READING, WATCHING, LISTENING TO
Find out what has been entertaining the Entertainment Manchester staff this week...
THE EDITOR
READING: I've got two books on the go at the moment, My Life by Fidel Castro (still) and Phra Farang by Phra Peter Pannapadipo. I've already talked about the former, so I'll focus on the latter, which is a very interesting book by a guy who used to be called Peter Robinson, an English businessman who gave up his superficial life in London to become a Buddhist monk in Thailand. It's a massive leap for him and his experiences not only as a monk but also a Phra Farang (foreign monk) in a completely different culture. It's warmly-written, amusing and inspiring story.
WATCHING: The only film I've really seen recently is The Frighteners, which I'd seen a long time ago on video. It was the Director's Cut on DVD (owned by The Writer), but to be honest I couldn't tell the difference. It's an entertaining enough flick, but there's not much below the surface, so it doesn't stay in the memory long. The main thing I've been watching, with a hell of lot below the surface, is the last series of Six Feet Under, completing my six-month marathon. Having watched it all the way through again, it's probably jumped above The Sopranos as my favourite TV show, so honest, funny, tragic, intelligent, spiritual, shocking and just downright awesome... I could watch it all again now. Maybe I will.
LISTENING TO: Since finishing Six Feet Under the main thing I've been listening to was a mix-CD I made of songs from the show, and it's very good indeed. From classic rock tracks like Journey To The Centre Of The Mind by The Amboy Dukes and Don't Fear The Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult to modern stuff like A Rush Of Blood To The Head by Coldplay (which has taken a whole new lease of life since I watched series there again recently) and of course Breathe Me by Sia, every song is connected to a scene and the emotions of that scene. That's what makes great TV and that's why SFU will always stay with me while I have these songs...
THE WRITER
READING: In the last Reading, Watching, Listening To I said I was going through a bit of a Steven Spielberg phase. I’m still going through it, although this time my obsession is in book form only. Having finished Warren Buckland’s ‘Directed by Steven Spielberg’, I’ve moved on to Bob Balaban’s ‘Spielberg, Truffaut and Me’. It’s a fascinating diary from the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Balaban proves a fine host as he explains his role in the making of the film, the young Spielberg’s directorial style and, best of all, the friendship he built up with Francois Truffaut, who plays French scientist Lamcombe. Next up, Joseph McBride’s out-of-print biography Steven Spielberg. If I can find it…
WATCHING: Weirdly for me, I’ve not watched many films recently. I got through about fifteen minutes of The Phantom Menace the other day, but then Jar Jar Binks appeared and I gave up. So the last thing I watched was a TV show: Wonder Woman. And in a bid to hang onto the little shreds of credibility which have just been set alight and thrown into the air by that revelation, I’ll say it’s fun, frothy entertainment. Hardly classic television, but good silly stuff.
LISTENING TO: And on the other end of the superhero scale, I’ve been listening to the soundtrack for Batman Begins incessantly just lately, partly due to the fact The Dark Knight is tantalisingly close to being released, but mostly because of the fact I love the track Molossus. It’s the music used in the brilliantly orchestrated Batmobile chase about halfway through the film and is highly recommended if you want to make your weekly shop a bit more interesting. Composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard are hard at work on the music for Dark Knight at the moment and I can‘t wait to hear what they‘ve come up with.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Sunday, May 04, 2008
ENTERTAINMENT ESSENTIALS: Temple Of The Dog
When Pearl Jam followed Nirvana out of Seattle and onto world domination, Kurt Cobain gracelessly called them sell-outs who were just cashing in on grunge, which was as wildly inaccurate as it was unfair. Indeed, Pearl Jam were much more entrenched in the Seattle scene than Nirvana ever were, because guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament had been in some of the bands who helped lay the foundations for the success that Nirvana had, like Green River and Mother Love Bone.
In March 1990, Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose just before their first album came out. That left Gossard and Ament to start setting up another band, initially called Mookie Blaylock (catchy name, eh?) while their friend Chris Cornell from fellow Seattle band Soundgarden went off on tour just after Wood's death and began writing some songs as a tribute to him. Those songs were called Reach Down and Say Hello 2 Heaven.
Cornell approached Ament and Gossard about getting together a group to record and release these songs as tribute single and they added Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron and a guitarist called Mike McCready, who had known Gossard since high school. Cornell had continued writing songs, meanwhile, and it was decided there was enough to make a full album, particularly as most of this material was much more melodic than he would normally be writing for his day-job band.
And so Temple Of The Dog was born, taking their name from a line in a Mother Love Bone song. The self-titled album came out in April 1991, and while it didn't particularly garner much attention at the time, its importance in the grunge timeline is unmistakeable. One of the best tracks and the only single released from the album is Hunger Strike, a duet between Cornell and an at-the-time-unknown singer called Eddie Vedder, who had been in town auditioning for Mookie Blaylock.
His now-unmistakeable vocals work perfectly alongside Cornell and make it one of the best and most significant songs in Seattle music history. Temple Of The Dog went their separate ways after the album came out, with Cornell and Cameron carrying on with Soundgarden until they split up in 1997 and Ament, Gossard, McCready and Vedder forming the band that soon became known as Pearl Jam. Fittingly, after Soundgarden's implosion, Cameron joined his former Temple mates as the full-time Pearl Jam drummer.
At a show in 2003, Cornell joined them for a show and performed Reach Down and Hunger Strike, while he also delighted this writer at an Audioslave show at the MEN Arena in 2005 when his solo acoustic mini-set included the beautiful Call Me A Dog, even if virtually no-one else seemed to know what it was. The effect that Temple Of The Dog had on Cornell as a songwriter can't be underestimated, as this period seems to be the pivotal moment in Soundgarden's career, where they stopped being a heavy metal group and moved towards becoming a hugely-popular grunge group with hits like the melodic Black Hole Sun.
For that reason alone, this is an important album, even without the effect it had in bringing all of the current members of Pearl Jam together for the first time. And, more than that, it's also a fantastic album on its own merits, and a fitting tribute to a now-mostly-forgotten talent in Andrew Wood. With rock supergroups like Audioslave and Velvet Revolver crashing and burning in recent years, Temple Of The Dog is a reminder of how something special really can happen when members of your favourite bands get together and make music...
When Pearl Jam followed Nirvana out of Seattle and onto world domination, Kurt Cobain gracelessly called them sell-outs who were just cashing in on grunge, which was as wildly inaccurate as it was unfair. Indeed, Pearl Jam were much more entrenched in the Seattle scene than Nirvana ever were, because guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament had been in some of the bands who helped lay the foundations for the success that Nirvana had, like Green River and Mother Love Bone.
In March 1990, Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose just before their first album came out. That left Gossard and Ament to start setting up another band, initially called Mookie Blaylock (catchy name, eh?) while their friend Chris Cornell from fellow Seattle band Soundgarden went off on tour just after Wood's death and began writing some songs as a tribute to him. Those songs were called Reach Down and Say Hello 2 Heaven.
Cornell approached Ament and Gossard about getting together a group to record and release these songs as tribute single and they added Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron and a guitarist called Mike McCready, who had known Gossard since high school. Cornell had continued writing songs, meanwhile, and it was decided there was enough to make a full album, particularly as most of this material was much more melodic than he would normally be writing for his day-job band.
And so Temple Of The Dog was born, taking their name from a line in a Mother Love Bone song. The self-titled album came out in April 1991, and while it didn't particularly garner much attention at the time, its importance in the grunge timeline is unmistakeable. One of the best tracks and the only single released from the album is Hunger Strike, a duet between Cornell and an at-the-time-unknown singer called Eddie Vedder, who had been in town auditioning for Mookie Blaylock.
His now-unmistakeable vocals work perfectly alongside Cornell and make it one of the best and most significant songs in Seattle music history. Temple Of The Dog went their separate ways after the album came out, with Cornell and Cameron carrying on with Soundgarden until they split up in 1997 and Ament, Gossard, McCready and Vedder forming the band that soon became known as Pearl Jam. Fittingly, after Soundgarden's implosion, Cameron joined his former Temple mates as the full-time Pearl Jam drummer.
At a show in 2003, Cornell joined them for a show and performed Reach Down and Hunger Strike, while he also delighted this writer at an Audioslave show at the MEN Arena in 2005 when his solo acoustic mini-set included the beautiful Call Me A Dog, even if virtually no-one else seemed to know what it was. The effect that Temple Of The Dog had on Cornell as a songwriter can't be underestimated, as this period seems to be the pivotal moment in Soundgarden's career, where they stopped being a heavy metal group and moved towards becoming a hugely-popular grunge group with hits like the melodic Black Hole Sun.
For that reason alone, this is an important album, even without the effect it had in bringing all of the current members of Pearl Jam together for the first time. And, more than that, it's also a fantastic album on its own merits, and a fitting tribute to a now-mostly-forgotten talent in Andrew Wood. With rock supergroups like Audioslave and Velvet Revolver crashing and burning in recent years, Temple Of The Dog is a reminder of how something special really can happen when members of your favourite bands get together and make music...
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
ENTERTAINMENT ESSENTIALS: Roger Corman
If box-office figures are anything to go by, modern filmgoers love a good bit of blood and gore. Horror films such as Eli Roth’s Hostel, the Saw franchise and the innumerable American remakes of Japanese fright flicks like The Grudge and The Eye have all done big business in recent years and the genre has seen budgets increase and Hollywood stars attracted to it as a result. But it wasn’t always like this. Way back in the 50s and early 60s, in between its two boom periods in the 20s and 30s and 70s and 80s, the genre was dismissed as the stuff of B-movies, a playground for cheapo flicks which could produce a tidy profit from a tiny budget. One man who excelled in this arena was Roger Corman, whose The Pit and the Pendulum is the subject of this week’s Entertainment Essentials.
Known today primarily for being the producer who handed big breaks to the likes of James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, Corman has also proven himself a highly talented director. His early, sci-fi tinged B-movies boasted absurd titles like Swamp Women, Naked Paradise and Attack of the Crab Monsters and are admittedly hardly great works of art. But they do stand as entertaining slices of hokum, and the fact they were highly profitable (a direct consequence of the low budgets which were being worked with) attracted the interest of burgeoning studio American International Pictures, who handed Corman a (slightly) bigger budget and asked him to create a horror film.
The result was 1960’s House of Usher. Based on the short story by master of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe, it was directed by Corman, written by legendary horror scribe Richard Matheson and starred Vincent Price as the doomed Roderick Usher, a paranoid patriarch whose fear of repeating the sins of his murderous ancestors leads to madness and death. Costing just $270,000 to make (by way of contrast, Hostel 2 cost $10million), it proved an unexpected success (the cheapness of the production again meaning profits were high) and inspired AIP to hire Corman, Matheson and Price for a second modestly-budgeted Poe film, this time an adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum.
However, there is a major problem with the second in Corman‘s seven-film Poe cycle: it’s barely Poe at all. Because the writer’s original tale stretches to only a few meagre pages and doesn‘t really have much by way of plot, Matheson created an original story in which Price plays Nicholas Medina, a frail old man who as a child witnessed his Inquisitor father bury his mother alive and fears he may have accidentally subjected his own wife Elizabeth to the same fate. Soon, Elizabeth’s brother arrives at Medina’s castle to discern what has happened to his sister and, as he attempts to solve the mystery, Matheson gradually cranks up the tension with a series of ghostly goings-on.
A song often played by Elizabeth is given an eerie airing, her old room is vandalised despite no-one having access to it and her voice can be heard wailing through the corridors at night. Photographed by Floyd Crosby and scored by Les Baxter, these scenes - and indeed the film as a whole - have a great stripped-back menace to them, and they are complemented well by a collection of flashbacks in which Corman, still on a small budget, innovatively experiments with expressionism. Wide-angle lenses, titled camera angles and blue and red-tinted film stock are used to create a dreamy but still oppressive atmosphere which brilliantly reflects Medina’s fevered state of mind, as well as the tone of Poe’s story.
Finally, all the hauntings drive Medina insane and his madness makes for a ghoulishly twisted end to a glorious slice of filmmaking. But sadly Corman, Matheson and Price could never quite match it. Their final Poe adaptation, 1964’s Tomb of Legeia, is praised in some quarters but mostly forgotten along with 1962’s The Premature Burial and anthology Tales of Terror. Disappointingly, Poe’s most famous work, The Raven, was turned into an overlong 1963 farce which bears little relation to its source, meaning 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death is the only other Poe cycle film that can be favourably compared with the first two.
Still, despite this, Corman, Matheson and Price contributed massively to horror cinema with their Poe films, with a scare in Pit being named as one of the most significant moments in post-60s American horror by Stephen King. Of course, time is rarely kind to the horror genre, and some may find Pit and its brother films laughable, over-the-top and cheap by today's glossy standards. But horror is not the domain of big budgets and A-list actors. It's the B-movie world of creaking walls, cobwebbed dungeons and subtle suggestion. Corman grasped this better than anyone and proved that when it comes to scaring the pants off you, less really is more.
If box-office figures are anything to go by, modern filmgoers love a good bit of blood and gore. Horror films such as Eli Roth’s Hostel, the Saw franchise and the innumerable American remakes of Japanese fright flicks like The Grudge and The Eye have all done big business in recent years and the genre has seen budgets increase and Hollywood stars attracted to it as a result. But it wasn’t always like this. Way back in the 50s and early 60s, in between its two boom periods in the 20s and 30s and 70s and 80s, the genre was dismissed as the stuff of B-movies, a playground for cheapo flicks which could produce a tidy profit from a tiny budget. One man who excelled in this arena was Roger Corman, whose The Pit and the Pendulum is the subject of this week’s Entertainment Essentials.
Known today primarily for being the producer who handed big breaks to the likes of James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, Corman has also proven himself a highly talented director. His early, sci-fi tinged B-movies boasted absurd titles like Swamp Women, Naked Paradise and Attack of the Crab Monsters and are admittedly hardly great works of art. But they do stand as entertaining slices of hokum, and the fact they were highly profitable (a direct consequence of the low budgets which were being worked with) attracted the interest of burgeoning studio American International Pictures, who handed Corman a (slightly) bigger budget and asked him to create a horror film.
The result was 1960’s House of Usher. Based on the short story by master of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe, it was directed by Corman, written by legendary horror scribe Richard Matheson and starred Vincent Price as the doomed Roderick Usher, a paranoid patriarch whose fear of repeating the sins of his murderous ancestors leads to madness and death. Costing just $270,000 to make (by way of contrast, Hostel 2 cost $10million), it proved an unexpected success (the cheapness of the production again meaning profits were high) and inspired AIP to hire Corman, Matheson and Price for a second modestly-budgeted Poe film, this time an adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum.
However, there is a major problem with the second in Corman‘s seven-film Poe cycle: it’s barely Poe at all. Because the writer’s original tale stretches to only a few meagre pages and doesn‘t really have much by way of plot, Matheson created an original story in which Price plays Nicholas Medina, a frail old man who as a child witnessed his Inquisitor father bury his mother alive and fears he may have accidentally subjected his own wife Elizabeth to the same fate. Soon, Elizabeth’s brother arrives at Medina’s castle to discern what has happened to his sister and, as he attempts to solve the mystery, Matheson gradually cranks up the tension with a series of ghostly goings-on.
A song often played by Elizabeth is given an eerie airing, her old room is vandalised despite no-one having access to it and her voice can be heard wailing through the corridors at night. Photographed by Floyd Crosby and scored by Les Baxter, these scenes - and indeed the film as a whole - have a great stripped-back menace to them, and they are complemented well by a collection of flashbacks in which Corman, still on a small budget, innovatively experiments with expressionism. Wide-angle lenses, titled camera angles and blue and red-tinted film stock are used to create a dreamy but still oppressive atmosphere which brilliantly reflects Medina’s fevered state of mind, as well as the tone of Poe’s story.
Finally, all the hauntings drive Medina insane and his madness makes for a ghoulishly twisted end to a glorious slice of filmmaking. But sadly Corman, Matheson and Price could never quite match it. Their final Poe adaptation, 1964’s Tomb of Legeia, is praised in some quarters but mostly forgotten along with 1962’s The Premature Burial and anthology Tales of Terror. Disappointingly, Poe’s most famous work, The Raven, was turned into an overlong 1963 farce which bears little relation to its source, meaning 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death is the only other Poe cycle film that can be favourably compared with the first two.
Still, despite this, Corman, Matheson and Price contributed massively to horror cinema with their Poe films, with a scare in Pit being named as one of the most significant moments in post-60s American horror by Stephen King. Of course, time is rarely kind to the horror genre, and some may find Pit and its brother films laughable, over-the-top and cheap by today's glossy standards. But horror is not the domain of big budgets and A-list actors. It's the B-movie world of creaking walls, cobwebbed dungeons and subtle suggestion. Corman grasped this better than anyone and proved that when it comes to scaring the pants off you, less really is more.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
READING, WATCHING, LISTENING TO
Find out what has been entertaining the Entertainment Manchester staff this week...
THE WRITER
READING: With the latest Indiana Jones film out next month (hurrah!), I'm going through a bit of a Steven Spielberg phase, so my entry into this edition will be slightly (well, very) 'Berg-centric. In terms of books, I'm currently reading Warren Buckland's 'Directed by Steven Spielberg', an in-depth analysis of Spielberg's directorial style (average shot length, camera position etc). I’m on the Jaws section at the moment and it’s very dry and serious stuff, but don’t let that put you off. Buckland really knows what he’s talking about and this (along with Joseph McBride’s stunning biography) is the first port of call for anyone studying Spielberg.
WATCHING: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I tried to watch Duel the other day, but my elderly DVD player was having none of it, so the last film I watched was CE3K, which I haven't seen for a while but is still a masterpiece. It's the slow build-up that makes it work. What so many imitators of Spielberg's blockbusters fail to recognise is that you've got to tease the audience, make them want to see the mothership, the shark or the dinosaur, not just hand it to them on a plate. Spielberg does that brilliantly here and because of it he really allows you to become Roy Neary, rather than just passively observe him, as he desperately seeks the meaning of that mash potato Devil's Tower.
LISTENING TO: I've been listening to pretty much nothing but John Williams soundtracks in recent weeks, some of which have been the obvious ones (Indy, Close Encounters - especially his ethereal music for the mothership scenes), but mostly the lesser praised stuff such as Saving Private Ryan and War of the Worlds. It’s perhaps a shame that neither album has the immediacy of some of Williams’s more well-known work and that they don‘t quite play as well in isolation as a Raiders March or Flying, but both are full of reflective, haunting music which perfectly fits the sombre mood of the films.
THE EDITOR
READING: My Life by Fidel Castro. It's not exactly an autobiography but is still his life story, as told by him in a series of interviews with Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet. One of the most divisive political characters of the 20th Century, Castro certainly has a story to tell and it's not one that you often get to hear in a Western world where he is so demonised by America. I haven't got far enough into it to make any judgements myself, but he's clearly a charismatic, passionate and fiercely intelligent man, and having recently finally stepped down, it seems a perfect time to hear what he has to say for himself.
WATCHING: On Tv over the last few weeks I've watched a couple of new American imports, one very good, one not so good. The very good one is Mad Men, rather deceptively hailed as being from 'the writer of The Sopranos', when 'a writer of The Sopranos' would have been more accurate as it isn't by David Chase, but Matthew Weiner, who was quite heavily involved in the stunning last series of that classic TV show. Mad Men isn't quite at that level, but it's very classy stuff nonetheless. Dirty Sexy Money though, despite a cast featuring Peter Krause, Donald Sutherland and one of the Baldwins (William probably), didn't really seem to have anything below the glossy and shallow surface.
