Things that go bump....

The Awakening
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1687901/

I saw two films this week: I was actually seeing The Awakening for the second time, as it is a film with a twist that made me want to go back and see it again to see if there were clues that I had missed about the true nature of what was going on. There were indeed a few, but only a few, and although I enjoyed the film, and thought that all four central performances were really very good, the twist is a problem in that it reveals two separate previously unsuspected truths. The first of these has some hints and clues earlier in the film, the second has really nothing at all to prepare one for the sudden eruption of a whole new story line in the last 15 minutes of the film, where there is an awful lot of sudden revelation and explaining in a way that feels terribly contrived, grafted onto what, up to that point,was a very well crafted story. I would still say go and see it, just forgive it the heavy handed denouement.
Musically, it is similarly well crafted yet slightly clumsy. The score of this British film is by British composer Daniel Pemberton, who has done quite a bit of TV and several computer game scores, but very little film scoring, and it does show slightly in places. Some of his ideas are lovely, and stand up to scrutiny very well on a second viewing/listening when one has the chance to listen more closely and can start start to understand his ideas better (this is often the way with film scores: you really cannot concentrate on both story and music first time through). At the start of the film, and again after the first scene, where plucky Florence has unmasked a gang of charlatan spiritualists and their fake seance, we hear a slow, quite disjunct piano melody, practically unaccompanied, a theme which returns at various points as if haunting Florence, and which is finally revealed to be the nursery rhyme tune emitting from a fabulously creepy rabbit-headed doll as we head towards the denouement. A second, more sweeping theme, is associated with the school that Florence goes to, to discover the truth of their apparent haunting, and again, this is intelligently tied in to the importance of the house the school occupies and its history in that same denouement; and a pair of melancholy, ostinato themes are used to describe Florence's deep sense of loss and despair throughout the film, and are finally used in the same context for another character during the denouement in a way that reveals unsuspected aspects of Florence's loss (desparately trying to avoid spoilers here, as it's a film that you need to see without knowing what has happened). An intelligent score, then, that in its own way, is helping to give clues about the truth of what is going on in the haunted school that, as with the other, more visual clues, one understands on a second viewing. Where it falls down is a tendency to go slightly overboard and feel a bit uneven as a result. Pemberton does some lovely things with unusual timbres in the haunting sequences, especially with a mysterious dollhouse that keeps appearing in different parts of the school, containing little doll figures that recreated thing Florence has done or is in the process of doing, and generally scaring the wits out of her; and he has a very nice line in musical stingers that make you jump. However, he overuses the voices in the score. Voices in this kind of score are a bit of a bit of a cliche anyway: it is very common, in a film where the are children in danger, for one to find children's voices in the music, and when he limits himself to one voice, it is all appropriately creepy and thrilling. The larger choral moments work less well, partly because the voices are clearly singing words, none of which are quite audible (although they feel like they should be) and partly because it just seems too much in relation to what's happening on screen at times, a bit too busy, trying a little bit too hard. But I am mostly being picky: although both film and score have their flaws, I was quite happy to see it twice.


The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1324999
From things that go bump in the night, to large bumps growing under Bella Swan's T shirt. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Well, it's my own fault for going to see this incomprehensibly overhyped film. I liked the first of the Twilights (sorry, I know, clear indication of moral turpitude), the second was less entertaining, and I found the third something of a trial, but this one outdoes itself in truly unmitigated awfulness, and the really sad thing for me is that its biggest problem is the music (although the dialogue, especially the discussions about whether it's a foetus or a baby, and the sudden shift into a scene from The Lion King when the wolves start talking to each other are also impressively terrible moments). This plot is really very dark and quite twisted on a number of levels, but you could be forgiven for not noticing this due to the wall to wall schmaltz provided by the songs and score. Bella, 18 years old and barely able to give informed consent, marries her vampire boyfriend and goes on honeymoon, still a virgin, then has sex with him knowing that he is so much stronger than her that he could easily kill her by accident, and is happy that she ends up with just an array of purple bruises and a comically destroyed bed (hoho!) after her wedding night. She then finds she is pregnant and that her vampire hybrid baby is killing her from the inside, but refuses to contemplate doing anything that might harm it; finds that the only food she can ingest is blood; goes into labour and is given a Caesarean without a working anaesthetic by a vampire who is then overwhelmed with the desire to drink her blood; has the baby bitten out of her by husband and apparently dies in agony; but is turned into a vampire in the nick of time, which is where Part 1 ends. All good rollicking fun for the teenybopper audience. This film is a 12A! Possibly the people responsible for giving the rating lost the will to live during the interminable wedding/ honeymoon scene, which takes up at least the first 45 minutes of the film, and rated it on the basis that no child under 12 should be allowed to see such appalling sentimental wallowing, but if they'd watch the rest with music turned off, I think the rating might have been higher.  I rather imagine the producers realised that without a hefty dose of aural cottonwool to staunch the trauma, the target audience would have a damn hard time with all this, and so the combination of moody soft rock songs and equally saccharine scoring from poor Carter Burwell (not a fun gig for him, I suspect) serve as  the equivalent of a perpetual soft focus lens, smoothing out the bumps (as it were) to make the messy, twisted nastiness of all this (let's not forget Bella as the poster girl for anorexia) into a sweet story of true love conquering all, even if only by the skin of Edward Cullen's teeth as he bites into her abdomen. Run, don't walk, away from any cinema showing this.