output. 

Its taken me a few years to catch up with Voyage of Time, finally importing a German Blu-ray relatively cheap, but alas, I possibly shouldn’t have bothered. Even as a fan and frequent apologist for Malick, I have to admit, this is a pretty poor effort. Pretty and vacuous, its terribly inferior to Godfrey Reggio’s magnificent Koyannisqatsi when it could/should have certainly been equal to it, with something new to say (instead, I have to report that Koyannisqatsi possibly shares so much of Voyage of Time‘s ‘message’ and sentiment but got there decades before and said it much better).

I’m not really even sure what Malick was thinking; we have an irritating, typical-of-Malick-horribly-obtuse Cate Blanchett narration that says nothing, for no reason at all other than, presumably, to have her name on the credits to ‘sell’ the film. Any narrative flow for this voyage through the ages of the universe and Earth is repeatedly derailed by dropped-in sequences of present-day humanity that serve no purpose at all: one moment we are in the present, then back in the past, then back in the present. At least in Reggio’s film the scenes of humanity unwittingly lost in urban cages and horrible jobs etc served some purpose, some commentary on life out of balance.

As one would expect, the film looks very pretty but little more impressive than what we’ve already seen in BBC wildlife documentaries on television, and while the visual effects are quite astonishing at times, without a clear ‘voice’ or narrative to give them purpose, what’s really the point of them at all? There’s nothing here that Kubrick’s 2001 didn’t say much more succinctly and effectively. Maybe Malick finally found he had too much to say, or nothing at all to say. Again, like so many of his recent films.

I had expected to see an expansion of that Tree of Life sequence, showing the Big Bang, the formation of stars and planets, the wild primeval life of Earth, perhaps a glimpse of mankind and its glories in art and history and then the long slow decline of the universe back to darkness, some kind of cosmological model and perhaps a sense of our small insignificant place within it. I didn’t expect to see a poor man’s Koyannisqatsi. At least that film had meaning; instead Malick’s Voyage has no meaning at all.    

Stowaway (2021)

I’m not sure why exactly, but there was something of Michael Crichton about Stowaway, something about how the high-concept premise was grounded by realistic characters/scientists trying to survive a dangerous situation against mounting odds. The title says it all really: a three-man mission to Mars is scuppered by a fourth person being accidentally stowed onboard. Its a neat premise even though eminently unlikely- the kind of thing that might work for a thirty-minute Twilight Zone as a neat idea (thinking about it, wasn’t it the plotline of the 1960s Lost in Space?). Stretched to a full movie though its hard to suspend the element of nagging disbelief. Indeed it almost ruined the whole thing for me, as I kept on expecting some major revelation towards the end that would answer my doubts and questions. 

Just how does a launch platform engineer get trapped inside a space capsule bulkhead, without anyone realising he was missing, and then only retrieved from said bulkhead by unscrewing the panel trapping him inside like some kind of space age reversal of The Cask of Amontillado? It didn’t make any sense to me, and the characters plea of ignorance/amnesia too convenient to really convince, either. I maintained doubts and a hope that my questions would be answered, but they never were, so consequently it was a constant distraction that almost ruined the whole thing for me and left me frustrated at the end.

So I suppose one’s entire enjoyment of the film is predicated upon how easily one can accept its premise and lack of explanation. Certainly there is plenty to enjoy- the art direction is absolutely top-notch, its as convincing a setting as I can remember in recent space films (perhaps taking a nod or two from Ad Astra) and the characters are just as convincing too.  Ships commander Marina Barnett (Toni Collette) is an astronaut veteran of previous Mars missions, calmly reassuring and nudging her two crewmates, scientists Zoe Levenson (Anna Kendrick) and David Kim (Daniel Dae Kim, who quietly steals the show). Both Kendrick and Kim are rather endearing and most importantly quite convincing as scientists trying to prove themselves and validate their research (possibly the Crichton element I referred to). Stowaway Michael Adams (Shamier Anderson) is a prospective applicant for a later mission who seems to have inadvertently circumvented the application bit until its realised that having an additional consumer of ship consumables endangers everybody.