LISTENING TO: Dangerous Game by Mary Weiss, one of the most underappreciated and remarkable albums of last year. Weiss was the lead singer in legendary girl group The Shangri-Las, but pretty much retired from the music industry when they imploded in 1968. Astonishingly, she reemerged last year with an cracking debut solo album backed by garage rockers The Reigning Sound, and while her voice has aged, her attitude and energy remains intact. Also impressive and retro is Chris Rea's latest album-book, The Return Of The Fabulous Hofner Bluenotes, an immaculately-presented three-album set that tells the fictional story of a 60s guitar instrumental group called The Delmonts and their progression into blues-rockers The Hofner Bluenotes. If that sounds a bit pretentious, it isn't because the music is awesome.
Find out what has been entertaining the Entertainment Manchester staff this week...
THE WRITER
READING: With the latest Indiana Jones film out next month (hurrah!), I'm going through a bit of a Steven Spielberg phase, so my entry into this edition will be slightly (well, very) 'Berg-centric. In terms of books, I'm currently reading Warren Buckland's 'Directed by Steven Spielberg', an in-depth analysis of Spielberg's directorial style (average shot length, camera position etc). I’m on the Jaws section at the moment and it’s very dry and serious stuff, but don’t let that put you off. Buckland really knows what he’s talking about and this (along with Joseph McBride’s stunning biography) is the first port of call for anyone studying Spielberg.
WATCHING: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I tried to watch Duel the other day, but my elderly DVD player was having none of it, so the last film I watched was CE3K, which I haven't seen for a while but is still a masterpiece. It's the slow build-up that makes it work. What so many imitators of Spielberg's blockbusters fail to recognise is that you've got to tease the audience, make them want to see the mothership, the shark or the dinosaur, not just hand it to them on a plate. Spielberg does that brilliantly here and because of it he really allows you to become Roy Neary, rather than just passively observe him, as he desperately seeks the meaning of that mash potato Devil's Tower.
LISTENING TO: I've been listening to pretty much nothing but John Williams soundtracks in recent weeks, some of which have been the obvious ones (Indy, Close Encounters - especially his ethereal music for the mothership scenes), but mostly the lesser praised stuff such as Saving Private Ryan and War of the Worlds. It’s perhaps a shame that neither album has the immediacy of some of Williams’s more well-known work and that they don‘t quite play as well in isolation as a Raiders March or Flying, but both are full of reflective, haunting music which perfectly fits the sombre mood of the films.
THE EDITOR
READING: My Life by Fidel Castro. It's not exactly an autobiography but is still his life story, as told by him in a series of interviews with Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet. One of the most divisive political characters of the 20th Century, Castro certainly has a story to tell and it's not one that you often get to hear in a Western world where he is so demonised by America. I haven't got far enough into it to make any judgements myself, but he's clearly a charismatic, passionate and fiercely intelligent man, and having recently finally stepped down, it seems a perfect time to hear what he has to say for himself.
WATCHING: On Tv over the last few weeks I've watched a couple of new American imports, one very good, one not so good. The very good one is Mad Men, rather deceptively hailed as being from 'the writer of The Sopranos', when 'a writer of The Sopranos' would have been more accurate as it isn't by David Chase, but Matthew Weiner, who was quite heavily involved in the stunning last series of that classic TV show. Mad Men isn't quite at that level, but it's very classy stuff nonetheless. Dirty Sexy Money though, despite a cast featuring Peter Krause, Donald Sutherland and one of the Baldwins (William probably), didn't really seem to have anything below the glossy and shallow surface.
LISTENING TO: Dangerous Game by Mary Weiss, one of the most underappreciated and remarkable albums of last year. Weiss was the lead singer in legendary girl group The Shangri-Las, but pretty much retired from the music industry when they imploded in 1968. Astonishingly, she reemerged last year with an cracking debut solo album backed by garage rockers The Reigning Sound, and while her voice has aged, her attitude and energy remains intact. Also impressive and retro is Chris Rea's latest album-book, The Return Of The Fabulous Hofner Bluenotes, an immaculately-presented three-album set that tells the fictional story of a 60s guitar instrumental group called The Delmonts and their progression into blues-rockers The Hofner Bluenotes. If that sounds a bit pretentious, it isn't because the music is awesome.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
ENTERTAINMENT ESSENTIALS - BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
He's met Abbott and Costello, had the likes of Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi don his pointy teeth and thick, black cape, and been the subject of parody in everything from Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers to cult kids show Count Duckula. So, when Francis Ford Coppola brought the century-old gothic legend of Count Dracula to the big screen in the early 90s, he did the only thing he could to make it fresh and new: he crafted an opulent romance in which the iconic bad guy is a lovesick good guy.
The Count of Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of the most unique interpretations of the character cinema has yet seen. He doesn't creep out of the shadows to claim his victims, he doesn't flap his cape around grandly in his cobweb-covered castle and he doesn't particularly 'vant to suck your blood'. No, what the dear old Count really wants is someone to love. The film begins with a 15th Century prologue. We find Vlad the Impaler returning from a bloody battle only to discover his wife has committed suicide having been misinformed that her husband had died
Feeling betrayed by God and desperate to save his beloved from eternal damnation, Vlad renounces his faith and embraces vampirism, vowing to return and avenge his wife. Skip forward four centuries and we’re in the late 1800s. London-based real estate agent Jonathan Harker has been called to Transylvania to discuss business with the now old and decrepit Count. When Dracula sees a picture of Harker’s fiancée, Mina Murray, however, Harker finds himself imprisoned in the old man’s mansion and Dracula bids to find a way to London to be reunited with the woman who he believes to be the reincarnation of his dead wife.
Considering Coppola’s film is otherwise more or less faithful to its source material, this diversion from the text could have been rather jarring. Stoker’s novel never entertained the notion of Mina and Dracula being lovers, and most cinematic incarnations have cut the former out of the adaptation altogether or at least reduced her significance. Yet, between the lines, Dracula has always been a sympathetic, romantic figure. Forever needing to kill to live and doomed to immortality, his is a story of the nature of existence, man‘s relationship with God and repressed passion, and the film’s brilliance is that it emphasises this neglected subtext by attaching it to an elaborate opera of sound and vision.
A film you can sense and smell, Coppola’s Dracula drips with grand colours and rich vitality, utilising every aspect of the medium to craft a sort of religious-horror-romance. Michael Ballhuas's lush velvet black and blood red cinematography pops from every inch of the screen, Wojciech Kilar's over-the-top score hums in the speakers with romantic strings and foreboding brass which sound like audio interpretations of heavan and hell, Eiko Ishioka's costumes have enough grandeur to make you believe they’ve been stolen from the gods of some lost opulent civilisation, and the decision to shoot everything on a soundstage and perform the effects in-camera creates a falseness which only adds to the film’s unnerving mood.
Aside from Keanu Reeves and Wynona Ryder as the rather stilted leads (hardly their faults really; the romantic leads in gothic horrors are rarely their most fascinating aspect), the acting is brilliantly bombastic too. In the second of a number of early-90s villainous roles, Gary Oldman is terrifically OTT as Dracula, exuding both the vulnerability and single-minded evil of the title character. Anthony Hopkins, Tom Waits and Sadie Frost also get in on the act, shouting, growling and writhing their way through the film, with Frost particularly impressive as the sexually liberated Lucy Westenra. In many ways they’re mime artists in a film which is arguably best viewed as a modern day silent movie.
Receiving favourable reviews and massive box-office, Dracula sadly marks the last time Coppola really achieved critical and commercial success. He followed it up with the saccharine Jack in 1996 before moving onto ho-hum John Grisham adaptation The Rainmaker in ‘97 and the critically-derided Youth Without Youth a decade later. Yet, even after all these setbacks, Coppola remains one of the most ambitious and unique directors still working. As Bram Stoker’s Dracula proves, he can craft new modes of storytelling from old stories and breath fresh life into clichéd legend.
It’s a skill which is all too absent in today’s filmmakers, and will hopefully return in full force in his next film, 2009’s family drama Tetro.
He's met Abbott and Costello, had the likes of Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi don his pointy teeth and thick, black cape, and been the subject of parody in everything from Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers to cult kids show Count Duckula. So, when Francis Ford Coppola brought the century-old gothic legend of Count Dracula to the big screen in the early 90s, he did the only thing he could to make it fresh and new: he crafted an opulent romance in which the iconic bad guy is a lovesick good guy.
The Count of Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of the most unique interpretations of the character cinema has yet seen. He doesn't creep out of the shadows to claim his victims, he doesn't flap his cape around grandly in his cobweb-covered castle and he doesn't particularly 'vant to suck your blood'. No, what the dear old Count really wants is someone to love. The film begins with a 15th Century prologue. We find Vlad the Impaler returning from a bloody battle only to discover his wife has committed suicide having been misinformed that her husband had died
Feeling betrayed by God and desperate to save his beloved from eternal damnation, Vlad renounces his faith and embraces vampirism, vowing to return and avenge his wife. Skip forward four centuries and we’re in the late 1800s. London-based real estate agent Jonathan Harker has been called to Transylvania to discuss business with the now old and decrepit Count. When Dracula sees a picture of Harker’s fiancée, Mina Murray, however, Harker finds himself imprisoned in the old man’s mansion and Dracula bids to find a way to London to be reunited with the woman who he believes to be the reincarnation of his dead wife.
Considering Coppola’s film is otherwise more or less faithful to its source material, this diversion from the text could have been rather jarring. Stoker’s novel never entertained the notion of Mina and Dracula being lovers, and most cinematic incarnations have cut the former out of the adaptation altogether or at least reduced her significance. Yet, between the lines, Dracula has always been a sympathetic, romantic figure. Forever needing to kill to live and doomed to immortality, his is a story of the nature of existence, man‘s relationship with God and repressed passion, and the film’s brilliance is that it emphasises this neglected subtext by attaching it to an elaborate opera of sound and vision.
A film you can sense and smell, Coppola’s Dracula drips with grand colours and rich vitality, utilising every aspect of the medium to craft a sort of religious-horror-romance. Michael Ballhuas's lush velvet black and blood red cinematography pops from every inch of the screen, Wojciech Kilar's over-the-top score hums in the speakers with romantic strings and foreboding brass which sound like audio interpretations of heavan and hell, Eiko Ishioka's costumes have enough grandeur to make you believe they’ve been stolen from the gods of some lost opulent civilisation, and the decision to shoot everything on a soundstage and perform the effects in-camera creates a falseness which only adds to the film’s unnerving mood.
Aside from Keanu Reeves and Wynona Ryder as the rather stilted leads (hardly their faults really; the romantic leads in gothic horrors are rarely their most fascinating aspect), the acting is brilliantly bombastic too. In the second of a number of early-90s villainous roles, Gary Oldman is terrifically OTT as Dracula, exuding both the vulnerability and single-minded evil of the title character. Anthony Hopkins, Tom Waits and Sadie Frost also get in on the act, shouting, growling and writhing their way through the film, with Frost particularly impressive as the sexually liberated Lucy Westenra. In many ways they’re mime artists in a film which is arguably best viewed as a modern day silent movie.
Receiving favourable reviews and massive box-office, Dracula sadly marks the last time Coppola really achieved critical and commercial success. He followed it up with the saccharine Jack in 1996 before moving onto ho-hum John Grisham adaptation The Rainmaker in ‘97 and the critically-derided Youth Without Youth a decade later. Yet, even after all these setbacks, Coppola remains one of the most ambitious and unique directors still working. As Bram Stoker’s Dracula proves, he can craft new modes of storytelling from old stories and breath fresh life into clichéd legend.
It’s a skill which is all too absent in today’s filmmakers, and will hopefully return in full force in his next film, 2009’s family drama Tetro.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
TOP TEN MUSIC VIDEOS
The Writer selects his favourite music videos...
1. Radiohead ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’
I'm constantly amazed at how little attention this gets on Top Music Videos lists. If a good video is one that reflects and heightens the emotion of the song, then Jonathan Glazer's promo for Street Spirit is unquestionably the finest. Opting largely to avoid a linear recreation of the lyrics, Glazer shows us a visual interpretation of the actual music, playing with slow motion to craft a collection of unconnected, avant garde images. And it works far better than that rather pretentious explanation sounds. From the moment Thom Yorke falls backwards in slow motion with lightening flashing in the background, you know you're in for something special. There's savage dogs, massive dragonflies, unnervingly unconcerned little boys and Ed O'Brien falling off a chair from then on, but it's one of the final images that remains the best. As Yorke sings "immerse yourself in love" a flying/dancing nun lady, in one of the few direct lyrical references, does just that, running out of a trailer in super fast motion before slowing down when jumping up and scooping some air across herself. The perfect way to end four minutes of visual and audio bliss.
2. Fiona Apple ‘Across The Universe’
There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson doesn't just make awesome films, you know. Having a few mates in the music biz has allowed him to try his hand at video-making and, as this promo for Fiona Apple's gorgeous cover of The Beatles' Across The Universe proves, he‘s pretty good. Made for 1998's Pleasantville and homing in on that film's themes of repression and violence, it features Apple floating her way through a 1950s diner which is being ripped apart by hoodlums. Glass, debris and even the occasional pie fly by but "nothing's gonna change" Apple's world as she continues her tour of the eatery completely oblivious to the carnage. It's sweetness is added to because Apple and Anderson were dating at the time, and you can really tell. Apple's never seemed quite so smiley and Anderson has never made one of his leading ladies look quite as lovely as his now-ex does here.
3. Weezer ‘Buddy Holly’
Fourteen years on, I'm still not entirely convinced that Spike Jonze doesn't own a time machine. How else could he have made this promo for Buddy Holly quite as brilliant as it is? The superimposition of Weezer into Al's Diner from Happy Days is too perfect, too seamless to have been done with the technology of the time, and shows exactly why the director has gone on to make such technically innovative films with such verve and accomplishment. It also shows that someone on the production team is one a hell of a geek. Every clip from the classic show has been perfectly selected and you have to look very, very closely at the changing clothes and hair styles to see that they have been taken from different episodes rather than one lost show in which River Cuomo and co came to town.
4. Pulp ‘This Is Hardcore’
Thanks to Common People and the accompanying Sadie Frost-starring video, Pulp are a band who have lamentably been consumed by the big black void of Britpop. However, This is Hardcore shows a darker side to the band, one that sets them aside from the Blurs and Oasises of the mid-90s. The promo seems like a pointless pastiche at first, the 40s film noir setting perfectly recreated but ringing ever so hollow. However, the use of ‘behind-the-scenes footage’, ‘deleted scenes’ and ‘screen-tests’ from this fake film add an element of reality to the piece, meaning the scenes of slaughtered femme fatales, fighting PIs and corrupted young women seem unnervingly authentic. There’s also a lot of random imagery thrown in for good measure and one moment is especially unsettling as a young starlet tries to grab an apple dangling in front of her face with her mouth. Weird, but utterly hypnotic.
5. REM ‘Everybody Hurts’
I'm a sucker for a video in which a great amount of people suddenly come together to sing, dance or do something similarly communal, and this is one of pop music's finest examples. Directed by Ridley Scott's son Jake, it takes place on a congested motorway, cutting from one frustrated motorist to the next, each one revealing a problem in subtitles, some comedic, some serious, some both, such as the car in which a boy begs his father to stop singing along to the radio before the camera pans back to his younger brother contemplating the nature of death in the back seat. It's all beautifully peaceful and incredibly engrossing, until the song kicks into gear and each person files out of their car and walks down the road. The closing news report is a nice touch, also. So often used as a gimmick now, it adds a dash of realism to help the intimacy of the song really hit home.
6. Johnny Cash ‘Hurt’
Is there anything else that can be said about Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt? Probably not, but let's give it a bash anyway. Music videos are not normally known for their subtlety, but this one makes a virtue of it. Clips of Cash's life and career are cut into scenes of him singing the song in his house. The imagery is perfectly selected (the scene of his wife watching from the stairs with a mixture of pride and sadness is especially affecting), while Cash's 'performance' feels too real and honest to be included in anything as trivial as a music video. But credit should also be given to the editor, who speeds the imagery up as the song grows more intense, flashing images quicker and quicker, before ending on a long held take of Cash closing the lid on his piano for one last time. A fitting send-off indeed.
7. Bjork ‘It's Oh So Quiet’
Now what was I saying about videos with people dancing in them? Bjork's It's Oh So Quiet once more features Spike Jonze's love of pop culture, as the director this time turns his hand to the Technicolor musicals of the 1940s. In the vid, he follows Bjork from a dirty bathroom through a garage and out into the street where she's joined in her merry escapades by dancing deliverymen, jigging postboxes and cartwheeling business drones. Jonze attempted a similar thing when he got Christopher Walken to flip flop about in his video for Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice, but this remains the finest example of the musical's influence upon pop videos.
8. Chemical Brothers ‘Let Forever Be’
More people dancing. Or rather, one person, multiplied, dancing. Directed by Michel Gondry, this is perhaps the most technically audacious video on this list. The promo features an attractive ginger lady. And that's about all I can tell you. She wakes up, multiplies, grows a large head, dances, gets back into bed, dances, does her job, dances, gets scared in a shopping mall, dances and dances a little bit more as she goes through what Gondry would probably call an ordinary day. What does it all mean? God knows. Does it look awesome? Hell yeah! For more Gondry weirdness check out his promo for Radiohead's Knives Out. Thom Yorke dressed as a mouse!? What more could you need?
9. Smashing Pumpkins ‘Tonight, Tonight’
As you'll be able to tell from this list, I'm a fan of technically innovative videos made by film directors who like to riff on popular culture. This is another one. Directed by Little Miss Sunshine creators Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and inspired by George Mellis' early silent film A Trip To The Moon, it features a young couple doing just that: taking a trip to the moon and beating away some curious lunar creatures along the way. The video perfectly echoes the gentleness of the song, but it's the technique behind it that makes it so special. This really does look like something from the turn of the century and is still a delight to look at some ten years after its creation.
10. Joy Division ‘Atmosphere’
Control director Anton Corbijn was criticised by some for this 1988 video for Atmosphere. Coming eight years after the death of Ian Curtis, it was accused of accelerating the cult that had grown around the Joy Division singer, and watching it back today Corbin probably does go a little over the top with the Curtis imagery. However, there's also something beautifully hypnotic about it. The stark black and white, the monochrome druids and the moment where one of them falls over while trying to carry a spire are strangely beautiful and a fitting tribute to Curtis’ legacy.
The Writer selects his favourite music videos...
1. Radiohead ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’
I'm constantly amazed at how little attention this gets on Top Music Videos lists. If a good video is one that reflects and heightens the emotion of the song, then Jonathan Glazer's promo for Street Spirit is unquestionably the finest. Opting largely to avoid a linear recreation of the lyrics, Glazer shows us a visual interpretation of the actual music, playing with slow motion to craft a collection of unconnected, avant garde images. And it works far better than that rather pretentious explanation sounds. From the moment Thom Yorke falls backwards in slow motion with lightening flashing in the background, you know you're in for something special. There's savage dogs, massive dragonflies, unnervingly unconcerned little boys and Ed O'Brien falling off a chair from then on, but it's one of the final images that remains the best. As Yorke sings "immerse yourself in love" a flying/dancing nun lady, in one of the few direct lyrical references, does just that, running out of a trailer in super fast motion before slowing down when jumping up and scooping some air across herself. The perfect way to end four minutes of visual and audio bliss.
2. Fiona Apple ‘Across The Universe’
There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson doesn't just make awesome films, you know. Having a few mates in the music biz has allowed him to try his hand at video-making and, as this promo for Fiona Apple's gorgeous cover of The Beatles' Across The Universe proves, he‘s pretty good. Made for 1998's Pleasantville and homing in on that film's themes of repression and violence, it features Apple floating her way through a 1950s diner which is being ripped apart by hoodlums. Glass, debris and even the occasional pie fly by but "nothing's gonna change" Apple's world as she continues her tour of the eatery completely oblivious to the carnage. It's sweetness is added to because Apple and Anderson were dating at the time, and you can really tell. Apple's never seemed quite so smiley and Anderson has never made one of his leading ladies look quite as lovely as his now-ex does here.
