tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41936906350410893132024-03-13T08:24:32.870-07:00Film and TV musicSteve Halfyard is a lecturer in film and television music at Birmingham Conservatoire in the UK. She has published (as Janet K. Halfyard) on the music of Batman (Danny Elfman and Hans Zimmer), Tim Burton, Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dollhouse, Firefly), music in cult TV, and music in horror films.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-30038658519161201952017-06-19T07:09:00.002-07:002017-06-19T07:10:20.843-07:00Wonder Woman<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: arial;">So then, </span><i style="font-family: arial;">Wonder Woman</i><span style="font-family: arial;">. Where
do I start? Well let’s start by saying </span><i style="font-family: arial;">alleluia</i><span style="font-family: arial;">,
and see where we go from there.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">Somewhere around 2008 I wrote the first version of what ended up in 2013
as <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HdktAAAAQBAJ">Cue the Big
Theme? The Sound of the Superhero</a>, essentially a little requiem for the
demise of thematically-driven superhero scoring in the era of CGI. I contrasted
how the two big superhero scores of the pre-CGI era, Williams’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Superman</i> (1978) and Elfman’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Batman</i> (1989) used their themes to
construct their hero’s identity, Williams’ Great Big Optimist and Elfman’s
complex, troubled Gadget Man. I have a particular love of Elfman’s approach,
where he only really composes one five note motif for Batman and then constantly
reinvents and varies it to provide the music for all aspects of Our Hero,
whether that is the action hero, the genius detective, the terrifyingly
powerful horror-film figure, the troubled soul, the bereft child or the man in
love (which I wrote about at some length <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Danny_Elfman_s_Batman.html?id=OGOYqpxsyRgC">here</a>).
And then along come a) CGI and b) Hans Zimmer and the musical landscape
changed. The music no longer had to work so hard to convince us that the
polystyrene boulders that Superman was hauling around were heavy, or that
Batman’s car was going <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really</i> fast,
and so it shifted away from action and toward psychology, and in doing so
rather abandoned all those marvelous themes. Sing me the theme from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Batman Begins</i>, anyone? And while I have
always been an advocate of the ‘different does not actually mean worse, it just
means different’ school of thought, I missed the themes, and I especially
missed the cleverness with which a composer like Elfman could take one musical
idea and make it mean so many things.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">And so, alleluia, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wonder Woman</i>,
scored by Rupert Gregson-Williams, younger brother of the better-known Harry.
RGW is mostly known, until very recently, for scoring comedy and the lighter
end of film (highlights include the 2014 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postman
Pat: The Movie</i>). I do so like it when you get a composer basically new to a
genre, who therefore has not become what Elfman was by the end of the 1990s, namely
was Sick to Death of Superheroes. Anyway, RGW writes an absolute blinder for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wonder Woman</i>; and he does my favourite
thing, which is have one musical idea that he uses to generate all his musical
ideas about her. I am going to resist the temptation to sit here and throw
musical examples at you, so some of this you are going to have to take my word
for.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">On the face if it, it looks like she has two distinct themes: a lyrical,
extended anthem (which I will come back to) and the one we already knew from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Batman v. Superman</i> (and therefore
written by Hans Zimmer/ Junkie XL). <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw_o7XUX3fg">This one has driving drums, wailing
electric cello</a> (which could easily be mistaken for an electric guitar),
both the instrumentation and the whole shape of the theme breaking every expectation
of what ‘female’ music sounds like. My good friend (actually, never met him,
but love his work) Phillip Tagg would point to the fact that both the ascending
melodic line and the use of the electric guitaresque cello and drums point to
masculine musical codes – the ladies are properly scored with nice flutes and
pianos, yes with cellos, but nice tuneful cellos; and with gently curved
melodies (up and back down; or down and back up). WW’s big theme does not do
this. Oh my word, no it does not (nor does Ms Buffy Summers’ theme tune, of
course).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">OK, music: the theme goes rapidly up a broken chord (E – G – B, so
outlining the triad and rising up from the tonic to the great heroic interval,
the perfect fifth) and then it wails; it undulates from the B to the B flat a
semitone below and then back to the B again (want a score example? <a href="https://musescore.com/user/9026621/scores/2490631">Go here</a>). So,
strip away the banshee ululation, and the basic shape is B – B flat – B. We are
in the key of E minor, so the B is our heroic perfect fifth; the B flat,
meanwhile, is the tritone, the diabolus in musica, the interval associated most
often with evil, danger and dysfunction. What the heck is it doing here?