Its a dramatic film and really quite impressively made, technically- I wasn’t entirely convinced by some of the science, as the MTS is set to revolving in order to maintain an artificial gravity reminiscent of how Christopher Nolan did it in Interstellar and then an extension rolls out like some kind of counter-balance and solar array but surely the centre of gravity was subsequently wrong (surely the MTS would continue to be the centre of gravity, but instead this shifts to the Solar array instead). I watched external visual effects shots of the ship on its journey and it just seemed at odds with what I’d seen earlier but never mind, maybe that’s just me missing something, or I saw it wrong, but this coupled with my nagging doubts about some guy being somehow sealed/screwed-in behind an important bulkhead panel left me troubled.

I suppose this film is the very definition of a flawed film, then. Maybe another viewing would alleviate my suspicion/disbelief, and likewise I had to wonder about how healthy a canister of oxygen would be having been blasted by deadly cosmic radiation, but that latter point is really the lesser of my concerns. When the central premise of  film, the crux of the whole drama, is predicated on something that just did not satisfy me at all, then I guess the film’s in some trouble. Either I missed a central piece of dialogue that answered everything or the film deliberately rushed past everything bluffing its way through (I suspect it was the latter). But its definitely well worth a watch, and no disaster.

Walk in the park… and then a doze.

Weather has been unusually fine of late, so plenty of Spring chores in the garden have taken our time, but we took the opportunity this morning to take Ed for a walk in a nearby park that he loves. Usually we follow the paths through the gardens and around the woods and fishing pool, but this morning adventure is in the air- we find a trail  leading off into the woods. Ed takes to this new territory with relish – he takes the lead and dashes ahead exploring the territory, as if he’s the first dog to ever follow this trail through a wilderness winding through the trees (well, its certainly a first for him, which is all that matters). He takes us up one pathway that leads through the trees and then winds down to a woodland pond, where two ducks on the opposite bank regard him with suspicion before wisely waddling off to the safety of the centre of the pond. A grey squirrel hasn’t been paying attention and leaps up startled when Ed sniffs in his direction; Ed suddenly yanks me on his lead as he dashes in vain pursuit until I pull him back in. I do wonder if Ed thinks he can also clamber up trees like a squirrel given enough of a run-up. Undeterred at me spoiling his fun, Ed finds a trail on that opposite side that winds up a grassy bank up into the trees, and we are off again…

 

This afternoon having gotten home and had lunch, we resume our chores in the back garden tidying up the patio (hopefully for a lazy summer chilling with books etc. but you know, English summer = plenty of rain, its like we never learn). Ed stretches out on the grass looking at us as if we are fools- its obviously far too warm for any such exertions.

He decides that its time for a doze on the cool grass. Its a dogs life.

 

Anti-Life (2020)

This was hilarious, its utterly bizarre that people are still hellbent on ripping off Alien all these years later, and doing it so ineptly. Everything in this film was so diabolically poor- the awful script, the wooden/cardboard sets, the woeful CGI… its like a masterclass in how NOT to make a sci-fi film and looks worse than any fan-flick that might surface on YouTube. It would be embarrassed by most student films, I’m certain (if it WAS a student film, I’d suggest the film-makers change career paths and go work in a grocery store instead).

But the film was also disturbing- what in the world are Bruce Willis and Thomas Jane doing in this rubbish? Being in this film must be the absolute nadir of both careers and I cannot understand their thinking, appearing in something as bad as this must be some kind of laughing-stock in the industry that could only harm their careers and reputation. Considering the budget this film must have had – something in the region of 1970s Doctor Who, by the look of it- I cannot imagine they appeared in this for the money. Okay, Willis has been slumming around for years at this point and never fails to amaze me how deep he can dig the hole his career is falling into (Willis spends the film sniggering and taking sips from his hip-flask like he KNOWS he’s in something akin to Plan 9 From Outer Space– maybe he thinks in fifty years this thing will be deemed somehow cool for being so bad), but Thomas Jane? He has his detractors but he’s surely better than this (The Expanse must seem so faraway). 