3. Weezer ‘Buddy Holly’
Fourteen years on, I'm still not entirely convinced that Spike Jonze doesn't own a time machine. How else could he have made this promo for Buddy Holly quite as brilliant as it is? The superimposition of Weezer into Al's Diner from Happy Days is too perfect, too seamless to have been done with the technology of the time, and shows exactly why the director has gone on to make such technically innovative films with such verve and accomplishment. It also shows that someone on the production team is one a hell of a geek. Every clip from the classic show has been perfectly selected and you have to look very, very closely at the changing clothes and hair styles to see that they have been taken from different episodes rather than one lost show in which River Cuomo and co came to town.
4. Pulp ‘This Is Hardcore’
Thanks to Common People and the accompanying Sadie Frost-starring video, Pulp are a band who have lamentably been consumed by the big black void of Britpop. However, This is Hardcore shows a darker side to the band, one that sets them aside from the Blurs and Oasises of the mid-90s. The promo seems like a pointless pastiche at first, the 40s film noir setting perfectly recreated but ringing ever so hollow. However, the use of ‘behind-the-scenes footage’, ‘deleted scenes’ and ‘screen-tests’ from this fake film add an element of reality to the piece, meaning the scenes of slaughtered femme fatales, fighting PIs and corrupted young women seem unnervingly authentic. There’s also a lot of random imagery thrown in for good measure and one moment is especially unsettling as a young starlet tries to grab an apple dangling in front of her face with her mouth. Weird, but utterly hypnotic.
5. REM ‘Everybody Hurts’
I'm a sucker for a video in which a great amount of people suddenly come together to sing, dance or do something similarly communal, and this is one of pop music's finest examples. Directed by Ridley Scott's son Jake, it takes place on a congested motorway, cutting from one frustrated motorist to the next, each one revealing a problem in subtitles, some comedic, some serious, some both, such as the car in which a boy begs his father to stop singing along to the radio before the camera pans back to his younger brother contemplating the nature of death in the back seat. It's all beautifully peaceful and incredibly engrossing, until the song kicks into gear and each person files out of their car and walks down the road. The closing news report is a nice touch, also. So often used as a gimmick now, it adds a dash of realism to help the intimacy of the song really hit home.
6. Johnny Cash ‘Hurt’
Is there anything else that can be said about Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt? Probably not, but let's give it a bash anyway. Music videos are not normally known for their subtlety, but this one makes a virtue of it. Clips of Cash's life and career are cut into scenes of him singing the song in his house. The imagery is perfectly selected (the scene of his wife watching from the stairs with a mixture of pride and sadness is especially affecting), while Cash's 'performance' feels too real and honest to be included in anything as trivial as a music video. But credit should also be given to the editor, who speeds the imagery up as the song grows more intense, flashing images quicker and quicker, before ending on a long held take of Cash closing the lid on his piano for one last time. A fitting send-off indeed.
7. Bjork ‘It's Oh So Quiet’
Now what was I saying about videos with people dancing in them? Bjork's It's Oh So Quiet once more features Spike Jonze's love of pop culture, as the director this time turns his hand to the Technicolor musicals of the 1940s. In the vid, he follows Bjork from a dirty bathroom through a garage and out into the street where she's joined in her merry escapades by dancing deliverymen, jigging postboxes and cartwheeling business drones. Jonze attempted a similar thing when he got Christopher Walken to flip flop about in his video for Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice, but this remains the finest example of the musical's influence upon pop videos.
8. Chemical Brothers ‘Let Forever Be’
More people dancing. Or rather, one person, multiplied, dancing. Directed by Michel Gondry, this is perhaps the most technically audacious video on this list. The promo features an attractive ginger lady. And that's about all I can tell you. She wakes up, multiplies, grows a large head, dances, gets back into bed, dances, does her job, dances, gets scared in a shopping mall, dances and dances a little bit more as she goes through what Gondry would probably call an ordinary day. What does it all mean? God knows. Does it look awesome? Hell yeah! For more Gondry weirdness check out his promo for Radiohead's Knives Out. Thom Yorke dressed as a mouse!? What more could you need?
9. Smashing Pumpkins ‘Tonight, Tonight’
As you'll be able to tell from this list, I'm a fan of technically innovative videos made by film directors who like to riff on popular culture. This is another one. Directed by Little Miss Sunshine creators Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and inspired by George Mellis' early silent film A Trip To The Moon, it features a young couple doing just that: taking a trip to the moon and beating away some curious lunar creatures along the way. The video perfectly echoes the gentleness of the song, but it's the technique behind it that makes it so special. This really does look like something from the turn of the century and is still a delight to look at some ten years after its creation.
10. Joy Division ‘Atmosphere’
Control director Anton Corbijn was criticised by some for this 1988 video for Atmosphere. Coming eight years after the death of Ian Curtis, it was accused of accelerating the cult that had grown around the Joy Division singer, and watching it back today Corbin probably does go a little over the top with the Curtis imagery. However, there's also something beautifully hypnotic about it. The stark black and white, the monochrome druids and the moment where one of them falls over while trying to carry a spire are strangely beautiful and a fitting tribute to Curtis’ legacy.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Oscars - The Results...
Four hours, twenty-five gongs and more fancy frocks than you can shake a Jimmy Choo shoe at later, and the 80th Academy Awards ceremony is over. And, despite all the hubbub over writers' strikes and rain-sodden red carpets, it all went pretty much according to plan.
The biggest surprise of the night was Marion Cotillard scooping Best Actress ahead of the more fancied Julie Christie and Ellen Page for her turn as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. Tilda Swinton's triumph over Cate Blanchett in the Supporting Actress category was also a slight shock, but as both women won at the BAFTAs two weeks' ago, their victories were hardly without precedent.
The Actor categories were foregone conclusions. Javier Bardem rightly claimed the Supporting prize for his subtly unnerving portrayal of hired assassin Anton Chigurh in the Coens' No Country For Old Men, while at the other end of the scale, Daniel Day-Lewis was an equally deserved winner for his brilliantly barmy turn as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood.
As was predicted, Paul Thomas Anderson's masterpiece was overlooked for the main two prizes. Instead, it was No Country that took home the Best Picture and Director awards, and although it remains one of the best films of the Coens’ career, I can't help but feel the Academy wimped out slightly by not handing at least one of the two to TWBB, which is a far more daring and innovative piece of work.
Aside from Cotillard, the only other prediction we got wrong in this blog came in the Adapted Screenplay category. We tipped Ronald Harwood's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; those darn Coens picked it up for their faithful rendition of Cormac McCarthy's book. Meanwhile, Diablo Cody won the Original Screenplay for Juno (and gave one of the sweetest speeches of the night), which means the former stripper is now a member of the Academy.
The perfect opportunity for that long overdue Showgirls reappraisal methinks...
Four hours, twenty-five gongs and more fancy frocks than you can shake a Jimmy Choo shoe at later, and the 80th Academy Awards ceremony is over. And, despite all the hubbub over writers' strikes and rain-sodden red carpets, it all went pretty much according to plan.
The biggest surprise of the night was Marion Cotillard scooping Best Actress ahead of the more fancied Julie Christie and Ellen Page for her turn as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. Tilda Swinton's triumph over Cate Blanchett in the Supporting Actress category was also a slight shock, but as both women won at the BAFTAs two weeks' ago, their victories were hardly without precedent.
The Actor categories were foregone conclusions. Javier Bardem rightly claimed the Supporting prize for his subtly unnerving portrayal of hired assassin Anton Chigurh in the Coens' No Country For Old Men, while at the other end of the scale, Daniel Day-Lewis was an equally deserved winner for his brilliantly barmy turn as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood.
As was predicted, Paul Thomas Anderson's masterpiece was overlooked for the main two prizes. Instead, it was No Country that took home the Best Picture and Director awards, and although it remains one of the best films of the Coens’ career, I can't help but feel the Academy wimped out slightly by not handing at least one of the two to TWBB, which is a far more daring and innovative piece of work.
Aside from Cotillard, the only other prediction we got wrong in this blog came in the Adapted Screenplay category. We tipped Ronald Harwood's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; those darn Coens picked it up for their faithful rendition of Cormac McCarthy's book. Meanwhile, Diablo Cody won the Original Screenplay for Juno (and gave one of the sweetest speeches of the night), which means the former stripper is now a member of the Academy.
The perfect opportunity for that long overdue Showgirls reappraisal methinks...
Saturday, February 23, 2008
OSCARS 2008 - OUR PREDICTIONS...
Best Picture: There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, Juno, Atonement, Michael Clayton
The big one and, fittingly, the most difficult to call. I think we can rule out Michael Clayton, which was a surprise nomination ahead of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in the first place, and Juno, which has proven popular enough to earn a nod but is still too niche to have a shot at winning the prize. Despite its unfortunate BAFTA win, the ho-hum Atonement is also an outsider, lacking the momentum (and quality) to take it over the finishing line. So, it comes down to the two westerns: There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men. Personally, I think Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is the superior one, but it’s just too damn out there for the conservative Academy members who are likely to be more turned on by the ‘the world ain’t what it used to be’ message of No Country.
WHAT SHOULD WIN: Blood just pipping No Country
WHAT WILL WIN: No Country just pipping Blood
Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, Joel & Ethan Coen, Jason Reitman, Julian Schnabel, Tony Gilroy
At the risk of repeating myself, we‘re likely to get a bit of Best Picture déjà vu in the Best Director category. Tony Gilroy and Jason Reitman are very much outsiders for Michael Clayton and Juno respectively, while Atonement’s Joe Wright is absent altogether. Taking his place is Diving Bell and the Butterfly’s Julian Schnabel, who’s a decent outside bet if you’re looking for a dark horse, but certainly not a favourite. Instead, it’s Anderson and the Coens who will battle it out. Again. And again I want Anderson to win, because you’re unlikely to see a more unique film this year than There Will Be Blood. Thankfully, he’s got more chance of winning here than in Best Picture, but it’s still likely to go to the Coens, as much for their illustrious career as No Country.
WHO SHOULD WIN: Paul Thomas Anderson
WHO WILL WIN: Joel and Ethan Coen
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, George Clooney, Johnny Depp, Tommy Lee Jones, Viggo Mortensen
The most open and shut category at this year’s awards. Daniel Day-Lewis is all set to run away with the prize and more than deserves to. Some have called it pantomimic, but the theatricality of Day-Lewis’s performance in There Will Be Blood is core to the character of Daniel Plainview and blending that with a turn of very real menace makes Mr Method a much-deserved shoo-in for the second Best Actor gong of his career.
WHO SHOULD WIN: Daniel Day-Lewis
WHO WILL WIN: Daniel Day-Lewis
Best Actress: Ellen Page, Julie Christie, Laura Linney, Marion Cotillard, Cate Blanchett
This is another category with a clear favourite, though one not quite as cut and dried as Best Actor. Despite being an awards favourite, the only one we can pretty much rule out is Cate Blanchett, whose turn in Elizabeth: The Golden Age hasn’t got enough momentum to bag the prize. The Savages is a bit too indie for the Academy so Laura Linney can probably be ruled out as well. Therefore it comes down to three. Marion Cotillard is in the running after her surprise win at the BAFTAs, but they are rarely precise indicators for the Oscars so the two main contenders are Ellen Page for Juno and Julie Christie for Away From Her. Newcomer vs. Veteran? With the Oscars, the veteran always wins, and in this case it’s just about right.
WHO SHOULD WIN: Julie Christie
WHO WILL WIN: Julie Christie
Supporting Actor: Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Hal Holbrook, Tom Wilkinson
After his Best Actor win for Capote in 2006, Philip Seymour Hoffman is an outsider for his turn in Charlie Wilson‘s War, especially as the film has little awards momentum. Tom Wilkinson is also doubtful for Michael Clayton, as is Hal Holbrook who was a surprise nomination for his turn in Sean Penn’s Into The Wild. Javier Bardem is clearly the favourite, and it would be a big surprise if he were to miss out. But don’t discount Casey Affleck for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Long title, but it’s been heavily praised and Oscar always throws up at least one major shock. This could well be it. Having said that though…
WHO SHOULD WIN: Javier Bardem
WHO WILL WIN: Javier Bardem
Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, Ruby Dee, Saoirse Ronan, Amy Ryan, Tilda Swinton
The most difficult category to call, probably because I’ve not seen most of the performances up for the prize. Out of the five, I’ve only seen Saoirse Ronan, who was superb for a girl so young in Atonement. Still, I'll have a dig at predictions. Ruby Dee and Amy Ryan seem outsiders, having not really picked up any momentum in the awards season so far, and Ronan is probably too young to be claiming the gong. So I’m going to say it’s between two people: Blanchett and Swinton. Blanchett is an old pro at the Oscars, but despite the difficulty of her performance (playing Bob Dylan), I reckon Swinton could claim the prize, especially after her success at the BAFTAs two weeks ago.
WHO SHOULD WIN: Dunno. Saoirse Ronan? Yeah, why not.
WHO WILL WIN: Tilda Swinton
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Atonement, Away From Her, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood.
Because of their dominance of the main prizes, No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood will be considered favourites here. However, I don’t think TWBB will take the prize because Anderson's script bears little in common with Upton Sinclair's source novel, and No Country could miss out because the Academy may be wary of a whitewash. So I'm going to tip The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It's been too heavily praised to be ignored completely and the screenplay categories are where the indie, niche films usually get recognition.
WHAT SHOULD WIN: No Country For Old Men
WHAT WILL WIN: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Juno, Lars and the Real Girl, Michael Clayton, Ratatouille, The Savages.
One of the easiest catergories to predict. Original Screenplay is traditionally the category where the year’s ‘little film that could’ triumphs. Lost In Translation and Little Miss Sunshine have done it in the past, and Juno will do it this year.
WHAT SHOULD WIN: Juno
WHAT WILL WIN: Juno
Best Picture: There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, Juno, Atonement, Michael Clayton
The big one and, fittingly, the most difficult to call. I think we can rule out Michael Clayton, which was a surprise nomination ahead of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in the first place, and Juno, which has proven popular enough to earn a nod but is still too niche to have a shot at winning the prize. Despite its unfortunate BAFTA win, the ho-hum Atonement is also an outsider, lacking the momentum (and quality) to take it over the finishing line. So, it comes down to the two westerns: There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men. Personally, I think Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is the superior one, but it’s just too damn out there for the conservative Academy members who are likely to be more turned on by the ‘the world ain’t what it used to be’ message of No Country.
WHAT SHOULD WIN: Blood just pipping No Country
WHAT WILL WIN: No Country just pipping Blood
Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, Joel & Ethan Coen, Jason Reitman, Julian Schnabel, Tony Gilroy
At the risk of repeating myself, we‘re likely to get a bit of Best Picture déjà vu in the Best Director category. Tony Gilroy and Jason Reitman are very much outsiders for Michael Clayton and Juno respectively, while Atonement’s Joe Wright is absent altogether. Taking his place is Diving Bell and the Butterfly’s Julian Schnabel, who’s a decent outside bet if you’re looking for a dark horse, but certainly not a favourite. Instead, it’s Anderson and the Coens who will battle it out. Again. And again I want Anderson to win, because you’re unlikely to see a more unique film this year than There Will Be Blood. Thankfully, he’s got more chance of winning here than in Best Picture, but it’s still likely to go to the Coens, as much for their illustrious career as No Country.
WHO SHOULD WIN: Paul Thomas Anderson
WHO WILL WIN: Joel and Ethan Coen
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, George Clooney, Johnny Depp, Tommy Lee Jones, Viggo Mortensen
The most open and shut category at this year’s awards. Daniel Day-Lewis is all set to run away with the prize and more than deserves to. Some have called it pantomimic, but the theatricality of Day-Lewis’s performance in There Will Be Blood is core to the character of Daniel Plainview and blending that with a turn of very real menace makes Mr Method a much-deserved shoo-in for the second Best Actor gong of his career.
WHO SHOULD WIN: Daniel Day-Lewis
WHO WILL WIN: Daniel Day-Lewis
Best Actress: Ellen Page, Julie Christie, Laura Linney, Marion Cotillard, Cate Blanchett
This is another category with a clear favourite, though one not quite as cut and dried as Best Actor. Despite being an awards favourite, the only one we can pretty much rule out is Cate Blanchett, whose turn in Elizabeth: The Golden Age hasn’t got enough momentum to bag the prize. The Savages is a bit too indie for the Academy so Laura Linney can probably be ruled out as well. Therefore it comes down to three. Marion Cotillard is in the running after her surprise win at the BAFTAs, but they are rarely precise indicators for the Oscars so the two main contenders are Ellen Page for Juno and Julie Christie for Away From Her. Newcomer vs. Veteran? With the Oscars, the veteran always wins, and in this case it’s just about right.
WHO SHOULD WIN: Julie Christie
WHO WILL WIN: Julie Christie
Supporting Actor: Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Hal Holbrook, Tom Wilkinson
After his Best Actor win for Capote in 2006, Philip Seymour Hoffman is an outsider for his turn in Charlie Wilson‘s War, especially as the film has little awards momentum. Tom Wilkinson is also doubtful for Michael Clayton, as is Hal Holbrook who was a surprise nomination for his turn in Sean Penn’s Into The Wild. Javier Bardem is clearly the favourite, and it would be a big surprise if he were to miss out. But don’t discount Casey Affleck for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Long title, but it’s been heavily praised and Oscar always throws up at least one major shock. This could well be it. Having said that though…
WHO SHOULD WIN: Javier Bardem
WHO WILL WIN: Javier Bardem
Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, Ruby Dee, Saoirse Ronan, Amy Ryan, Tilda Swinton
The most difficult category to call, probably because I’ve not seen most of the performances up for the prize. Out of the five, I’ve only seen Saoirse Ronan, who was superb for a girl so young in Atonement. Still, I'll have a dig at predictions. Ruby Dee and Amy Ryan seem outsiders, having not really picked up any momentum in the awards season so far, and Ronan is probably too young to be claiming the gong. So I’m going to say it’s between two people: Blanchett and Swinton. Blanchett is an old pro at the Oscars, but despite the difficulty of her performance (playing Bob Dylan), I reckon Swinton could claim the prize, especially after her success at the BAFTAs two weeks ago.
WHO SHOULD WIN: Dunno. Saoirse Ronan? Yeah, why not.
WHO WILL WIN: Tilda Swinton
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Atonement, Away From Her, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood.
Because of their dominance of the main prizes, No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood will be considered favourites here. However, I don’t think TWBB will take the prize because Anderson's script bears little in common with Upton Sinclair's source novel, and No Country could miss out because the Academy may be wary of a whitewash. So I'm going to tip The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It's been too heavily praised to be ignored completely and the screenplay categories are where the indie, niche films usually get recognition.
WHAT SHOULD WIN: No Country For Old Men
WHAT WILL WIN: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Juno, Lars and the Real Girl, Michael Clayton, Ratatouille, The Savages.
One of the easiest catergories to predict. Original Screenplay is traditionally the category where the year’s ‘little film that could’ triumphs. Lost In Translation and Little Miss Sunshine have done it in the past, and Juno will do it this year.
WHAT SHOULD WIN: Juno
WHAT WILL WIN: Juno
Sunday, February 03, 2008
TOP TEN MOVIE SCENES
Here The Editor and The Writer pick their top ten movie scenes of all time, but be warned, there will be some spoilers here, so be careful what you read if you've not seen some of the films...
THE EDITOR
1. The Godfather Part II
My all-time favourite movie scene was quite easy to pick. It's from The Godfather Part II and it's the ending, so if you hadn't already heeded the warning about spoilers and haven't seen the film, STOP READING NOW. The film could easily have been subtitled The Fall Of Michael Corleone, not in a business or mafia sense, but as a human being, having started the first movie as a brave and decent war hero. The key scene is where his weak brother Fredo is going on a fishing trip with Michael's son, but henchman Al Neri stops the boy from joining them. Great acting from John Cazale shows that Fredo realises what is going to happen, and he is executed out on the boat, while Michael watches from inside. We don't see the death, nor do we see more than a silhouette of Michael, but it's perfect, as is the closing shot of Al Pacino sitting out in a chair staring with eyes that show just how emotionless and ruthless he has become. Cinema gold.