Well,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Batman</i>’s scoring (1989) also uses lots of tritones – that’s part of
how Elfman makes him complex and ‘dark’ in comparison to Williams’ sunny
Superman. But Diana is not dark – she is much more like Superman in many
respects. And she clearly is not evil - but oh, the number of bad women in film
music history with tritones in their (usually jazzy) scoring to symbolize how
very naughty they are, from the tritones all over the place in Franz Waxman’s
1941 score for the sexy, threatening and entirely absent eponymous anti-heroine
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QangvYJNc3U">Rebecca</a></i> to those in
both <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpR9vjHrxS8">Bellatrix Lestrange</a>
and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpHVdruWNbw">Dolores Umbridge’s</a>
themes in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Harry Potter</i> scores (links
are to youtube examples)…. So why the tritone here, given that Diana is clearly
not one of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">those</i> women?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">Well, let’s think of this tritone as the equivalent of the word ‘bitch’,
a word we so often find applied to women of power from Hillary Clinton to any
woman on social media who has taken a stand against mysongynistic attitudes; a
word that would also describe all those bad, bad women in film who deceive and
betray good men, because that is what bad women in film are normally guilty of.
This tritone, used here for Diana, is an appropriation, a reclamation, a
rehabilitation of a term of musical abuse used to score women who would dare to
be powerful. It traditionally constructs such women as evil. Here, it
constructs Diana as a goddess. This makes me very happy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">In the already familiar form of that strident (Harpy! Banshee! Bitch!) wailing
electronic guitarish cello that is clearly taking no prisoners, this is the
theme that RGW uses for Diana in some of her most obviously powerful moments of
pure action. We get it, very understated, near the start of the film as she
stands on the clifftop contemplating her wrists after that first extraordinary
moment when her divine power was suddenly unleashed (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjCmY2AaDfg">here</a> at 1:03); we then
have to wait until after she has crossed No Man’s Land and descends upon the
German’s in the town of Veld like – well, like an avenging god (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ise1XcxOidQ">here</a> at 3:24); and again
in her showdown with Ludendorf; but it is missing from her battle with Ares and
we don’t hear it again until the closing seconds of the film where it confirms
her power rather than scoring any specific action on screen. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">To understand why her theme of godly power is missing from the battle
with Ares, we need to look at her second theme, the heroic anthem. Right at the
start of the film, still in the production credits (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puEi1ZFPwFo">here from the start to 0:35</a>),
we hear first a muted, distant version of the Power theme and then, shortly
afterwards, a four note rising theme (E – F sharp – G – G) . This four note
theme then develops later both in the opening scene and throughout the film to
give us a much more traditionally heroic theme in the Batman/ Superman mold. It
is characterized by sequences of short phrases – phrases that keep on rising, taking
us higher: this is a classic heroic musical gesture, the idea of ascent, of the
hero’s power in the ascendant. [This theme also tends to do some lovely mediant
shifts in the harmony that, along with these ascending melodies, point to restlessness,
the quest, the impetus and momentum of the hero’s journey, but I shall leave
that for another occasionThere’s an additional element to this theme which is a
motif that is clearly part of it but used less frequently and has in it some
really emotive minor sixth leaps and falls (big intervals tend to give us big
emotions) – we hear this part of the theme at the point that Diana looks at the
photo of Steve when she opens the ‘gift’ from Bruce Wayne at the start of the
film. Again, an important musical element for scenes that need just a bit more
of an emotional kick, but too much for today].<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">So: the rising ‘anthem’ theme. It is actually derived from the Power
theme, which is revealed in its second phrase: sorry, I said I wouldn’t throw
musical examples at you, I lied. This is done using some of the basic
techniques of thematic transformation (which include intervallic or rhythmic
diminution and augmentation, transposition, inversion, retrograding and other
fun things)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">So, remember the power theme:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">E – G – B – B flat – B. Let’s divide this into two parts<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">Motif 1: E – G – B [the broken chord on E minor]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">Motif 2: B – B flat – B<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">So the first two phrases of the ‘anthem’ (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puEi1ZFPwFo">here</a> at 2:20) go:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">E – F sharp – G - G ---------- <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">G – B – D - D ----------- [ a broken chord starting on G]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">The first phrase is therefore a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">melodic
compression</i> of motif 1 (the intervals made smaller); the second phrase
restores the original intervals but are a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">transposition</i>
of motif 1 (the intervals made larger again, but all shifted up a third, whilst
staying in the key E minor). So there we have the reinvention of the first
motif. Later in this ‘new’ theme, the music shifts into a new key (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puEi1ZFPwFo">here</a> at 2:42) and brings
in another idea that comes back a lot in later cues:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">F – C – B flat – C<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">This is an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">augmentation</i> and
transposition of motif 2: the semitone ‘bend’ from B to B flat and back again
(a semitone) becomes a more lyrical bend of a slightly larger interval (a whole
tone). So, this second theme is the musical child of the first: much more
lyrical, much more varied and developed, but with its musical material derived
from the Power theme.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">The No Man’s Land Scene uses this second theme for Diana’s crossing – it
starts out with just the underlying harmony, no obvious melody (but you can
actually <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsDibxZlRhg">sing the melody
of the theme along to it</a> if you want!) but the melody comes in later on.