I honestly think this film has no rights being released, in my opinion its quite un-releasable in the state its in with no redeeming features at all. Nothing works on any level – I haven’t seen anything quite as bad as this in a long, long time. You’ll note I haven’t mentioned anything of the plot. I’m not sure it really had one, and if I were to jot it down here now… well, I’d be spending more time on this post than this film deserves.

Streaming services like Netflix (how I watched this film) are so desperate for new content they will buy and stream ANYTHING and this film proves it. Its like any kind of quality control has been dismissed for the sake of having something, anything, new and Willis being attached to it is just another example of the cynicism behind rubbish like this. Films like this make me despair at the where the film industry and artform is going, now. There used to be a time when you had to have talent to be able to make films, but that isn’t the case these days. Seems any idiot can write and direct and produce a film now – they don’t even need an idea, they just need a DVD collection they can rip off (sorry, ‘homage’).

Anyway, that’s quite enough. Its past time I started trying to forget this film exists. 

 

 

The Tunnel (orig. Tunnelen) (2019)

The Tunnel (‘Tunnelen’ in its original) is a Norwegian disaster film in which people on their way home for Christmas are trapped inside the titular tunnel when a truck carrying gas crashes and soon after explodes a few kilometres beyond its East entrance, filling the tunnel with deadly smoke and darkness, killing many of those trying to flee and trapping others in their vehicles under the mountain. Its a very well-crafted film and convincingly staged, but ultimately becomes undermined by a script that is handicapped by collapsing into predictable melodrama.

Clearly inspired (or indebted to) Hollywood disaster movies, the human element is pure soap opera: when the hero of the film, Stein (Thorbjørn Harr), who works for the emergency services, discovers his daughter Elise is trapped inside the tunnel he is forced to disobey his superiors and go in on his own. There’s a subplot to this regards his dead wife who his daughter is mourning and Stein’s new girlfriend, Ingrid (Lisa Carlehed, whose facial similarity to English actress Julia Ormond in some shots kept distracting me). Elise refuses to accept Ingrid and despises her for ‘replacing’ her mother, which has caused Elise, following another argument with her father, to run away from home and thus get trapped in the tunnel. So there’s all that emotional tension between guilty father and angry daughter and flashbacks to the ill mother and then Ingrid and Elise eventually finding a connection when Ingrid puts her own life at risk and gets involved in rescuing her…(all this while the authorities are waiting for the ‘proper’ rescue team to get up a mountain pass blocked by a snowfall/avalanche).

Its funny- had this been set in the Colorado mountains or something and starred Dwayne Johnson it might have been an elevated b-movie but it might have been a guilty pleasure. Its funny how America has made this kind of nonsense its own, especially with larger-than-life stars like Willis, Stallone etc. its a genre that’s almost built-in with its own excuses and critical ‘get out of jail’ card that gets it a free pass (almost). Transplanted to a European setting and what is usually a more muted, realistic European cinema/television it just feels a little ‘off’. The film pads out the story by also introducing several minor characters who will be ‘victims’ trapped in the tunnel or staff manning the phones of the emergency services but they are pretty much all unlikeable and fairly redundant, really. We are shown their struggles and pain and sometimes their deaths but we don’t care as much the film-makers intend us to do, and we know how the main plotline of Stein, Elise and Ingrid is going to turn out. 

Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, this is by no means a terrible film- it is really fairly competent and a diverting way to spend a few hours. I always find a certain appeal of watching European films is seeing something that looks freshly different from the usual Western (okay, ‘American’) setting; glimpses of a different culture and architecture offer at the very least a visual novelty. Usually its accompanied by a similarly enjoyable arthouse, less popcorn sensibility so its unfortunate that this is an example of European cinema so clearly mimicking Hollywood tropes. Mind, perhaps only European cinema could so vividly prove how dangerous discarded carrier bags can be. 