2. Edward Scissorhands
A rather less violent one here, perhaps surprising as it's from a Tim Burton movie, given the amount of blood currently on display in Sweeney Todd. Instead it's one of the most beautiful scenes of any movie, and the perfect combination of Burton's eye for visuals and Danny Elfman's ability to make haunting and lovely music to go with the scene. The Ice Dance is Elfman's crowning glory as a score, just as the film is Burton's finest achievement, and when Edward is carving a statue out of ice and creating a a snowfall effect that Kim dances under, it's balletic and beautiful. No wonder the film works so well as a ballet by Matthew Bourne.
3. The Godfather
For one of my favourite movie scenes of all time, it had to be one that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up for one reason or another, and one of the select group of films to have completely blown me away the first time I watched it was The Godfather. I was absolutely loving it from the very start, but the scene that literally left me open-mouthed was where James Caan's volatile Sonny is tricked into going to sort out his abusive brother-in-law and is ambushed and murdered at a toll booth. Having watched the film with no knowledge of the story whatsoever, seeing one of the main characters die in a hail of bullets halfway through was just awesome, and the direction of the scene was incredible.
4. Heat
And back to the violence. Ironically, Heat isn't a violent film particularly, and its strengths mostly lie in the more subtle scenes, with the legendary Pacino/De Niro coffee shop scene definitely a contender for this list for the understated magic of it all (let's face it, nowadays if they were in the same film, it would be in an awful comedy). However, I'm going for a scene that could never be considered understated - the bank heist. It's the big score for De Niro's gang, but Pacino's cops arrive just as they are escaping. Cue the best gunfight you'll ever see (or hear - it's one of the loudest things I've ever heard in film), with Michael Mann showing most action directors how it should be done.
5. American Beauty
Never mind the overheated plastic bag scene or the stuff with the petals. The scene that makes American Beauty special is the very last one, just after Lester has been shot by his neighbour. His voiceover about the beauty of life mingles with visuals of the things that made his life special (his young daughter with the pretty dress and sparkler is the part that usually gets me) and the rest of the people in the house reacting to the gunshot that kills him, with Thomas Newman's lovely piano theme over the top. The film was like a dry-run for Six Feet Under and this scene shows why.
6. Manhattan
Another case of the perfect marriage of music and visuals here in the opening scene of Woody Allen's masterpiece Manhattan. From the opening flourishes of Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue you know it's going to be special, particularly as Allen and Gordon Willis decided to film in black and white, giving the Manhattan scenery a very special tinge. With Allen's faltering introductory narrative over the top. It gets even better when he shuts up and Gershwin's tune explodes into life, and if you can think of a better start to any film I'd like to hear about it...
7. The Big Lebowski
My favourite Coen Brothers film by a mile and one of my favourite films of all time, The Big Lebowski is nothing BUT great movie scenes all the way through, but my personal favourite is where John Turturro's sex-offender bowler Jesus is melodramatically bowling to the sounds of the Gypsy Kings' cover of Hotel California. As well as the music and the dancing from Turturro - and the deadpan reactions of Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi and John Goodman to this bizarre sight - what I think I love best about it is that it has no real purpose to the story at all. Mad geniusness.
8. Hotel Rwanda
By far and away the most affecting scene in my list as well as the most recent, this is also probably the one thing that has ever made me cry at a cinema. Hotel Rwanda tells the true story of hotelier Paul Rusesabagina during the Rwandan genocide and the scene that made the most impact on me was when the UN pull out all of the Western tourists and journalists (including Joaquin Phoenix), leaving the Rwandans behind at the mercy of their enemies. Most heartbreaking of all is when a foreign priest arrives with a group of children, but is prevented by the UN peacekeeping army from taking any of them to safety. Great dignified acting from Don Cheadle as Rusesabagina and haunting music makes it all so powerful, as well as the inevitable sense of guilt and outrage.
9. Swimming With Sharks
"What did I tell you on your first day? Your thoughts are NOTHING. You are NOTHING." "If you were in my toilet bowl I wouldn't bother flushing it. My bathmat means more to me than you. See this? (picks up desk diary) This means more to the company than you, but do you hear it complain when I do this? (throws desk diary at Guy)" In my opinion Kevin Spacey has never been better than as the ultimate boss from hell in this tale of Hollywood movie moguls and their hapless underlings. This scene, where Frank Whaley's Guy plucks up the courage to ask his boss Buddy to not shout at him quite so much is awesome, right down to the satisfied smirk on Buddy's face after Guy's hasty and undignified retreat.
10. Ringu
Ahhh, thank goodness that evil Sadako's curse has been lifted. Now our heroes can relax for the rest of the film and so can we. Look, there's the ex-husband, back at home and happy that his ex-wife and son are safe and of course, so is he. Oh look, the TV's just turned on. Odd. Hmmm, that well looks familiar. So does that freaky looking girl climbing out of it. But the curse was lifted wasn't it? Oh dear. She even walks evilly, in a 'I've been pushed down a well' kind of way. Still, she's on the TV, what could she go in there? AAAARRRGHHH! SHE'S CLIMBED OUT OF THE TV!!!! Look at her freaky, nailless fingers! LOOK AT HER EYE!!!! AAAARRGGHHH!
THE WRITER
1. Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park is not a classic film. Hell, it's not even a classic Steven Spielberg film. It's an effects movie, one created more out of a desire to show off a new toy than artistic necessity. But when those toys are as shiny and fun as the ones Spielberg got to play with on JP that's all you really need. The film is, of course, filled with magnificent scenes - the sick Triceratops, the Raptors in the kitchen, the classically Spielbergian closing shot - but it's our first glimpse of the T-Rex that is the finest. Not only does the beast still look astonishingly realistic, but the built up is beautifully played: the shivering water, the missing goat, the immense electric fence being cut through like a knife through butter. Objectively speaking, it may not be the best scene in cinema history, but it rocked my ten-year-old world and began my life-long love affair with the movies.
2. Punch-Drunk Love
Speaking of love, Paul Thomas Anderson's magnificent romantic comedy Punch Drunk Love is comfortably the finest of its kind in recent years. Not that most people noticed. Despite the fact it stars bankable star Adam Sandler, Anderson's fourth feature left many befuddled. Is it a mainstream film? An arthouse film? An Anderson picture? A Sandler flick? A comedy? A drama? The truth is, it's all these things and more; a delightful evocation of the blinding fear and roaring delight of falling in love at the most unexpected of times. And smack in the middle of it comes the crowning achievement of Anderson’s career. Sandler's character Barry has finally resolved to find the woman of his dreams (Lena, played with otherworldly charm by Emily Watson), who is currently on a business trip in Hawaii. Anderson tracks Barry through the airport, into the sky and then to his final meet-up with Lena all to the sounds of Shelley Duvall's bizarre rendition of He Needs Me from Robert Altman's Popeye. Lush, heartfelt and very, very weird, it the perfect encapsulation of the film's sensibilities and, dare I say, the ultimate cinematic evocation of being in love.
3. A Clockwork Orange
From one extreme to the other now. There's very, very little love in A Clockwork Orange (well, not unless you count Alex's love of violence), only anger, hatred and typically Kubrickian misanthropy. And yet, from these undesirable emotions, Kubrick musters one of the most perfect images in cinema history. Right at the start of the film. Just as you're settling in, preparing for a master class in film-making, the music starts up, sounding like something created by the warped, evil brother of Vangelis, and the camera tracks slowly away from Alex and his droogs sat in some kind of bar, wearing some kind of clothing, staring in the camera, through it even, and straight to the audience. Kubrick was a master of setting mood, and this is a scene so perfect not even Blur could bugger it up in their video for The Universal.
4. Singin' In The Rain
Earlier this week, I watched Tim Burton's version of Sweeney Todd, and was severely disappointed. True to Burton's form, it was a joy to look at and featured a corking turn from Johnny Depp as the titular demon barber, but as a musical it was left severely lacking. What so few cinematic musicals realise is that songs should be used sparingly; to elevate the emotions of a scene, rather than to get the audience to buy the soundtrack once they've left the theatre. Yet there is one that bucks the trend: Singin’ In The Rain. From the Good Mornin' singalong to Donald O'Connor's ballistic rendition of Make 'Em Laugh, Rain grasps that when music and visuals combine they can create otherworldly slices of cinema that can get our pulses racing and mouths smiling like no other, and in the title song, it has the single most joyful scene in cinema history.
5. From Russia With Love
As a fan of the Connery Bond films I was excited to hear Daniel Craig reveal that Quantum of Solace (it's a perfect title, naysayers!) will be a return to the "60s style spy movie". Craig explicitly referenced production designer extraordinaire Ken Adam, so are we to expect some grandiose hollowed out caves in Quantum? After the realism of Casino Royale, perhaps not, but what I do reckon (and hope we'll see) are down and dirty fights, much like the train carriage one between Connery and Robert Shaw at the end of From Russia With Love. Relying only on his attaché case and wits, Bond has to fight off SPECTRE assassin Red Grant in any way he can. Brutal, bloody and nasty, what follows is one of the finest mano-a-mano fight in cinema history. Let's hope Craig has been studying it.
6. Spider-Man 2
An odd entry onto the list, perhaps, but let me explain. The scene I refer to comes at the end of the film. An unmasked Spider-Man has just talked Doctor Octopus out of his villainous ways and as the eight-limbed scientist goes off to stop the imminent apocalypse he has created, Spidey turns around to see long-time love Mary Jane Watson staring at him with bewilderment. Finally, after two films she knows his secret. They can, at long last, confess their love for one another and all will be well in the world! But the wall behind MJ has other ideas, and as it begins to collapse on top of her, Spidey rushes over and catches it. An entire wall! And what does he say after this act of superheroic derring do? "This is really heavy". Romance, action and self-deprecating humour. It epitomises everything that is great about Sam Raimi, his Spider-Man films and the comics that inspired them.
7. The Apartment
It's such a shame that Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine only ever appeared in two films together (Billy Wilder's Irma La Douce being the second), because they have such a unique chemistry they really should be regarded among cinema‘s finest on-screen couples. A world apart from the smouldering passion of, say, Bogart and Bacall, MacLaine and Lemmon are the normal people, Mr and Mrs Everyman, a couple who you aspire to be, until you realise that, in fact, you are them. There are plenty of beautiful moments between them in Irma, but it's the end of The Apartment that takes the honours. After realising she loves him, Fran (MacLaine) runs to Bud Baxter’s (Lemmon) apartment and stops him from leaving town. Having loved her from the start of the film, Baxter finally tells her as much. Fran shuffles some playing cards, looks at Bud and says: "Shut up and deal". Pure cinematic perfection.
8. Alien
A bit of horror now. There have been many scenes throughout cinema history that have perfectly epitomised our fear of what could be out to get us. The ending of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the iconic shower scene in Psycho spring to mind. But for sheer, raw primal power, nothing can compete with Alien's dinner table scene. You all know the drill by now (and if you don't then what have you been doing with your life) and perhaps it's become cliché (when I saw the director's cut a few years ago, the scene inspired a few giggles of derision). But Ridley Scott's masterpiece has lost none of its fear factor and this sequence is the perfect encapsulation of that.
9. Raging Bull
Martin Scorsese is often credited as the master of realism and innovative camerawork. And yet it’s his most expressionistic and relatively still scene that is his best. The opening credits of Raging Bull find boxer Jake La Motta in a boxing ring, shadow fighting in slow-motion to the sounds of Pietro Mascagni‘s Cavalleria Rusticana: Intermezzo. It's so simple, but so perfect, summing up the themes of floundering masculinity that the film so magnificently explores.
10. Marie Antoinette
As this is the most recent film on the list and as it's the final scene that I'm citing here, I won't explain it. Suffice to say, Sofia Coppolla is a master of mood and the last shot of her unfairly maligned biopic of Marie Antoinette is a perfect denouement which brilliantly captures the tragedy and wasted youth of the doomed queen.
Here The Editor and The Writer pick their top ten movie scenes of all time, but be warned, there will be some spoilers here, so be careful what you read if you've not seen some of the films...
THE EDITOR
1. The Godfather Part II
My all-time favourite movie scene was quite easy to pick. It's from The Godfather Part II and it's the ending, so if you hadn't already heeded the warning about spoilers and haven't seen the film, STOP READING NOW. The film could easily have been subtitled The Fall Of Michael Corleone, not in a business or mafia sense, but as a human being, having started the first movie as a brave and decent war hero. The key scene is where his weak brother Fredo is going on a fishing trip with Michael's son, but henchman Al Neri stops the boy from joining them. Great acting from John Cazale shows that Fredo realises what is going to happen, and he is executed out on the boat, while Michael watches from inside. We don't see the death, nor do we see more than a silhouette of Michael, but it's perfect, as is the closing shot of Al Pacino sitting out in a chair staring with eyes that show just how emotionless and ruthless he has become. Cinema gold.
2. Edward Scissorhands
A rather less violent one here, perhaps surprising as it's from a Tim Burton movie, given the amount of blood currently on display in Sweeney Todd. Instead it's one of the most beautiful scenes of any movie, and the perfect combination of Burton's eye for visuals and Danny Elfman's ability to make haunting and lovely music to go with the scene. The Ice Dance is Elfman's crowning glory as a score, just as the film is Burton's finest achievement, and when Edward is carving a statue out of ice and creating a a snowfall effect that Kim dances under, it's balletic and beautiful. No wonder the film works so well as a ballet by Matthew Bourne.
3. The Godfather
For one of my favourite movie scenes of all time, it had to be one that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up for one reason or another, and one of the select group of films to have completely blown me away the first time I watched it was The Godfather. I was absolutely loving it from the very start, but the scene that literally left me open-mouthed was where James Caan's volatile Sonny is tricked into going to sort out his abusive brother-in-law and is ambushed and murdered at a toll booth. Having watched the film with no knowledge of the story whatsoever, seeing one of the main characters die in a hail of bullets halfway through was just awesome, and the direction of the scene was incredible.
4. Heat
And back to the violence. Ironically, Heat isn't a violent film particularly, and its strengths mostly lie in the more subtle scenes, with the legendary Pacino/De Niro coffee shop scene definitely a contender for this list for the understated magic of it all (let's face it, nowadays if they were in the same film, it would be in an awful comedy). However, I'm going for a scene that could never be considered understated - the bank heist. It's the big score for De Niro's gang, but Pacino's cops arrive just as they are escaping. Cue the best gunfight you'll ever see (or hear - it's one of the loudest things I've ever heard in film), with Michael Mann showing most action directors how it should be done.
5. American Beauty
Never mind the overheated plastic bag scene or the stuff with the petals. The scene that makes American Beauty special is the very last one, just after Lester has been shot by his neighbour. His voiceover about the beauty of life mingles with visuals of the things that made his life special (his young daughter with the pretty dress and sparkler is the part that usually gets me) and the rest of the people in the house reacting to the gunshot that kills him, with Thomas Newman's lovely piano theme over the top. The film was like a dry-run for Six Feet Under and this scene shows why.
6. Manhattan
Another case of the perfect marriage of music and visuals here in the opening scene of Woody Allen's masterpiece Manhattan. From the opening flourishes of Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue you know it's going to be special, particularly as Allen and Gordon Willis decided to film in black and white, giving the Manhattan scenery a very special tinge. With Allen's faltering introductory narrative over the top. It gets even better when he shuts up and Gershwin's tune explodes into life, and if you can think of a better start to any film I'd like to hear about it...
7. The Big Lebowski
My favourite Coen Brothers film by a mile and one of my favourite films of all time, The Big Lebowski is nothing BUT great movie scenes all the way through, but my personal favourite is where John Turturro's sex-offender bowler Jesus is melodramatically bowling to the sounds of the Gypsy Kings' cover of Hotel California. As well as the music and the dancing from Turturro - and the deadpan reactions of Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi and John Goodman to this bizarre sight - what I think I love best about it is that it has no real purpose to the story at all. Mad geniusness.
8. Hotel Rwanda
By far and away the most affecting scene in my list as well as the most recent, this is also probably the one thing that has ever made me cry at a cinema. Hotel Rwanda tells the true story of hotelier Paul Rusesabagina during the Rwandan genocide and the scene that made the most impact on me was when the UN pull out all of the Western tourists and journalists (including Joaquin Phoenix), leaving the Rwandans behind at the mercy of their enemies. Most heartbreaking of all is when a foreign priest arrives with a group of children, but is prevented by the UN peacekeeping army from taking any of them to safety. Great dignified acting from Don Cheadle as Rusesabagina and haunting music makes it all so powerful, as well as the inevitable sense of guilt and outrage.
9. Swimming With Sharks
"What did I tell you on your first day? Your thoughts are NOTHING. You are NOTHING." "If you were in my toilet bowl I wouldn't bother flushing it. My bathmat means more to me than you. See this? (picks up desk diary) This means more to the company than you, but do you hear it complain when I do this? (throws desk diary at Guy)" In my opinion Kevin Spacey has never been better than as the ultimate boss from hell in this tale of Hollywood movie moguls and their hapless underlings. This scene, where Frank Whaley's Guy plucks up the courage to ask his boss Buddy to not shout at him quite so much is awesome, right down to the satisfied smirk on Buddy's face after Guy's hasty and undignified retreat.
10. Ringu
Ahhh, thank goodness that evil Sadako's curse has been lifted. Now our heroes can relax for the rest of the film and so can we. Look, there's the ex-husband, back at home and happy that his ex-wife and son are safe and of course, so is he. Oh look, the TV's just turned on. Odd. Hmmm, that well looks familiar. So does that freaky looking girl climbing out of it. But the curse was lifted wasn't it? Oh dear. She even walks evilly, in a 'I've been pushed down a well' kind of way. Still, she's on the TV, what could she go in there? AAAARRRGHHH! SHE'S CLIMBED OUT OF THE TV!!!! Look at her freaky, nailless fingers! LOOK AT HER EYE!!!! AAAARRGGHHH!
THE WRITER
1. Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park is not a classic film. Hell, it's not even a classic Steven Spielberg film. It's an effects movie, one created more out of a desire to show off a new toy than artistic necessity. But when those toys are as shiny and fun as the ones Spielberg got to play with on JP that's all you really need. The film is, of course, filled with magnificent scenes - the sick Triceratops, the Raptors in the kitchen, the classically Spielbergian closing shot - but it's our first glimpse of the T-Rex that is the finest. Not only does the beast still look astonishingly realistic, but the built up is beautifully played: the shivering water, the missing goat, the immense electric fence being cut through like a knife through butter. Objectively speaking, it may not be the best scene in cinema history, but it rocked my ten-year-old world and began my life-long love affair with the movies.
2. Punch-Drunk Love
Speaking of love, Paul Thomas Anderson's magnificent romantic comedy Punch Drunk Love is comfortably the finest of its kind in recent years. Not that most people noticed. Despite the fact it stars bankable star Adam Sandler, Anderson's fourth feature left many befuddled. Is it a mainstream film? An arthouse film? An Anderson picture? A Sandler flick? A comedy? A drama? The truth is, it's all these things and more; a delightful evocation of the blinding fear and roaring delight of falling in love at the most unexpected of times. And smack in the middle of it comes the crowning achievement of Anderson’s career. Sandler's character Barry has finally resolved to find the woman of his dreams (Lena, played with otherworldly charm by Emily Watson), who is currently on a business trip in Hawaii. Anderson tracks Barry through the airport, into the sky and then to his final meet-up with Lena all to the sounds of Shelley Duvall's bizarre rendition of He Needs Me from Robert Altman's Popeye. Lush, heartfelt and very, very weird, it the perfect encapsulation of the film's sensibilities and, dare I say, the ultimate cinematic evocation of being in love.