This, to me, is the theme of Diana’s heroic compassion, the theme of Diana as
Amazon, pursuing the Amazon mission to save humankind. The Power theme is Diana
as God: and this is why it is the Heroic theme rather than the Power theme that
we hear in her final battle with Ares. She does not battle him as Diana the goddess,
a war between gods for pre-eminence, but as Diana the champion of humanity; and
so, just as when her compassion leads her to cross No Man’s Land to liberate
the people of Veld we hear her Heroic theme, so too we hear it as she finally
employs the full scope of her power to liberate the world from Ares – same
mission on a larger scale. It is her compassion, not her innate power, that
makes her the superhero that I now love most in the whole universe of superheroes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">And it is a brilliant, brilliant score that never compromises her power.
She has a lovely love theme that is an inversion of her heroic theme (Batman’s
love theme was also a variation of his hero theme), which casts her love for
Steve as something connected with and embedded in her heroic identity – not in
conflict with it, but an aspect of her as a fully rounded person that (quite
literally, in musical terms) just allows it to go in another direction – the
only time that her scoring has a predominantly descending shape rather than an
ascending one (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOqwMvwAKvg" target="_blank">here</a> at 4:00).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">Two other characters get themes: Ludendorf has a fabulous (oh joy!)
octatonic theme that musically means he is operating in a completely different
musical territory to everyone else - if you are unfamiliar with the octatonic,
it’s a strange scale/ mode that was ‘invented’ in the late 19<sup>th</sup>
century and has some very odd properties, one of which is that it is full of my
much love little tritones; and likewise, Ares’ music is octatonic. He has a
nasty little three mote motif F – A flat – E and an octatonic ostinato/
repeating figure (F – G – A flat – F – B<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>- A flat - E) that places him and Ludendorf in the same musical
territory – but it’s the octatonic character of the music rather than the
tritones as such that group them as the bad guys, leaving the tritone itself
simply as a carrier of power in this score, one can be used for good or evil.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "arial";">However, the Zimmer/ Junkie XL theme from the earlier film was a
potential problem: it’s a very odd theme, and I recognize that they were trying
to write something which sounded different from the darkly brooding, strangely
restrained themes that have been written for most superheroes over the last decade
or so; but it is so un-restrained and all that electronica is so timbrally at
odds with the classic superhero orchestral sound that it could have resulted in
a score that was big on quirky and unusual, with its crazy-woman Banshee wail
(I have discovered in the course of writing this that they were genuinely
trying to evoke a Banshee wail) and not so hot on superheroic. RGW gets it
absolute right: he reinvents the key elements of the Power theme for his heroic
orchestral music, uses the Power theme in muted versions in the first hour or
so of the film, and saves the Power theme for a tiny number of key moments in
the second half of the film where the scale of the action is such that its
introduction just raise the stakes a few notches even higher than they already
were. And in this underused form, the timbral difference works constructively:
we are thrown out of the familiar orchestral textures into this musically other
place of electronica and pounding drums – we hear her other nature as God, her
awesome Otherness in these moments. So we get it all: the big compassionately
heroic score that humanizes her, allows us to identify with her; and we get the
theme of her unutterable difference and power that can leave no one in any
doubt that this woman is truly a hero. I shall go and have a little weep now,
I’m all overcome. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-82505457404006862812017-03-02T01:25:00.000-08:002017-03-02T01:33:24.114-08:00La La Land<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
So, then: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La La Land</i>. I liked it, I didn’t love it, I confess to having got a
bit bored in places – I do think that sometimes people get so thrilled just by
the fact that something is a musical that they lose a portion of their critical
judgement (e.g. the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Xena: Warrior
Princess</i> musical is really very patchy at a musical level but the fans just
adored it simply because it was ooo, a musical). Nonetheless, I forgave <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La La Land</i> its moments of ‘oh get on
with it’ and its rather dubious privileging of the white boy over the black boy
as the authentic exponent of jazz because of the first and last seven minutes
of the film, two sequences which frame it as a musical in a way that seem to
refer back in a very self-conscious way to everything the classical Hollywood
musical of the 1930s and ‘40s was; and in the act of doing this position the
film both as a classic film musical and as a commentary on the nature of such
musicals in relation to what life is really like. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
OK, I am going to do theory in a
blog, something I generally avoid, but here goes. When I was writing my chapter