 

Later by Stephen King

Haven’t read a Stephen King book for awhile, but this one was recommended by my brother and hey, by Stephen King standards this thing is practically a short story, running just under 250 pages which absolutely fly by. It has none of the padding and excess that weakens so much of Kings work- he’s always been a great writer in desperate need of a good editor in my opinion but there’s no such problems here; this book is tight and concise and pretty much has all Kings good points and few of the bad.

It also finds King on very familiar ground, with shades of his own The Dead Zone and The Shining and, as commented upon in the story itself, the Brice Willis film The Sixth Sense (I suppose one could describe this as King’s own spin on the latter). The main character is a child who realises he can see and speak to the recently dead, a ghoulish talent that finds surprising exploits as he grows up. Its probably assisted by being published as part of the Hard Case Crime imprint, which is dedicated to pulpish crime potboilers and therefore the book is not being essentially sold as a standard Stephen King horror yarn. I actually kept on expecting the crime element to come more to the fore when it really doesn’t; its there but not as much as the cover painting might suggest.

As a piece of pulp horror in the guise of a crime potboiler its really, really good, and as I have noted its brevity is perhaps its best asset. Its so easy when reading this to imagine King going off on a tangent or two and spreading the same storyline over 600 pages or more but thankfully he doesn’t, although perhaps the endearing main character and the clever premise might have some of Kings hardcore fans wishing it was indeed a 600-page opus.

My chief concern with the paperback edition I read was some bad proof-reading, as there are some pretty glaring typos that really should be unforgivable in this day and age- or is it rather indicative of how books are electronic files these days and such things are somehow easier to creep in (when I would have thought the opposite was true)? I just find them very irritating- there’s a few instances of sentences missing words, breaking the syntax although when reading it your brain will likely fill in the blank, hardly noticing (I grimaced at one and asked Claire to read the paragraph and she didn’t even notice it until I showed her- which is an interesting point perhaps regards how our brains work when reading).

I’ll not go into the plot or its twists/developments as they are the rewards of reading the story. Suffice to say this is a great little read that doesn’t out-stay its welcome, I really quite enjoyed it. Wouldn’t surprise me though if it turned out to be the start of a series…

Stories from the shelf (Part One)

Every shelf tells a story. Here’s the top shelf of a corner unit that contains many of my film soundtracks collected over the years (mostly the ‘premium’ limited expansions that I largely had to import from America). It possibly says more about how my brain works than anything else, as I clearly tried to make it alphabetical, or something, starting therefore with John Barry and a few titles beginning with ‘A’ then going somewhat astray. Lower shelves in future instalments will be all Goldsmith and Horner and Williams and more, but I’m going to start from the top and work my way down, so we begin with John Barry.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Barry, but I know many film soundtrack lovers are absolutely convinced he’s brilliant and top of the pile. One soundtrack I didn’t squeeze in here and probably should have is his soundtrack for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which is probably my favourite of his (and my favourite Bond film, too). I suspect the reason why that expanded CD isn’t on this shelf is because I’m not actually sure where it is…

You may find a recurrent theme going on, where notable absences come to my mind for the same reason.  I’ve been buying too many CDs for so many years, and part of the reason why I put up some more shelving last summer was to put my favourite and most treasured discs in one place so I know where to find them (this years project is to do the same with my books but hey-ho we’ll see how THAT goes). Part of the problem is that, once a disc is ripped onto my laptop/external hard drive, I can then listen to it often but without going back to the CD, so that disc actually gets untouched for months, years…

Anyway, back to this shelf. And Barry. My issue with Barry is likely the same reason his devotees are so devoted. Barry had a knack of finding a ‘killer’ theme and therefore compilation albums of his soundtracks are often very successful, but unfortunately (from my point of view) this would also prove to be Barry’s weakness in his actual full scores, and certainly score expansions on CD. Barry would write a wonderful theme for a film and then he would use that for most of the score, reworking it and re-orchestrating it endlessly. His fans adore this, I’m sure. My personal mileage varies so I only have select albums, and one or two even then only because I bought them in sales.