3. A Clockwork Orange
From one extreme to the other now. There's very, very little love in A Clockwork Orange (well, not unless you count Alex's love of violence), only anger, hatred and typically Kubrickian misanthropy. And yet, from these undesirable emotions, Kubrick musters one of the most perfect images in cinema history. Right at the start of the film. Just as you're settling in, preparing for a master class in film-making, the music starts up, sounding like something created by the warped, evil brother of Vangelis, and the camera tracks slowly away from Alex and his droogs sat in some kind of bar, wearing some kind of clothing, staring in the camera, through it even, and straight to the audience. Kubrick was a master of setting mood, and this is a scene so perfect not even Blur could bugger it up in their video for The Universal.
4. Singin' In The Rain
Earlier this week, I watched Tim Burton's version of Sweeney Todd, and was severely disappointed. True to Burton's form, it was a joy to look at and featured a corking turn from Johnny Depp as the titular demon barber, but as a musical it was left severely lacking. What so few cinematic musicals realise is that songs should be used sparingly; to elevate the emotions of a scene, rather than to get the audience to buy the soundtrack once they've left the theatre. Yet there is one that bucks the trend: Singin’ In The Rain. From the Good Mornin' singalong to Donald O'Connor's ballistic rendition of Make 'Em Laugh, Rain grasps that when music and visuals combine they can create otherworldly slices of cinema that can get our pulses racing and mouths smiling like no other, and in the title song, it has the single most joyful scene in cinema history.
5. From Russia With Love
As a fan of the Connery Bond films I was excited to hear Daniel Craig reveal that Quantum of Solace (it's a perfect title, naysayers!) will be a return to the "60s style spy movie". Craig explicitly referenced production designer extraordinaire Ken Adam, so are we to expect some grandiose hollowed out caves in Quantum? After the realism of Casino Royale, perhaps not, but what I do reckon (and hope we'll see) are down and dirty fights, much like the train carriage one between Connery and Robert Shaw at the end of From Russia With Love. Relying only on his attaché case and wits, Bond has to fight off SPECTRE assassin Red Grant in any way he can. Brutal, bloody and nasty, what follows is one of the finest mano-a-mano fight in cinema history. Let's hope Craig has been studying it.
6. Spider-Man 2
An odd entry onto the list, perhaps, but let me explain. The scene I refer to comes at the end of the film. An unmasked Spider-Man has just talked Doctor Octopus out of his villainous ways and as the eight-limbed scientist goes off to stop the imminent apocalypse he has created, Spidey turns around to see long-time love Mary Jane Watson staring at him with bewilderment. Finally, after two films she knows his secret. They can, at long last, confess their love for one another and all will be well in the world! But the wall behind MJ has other ideas, and as it begins to collapse on top of her, Spidey rushes over and catches it. An entire wall! And what does he say after this act of superheroic derring do? "This is really heavy". Romance, action and self-deprecating humour. It epitomises everything that is great about Sam Raimi, his Spider-Man films and the comics that inspired them.
7. The Apartment
It's such a shame that Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine only ever appeared in two films together (Billy Wilder's Irma La Douce being the second), because they have such a unique chemistry they really should be regarded among cinema‘s finest on-screen couples. A world apart from the smouldering passion of, say, Bogart and Bacall, MacLaine and Lemmon are the normal people, Mr and Mrs Everyman, a couple who you aspire to be, until you realise that, in fact, you are them. There are plenty of beautiful moments between them in Irma, but it's the end of The Apartment that takes the honours. After realising she loves him, Fran (MacLaine) runs to Bud Baxter’s (Lemmon) apartment and stops him from leaving town. Having loved her from the start of the film, Baxter finally tells her as much. Fran shuffles some playing cards, looks at Bud and says: "Shut up and deal". Pure cinematic perfection.
8. Alien
A bit of horror now. There have been many scenes throughout cinema history that have perfectly epitomised our fear of what could be out to get us. The ending of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the iconic shower scene in Psycho spring to mind. But for sheer, raw primal power, nothing can compete with Alien's dinner table scene. You all know the drill by now (and if you don't then what have you been doing with your life) and perhaps it's become cliché (when I saw the director's cut a few years ago, the scene inspired a few giggles of derision). But Ridley Scott's masterpiece has lost none of its fear factor and this sequence is the perfect encapsulation of that.
9. Raging Bull
Martin Scorsese is often credited as the master of realism and innovative camerawork. And yet it’s his most expressionistic and relatively still scene that is his best. The opening credits of Raging Bull find boxer Jake La Motta in a boxing ring, shadow fighting in slow-motion to the sounds of Pietro Mascagni‘s Cavalleria Rusticana: Intermezzo. It's so simple, but so perfect, summing up the themes of floundering masculinity that the film so magnificently explores.
10. Marie Antoinette
As this is the most recent film on the list and as it's the final scene that I'm citing here, I won't explain it. Suffice to say, Sofia Coppolla is a master of mood and the last shot of her unfairly maligned biopic of Marie Antoinette is a perfect denouement which brilliantly captures the tragedy and wasted youth of the doomed queen.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Entertainment Essentials: Andy Palacio & The Garifuna Collective - Watina
Sometimes you discover someone wonderful just too late. This week has seen a lot of media coverage about the death of Heath Ledger, an actor that I have to confess I've seen next to nothing of in films. That's largely because I've still never got round to watching Brokeback Mountain, and maybe when I've seen it I'll understand why Ledger was rated so highly. But while his death has gained masses of media coverage, it's another sad event recently that has inspired this blog.
Andy Palacio died on January 19th, and like Ledger he was on the cusp of getting real recognition, even if it was always likely to be a much smaller scale. You've probably never heard of him, and I hadn't until not so long ago when someone recomended his most recent album Watina to me. So now I'm recommending it to you, particularly those of you who are fond of really great 'world music' (terrible genre title though that is).
Palacio was a Belizean singer in the Punta style of Central America and he died in his home country - where he was also a government official and dedicated champion of the culture of his Garifuna people (they were ship-wrecked African slaves who formed an inter-racial community with the people of St Kitts before being expelled to Honduras by the British in 1797). Watina features a more acoustic-led and soulful form of his music, inspired by his Garifuna roots and it is nothing short of a masterpiece.
It's all in his native language, which means that you won't know what the songs are about beyond the English translations of the titles, but that hardly matters because it is the music that makes the emotional impact, particularly on tracks like Baba and Águyuha Nidúheñu. Palacio took inspiration from the Caribbean forms of reggae and soca, parts of Cuban son music and the unmistakable rhythms of Africa to come up with an album that is all about his roots and the roots of his people.
One of the aims of Watina was to ensure that Garifuna culture did not disappear and Watina's success around the world has certainly helped to revive it, with Palacio named as a Unesco Artist For Peace late last year and he and his Garifuna Collective set to be amongst the winners in the Radio 3 Awards For World Music. Sadly, when the award is handed over in April, Palacio will not be there to receive it, but hopefully his death will have one positive effect in that it might spread the word about the wonders of Watina. It's the power of music to inspire a whole people and that is an incredible thing.
Through that, he will continue to be a champion for his people, and if that is the case, then it is never too late to discover Andy Palacio.
Sometimes you discover someone wonderful just too late. This week has seen a lot of media coverage about the death of Heath Ledger, an actor that I have to confess I've seen next to nothing of in films. That's largely because I've still never got round to watching Brokeback Mountain, and maybe when I've seen it I'll understand why Ledger was rated so highly. But while his death has gained masses of media coverage, it's another sad event recently that has inspired this blog.
Andy Palacio died on January 19th, and like Ledger he was on the cusp of getting real recognition, even if it was always likely to be a much smaller scale. You've probably never heard of him, and I hadn't until not so long ago when someone recomended his most recent album Watina to me. So now I'm recommending it to you, particularly those of you who are fond of really great 'world music' (terrible genre title though that is).
Palacio was a Belizean singer in the Punta style of Central America and he died in his home country - where he was also a government official and dedicated champion of the culture of his Garifuna people (they were ship-wrecked African slaves who formed an inter-racial community with the people of St Kitts before being expelled to Honduras by the British in 1797). Watina features a more acoustic-led and soulful form of his music, inspired by his Garifuna roots and it is nothing short of a masterpiece.
It's all in his native language, which means that you won't know what the songs are about beyond the English translations of the titles, but that hardly matters because it is the music that makes the emotional impact, particularly on tracks like Baba and Águyuha Nidúheñu. Palacio took inspiration from the Caribbean forms of reggae and soca, parts of Cuban son music and the unmistakable rhythms of Africa to come up with an album that is all about his roots and the roots of his people.
One of the aims of Watina was to ensure that Garifuna culture did not disappear and Watina's success around the world has certainly helped to revive it, with Palacio named as a Unesco Artist For Peace late last year and he and his Garifuna Collective set to be amongst the winners in the Radio 3 Awards For World Music. Sadly, when the award is handed over in April, Palacio will not be there to receive it, but hopefully his death will have one positive effect in that it might spread the word about the wonders of Watina. It's the power of music to inspire a whole people and that is an incredible thing.
Through that, he will continue to be a champion for his people, and if that is the case, then it is never too late to discover Andy Palacio.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Say What?! - The Coens Are Best Outside Of Coenworld
“There's more to life than a little money, ya know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are. And it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it.”
The above quote comes from the mouth of pregnant police officer Marge Gunnarson when she is lecturing accosted crook Gaear Grimsrud in a scene which comes close to the end of the Coen Brothers' 1996 masterpiece Fargo. It is, perhaps, slightly unusual to start a blog entry with a quote from the end of a film, and even more so because this particular quote is relatively bland compared to the deliciously witty words the Coens usually write for their actors. But I mention this for a reason.
Watching the writer/director team's latest film, No Country For Old Men, I was reminded of Fargo, and Marge in particular. Based on Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, No Country blends the Western with a bit of black comedy, a pinch of thriller and a dash of horror to tell the three-pronged story of the repercussions of a failed drugs deal. The first leg of this tripod of tragedy is Llewelyn Moss, a hapless stooge in the great Coen tradition who stumbles into trouble when he picks up the money from the aforementioned drug job. He's an innocent goon in hopelessly beyond his depth brilliantly portrayed by Josh Brolin. But while he may be the character who instigates the film's chaos, Moss is merely a McGuffin.
Instead, the film's central themes revolve around the two remaining characters. First up is the man who peruses Moss in order to get the cash back, assassin Anton Chigurgh. Played with chilling stillness by Spanish actor Javier Bardem, Chigurh is like the Terminator made flesh, a monosyllabic manifestation of your worst nightmares who will coolly blow up a car just so he can create a diversion to rob a chemist of the supplies he needs to heal a battle wound. It’s another stunning, Oscar-worthy performance, and once you’ve seen it, the question “What time do you go to bed?” will take on new, terrifying meaning.
Caught in the middle of this chase is Tommy Lee Jones' Ed Tom Bell, the aging local sheriff who acts as the benevolent yin to Chigurgh's Satanic yang as hopelessly peruses he and Moss across the Texan borderlands trying to fathom just what kind of man would be capable of Chigurgh's evil. Jones is, as ever, laconically perfect and although the character was created by McCarthy, he feels decidedly Coenesque, comparable, in fact, to Marge. Bell is a traditional kind of guy, a humane man, cut adrift in a world without morals and when he opens the film lamenting the crime that's about to take place, it's impossible not to be reminded of Marge's soulful lecture to Grimsrud.
Fargo and No Country For Old Men are, to my money at least, the Coens’ finest films, and it strikes me as no coincidence that the best words to describe them are humane, moral and soulful. The Coens' critics accuse them of intellectual smugness, of placing their films in a hermetically sealed box that makes audience connection nigh on impossible. While I would certainly disagree with the former point (surely the Coens are too withdrawn to be smug), I find evidence of the latter in the overbearing quirkiness of O’ Brother Where Art Thou, the suffocating intellectual surrealism of Barton Fink and the distancing noir coldness of The Man Who Wasn’t There.
This isn’t to say any of them are bad films (except perhaps O’ Brother - but that’s more to do with my loathing of bluegrass, a musical genre so hideous only an oxymoron could aptly describe it) or that I don‘t enjoy the Coens’ sense of humour (you’d have to be dead not to laugh at The Big Lebowski), only that they will never hold a candle to Fargo and now No Country, because every time I hear George Clooney proclaim himself “a Dapper Dan man” or Fink make another reference to wrestling pictures I hear Joel and Ethan giggling behind camera and see an imaginary brick wall being built between myself and the screen.
There are plenty of reasons to giggle at Fargo and No Country, of course; the accents, the hopelessness of William H Macy’s small-time crook, Javier Bardem’s haircut. But each them is couched in a real world scenario stripped of overt quirks, and seem to communicate something of the characters: a naivety, a desperation, a sense of unpredictable, sociopathic evil. All of these are very real human emotions, allowed to breath thanks to the fact the Coens have poked their heads out of the Coenworld bunker for just long enough to connect with the rest of the world.
Burn After Reading, an original black comedy about a gym instructor who is targeted for assassination after stumbling across an ex-CIA man’s memoirs, will be their next film, and hilarious I’m sure it will be. But it sounds like the brothers are dipping their head back in the bunker again, something I‘m a little disappointed by. The Coens are as good, if not better, at creating moments of touching human connection as they are at moments of surreal comedy, and the endings of both No Country and Fargo prove as much.
The former I won't ruin here (although it's at once brilliantly ambiguous and emotionally touching), but the ending of Fargo (which bears a semi-similar resemblance to No Country's coda) reads:
Norm: They announced it.
Marge They announced it?
Norm: Yeah.
Marge: So?
Norm: Three-cent stamp.
Marge: Your mallard?
Norm: Yeah.
Marge: Oh, that's terrific.
Norm: It's just a three-cent stamp.
Marge: It's terrific.
Norm: Hautman's blue-winged teal got the 29-cent. People don't much use the three-cent.
Marge: Oh, for Pete's sake. Of course they do. Whenever they raise the postage, people need the little stamps.
Bland and unremarkable it may be, but accompanied by a tinkly interpretation of Carter Burwell’s Fargo theme and a beautiful performance from Frances McDormand, it’s the best and most human scene the Coens have ever written, touching upon a nobility and appreciation of simple homelife that they are often deemed too cynical to understand.
Surrealism may have made their name, but you can keep your Soggy Bottom Boys, your Satanic hotels, hell, even The Dude’s beloved rug. Norm’s three-cent mallard is the pinnacle of the Coens’ career, and No Country For Old Men is a sign they can surpass it in the future.
“There's more to life than a little money, ya know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are. And it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it.”
The above quote comes from the mouth of pregnant police officer Marge Gunnarson when she is lecturing accosted crook Gaear Grimsrud in a scene which comes close to the end of the Coen Brothers' 1996 masterpiece Fargo. It is, perhaps, slightly unusual to start a blog entry with a quote from the end of a film, and even more so because this particular quote is relatively bland compared to the deliciously witty words the Coens usually write for their actors. But I mention this for a reason.
Watching the writer/director team's latest film, No Country For Old Men, I was reminded of Fargo, and Marge in particular. Based on Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, No Country blends the Western with a bit of black comedy, a pinch of thriller and a dash of horror to tell the three-pronged story of the repercussions of a failed drugs deal. The first leg of this tripod of tragedy is Llewelyn Moss, a hapless stooge in the great Coen tradition who stumbles into trouble when he picks up the money from the aforementioned drug job. He's an innocent goon in hopelessly beyond his depth brilliantly portrayed by Josh Brolin. But while he may be the character who instigates the film's chaos, Moss is merely a McGuffin.
Instead, the film's central themes revolve around the two remaining characters. First up is the man who peruses Moss in order to get the cash back, assassin Anton Chigurgh. Played with chilling stillness by Spanish actor Javier Bardem, Chigurh is like the Terminator made flesh, a monosyllabic manifestation of your worst nightmares who will coolly blow up a car just so he can create a diversion to rob a chemist of the supplies he needs to heal a battle wound. It’s another stunning, Oscar-worthy performance, and once you’ve seen it, the question “What time do you go to bed?” will take on new, terrifying meaning.
Caught in the middle of this chase is Tommy Lee Jones' Ed Tom Bell, the aging local sheriff who acts as the benevolent yin to Chigurgh's Satanic yang as hopelessly peruses he and Moss across the Texan borderlands trying to fathom just what kind of man would be capable of Chigurgh's evil. Jones is, as ever, laconically perfect and although the character was created by McCarthy, he feels decidedly Coenesque, comparable, in fact, to Marge. Bell is a traditional kind of guy, a humane man, cut adrift in a world without morals and when he opens the film lamenting the crime that's about to take place, it's impossible not to be reminded of Marge's soulful lecture to Grimsrud.
Fargo and No Country For Old Men are, to my money at least, the Coens’ finest films, and it strikes me as no coincidence that the best words to describe them are humane, moral and soulful. The Coens' critics accuse them of intellectual smugness, of placing their films in a hermetically sealed box that makes audience connection nigh on impossible. While I would certainly disagree with the former point (surely the Coens are too withdrawn to be smug), I find evidence of the latter in the overbearing quirkiness of O’ Brother Where Art Thou, the suffocating intellectual surrealism of Barton Fink and the distancing noir coldness of The Man Who Wasn’t There.
This isn’t to say any of them are bad films (except perhaps O’ Brother - but that’s more to do with my loathing of bluegrass, a musical genre so hideous only an oxymoron could aptly describe it) or that I don‘t enjoy the Coens’ sense of humour (you’d have to be dead not to laugh at The Big Lebowski), only that they will never hold a candle to Fargo and now No Country, because every time I hear George Clooney proclaim himself “a Dapper Dan man” or Fink make another reference to wrestling pictures I hear Joel and Ethan giggling behind camera and see an imaginary brick wall being built between myself and the screen.
There are plenty of reasons to giggle at Fargo and No Country, of course; the accents, the hopelessness of William H Macy’s small-time crook, Javier Bardem’s haircut. But each them is couched in a real world scenario stripped of overt quirks, and seem to communicate something of the characters: a naivety, a desperation, a sense of unpredictable, sociopathic evil. All of these are very real human emotions, allowed to breath thanks to the fact the Coens have poked their heads out of the Coenworld bunker for just long enough to connect with the rest of the world.
Burn After Reading, an original black comedy about a gym instructor who is targeted for assassination after stumbling across an ex-CIA man’s memoirs, will be their next film, and hilarious I’m sure it will be. But it sounds like the brothers are dipping their head back in the bunker again, something I‘m a little disappointed by. The Coens are as good, if not better, at creating moments of touching human connection as they are at moments of surreal comedy, and the endings of both No Country and Fargo prove as much.
The former I won't ruin here (although it's at once brilliantly ambiguous and emotionally touching), but the ending of Fargo (which bears a semi-similar resemblance to No Country's coda) reads:
Norm: They announced it.
Marge They announced it?
Norm: Yeah.
Marge: So?
Norm: Three-cent stamp.
Marge: Your mallard?
Norm: Yeah.
Marge: Oh, that's terrific.
Norm: It's just a three-cent stamp.
Marge: It's terrific.
Norm: Hautman's blue-winged teal got the 29-cent. People don't much use the three-cent.
Marge: Oh, for Pete's sake. Of course they do. Whenever they raise the postage, people need the little stamps.
Bland and unremarkable it may be, but accompanied by a tinkly interpretation of Carter Burwell’s Fargo theme and a beautiful performance from Frances McDormand, it’s the best and most human scene the Coens have ever written, touching upon a nobility and appreciation of simple homelife that they are often deemed too cynical to understand.
Surrealism may have made their name, but you can keep your Soggy Bottom Boys, your Satanic hotels, hell, even The Dude’s beloved rug. Norm’s three-cent mallard is the pinnacle of the Coens’ career, and No Country For Old Men is a sign they can surpass it in the future.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
WATCHING, READING, LISTENING TO
Over the Christmas holidays, everyone watches more, reads more and listens to more than normal because we've got spare time to fill, so here's our SPECIAL BUMPER EDITION of Watching, Reading, Listening To...