on TV musicals for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sounds-Fear-Wonder-Music-Investigating/dp/1784530298" target="_blank">Sounds of Fear andWonder</a></i>, I came across a really useful idea from Richard Dyer about the way
that the classical musical provides a Utopian solution to the social tensions within
our day to day lives, which I present below in a wee table:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoNormalTable" style="border-collapse: collapse; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-table-layout-alt: fixed; mso-yfti-tbllook: 1184;">
<thead>
<tr style="height: 13.95pt; mso-yfti-firstrow: yes; mso-yfti-irow: 0;">
<td style="border-bottom: solid black 1.0pt; border: none; height: 13.95pt; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid black .25pt; padding: 0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle1">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">‘Real Life’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid black 1.0pt; border: none; height: 13.95pt; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid black .25pt; padding: 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle1">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Utopian</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border-bottom: solid black 1.0pt; border: none; height: 13.95pt; mso-border-bottom-alt: solid black .25pt; padding: 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle1">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Dystopian</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</td>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr style="height: 13.95pt; mso-yfti-irow: 1;">
<td style="border: none; height: 13.95pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid black .25pt; padding: 0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Scarcity
(poverty, unequal distribution of wealth)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border: none; height: 13.95pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid black .25pt; padding: 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Abundance</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="border: none; height: 13.95pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid black .25pt; padding: 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Excess</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 36.25pt; mso-yfti-irow: 2;">
<td style="height: 36.25pt; padding: 0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Exhaustion
(work, labour, pressures of life)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="height: 36.25pt; padding: 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Energy (work
= play)</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="height: 36.25pt; padding: 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Over-exuberance; inappropriate playfulness or
cheerfulness</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 24.25pt; mso-yfti-irow: 3;">
<td style="height: 24.25pt; padding: 0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Dreariness
(monotony, predictability)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="height: 24.25pt; padding: 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Intensity
(excitement, drama)</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="height: 24.25pt; padding: 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Danger, anxiety, crisis</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 48.25pt; mso-yfti-irow: 4;">
<td style="height: 48.25pt; padding: 0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Manipulation
(advertising, bourgeois democracy, sex roles)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="height: 48.25pt; padding: 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Transparency
(open, spontaneous and honest communication and relationships)</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="height: 48.25pt; padding: 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Excessive honesty, involuntary spontaneity,
incomprehensibility</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr style="height: 36.25pt; mso-yfti-irow: 5; mso-yfti-lastrow: yes;">
<td style="height: 36.25pt; padding: 0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Fragmentation
(job mobility, high rise flats, legislation against collective activity)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="height: 36.25pt; padding: 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="TableStyle2">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Community
(togetherness, collective activity)</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</td>
<td style="height: 36.25pt; padding: 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt 4.0pt; width: 120.4pt;" valign="top" width="120"><div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;">Isolation, illusion of community,
insincerity</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="TableStyle2">
<br /></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Adapted
from: </span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria;">Richard Dyer,
(1981). ‘Entertainment and Utopia’. </span><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In Rick Altman (ed) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Genre, The Musical: A Reader</i>. London and Boston: Routledge and
Kegan Paul. 175–89.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
In my chapter, I extended this to
look at how TV musicals tend to explore dystopian solutions (the third column);
and actually if you look at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chicago</i>,