This criticism, by the way, is possibly actually unfair, certainly in the case of the first disc here, The Lion in Winter, a film I haven’t even seen but I was recommended the score and yeah, its a wonderful piece of work. Some people refer to it as Barry’s Christmas album and that rather fits: its in a medieval mode, with choir and pomp and majesty. It features, typical of Barry, some simply magnificent themes (‘Eleanor’s Arrival’ is quite gorgeous, the kind of music that as soon as you hear it you stop what you are doing and purely listen, enrapt, and frustratingly this is one of those times where Barry doesn’t then reuse the theme continuously so my argument regards Barry comes undone). This is possibly my second-favourite Barry score. It dates from 1968, so its almost as old as I am (its aged considerably better).

Second on the shelf is his immensely popular Dances With Wolves soundtrack, here the two-disc expanded edition from La La Land Records (a label you’ll see plenty of here, alongside Intrada and the late, lamented FSM) which was released in 2015. Soundtracks are often like Blu-rays, they seem to get released on anniversaries, something marketing boys seem to be fascinated by which endlessly irritates me. Disc releases of films seem to be delayed years in order to tie into some 15th or 20th or 25th Anniversary (the higher that number goes the more scared I become when its one I recall seeing it at the cinema). An interesting piece of trivia: Dances With Wolves was originally supposed to be scored by Basil Poledouris (of Conan the Barbarian and most pertinently, Lonesome Dove fame), but he backed out of it in order to fulfil obligations to his friend John Milius regards his delayed Flight of the Intruder film. Wolves would have been Poledouris’ break-out score, conceivably changing his career completely and fans of Lonesome Dove can only wonder at what Poledouris might have conceived recording the score for Kevin Costner’s hit Western. Poledouris’ career slid downhill after that, and the bittersweet sting in the tale is that Intruder got pushed back six months so Poledouris could have scored both after all. Life can be cruel. But then again, I guess Barry’s fans hear that story and grit their teeth thinking that they almost missed out on one of Barry’s most popular scores. Its certainly got some wonderful emotive themes and was a big part of the films success. 

Barry’s smouldering, evocative score for Body Heat follows: Lawrence Kasdan’s wonderful neo-noir is a fantastic film truly elevated by Barry’s moody score. Its possibly too repetitive (this is FSMs 2-disc expansion with full score on disc one and Barry’s original album on disc two with an added near-thirty minutes of theme demos that wears thin) but its so atmospheric, its almost like a sultry, smoky score of summer heat, which is exactly what Barry was aiming at. 

Another FSM disc follows- Barry’s score for the 1976 King Kong. Back in the early 1980s, the vinyl album of this was in the bargain bins of record stores and I picked up a copy (as I recall it came with a poster): I was always seduced by that films poster art that was actually promising some other movie entirely (not the poster which FSM used, by the way, as they obviously intended their 2-disc edition to stand out from the original which FSM had actually reissued on CD a few years earlier). I didn’t see the 1976 film until several years later, when much of the music would make more sense, but the film always fascinated me because a paperback of the making of the film was one of the first books I ever read and one that really fired my imagination about movies and the stories about the making of them. So while this King Kong was really a disaster movie for all the wrong reasons, I’ll always have some affection for it. This Kong has something so typically Barry- an absolute belter of a love theme, and it sounds fantastic in some of its variations here in expanded form. Some of the action music is quite jarring and atonal but the romantic sweep of the love theme is quite timeless, Barry just had a gift for melodies like that (see also Somewhere in Time, Raise the Titanic and so many others). I will also just say that the track Kong Hits the Big Apple was a big-band number that was much derided by my freinds and I back in the day when we listened to the vinyl album, and it hasn’t really aged well since, but hey, it was 1976.  