THE WRITER
WATCHING: As with every Christmas, my free time this year was spent slouching in front of the TV watching so many films it's probably easiest just to list what I watched one by one and then give a pithy remark. So, here goes:
Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Night: An hour and a half of dreadful Christmas animation that, on the one hand, appealed to Sandler's usual dead-headed fans, but on the other, tried to capture the family Christmas market. Deservedly, it ended up attracting neither.
Ella Enchanted: Anne Hathaway is a charming, likeable actress, but this postmodern fairy tale is way beneath her talents. For a better 'little girls' princess' film go watch Enchanted.
Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events: Liked it when it was out at the cinema, like it now. Brad Silberling is an underrated little director (check out the wonderful drama Moonlight Mile for more evidence) and this pleasingly dark kids' film shows why you really should check out more of his work.
Princess Diaries 2: See Ella Enchanted.
A Christmas Carol: Charles Dickens' most famous story has been made so many times that you only really watch each one to see what each actor brings to it. Sadly, despite this 1999 effort's commendable loyalty to the source and a great turn from Richard E Grant as Bob Crachit, Patrick Stewart's performance as Scrooge is so surprisingly hammy it could have been served up at Christmas dinner.
The Polar Express: Watching Robert Zemeckis's Christmas film on the small screen really shows how much motion capture needs 3D IMAX technology to make it fly. Sure, the story's all Christmassy and warm, but the script's stretched beyond recognition and it's actually quite boring at times without a REALLY BIG SCREEN to make it all fancy.
Doctor Who - Voyage Of The Damned: Good stuff, but the weakest of the three Christmas specials for two reasons. Firstly, Kylie, as good as she was, was just playing Rose and Martha by another name. Secondly, it was too long. 70 minutes seems great, but it's a bit of a no man's land, giving enough scope to create character arcs and subplots, but not quite enough time to develop them satisfactorily, thus making some parts of Voyage of the Damned seem like filler.
Moonraker: The Editor and I have had many a long talk about the merits of Roger Moore's run as James Bond. I hate his tenure, The Editor doesn't. So, as the open-minded type, I sat down and watched the three Moore Bonds on this Christmas to see if I was wrong. I was not. Moonraker is utter garbage from start to finish, taking one of Ian Fleming's best novels and turning it into a structureless excuse to cash in on the Star Wars phenemonon.
For Your Eyes Only: I was assured that this was a slightly edgier effort from the Moore era after Moonraker was poorly received. It's certainly got its feet on the ground in comparison with its predecessor, but it's still aimless tosh in which the 104-year-old Rog flirts with women not even half his age.
Octopussy: Sir Rog, now 136 years of age, goes to more exotic locations, beds more women and even finds time to dress up as a clown. How apt.
Garfield: You know who'd make an interesting Bond? Bill Murray. Well, he certainly does a good job as Garfield in this seriously underratted cinematic debut for the lardy cat. It's certainly no masterpiece, but I dug this entertaining little kids film, which managed to blend decent, semi-subversive jokes, with a reasonably sweet love story between Breckin Myer and Jennifer Love-Hewitt.
The Terminal: Silly romantic comedy or subervise satire on the death of the American dream at the hands of commerce and capitalism. I think the latter, the Editor goes for the far less interesting choice of the former. Either way, The Terminal is one of Spielberg's most underrated recent efforts.
The Simpsons Movie: And speaking of underrated, I'm not quite sure why The Simpsons Movie has been so harshly written off. Watching it a second time on DVD, the jokes still fly, the characters still have heart and the structure is still sound. This is certainly not just an overextended single episode.
Ice Princess: Look, I watched Ella Enchanted, so why not this? Young girl wants to be an ice skater, but she's a geek played by Michelle Trachtenberg. Guess what happens next. Entirely predictable, but notable for creating a bizarre dystopian nightmare in which Kim Cattrell's bitchy skating coach wins out over Joan Cusack's sweet and intelligent mother character. Truly frightening.
The Spy Who Loved Me: The Bond continues. This is one of only two Moore efforts I enjoy (Live And Let Die being the second) and, despite the fact it doesn't really add up to anything more than the sum of its parts, it's very watchable.
Goldeneye: Pierce Brosnan. Great Bond, bad films. Goldeneye is, by some distance, the best flick of his tenure, blending a rich story, interesting characters and some cracking action set pieces.
Diamonds Are Forever: Why is everyone so down on DAF? Okay, it's not great and Shir Shean looks a few years too old (and a few pounds overweight), but it's a decent little thriller and features a great fight between Bond and a diamond smuggler in a lift.
READING: Everyone must fink I'm dead clever like, cos I got loads of books this Christmas, so again, I'll just list 'em with a quick comment:
Complete Bond Box-Set: A friend bought me a boxset including all fourteen Fleming Bonds, so now I can discover exactly how many great stories were ruined by Sir Rog's arching brow. First up, having already read the first four is book five: From Russia With Love. Best Bond film. Best Bond book? Hopefully.
Long Way Down: Slightly disappointed by the TV series, which seemed a little too well-planned to have the same sense of danger as Long Way Round, so I'm looking forward to sinking my teeth into the book which has started reasonably well.
Charlie Brooker's Dawn Of The Dumb: Knowing I'm a grumpy old man who enjoys the writing of fellow grumpies, The Editor bought me The Guardian columist's second book. It's basically a compilation of his work from 2004 onwards, but when that includes gems as good as "David Cameron's like a big hollow Easter egg with all the sweets taken out" what more do you need?
The Marvel Museum: It's a history of Marvel comics! In a big book! With a load of replica memorbilia! What more could a geek want? Well, complete control over their headquarters so I can stop them buggering up Spider-Man wouldn't be bad. But this comes a close second. Now I own an invitation for Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's wedding. Hurrah!
Directed By Steven Spielberg: Bought this for myself before Christmas because I wanted to read a serious examination of Spielberg's directorial style. Only read the first page, but it was a good one, so let's hope it continues...
LISTENING TO: Not being a huge music fan, I've only been listening to two things over Christmas. First, Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood, which is a unique piece of work every bit as magnificent as I hope the film will be. Secondly, the fancy-dan discbox thing of Radiohead's In Rainbows. Obviously, it's still awesome, but now it's even awseomer, because it comes with an extra disc. True to form, In Rainbows CD 2 has two curious instrumentals (MK 1 & 2), but they work well in the dreamy context of the album, extras, bonus disc...thing. Down Is The New Up is a cracking little slice of funk every bit deserving of the hype it has received, while Last Flowers and Four Minute Warning are slow, ethereal ballads right up their with the likes of Motion Picture Soundtrack and Street Spirit. Bangers and Mash is slightly dissapointing, but only because it lacks the venom of its live performances, and it's more than made up for by the two remaining tracks (Go Slowly and Up on the Ladder) and the beauty of the discbox's presentation. To be honest, I hope this is how Radiohead release all their albums. Disbox aside, the songs on CD 2 deserve better than B-side status and the cutting room floor and this is the way to save them from that fate.
THE EDITOR
WATCHING: Unlike The Writer, I didn't watch many films on TV this Christmas, and judging by the stuff he watched I think I chose the right option. Here's what I saw:
The Wire Series 1: Rented it from LoveFilm as I'd heard a lot about how good it is, and as The Sopranos finished last year and there's not much else that I like on TV. It takes a lot of concentration to get into the intricate and expansive tale of life in Baltimore for police and drug dealers alike, but it's richly rewarding and awesome stuff. I haven't seen the whole first series yet and I'm already looking forward to the second one and beyond. God bless HBO.
Six Feet Under Series 1: Speaking of HBO, my fiancee bought me the complete SFU box-set for my birthday before Christmas and I've watched the first series so far. I've seen it twice before and it's still just as funny, moving and powerful as the first time, perhaps even more as it's the first time I've watched it since the show ended.
Transformers: Another DVD, this time a Christmas present. I saw it at the cinema and really enjoyed it then, and I still liked it on the smaller screen. Having grown up with Transformers, obviously some of the characterisation was a bit off, but you can't take it that seriously as it doesn't take itself very seriously. It's a good laugh and there's lots of fun to be had from it.
The Stingiest Man In Town: A Rankin/Bass animated remake of a musical version of A Christmas Carol, with Tom Bosley as 'The Christmas Humbug' (the narrator basically) and Walter Mathau as Scrooge. It's something that I've had on tape since I was young and I loved it then and now. It might not be that good really and it's a bit sentimental at times, but that's Christmas for you and I love the songs.
The Muppet Christmas Carol: I'd never seen this before and I was a bit disappointed really. There's some good jokes as you'd expect from the Muppets, but I thought Michael Caine was very flat as Scrooge and that stopped it from ever really taking off.
First Daughter: One of the few films I saw on TV, this was my fiancee's choice rather than mine and it wasn't great, despite being directed by Forest Whittaker. Katie Holmes plays the President's daughter, going off to uni and falling in love, etc, etc. It's like a schmaltzy version of a storyline from The West Wing and doesn't really go anywhere.
Stephen King's Rose Red; Another birthday present, this DVD was part of a Stephen King box-set and it lasts about four hours, so provided plenty of viewing. Like most King adaptations it's a bit cheesy at times and packed with the kind of cliches that get edited out of the better ones, but it's a pretty spooky haunted house tale and was good fun.
READING: Didn't really have much time for reading over Christmas, so the only thing I really flicked through was a book about The Sopranos that The Writer got me for my birthday. It's a really good book with all the background info and stories from the making of my favourite TV show of all time, so I'm sure I'll enjoy dipping in and out of it. I got given a lot of books for Christmas and bought some more with book tokens, etc, so i should get a move on with the two I'm currently reading...
LISTENING TO: Unusually, I didn't listen to much music over Christmas, mainly because I watched so many DVDs. Apart from Xmas music, I listened to Sia's new album (reviewed on the main site), the Transformers The Movie soundtrack (a present), some Timi Yuro and albums that I bought with iTunes vouchers. Two of them were inspired by hearing songs on Six Feet Under (The Amboy Dukes and Craig Armstrong) and the rest were classic Aretha Franklin albums that I'd never got around to buying before. All good stuff.
Over the Christmas holidays, everyone watches more, reads more and listens to more than normal because we've got spare time to fill, so here's our SPECIAL BUMPER EDITION of Watching, Reading, Listening To...
THE WRITER
WATCHING: As with every Christmas, my free time this year was spent slouching in front of the TV watching so many films it's probably easiest just to list what I watched one by one and then give a pithy remark. So, here goes:
Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Night: An hour and a half of dreadful Christmas animation that, on the one hand, appealed to Sandler's usual dead-headed fans, but on the other, tried to capture the family Christmas market. Deservedly, it ended up attracting neither.
Ella Enchanted: Anne Hathaway is a charming, likeable actress, but this postmodern fairy tale is way beneath her talents. For a better 'little girls' princess' film go watch Enchanted.
Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events: Liked it when it was out at the cinema, like it now. Brad Silberling is an underrated little director (check out the wonderful drama Moonlight Mile for more evidence) and this pleasingly dark kids' film shows why you really should check out more of his work.
Princess Diaries 2: See Ella Enchanted.
A Christmas Carol: Charles Dickens' most famous story has been made so many times that you only really watch each one to see what each actor brings to it. Sadly, despite this 1999 effort's commendable loyalty to the source and a great turn from Richard E Grant as Bob Crachit, Patrick Stewart's performance as Scrooge is so surprisingly hammy it could have been served up at Christmas dinner.
The Polar Express: Watching Robert Zemeckis's Christmas film on the small screen really shows how much motion capture needs 3D IMAX technology to make it fly. Sure, the story's all Christmassy and warm, but the script's stretched beyond recognition and it's actually quite boring at times without a REALLY BIG SCREEN to make it all fancy.
Doctor Who - Voyage Of The Damned: Good stuff, but the weakest of the three Christmas specials for two reasons. Firstly, Kylie, as good as she was, was just playing Rose and Martha by another name. Secondly, it was too long. 70 minutes seems great, but it's a bit of a no man's land, giving enough scope to create character arcs and subplots, but not quite enough time to develop them satisfactorily, thus making some parts of Voyage of the Damned seem like filler.
Moonraker: The Editor and I have had many a long talk about the merits of Roger Moore's run as James Bond. I hate his tenure, The Editor doesn't. So, as the open-minded type, I sat down and watched the three Moore Bonds on this Christmas to see if I was wrong. I was not. Moonraker is utter garbage from start to finish, taking one of Ian Fleming's best novels and turning it into a structureless excuse to cash in on the Star Wars phenemonon.
For Your Eyes Only: I was assured that this was a slightly edgier effort from the Moore era after Moonraker was poorly received. It's certainly got its feet on the ground in comparison with its predecessor, but it's still aimless tosh in which the 104-year-old Rog flirts with women not even half his age.
Octopussy: Sir Rog, now 136 years of age, goes to more exotic locations, beds more women and even finds time to dress up as a clown. How apt.
Garfield: You know who'd make an interesting Bond? Bill Murray. Well, he certainly does a good job as Garfield in this seriously underratted cinematic debut for the lardy cat. It's certainly no masterpiece, but I dug this entertaining little kids film, which managed to blend decent, semi-subversive jokes, with a reasonably sweet love story between Breckin Myer and Jennifer Love-Hewitt.
The Terminal: Silly romantic comedy or subervise satire on the death of the American dream at the hands of commerce and capitalism. I think the latter, the Editor goes for the far less interesting choice of the former. Either way, The Terminal is one of Spielberg's most underrated recent efforts.
The Simpsons Movie: And speaking of underrated, I'm not quite sure why The Simpsons Movie has been so harshly written off. Watching it a second time on DVD, the jokes still fly, the characters still have heart and the structure is still sound. This is certainly not just an overextended single episode.
Ice Princess: Look, I watched Ella Enchanted, so why not this? Young girl wants to be an ice skater, but she's a geek played by Michelle Trachtenberg. Guess what happens next. Entirely predictable, but notable for creating a bizarre dystopian nightmare in which Kim Cattrell's bitchy skating coach wins out over Joan Cusack's sweet and intelligent mother character. Truly frightening.
The Spy Who Loved Me: The Bond continues. This is one of only two Moore efforts I enjoy (Live And Let Die being the second) and, despite the fact it doesn't really add up to anything more than the sum of its parts, it's very watchable.
Goldeneye: Pierce Brosnan. Great Bond, bad films. Goldeneye is, by some distance, the best flick of his tenure, blending a rich story, interesting characters and some cracking action set pieces.
Diamonds Are Forever: Why is everyone so down on DAF? Okay, it's not great and Shir Shean looks a few years too old (and a few pounds overweight), but it's a decent little thriller and features a great fight between Bond and a diamond smuggler in a lift.
READING: Everyone must fink I'm dead clever like, cos I got loads of books this Christmas, so again, I'll just list 'em with a quick comment:
Complete Bond Box-Set: A friend bought me a boxset including all fourteen Fleming Bonds, so now I can discover exactly how many great stories were ruined by Sir Rog's arching brow. First up, having already read the first four is book five: From Russia With Love. Best Bond film. Best Bond book? Hopefully.
Long Way Down: Slightly disappointed by the TV series, which seemed a little too well-planned to have the same sense of danger as Long Way Round, so I'm looking forward to sinking my teeth into the book which has started reasonably well.
Charlie Brooker's Dawn Of The Dumb: Knowing I'm a grumpy old man who enjoys the writing of fellow grumpies, The Editor bought me The Guardian columist's second book. It's basically a compilation of his work from 2004 onwards, but when that includes gems as good as "David Cameron's like a big hollow Easter egg with all the sweets taken out" what more do you need?
The Marvel Museum: It's a history of Marvel comics! In a big book! With a load of replica memorbilia! What more could a geek want? Well, complete control over their headquarters so I can stop them buggering up Spider-Man wouldn't be bad. But this comes a close second. Now I own an invitation for Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's wedding. Hurrah!
Directed By Steven Spielberg: Bought this for myself before Christmas because I wanted to read a serious examination of Spielberg's directorial style. Only read the first page, but it was a good one, so let's hope it continues...
LISTENING TO: Not being a huge music fan, I've only been listening to two things over Christmas. First, Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood, which is a unique piece of work every bit as magnificent as I hope the film will be. Secondly, the fancy-dan discbox thing of Radiohead's In Rainbows. Obviously, it's still awesome, but now it's even awseomer, because it comes with an extra disc. True to form, In Rainbows CD 2 has two curious instrumentals (MK 1 & 2), but they work well in the dreamy context of the album, extras, bonus disc...thing. Down Is The New Up is a cracking little slice of funk every bit deserving of the hype it has received, while Last Flowers and Four Minute Warning are slow, ethereal ballads right up their with the likes of Motion Picture Soundtrack and Street Spirit. Bangers and Mash is slightly dissapointing, but only because it lacks the venom of its live performances, and it's more than made up for by the two remaining tracks (Go Slowly and Up on the Ladder) and the beauty of the discbox's presentation. To be honest, I hope this is how Radiohead release all their albums. Disbox aside, the songs on CD 2 deserve better than B-side status and the cutting room floor and this is the way to save them from that fate.
THE EDITOR
WATCHING: Unlike The Writer, I didn't watch many films on TV this Christmas, and judging by the stuff he watched I think I chose the right option. Here's what I saw:
The Wire Series 1: Rented it from LoveFilm as I'd heard a lot about how good it is, and as The Sopranos finished last year and there's not much else that I like on TV. It takes a lot of concentration to get into the intricate and expansive tale of life in Baltimore for police and drug dealers alike, but it's richly rewarding and awesome stuff. I haven't seen the whole first series yet and I'm already looking forward to the second one and beyond. God bless HBO.
Six Feet Under Series 1: Speaking of HBO, my fiancee bought me the complete SFU box-set for my birthday before Christmas and I've watched the first series so far. I've seen it twice before and it's still just as funny, moving and powerful as the first time, perhaps even more as it's the first time I've watched it since the show ended.
Transformers: Another DVD, this time a Christmas present. I saw it at the cinema and really enjoyed it then, and I still liked it on the smaller screen. Having grown up with Transformers, obviously some of the characterisation was a bit off, but you can't take it that seriously as it doesn't take itself very seriously. It's a good laugh and there's lots of fun to be had from it.
The Stingiest Man In Town: A Rankin/Bass animated remake of a musical version of A Christmas Carol, with Tom Bosley as 'The Christmas Humbug' (the narrator basically) and Walter Mathau as Scrooge. It's something that I've had on tape since I was young and I loved it then and now. It might not be that good really and it's a bit sentimental at times, but that's Christmas for you and I love the songs.
The Muppet Christmas Carol: I'd never seen this before and I was a bit disappointed really. There's some good jokes as you'd expect from the Muppets, but I thought Michael Caine was very flat as Scrooge and that stopped it from ever really taking off.
First Daughter: One of the few films I saw on TV, this was my fiancee's choice rather than mine and it wasn't great, despite being directed by Forest Whittaker. Katie Holmes plays the President's daughter, going off to uni and falling in love, etc, etc. It's like a schmaltzy version of a storyline from The West Wing and doesn't really go anywhere.
Stephen King's Rose Red; Another birthday present, this DVD was part of a Stephen King box-set and it lasts about four hours, so provided plenty of viewing. Like most King adaptations it's a bit cheesy at times and packed with the kind of cliches that get edited out of the better ones, but it's a pretty spooky haunted house tale and was good fun.
READING: Didn't really have much time for reading over Christmas, so the only thing I really flicked through was a book about The Sopranos that The Writer got me for my birthday. It's a really good book with all the background info and stories from the making of my favourite TV show of all time, so I'm sure I'll enjoy dipping in and out of it. I got given a lot of books for Christmas and bought some more with book tokens, etc, so i should get a move on with the two I'm currently reading...
LISTENING TO: Unusually, I didn't listen to much music over Christmas, mainly because I watched so many DVDs. Apart from Xmas music, I listened to Sia's new album (reviewed on the main site), the Transformers The Movie soundtrack (a present), some Timi Yuro and albums that I bought with iTunes vouchers. Two of them were inspired by hearing songs on Six Feet Under (The Amboy Dukes and Craig Armstrong) and the rest were classic Aretha Franklin albums that I'd never got around to buying before. All good stuff.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Top Ten Christmas Films - By The Writer
1. It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)
Come on, what else was it going to be?! It may be as predictable as your uncle telling an off-colour joke at Christmas dinner, but It’s A Wonderful Life is quite simply the best Christmas film ever made, quite simply because it’s the only one that’s good at any time of year. Take out the Bedford Falls snow and Christmassy-setting of the final scenes and this is an evergreen tale of one man’s personal struggles - and a bloody depressing one it is too. Sure, you may remember Frank Capra’s classic for it’s ‘every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings’ mantra, but deep down this is really a dark, depressing tale of an ambitious young man finding the hopes and expectations of his youth battered into submission by the Dickins-esque spectre of real life. No wonder the poor guy wanted to kill himself. Thankfully, guardian angel Clarence swoops down to remind Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey that it is indeed a wonderful life and creates a beautiful finale into the bargain. I once saw this on the big screen in a packed auditorium a few weeks before the big day. If you get the opportunity to do the same take it. It’s one of the best cinematic experiences I have ever enjoyed.
2. Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Here’s another film that’s not just for Christmas. It is also regularly viewed at Halloween. Indeed, one of the finest pleasures of my youth was in seeing just how badly ITV would bugger up the scheduling of Nightmare Before Christmas (I was a very lonely child). Halloween? Christmas? Morning? ‘Noon? Night? They never got it right of course (they are ITV, after all), but it’s really not too difficult to work out. Despite its ghoulish stars and ‘Created by Tim Burton’ credit (Henry Selick, we should remember, is the man who toiled in the director’s chair), this is really all about Christmas and its heartwarming magic, as witnessed in Danny Elfman’s magnificent song ‘What’s This?’. “There's children throwing snowballs, instead of throwing heads. They're busy building toys and absolutely no-one’s dead.” Is it just us or is this the most weirdly perfect description of Christmas ever?
3. How The Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)
Here’s the story that inspired Burton’s Nightmare. Dr Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas is, of course, a classic in book form. However, in taking it to the animated arena, Looney Tunes legend Chuck Jones added something extra to it. Extending it slightly to fit 25 minutes, he and Seuss managed to craft a sweet but not sentimental tale of a grumpy green ghoul who attempts to ruin Christmas for all the innocent Whos in Whoville. Of course, he sees that Christmas “can’t be bought in a store” and that “maybe it means a little bit more”, but it’s Jones animation that shines just as much as the message. The whitish-blue snow, the primary colours of Whoville and the marvellous scene where the Grinch’s mouth spreads and spreads and spreads into the world’s wildest villainous smile make this a true classic.
4. Gremlins (1984)
Does this count? It’s not strictly a Christmas film, and even if it were, it’d be a damn nasty one, but therein lies the charm of Joe Dante’s demonic inversion of Wonderful Life. This is the anti-Christmas film, in which a load of nasty beasties run riot, the nice boy doesn’t get to keep the cute little critter at the end and his charmingly mad next door neighbour appears to die (he doesn‘t, but he is run over by a gremlin in a snow plough). Yet, despite this, it’s still chock full of ingenious comedy which adds levity to the anarchy. See, for example, the Gremlin being chucked in blender, the Gremlins hanging out in the bar, drinking smoking and flashing, and the evil Mrs Deagle riding her malfunctioning stairmaster out the window…Okay, maybe they’re not quite jolly little slices of silly comedy, but everyone needs a bit of cynicism at Christmas…and Dante delivers it in spades.
5. Die Hard (1988)
The best action film ever made is also one of the best Christmas films ever made. Sure, it may only be tenuously set at Christmas and, considering the events take place in LA, it’s a fairly sunny Christmas. However, the whole point of Christmas is to conquer work/the traffic/irritating relatives to get to the people you love. The only difference for Bruce Willis’s John McClane (still his best performance) is that he must stop an evil German terrorist and his gang of Teutonic henchmen from blowing up Nakatomi Plaza before he can get to the woman he loves. Cue big explosions, flying limbs and swear words galore. Yipee-kay-yay motherfudger!
6. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
As someone who grew up mostly watching the 1980s Charlie Brown Specials I was shocked to see how dark and neurotic the character was back in the 60s. Sure, when I was a kid he was a bit depressed, but back when he first made the jump from Charles Schultz’s comic strip to moving animation, he and Snoopy made Scrooge look like a happy little camper and had the evil angry eyes and growly voices to prove it. So why is this one in here if its so depressing? Well, while it is quite sad, its message (Christmas is about more than flashy trees and presents) is spot on and frankly there’s something classic, almost Norman Rockwell-esque, about the animation that screams Christmas. Come on, what would the yuletide be without the Peanuts gang skating on a frozen lake as the snow falls?
7. The Muppet’s Christmas Carol (1992)
This was only the second Muppets feature film to be released after the death of Jim Henson and it‘s one of the best. Christmas Carol remakes are ten a penny at this time of year, but Brian Henson’s version stays surprisingly close to the source to make for bizarrely one of the most faithful adaptations of any book ever. As if that isn’t enough, you also have the fact one of the greatest stories ever told is being played out…by Muppets. Kermit takes on Bob Cratchit, the Marleys are, of course, Statler and Waldorf and Charlie Dickens himself is played by none other than Gonzo. He should be flattered.
8. The Apartment (1960)
You’re going to have to bear with me on this one. Billy Wilder’s masterpiece The Apartment isn’t strictly a Christmas film. It takes place over the festive season and it’s big finale happens on New Year’s Eve, but it’s not technically a Christmas film. So, why is it here? Because I’m the one writing this list and you’re not, so sod off. The Apartment is my favourite film of all time, boasting one of Jack Lemmon’s best performances as the down-and-out Bud Baxter and one of the most well-rounded screen romances in the shape of his infatuation with Shirely McLaine’s Fran Kubelick, an elevator girl at Bud’s office who tries to kill herself when her own relationship goes down the pan. Not very Christmassy, you may think, but then there’s that New Year’s finale. Hearing that Bud has done the right thing and told the bosses who rent his apartment to have extra-marital affairs to go hang, Fran goes to find him just as he’s about to leave town. Do they get together? I won’t ruin it for you, but the answer includes the finest closing line since Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, so check it out.
9. Scrooged (1998)
Christmas is great. Bill Murray is great. Christmas plus Bill Murray is simply magnificent. Scrooged is arguably one of the most under-rated Christmas films ever. Directed by Harold Ramis before he and Murray found a bit of critical respectability with Groundhog Day, it’s a bitter and cynical reworking A Christmas Carol with Murray installed in the Scrooge role, re-imagined here as a heartless TV executive. It doesn’t scrimp on the horror, with the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future really quite nasty. However, the heart is still very much there and, simply because its Murray, it’s probably one of the funniest Christmas films ever made even if, as The Editor told me a few weeks back, it does get slightly less amusing with each viewing.
10. Elf (2005)
Here’s another festive treat that doesn’t really get the respect it deserves. Will Ferrell is a fine comic talent, but his wide-eyed naivety and aptitude for slapstick has only really been exploited fully in this tale of an human who was raised as an elf and finds himself thrust out into the real world in a bid to find his real father. Former Swinger Jon Favraeu makes an impressive directorial debut, showing all the zest and vigour he would later display in the also-underrated Zathura and will hopefully bring to next summer’s Iron Man, while the Christmas Eve-set finale is a heart-warmingly sweet moment that never descends into sentimentality. And as Zooey Deschanel dressed up as an elf? Well, I know what I want to find in my stocking on Christmas morn...
Top Ten Christmas Albums - By The Editor
1. A Christmas Present For You From Phil Spector (1963)
Phil Spector made so many incredible records in his time as the best pop producer in the world, but the best album he ever made was this one, which is also the best Christmas album of all time by a distance. Ironically, it wasn't a success at the time, with festive spirit rather sapped by it being released on the day of JFK's assassination, but it's grown in popularity ever since, and with so many definitive versions of Christmas classics by the likes of The Crystals and The Ronettes as well as the awesome Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) by Darlene Love, this is the best present anyone's ever given us.
2. A Charlie Brown Christmas - Vince Guaraldi (1965)
The Writer quite rightly cited the first Peanuts cartoon as one of the best Christmas films of all time, and the soundtrack from it is just as great. Vince Guaraldi's piano jazz music became synonymous with the Peanuts cartoons down the years and his Linus and Lucy theme is instantly recognisable, but the rest of the music here is just wonderful and smooth Christmas music. The opening song of the show, Christmastime Is Here is delightful and so are all of the tunes here that aren't even in the TV special (after all, this album is longer than that was)...
3. The McGarrigle Christmas Hour - Kate & Anna McGarrigle (2005)
The McGarrigle Hour was a landmark album for the Canadian folk sister act, bringing in their family and friends for an album that sounded like the best party you never got invited to, so it was only fitting that they should repeat the formula for a Christmas record. With family like Rufus and Martha Wainwright and friends like Teddy Thompson and Emmylou Harris, it's not difficult to see why this is such an awesome record, and the mixture of old Christmas tunes, new Christmas tunes and the vast array of talent make this a Christmas album for people who don't want to listen to Slade.
4. Barenaked For The Holidays - Barenaked Ladies (2004)
Not ones to just cash in on the festive spirit, Barenaked Ladies give value for money on their Christmas album with a collection of carols (all delivered in their trademark jokey way), festive favourites and original tracks. Being polite Canadian types, they also through in a few Hanukkah songs as well and it all makes for an album that is fun and intelligent and while at times it can get a little irritating, the positives outweight the negatives.
5. Songs for Christmas - Sufjan Stevens (2006)
When you get a Sufjan Stevens album, you know that you're going to get a lot for your money and you also know that it's going to take a while to really get into because it's so long. Clocking in at over two hours of material, Songs For Christmas is actually a compilation for a few different festive EPs recorded between 2001 and 2006, and features all the usual songs plus a whole load of original songs. It doesn't all work, but it's certainly the best album you can get for that indie kid.
6. Dig That Crazy Christmas - The Brian Setzer Orchestra (2005)
His second collection of Christmas tunes in three years, this is probably the best of Setzer's holiday albums, mainly because of the song choices. Jingle Bell Rock, Zat You Santa Claus? and Cool Yule all benefit from his big-band-meets-surf-rock style of music, while originals like Santa Drives A Hot Rod make this a very cool and very fun alternative at Christmas.
7. The Beach Boys' Christmas Album - The Beach Boys (1964)
A rather rushed cash-in album, this doesn't come close to standing up to the kind of music that the Beach Boys were making at this time,but there's enough great stuff here to make it worthwhile. The best part is the first half, with original tracks like Little Saint Nick, Santa's Beard and Merry Christmas Baby all having that Brian Wilson magic, and while the second half - arranged by Dick Reynolds and featuring carols and Xmas favourites - is a bit dreary, it's still a decent album altogether.
8. One More Drifter in the Snow - Aimee Mann (2006)
Aimee Mann and Christmas shouldn't really go together, but somehow this works. Perhaps it's because she was inspired to make it by A Charlie Brown Christmas, or perhaps it's just the sheer wonder of hearing her and Grant Lee Phillips sing You're A Mean One, Mr Grinch. But whatever it is, One More Drifter In The Snow manages to tread the line between depressing Christmas and merry Christmas well and with plenty of class.
9. Winter Carols - Blackmore's Night (2006)
Those who haven't heard Blackmore's Night before might be rather surprised if they get Winter Carols on the basis of Ritchie Blackmore's work with Deep Purple and Rainbow, because this is a world away from those rock bands. This group is basically a Rennaissance folk group (seriously) with Blackmore on acoustic guitar and Candice Night (get it?) on vocals. However, this works perfectly for a collection of carols and a couple of original tracks, as the music sounds like what Christmas music was before Wizzard or even Bing Crosby were around. Lord Of The Dance is never a good thing, but there's plenty of other good stuff to make up for it.
10. A Christmas Together - John Denver & The Muppets (1979)
I've changed this one since we posted the blog, mainly because A Christmas Together appeared on my iPod's shuffling about ten minutes later and reminded me why it should be in the list. It's from a TV special by country legend Denver and those crazy Muppets, where they sing a bunch of Christmas tunes together, making for a real contrast between his sweet vocals and some of the more 'colourful' singing voices of the various characters. Musically, it's sublime and the presence of the Muppets helps cut through the treacle to make it an album with heart and a sense of fun. Sorry Jethro Tull...
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
1. It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)
Come on, what else was it going to be?! It may be as predictable as your uncle telling an off-colour joke at Christmas dinner, but It’s A Wonderful Life is quite simply the best Christmas film ever made, quite simply because it’s the only one that’s good at any time of year. Take out the Bedford Falls snow and Christmassy-setting of the final scenes and this is an evergreen tale of one man’s personal struggles - and a bloody depressing one it is too. Sure, you may remember Frank Capra’s classic for it’s ‘every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings’ mantra, but deep down this is really a dark, depressing tale of an ambitious young man finding the hopes and expectations of his youth battered into submission by the Dickins-esque spectre of real life. No wonder the poor guy wanted to kill himself. Thankfully, guardian angel Clarence swoops down to remind Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey that it is indeed a wonderful life and creates a beautiful finale into the bargain. I once saw this on the big screen in a packed auditorium a few weeks before the big day. If you get the opportunity to do the same take it. It’s one of the best cinematic experiences I have ever enjoyed.
2. Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Here’s another film that’s not just for Christmas. It is also regularly viewed at Halloween. Indeed, one of the finest pleasures of my youth was in seeing just how badly ITV would bugger up the scheduling of Nightmare Before Christmas (I was a very lonely child). Halloween? Christmas? Morning? ‘Noon? Night? They never got it right of course (they are ITV, after all), but it’s really not too difficult to work out. Despite its ghoulish stars and ‘Created by Tim Burton’ credit (Henry Selick, we should remember, is the man who toiled in the director’s chair), this is really all about Christmas and its heartwarming magic, as witnessed in Danny Elfman’s magnificent song ‘What’s This?’. “There's children throwing snowballs, instead of throwing heads. They're busy building toys and absolutely no-one’s dead.” Is it just us or is this the most weirdly perfect description of Christmas ever?
3. How The Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)
Here’s the story that inspired Burton’s Nightmare. Dr Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas is, of course, a classic in book form. However, in taking it to the animated arena, Looney Tunes legend Chuck Jones added something extra to it. Extending it slightly to fit 25 minutes, he and Seuss managed to craft a sweet but not sentimental tale of a grumpy green ghoul who attempts to ruin Christmas for all the innocent Whos in Whoville. Of course, he sees that Christmas “can’t be bought in a store” and that “maybe it means a little bit more”, but it’s Jones animation that shines just as much as the message. The whitish-blue snow, the primary colours of Whoville and the marvellous scene where the Grinch’s mouth spreads and spreads and spreads into the world’s wildest villainous smile make this a true classic.
4. Gremlins (1984)
Does this count? It’s not strictly a Christmas film, and even if it were, it’d be a damn nasty one, but therein lies the charm of Joe Dante’s demonic inversion of Wonderful Life. This is the anti-Christmas film, in which a load of nasty beasties run riot, the nice boy doesn’t get to keep the cute little critter at the end and his charmingly mad next door neighbour appears to die (he doesn‘t, but he is run over by a gremlin in a snow plough). Yet, despite this, it’s still chock full of ingenious comedy which adds levity to the anarchy. See, for example, the Gremlin being chucked in blender, the Gremlins hanging out in the bar, drinking smoking and flashing, and the evil Mrs Deagle riding her malfunctioning stairmaster out the window…Okay, maybe they’re not quite jolly little slices of silly comedy, but everyone needs a bit of cynicism at Christmas…and Dante delivers it in spades.
5. Die Hard (1988)
The best action film ever made is also one of the best Christmas films ever made. Sure, it may only be tenuously set at Christmas and, considering the events take place in LA, it’s a fairly sunny Christmas. However, the whole point of Christmas is to conquer work/the traffic/irritating relatives to get to the people you love. The only difference for Bruce Willis’s John McClane (still his best performance) is that he must stop an evil German terrorist and his gang of Teutonic henchmen from blowing up Nakatomi Plaza before he can get to the woman he loves. Cue big explosions, flying limbs and swear words galore. Yipee-kay-yay motherfudger!
6. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
As someone who grew up mostly watching the 1980s Charlie Brown Specials I was shocked to see how dark and neurotic the character was back in the 60s. Sure, when I was a kid he was a bit depressed, but back when he first made the jump from Charles Schultz’s comic strip to moving animation, he and Snoopy made Scrooge look like a happy little camper and had the evil angry eyes and growly voices to prove it. So why is this one in here if its so depressing? Well, while it is quite sad, its message (Christmas is about more than flashy trees and presents) is spot on and frankly there’s something classic, almost Norman Rockwell-esque, about the animation that screams Christmas. Come on, what would the yuletide be without the Peanuts gang skating on a frozen lake as the snow falls?
7. The Muppet’s Christmas Carol (1992)
This was only the second Muppets feature film to be released after the death of Jim Henson and it‘s one of the best. Christmas Carol remakes are ten a penny at this time of year, but Brian Henson’s version stays surprisingly close to the source to make for bizarrely one of the most faithful adaptations of any book ever. As if that isn’t enough, you also have the fact one of the greatest stories ever told is being played out…by Muppets. Kermit takes on Bob Cratchit, the Marleys are, of course, Statler and Waldorf and Charlie Dickens himself is played by none other than Gonzo. He should be flattered.
8. The Apartment (1960)
You’re going to have to bear with me on this one. Billy Wilder’s masterpiece The Apartment isn’t strictly a Christmas film. It takes place over the festive season and it’s big finale happens on New Year’s Eve, but it’s not technically a Christmas film. So, why is it here? Because I’m the one writing this list and you’re not, so sod off. The Apartment is my favourite film of all time, boasting one of Jack Lemmon’s best performances as the down-and-out Bud Baxter and one of the most well-rounded screen romances in the shape of his infatuation with Shirely McLaine’s Fran Kubelick, an elevator girl at Bud’s office who tries to kill herself when her own relationship goes down the pan. Not very Christmassy, you may think, but then there’s that New Year’s finale. Hearing that Bud has done the right thing and told the bosses who rent his apartment to have extra-marital affairs to go hang, Fran goes to find him just as he’s about to leave town. Do they get together? I won’t ruin it for you, but the answer includes the finest closing line since Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, so check it out.
9. Scrooged (1998)
Christmas is great. Bill Murray is great. Christmas plus Bill Murray is simply magnificent. Scrooged is arguably one of the most under-rated Christmas films ever. Directed by Harold Ramis before he and Murray found a bit of critical respectability with Groundhog Day, it’s a bitter and cynical reworking A Christmas Carol with Murray installed in the Scrooge role, re-imagined here as a heartless TV executive. It doesn’t scrimp on the horror, with the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future really quite nasty. However, the heart is still very much there and, simply because its Murray, it’s probably one of the funniest Christmas films ever made even if, as The Editor told me a few weeks back, it does get slightly less amusing with each viewing.
10. Elf (2005)
Here’s another festive treat that doesn’t really get the respect it deserves. Will Ferrell is a fine comic talent, but his wide-eyed naivety and aptitude for slapstick has only really been exploited fully in this tale of an human who was raised as an elf and finds himself thrust out into the real world in a bid to find his real father. Former Swinger Jon Favraeu makes an impressive directorial debut, showing all the zest and vigour he would later display in the also-underrated Zathura and will hopefully bring to next summer’s Iron Man, while the Christmas Eve-set finale is a heart-warmingly sweet moment that never descends into sentimentality. And as Zooey Deschanel dressed up as an elf? Well, I know what I want to find in my stocking on Christmas morn...