Then we come to Barry’s The Black Hole score. Again, this was one I had on vinyl and it really suffers from Barry’s habit of just repeating ad nauseam a theme over and over. The Black Hole was an ill-fit for Barry; I don’t think this kind of space adventure flick was really suited to him, it was really John Williams domain and to be fair, even a great like Jerry Goldsmith possibly struggled at that kind of thing (although Star Trek: The Motion Picture is absolutely magnificent, but more on that later, as that’s a story for another shelf). I recall that The Black Hole was one of, if not THE, first digital recordings of a major film score., because they made a big deal of it on the cover of the album and in adverts I read in Starlog at the time (1979). In that respect, it seemed more something of the future than the actual music did. Its no disaster but I remember buying this expanded CD edition more out of a sense of nostalgia than a love of the music, although it is a pretty cool main theme (the heroic action theme is diabolical though, that REALLY didn’t suit Barry- Star Wars theme it isn’t). In hindsight the case of The Black Hole, and Disney so clearly trying to mimic the appeal/success of Star Wars, is really kind of funny when you consider that they spent over $4 billion buying the thing from George Lucas decades later- if you can’t beat ’em, er, buy ’em, seems to be the lesson of that story).

This post is getting too long already so we’ll skip on past a few Barry discs I bought in sales in order to instead dwell on Alan Silvestri’s score for The Abyss, here the expanded Varese two-disc edition that was something of a Grail of mine. I’m not a big fan of Silvestri’s scores, but I always loved The Abyss, score and movie. 1989: summer of Batman, soundtracks like Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade, Pet Semetary… soundtracks that were coming out on CD then, vinyl being a thing of the distant past. The Abyss was a suspenseful, dramatic and strange score, even if its Main Title owed an awful lot to the opening of James Horner’s Brainstorm. Temp music rearing its ugly head again, I suspect (I mean, that thing is a blatant rip).  

Back then I still bought soundtracks from shops, even though that seems something so long ago. I remember the Saturday I went into town and bought both The Abyss CD and Laurie Anderson’s Strange Angels CD, listening to both of them late that night on headphones (Strange Angels has always been a personal favourite album, by the way, which is possibly why I remember that day so clearly- oh and two girls in the town who I think were trying to pick me and my mate Andy up, but I was too distracted (okay, ignorant) to pick up on it at the time, foolishly batting them off. I had odd priorities for a teenager back then and I placed nerdy concerns somewhere higher than girls).  

Varese’s original The Abyss album on CD was typical of the time, limited to about 40 or 50 minutes or so (which was pretty good, as many hovered around the 30-minute mark due to music union issues), certainly far from complete and missing some of the music I enjoyed in the film- so the deluxe version released in 2014 really was something special, so much so that I posted about it here at the time. A limited edition, as so many of these score expansions on disc are, I recently noticed this edition being up for sale at £150 on Amazon. Yikes. I dare say quite a few CDs on my shelves might be worth something now, or at least for as long as people have CD drives/players. 

Here’s where my filing of my CDs becomes a little eccentric. What follows on the shelf are a number of discs linked by the actor who stars in the particular films, rather than by the composer: Avanti!, The Apartment/The Fortune Cookie, Irma La Douce,  How To Murder Your Wife/Lord Love A Duck and Barefoot in the Park/The Odd Couple (regards those last two, the films in question are definitely NOT Lord Love A Duck or Barefoot in the Park, its just that those each feature scores for two films by Neal Hefti). The actor in question is of course Jack Lemmon, and these are films I absolutely adore, and they date from a period when film music was really quite wonderful, melodic and memorable: scores that are great, for great movies that star a great actor. The actual music is quite varied and the composers quite different in style, but generally seem to have great romantic themes that really soar: Carlo Rustichelli’s Avanti! is beautiful and timeless, and Neal Hefti’s How To Murder Your Wife has a love theme that just.. well, I fell in love with THAT theme back when I first saw the film many years ago, and it never ceases to amaze me that it ever came out on CD one day, and one that actually featured the full score as well as the original album on a second disc.  I think I was buying film soundtracks at a particularly fortuitous time: the last score for a Jack Lemmon film that I’m really holding out for is Prisoner of Second Avenue, another personal favourite film whose Blu-ray I can endlessly re-watch. Maybe one day.

Next disc on this shelf is Peter Schickele’s Silent Running. This is another CD that is pretty special to me. Douglas Trumbull’s film Silent Running has always been a particular favourite of mine and its ecological themes have only gotten more prescient as time has moved on, and Schickele’s score is one that sounds really quite unique: its very 1970s, featuring small orchestration with folk songs from Joan Baez that should really date it (maybe they do, but that only adds to the films strange charm). It was one of the films from which I recorded the music via tape deck and holding a microphone to the tinny tv speaker, and listened to the cassette with the music mixed with some dialogue and sound effects.

Many, many moons ago back in the 1980s I used to see the vinyl album in stores but I never bought it (pocket money never stretched that far), and when it went out of print I just thought it would turn up on CD someday (everything seemed to eventually), but it didn’t. I think the reason was that the master-tapes were lost or destroyed, so when Intrada finally released it on disc in 2016, it was actually a recording sourced from a pristine vinyl copy, and surprisingly, it sounds pretty damn fine.  Plenty good enough to me, considering I’d been pining for a release for decades at that point. Whenever I see this CD on the shelf I have a bit of a ‘pinch-me’ moment. 

Finally, Marcelo Zarvos’ The Door in the Floor soundtrack: I love this music. Its one of those deeply emotional, rather dark and reflective scores… the film is a pretty bleak drama, really quite sad, being about the break-up of a marriage that being destroyed by the unbearable grief over the loss of two children in an accident (it stars Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger and Mimi Rogers and is really quite good). Its one of those cases where the music is as integral and important as any other part of the picture. In this respect its like Vangelis’ Blade Runner: the score is the soul of the movie. Zarvos’ score is such a powerful work of longing and regret; to me it works completely seperate from the film the music it was written for. I suspect many will have never heard it or seen the film (it dates back to 2004, incredibly).

Crikey, this one went on a bit. Might have to pause awhile before I get around to the next shelf: Horner!

Yes I know, ‘G’ (for Goldsmith) comes before Horner but there is a method to my madness…

.

Revisiting Contact (1997)

I have a fascination with space travel, alien civilizations and our own place in the Cosmos that dates back to me as a kid watching Star Trek. Films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Carl Sagan’s book and tv series Cosmos only reinforced my conviction that we are not alone, that we should watch the skies and being alone in this vast universe is surely a big waste of Space. 

I never read Carl Sagan’s book Contact. I’m not entirely sure why, it seems a strange omission but life is weird like that, we make some choices which, looking back, don’t entirely make a lot of sense.   

So I don’t know what differences exist between Robert Zemeckis’ 1997 film and the original book, or whether it is wholly faithful. It feels like something Carl Sagan would have written; certainly it has novel ideas and extrapolates from scientific ideas a plausible premise about First Contact. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter to me, although now that I consider it I really should catch up with the book sometime. Its enough that the film was, when I saw it at the cinema back in the day, and remains today watching my Blu-Ray copy, a pretty strong and quite satisfying film. 

Its perhaps a wee bit melodramatic, a little too Hollywood… maybe its just that its a product of the 1990s. I think it would have benefited by being made several years ago with a less emotive director, someone like Denis Villeneuve, really- its no mistake that the film I kept on thinking about while watching Contact was Villeneuve’s own First Contact film, his superb Arrival from 2016. Arrival is a better film by some margin, I think, but I would dearly love to see what someone like Villeneuve might have made of something like Contact, given the material and a big cinematic toybox.

I was oddly disturbed, funnily enough, when I considered that the last time I had watched Contact was before Arrival existed- this was the first time watching Contact in which Arrival was in my thoughts, and it made me consider the strange thing it is of re-watching films over the years. We are different, the world is different, the cinematic landscape is different: and that later point is perhaps the most telling of all. Films made decades later with better technologies inevitably have some bearing on whether a film still holds up years down the line. For one thing, I seem to remember the visual effects of Contact being pretty cutting-edge back in 1997; its funny how much some CG effects have aged spectacularly badly. Many of Contact’s visual effects hold up pretty well, and some of them, er, really don’t look good.   