Top Ten Christmas Albums - By The Editor
1. A Christmas Present For You From Phil Spector (1963)
Phil Spector made so many incredible records in his time as the best pop producer in the world, but the best album he ever made was this one, which is also the best Christmas album of all time by a distance. Ironically, it wasn't a success at the time, with festive spirit rather sapped by it being released on the day of JFK's assassination, but it's grown in popularity ever since, and with so many definitive versions of Christmas classics by the likes of The Crystals and The Ronettes as well as the awesome Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) by Darlene Love, this is the best present anyone's ever given us.
2. A Charlie Brown Christmas - Vince Guaraldi (1965)
The Writer quite rightly cited the first Peanuts cartoon as one of the best Christmas films of all time, and the soundtrack from it is just as great. Vince Guaraldi's piano jazz music became synonymous with the Peanuts cartoons down the years and his Linus and Lucy theme is instantly recognisable, but the rest of the music here is just wonderful and smooth Christmas music. The opening song of the show, Christmastime Is Here is delightful and so are all of the tunes here that aren't even in the TV special (after all, this album is longer than that was)...
3. The McGarrigle Christmas Hour - Kate & Anna McGarrigle (2005)
The McGarrigle Hour was a landmark album for the Canadian folk sister act, bringing in their family and friends for an album that sounded like the best party you never got invited to, so it was only fitting that they should repeat the formula for a Christmas record. With family like Rufus and Martha Wainwright and friends like Teddy Thompson and Emmylou Harris, it's not difficult to see why this is such an awesome record, and the mixture of old Christmas tunes, new Christmas tunes and the vast array of talent make this a Christmas album for people who don't want to listen to Slade.
4. Barenaked For The Holidays - Barenaked Ladies (2004)
Not ones to just cash in on the festive spirit, Barenaked Ladies give value for money on their Christmas album with a collection of carols (all delivered in their trademark jokey way), festive favourites and original tracks. Being polite Canadian types, they also through in a few Hanukkah songs as well and it all makes for an album that is fun and intelligent and while at times it can get a little irritating, the positives outweight the negatives.
5. Songs for Christmas - Sufjan Stevens (2006)
When you get a Sufjan Stevens album, you know that you're going to get a lot for your money and you also know that it's going to take a while to really get into because it's so long. Clocking in at over two hours of material, Songs For Christmas is actually a compilation for a few different festive EPs recorded between 2001 and 2006, and features all the usual songs plus a whole load of original songs. It doesn't all work, but it's certainly the best album you can get for that indie kid.
6. Dig That Crazy Christmas - The Brian Setzer Orchestra (2005)
His second collection of Christmas tunes in three years, this is probably the best of Setzer's holiday albums, mainly because of the song choices. Jingle Bell Rock, Zat You Santa Claus? and Cool Yule all benefit from his big-band-meets-surf-rock style of music, while originals like Santa Drives A Hot Rod make this a very cool and very fun alternative at Christmas.
7. The Beach Boys' Christmas Album - The Beach Boys (1964)
A rather rushed cash-in album, this doesn't come close to standing up to the kind of music that the Beach Boys were making at this time,but there's enough great stuff here to make it worthwhile. The best part is the first half, with original tracks like Little Saint Nick, Santa's Beard and Merry Christmas Baby all having that Brian Wilson magic, and while the second half - arranged by Dick Reynolds and featuring carols and Xmas favourites - is a bit dreary, it's still a decent album altogether.
8. One More Drifter in the Snow - Aimee Mann (2006)
Aimee Mann and Christmas shouldn't really go together, but somehow this works. Perhaps it's because she was inspired to make it by A Charlie Brown Christmas, or perhaps it's just the sheer wonder of hearing her and Grant Lee Phillips sing You're A Mean One, Mr Grinch. But whatever it is, One More Drifter In The Snow manages to tread the line between depressing Christmas and merry Christmas well and with plenty of class.
9. Winter Carols - Blackmore's Night (2006)
Those who haven't heard Blackmore's Night before might be rather surprised if they get Winter Carols on the basis of Ritchie Blackmore's work with Deep Purple and Rainbow, because this is a world away from those rock bands. This group is basically a Rennaissance folk group (seriously) with Blackmore on acoustic guitar and Candice Night (get it?) on vocals. However, this works perfectly for a collection of carols and a couple of original tracks, as the music sounds like what Christmas music was before Wizzard or even Bing Crosby were around. Lord Of The Dance is never a good thing, but there's plenty of other good stuff to make up for it.
10. A Christmas Together - John Denver & The Muppets (1979)
I've changed this one since we posted the blog, mainly because A Christmas Together appeared on my iPod's shuffling about ten minutes later and reminded me why it should be in the list. It's from a TV special by country legend Denver and those crazy Muppets, where they sing a bunch of Christmas tunes together, making for a real contrast between his sweet vocals and some of the more 'colourful' singing voices of the various characters. Musically, it's sublime and the presence of the Muppets helps cut through the treacle to make it an album with heart and a sense of fun. Sorry Jethro Tull...
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Friday, November 23, 2007
WATCHING, READING AND LISTENING TO
THE EDITOR
WATCHING: I don't go to the cinema often, but I've not seen many films this year better than Into The Wild. Sure, Chris McCandless was selfish, cocky and reckless, but his journey and eventual fatal stay in the Alaskan wilderness still makes for a haunting tale and it's very well told by Sean Penn, who stays remarkably faithful to the book (which I've since started reading). The cinematography is sublime throughout, with stunning scenery as Chris wanders around the fringes of American life, and Eddie Vedder's soundtrack is good on its own and awesome in the context of the film. Penn rightly realised that the true tragedy of this story comes from the people that Chris meets, charms and then walks away from, not least the poor old man (played with class by Hal Holbrook) whose heart is clearly breaking when he has to say his goodbyes. A gorgeous road movie that cuts deep and leaves a mark.
READING: Like I said, I've been tearing through the Into The Wild book, written by journalist Jon Krakauer in 1996, inspired by an article he wrote about McCandless. It's a great book, particularly as it fills in all the gaps around what you see in the film and sticks to the hard facts of what we can know about what happened, while obviously some of the film is fictionalised, not least the parts where he is in Alaska on his own. When I finish that, it'll be back to Anna Karenina, appropriately as Tolstoy was one the authors who inspired McCandless' adventures. Then when I finish that, it'll be back to Wild Swans by Jung Chang. Only three books on the go at the moment then...
LISTENING TO: Erm, Into The Wild! Seriously though, the soundtrack has taken on a whole new depth since seeing the film, and all the short songs that didn't make much impact on their own have suddenly developed a real spine-tingling quality. Good work Vedder! As well as that, I've been listening to lots of very good albums from 2007 to start trying to finalise my Top 20 lists. Some albums haven't sounded as good as I first thought they were, and have fallen down or out of the list, while some have shot up the rankings. And I think we have a winner, unless something special comes out in the next few weeks...
THE WRITER
WATCHING: Frankly, it's not been a great week for films. I've only watched two flicks this week and both have been pretty rotten. Firstly, I watched High School High, a John Lovitz-starring Dangerous Minds parody whose jokes were so lame it came off as more of a bad drama than a good comedy. The second film I watched was Cannonball Run, which was marginally better, but did feature Burt Reynolds at his most irritating and Roger Moore parodying his James Bond, which is quite an achievement really seeing as his Bond was a parody anyway. Meanwhile, on a random point, I saw that Coca Cola ad with the people chanting 'Holidays are coming' that hasn't been showed for the past few years, but appears to have made a comeback. Evil company, great advert.
READING: I'm back on the Bonds. Earlier in the year, I embarked upon a literary James Bond marathon by reading some of Ian Fleming's original novels. They're all really enjoyable reads (especially Moonraker, which only make the unrecognisable film 'adaptation' even more unforgivable), but I struggled to get through Diamonds Are Forever and have only just returned to it. It's widely regarded as one of the weaker 007 books, and it's not hard to see why, with its slow-moving plot and un-engaging villains. Still, in emotionally scarred Bond girl Tiffany Case, Fleming has created a rich, grounded femme fatale who would fit well in the Casino Royale sequel.
LISTENING TO: Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack. I've never been quite as convinced by Danny Elfman's score writing talents as most other people are. He‘s certainly very talented, but his work has a trademark to it that makes it sound fairly uniform and, despite my enjoyment of both scores, its sometimes difficult to differentiate his work on the Batman and Spider-Man films. Having recently listened to the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, though, I am now well and truly in the Elfman camp. This is a rich, textured score that is not only good enough to be ranked up there with any of the truly great musical soundtracks, but also displays his sadly unexplored talent with lyrics. What's This perfectly describes the childlike wonder of Christmas and This Is Halloween has the phrase 'tender lumplings' in it. No real analysis to add to that, I just think it's a phrase that should come in to more common usage.
THE EDITOR
WATCHING: I don't go to the cinema often, but I've not seen many films this year better than Into The Wild. Sure, Chris McCandless was selfish, cocky and reckless, but his journey and eventual fatal stay in the Alaskan wilderness still makes for a haunting tale and it's very well told by Sean Penn, who stays remarkably faithful to the book (which I've since started reading). The cinematography is sublime throughout, with stunning scenery as Chris wanders around the fringes of American life, and Eddie Vedder's soundtrack is good on its own and awesome in the context of the film. Penn rightly realised that the true tragedy of this story comes from the people that Chris meets, charms and then walks away from, not least the poor old man (played with class by Hal Holbrook) whose heart is clearly breaking when he has to say his goodbyes. A gorgeous road movie that cuts deep and leaves a mark.
READING: Like I said, I've been tearing through the Into The Wild book, written by journalist Jon Krakauer in 1996, inspired by an article he wrote about McCandless. It's a great book, particularly as it fills in all the gaps around what you see in the film and sticks to the hard facts of what we can know about what happened, while obviously some of the film is fictionalised, not least the parts where he is in Alaska on his own. When I finish that, it'll be back to Anna Karenina, appropriately as Tolstoy was one the authors who inspired McCandless' adventures. Then when I finish that, it'll be back to Wild Swans by Jung Chang. Only three books on the go at the moment then...
LISTENING TO: Erm, Into The Wild! Seriously though, the soundtrack has taken on a whole new depth since seeing the film, and all the short songs that didn't make much impact on their own have suddenly developed a real spine-tingling quality. Good work Vedder! As well as that, I've been listening to lots of very good albums from 2007 to start trying to finalise my Top 20 lists. Some albums haven't sounded as good as I first thought they were, and have fallen down or out of the list, while some have shot up the rankings. And I think we have a winner, unless something special comes out in the next few weeks...
THE WRITER
WATCHING: Frankly, it's not been a great week for films. I've only watched two flicks this week and both have been pretty rotten. Firstly, I watched High School High, a John Lovitz-starring Dangerous Minds parody whose jokes were so lame it came off as more of a bad drama than a good comedy. The second film I watched was Cannonball Run, which was marginally better, but did feature Burt Reynolds at his most irritating and Roger Moore parodying his James Bond, which is quite an achievement really seeing as his Bond was a parody anyway. Meanwhile, on a random point, I saw that Coca Cola ad with the people chanting 'Holidays are coming' that hasn't been showed for the past few years, but appears to have made a comeback. Evil company, great advert.
READING: I'm back on the Bonds. Earlier in the year, I embarked upon a literary James Bond marathon by reading some of Ian Fleming's original novels. They're all really enjoyable reads (especially Moonraker, which only make the unrecognisable film 'adaptation' even more unforgivable), but I struggled to get through Diamonds Are Forever and have only just returned to it. It's widely regarded as one of the weaker 007 books, and it's not hard to see why, with its slow-moving plot and un-engaging villains. Still, in emotionally scarred Bond girl Tiffany Case, Fleming has created a rich, grounded femme fatale who would fit well in the Casino Royale sequel.
LISTENING TO: Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack. I've never been quite as convinced by Danny Elfman's score writing talents as most other people are. He‘s certainly very talented, but his work has a trademark to it that makes it sound fairly uniform and, despite my enjoyment of both scores, its sometimes difficult to differentiate his work on the Batman and Spider-Man films. Having recently listened to the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, though, I am now well and truly in the Elfman camp. This is a rich, textured score that is not only good enough to be ranked up there with any of the truly great musical soundtracks, but also displays his sadly unexplored talent with lyrics. What's This perfectly describes the childlike wonder of Christmas and This Is Halloween has the phrase 'tender lumplings' in it. No real analysis to add to that, I just think it's a phrase that should come in to more common usage.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
WATCHING, READING AND LISTENING TO
THE EDITOR
WATCHING: Since last time, The Sopranos has come to an end on E4 and I'm still really digesting THAT ending (I won't spoil it here for anyone who is waiting for C4) and deciding whether it was the best thing ever or the worst thing ever. And indeed, what actually happened. But one thing for sure is that the show itself was awesome from start to finish, though I'm resisting the temptation to watch it from the start on More4 in the hope that someone will buy me the DVD box-set for Christmas and I can watch at my own pace. It's certainly the kind of programme that deserves much closer attention than you can pay to it over the course of six series in eight years. The plot-lines and characterisation are so intricate that I'm sure there's going to be loads that I missed first time around.
READING: As I had a week away recently I managed to read Michael Palin's Diaries: The Python Years, which much more interesting than reading one man's diaries from ten years of his life might sound. For one thing, it runs from 1969 when the Pythons were starting out, to 1979 when they had made Life Of Brian and were very famous and important and coming to the end of their work as a team. It's very interesting to read about the inner workings of it all and while Palin is as fair-minded as you'd expect from him, there's still some snide digs at Eric Idle and John Cleese to keep things ticking over nicely. Through in all of his trips to work on Saturday Night Live and all the famous and talented people he meets, and you've got a great antidote to the blog culture (yes, this is being written in a blog, so what?) of mediocre people writing about their mundane daily lives...
LISTENING TO: A bit of a hangover from WATCHING, but having seen the original Godzilla (Gojira if like) at the weekend, I bought off iTunes a compilation soundtrack of music from the Godzilla films between 1954 and 1975. With around 40 tracks, I did worry that it might be a bit repetitive, with lots of uses of the main theme, but instead it was quite the opposite, with Akira Ifukube using all kinds of different music for the various films in the series, making it very fun listening throughout. The only pity is that I now want to rent the rest of the films and virtually none of them are out on region 2 DVD. Sort it out someone, there's so much tripe out there on DVD that surely no-one ever watches, so why can't these be released?
THE WRITER
WATCHING: The last thing I saw at the cinema was In the Shadow of the Moon, a majestic documentary about the Apollo moon missions of the late 60s and 70s that pays fitting tribute to the men involved without descending into the overbearing patriotism or trite spiritualism that might have been expected. On TV, I’m currently enjoying Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s travel chronicle Long Way Down, which occasionally becomes a little too laddish but remains an engagingly intelligent watch. And on DVD I’m working my way through the magnificent third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Which leads us nicely onto…
READING: Buffy Season 8. I had put off buying this official comic book continuation of the Buffy story until recently because I wasn’t too keen on the team of potential slayers that emerged at the end of season seven or the idea of them now being a sort of military organisation scattered across the world. However, just seven issues in, this is shaping up to be one of the finest seasons in the series’ history. The military idea is working surprisingly well, the various slayers are all getting enough page time to give them all individual personalities, and, best of all, the Scooby Gang has been reunited. Seeing Buffy, Willow and Xander together again for the first time since 2003 is one of my highlights of the year so far.
LISTENING TO: Amid all the hype over the download-only release, I struggled to get to grips with Radiohead’s In Rainbows on the first few listens. While I enjoyed it, it seemed to lack the stand out songs of their other albums. However, after a few weeks of solid listens, it emerges as one of their finest records, arguably challenging OK Computer and The Bends for all-time classic status. Bodysnatchers finds them rocking out in a way they haven’t done since National Anthem. Nude and Videotape are haunting little pieces filled with the band’s usual melancholia. And All I Need builds to the kind of ethereal crescendo of noise that only Radiohead can pull off. All in all, it’s a classic and I can’t wait for my discbox thingy to arrive next month.
THE EDITOR
WATCHING: Since last time, The Sopranos has come to an end on E4 and I'm still really digesting THAT ending (I won't spoil it here for anyone who is waiting for C4) and deciding whether it was the best thing ever or the worst thing ever. And indeed, what actually happened. But one thing for sure is that the show itself was awesome from start to finish, though I'm resisting the temptation to watch it from the start on More4 in the hope that someone will buy me the DVD box-set for Christmas and I can watch at my own pace. It's certainly the kind of programme that deserves much closer attention than you can pay to it over the course of six series in eight years. The plot-lines and characterisation are so intricate that I'm sure there's going to be loads that I missed first time around.
READING: As I had a week away recently I managed to read Michael Palin's Diaries: The Python Years, which much more interesting than reading one man's diaries from ten years of his life might sound. For one thing, it runs from 1969 when the Pythons were starting out, to 1979 when they had made Life Of Brian and were very famous and important and coming to the end of their work as a team. It's very interesting to read about the inner workings of it all and while Palin is as fair-minded as you'd expect from him, there's still some snide digs at Eric Idle and John Cleese to keep things ticking over nicely. Through in all of his trips to work on Saturday Night Live and all the famous and talented people he meets, and you've got a great antidote to the blog culture (yes, this is being written in a blog, so what?) of mediocre people writing about their mundane daily lives...
LISTENING TO: A bit of a hangover from WATCHING, but having seen the original Godzilla (Gojira if like) at the weekend, I bought off iTunes a compilation soundtrack of music from the Godzilla films between 1954 and 1975. With around 40 tracks, I did worry that it might be a bit repetitive, with lots of uses of the main theme, but instead it was quite the opposite, with Akira Ifukube using all kinds of different music for the various films in the series, making it very fun listening throughout. The only pity is that I now want to rent the rest of the films and virtually none of them are out on region 2 DVD. Sort it out someone, there's so much tripe out there on DVD that surely no-one ever watches, so why can't these be released?
THE WRITER
WATCHING: The last thing I saw at the cinema was In the Shadow of the Moon, a majestic documentary about the Apollo moon missions of the late 60s and 70s that pays fitting tribute to the men involved without descending into the overbearing patriotism or trite spiritualism that might have been expected. On TV, I’m currently enjoying Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s travel chronicle Long Way Down, which occasionally becomes a little too laddish but remains an engagingly intelligent watch. And on DVD I’m working my way through the magnificent third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Which leads us nicely onto…
READING: Buffy Season 8. I had put off buying this official comic book continuation of the Buffy story until recently because I wasn’t too keen on the team of potential slayers that emerged at the end of season seven or the idea of them now being a sort of military organisation scattered across the world. However, just seven issues in, this is shaping up to be one of the finest seasons in the series’ history. The military idea is working surprisingly well, the various slayers are all getting enough page time to give them all individual personalities, and, best of all, the Scooby Gang has been reunited. Seeing Buffy, Willow and Xander together again for the first time since 2003 is one of my highlights of the year so far.
LISTENING TO: Amid all the hype over the download-only release, I struggled to get to grips with Radiohead’s In Rainbows on the first few listens. While I enjoyed it, it seemed to lack the stand out songs of their other albums. However, after a few weeks of solid listens, it emerges as one of their finest records, arguably challenging OK Computer and The Bends for all-time classic status. Bodysnatchers finds them rocking out in a way they haven’t done since National Anthem. Nude and Videotape are haunting little pieces filled with the band’s usual melancholia. And All I Need builds to the kind of ethereal crescendo of noise that only Radiohead can pull off. All in all, it’s a classic and I can’t wait for my discbox thingy to arrive next month.
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