The search for extra-terrestrial life always made perfect sense and great importance to me. As Arthur C Clarke put it,  “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” Contact doesn’t voice it in the same way, it leaves that argument unspoken and I keep on thinking that Jodie Foster’s character, our central heroine, Ellie, should scream that sentiment out at her loudest voice: how can any one of her detractors critiquing her obsession with SETI deny it? Contact seems more concerned with arguments of Faith, examinations of Faith, either in God or Science and its a bittersweet stroke of genius that Ellie’s First Contact experience ultimately becomes a matter of Faith. Are we believers (of course we are, we saw what she saw) or are we non-believers (did we really just see what she thinks she saw)? I think the film would have been incredibly brave had it just left it that way- instead it tips its hat with a reveal that Ellie’s digital recorder may have recorded just static- but it recorded eighteen hours of it, which validates Ellie’s claims. It feels a little too literal, too obvious to me, I think I would have preferred a vaguer conclusion. I think what I’m getting at is that Contact is still an enjoyable and fairly strong film- it just isn’t sophisticated enough, for me today. Maybe its too literal. 

The films constant tension between God and science, between Faith and Empirical Evidence is both its most interesting dynamic and its most irritating. It keeps on forcing its way in. It feels like something Carl Sagan would have written, even if he always seemed quite dismissive about anything Divine- God always seemed too simple a solution for Carl. My suspicion, having not read the book, is that a lot of the films preoccupation with God and science are from the Hollywood direction, not the book, but hey, I could be way wrong and should-have-done-my-research.

The cast is really good. Jodie Foster is great as Ellie, and its wonderful seeing Tom Skerritt as the  boo-hiss villain of the piece, scientist/bureaucrat/bastard David Drumlin. James Woods of course could play the frankly despicable -if wholly believable- government senator Kitz in his sleep, and seeing him in this I wonder again why we see so little of him these days (has he retired?). How wonderful, too, is John Hurt as tech magnate S. R. Hadden (and me suddenly realising he’s a fellow Alien colleague of Skerritt, and yep they both die in this film too). Really, the cast is one of the films strengths. Even a rather young-looking Matthew McConaughey, who always irritated me in the film and still does -too cool, too self-confident, too sexy, too Hollywood- has the novel perspective gifted from his later roles, particularly Interstellar, a film that assumes intelligence but is frankly quite behind Contact in that regard (Interstellar’s twist that the ‘aliens’ are our future selves communicating via a Cosmic Bookcase is just… I’m always rather lost for words). 

As I’ve gotten older my own faith, as it were, that it would surely be just a matter of Time before SETI found some evidence of an alien signal and proof of neighbours in the Cosmos, has not been realised. Years and decades went by and the euphoria of Close Encounters of the Third Kind was eventually worn down by mundane reality. When that film originally came out I read something by someone remarking that the events of CE3K had they happened would have been kept secret, we -the public at large- would never have been told, it was an event just too big, too huge. It would change too much, so such revelations would be hidden away for our own safety. Reading that as a kid, I dismissed it with my usual youthful enthusiasm, but as I’ve gotten older and more jaded… partly I think, how do you keep such secrets secret in this Information Age, but then I think, grow up. They can hide anything.

Maybe something like Close Encounters of the Third Kind couldn’t be made today. Its message of Good Aliens after decades of Hollywood alien invasions felt quite radical at the time, even if its sentiments proved short-lived with Alien and Independence Day and so many others reasserting the alien’s rightful place of outsiders and menace. Are we ready for First Contact? Robert Zemeckis’ film suggests that we’re not, and its possibly right, but its a great question to ask and ponder over. For my part, a recurring problem for me every time Contact finishes, is that its somehow pressed some magical ‘reset’ button worthy of 1960s television- there is no mention of the alien technology just sitting waiting to be used again, or the various applications of that technology that would filter down into military and civilian use. Ellie is even back at her old job listening for signals again. James Woods dismissing the whole thing as an elaborate hoax by some high-tech industrialist is like some kind of magic trick, and its that one moment in which Contact becomes, at the last moment, utterly stupid.

Just as at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, there would be no going back, and maybe the REALLY interesting films, in both cases, would be the films telling us what happened next, but neither CE3K2 or Contact 2 ever happened. Sometimes film-makers get away scot-free.