the most successful film musical of recent times before <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La La Land</i>, that too offers a dystopian solution to social tensions
in its celebration of murder, awash with inappropriate playfulness, a great
deal of excessive honesty and the illusion of community in the prison among the
merry murderesses (something I have been having enormous fun exploring recently
with one of my final year undergrads in her project on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chicago</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Assassins</i>).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La La Land</i> does not go down that route, and instead balances itself
quite finally between ideas of real life and their possible Utopian solutions,
right from the word go. In many ways, this is absolutely a classic ‘backstage’
musical in the model of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">42<sup>nd</sup>
Street</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Singin’ in the Rain</i>:
the central characters are performers desperate for success, persuing their
drams of becoming stars; and after various set backs, they succeed. But the
twist in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La La Land</i> is the
compromised happy ending – the Utopian solution of the classic musical would
dictate that the lovers must both achieve their dreams and end up together, but
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La La Land</i> denies us this resolution
and instead presents us with the much more realistic ending, that they have
both achieved their dreams but only by accepting that scarcity sometimes
prevails over abundance: we rarely get to ‘have it all’ and some things (in
this case, the relationship) must be sacrificed in order to have others. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
The film frames itself with two
fantastic (meant in both senses of the word) sequences that present us with a
specific and overt movement between the real world and the Utopian version of
the musical. The opening sequence starts out completely rooted in the real:
cars stationary in blazing heat on the freeway. We pan past different cars –
each occupant is listening to their own music, each one isolated from the
others. This is social fragmentation; this is exhaustion and dreariness. And
then we linger on one woman who starts to sing along to her radio, and then
gets out of her car and starts dancing as well as singing. In the real world,
everyone would think she had gone a little crazy in the heat and would either
start filming her on their phone or desperately try not to catch her eye in
case she’s about turn dangerous. But no, we have made a move into the Utopian
world of the musical, and the music instead acts to turn these strangers into a
community of energetic performers, their cars into a set on and around which
they dance in perfect coordination – this is the perfect musical moment in
which we actually witness the moment that our own real, dreary and
uncomfortable world is transformed into an exuberant theatre of playfulness in
which all occasions conspire to support the abundance of performative energy,
perhaps at its most intense in the moment that a truck door is raised to reveal
a band inside, already playing along (rather than dead from heat stroke).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
At the end of the song, everyone
returns to their cars, life returns to normal and indeed nothing has changed –
the couple who we know (because we’ve seen the trailers, the publicity, the TV
interviews) are going to be the stars of this show have an annoyed altercation
with each other: no one has come out of the fantastic moment any less isolated
than they went in, but the alternative mode of existence possible in this
narrative has been very clearly established.</div>
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To some extent, the rest of the
film proceeds by exploring the balancing act between the Utopian and the real,
with the real increasingly winning through toward the end of the film: the
lovers want Utopia, but it cannot be sustained and in the end they part – we
see the moment before the decision is made and then cut several years to the
end of the film, the point where Mia is now a star and Sebastian has his jazz club,
but they have not seen each other in the intervening time. And here, the film
closes the frame with a second fantastic sequence in which the entire film is
replayed as a music and dance sequence in which the purely Utopian version of
the story (very <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An American in Paris</i>)
is played out before our eyes from their first encounter to the happy ending
where they are married and have a child; every real-life decision and event
which conspired to pull them apart is reworked with the happier outcome to
produce the ending the musical <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">should</i>
have had. And we are seduced, because that is what we want from musicals – we
want happy endings. I sat there in the cinema, and started crying in this
sequence because I knew it wasn’t true, and that knowledge kind of broke my heart
because I really wanted them to get the happy ending a musical should have
given them. And although, as I have said, I liked rather than loved this film,
I cannot help but respect what it did in taking the genre of the musical,
understanding what a Hollywood film musical is to its very core, and then
denying us the ultimate Utopian pleasure that we want from it, reminding us
that life just isn’t like that. I shall go and have a little weep now.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-14411266461789718442016-04-03T05:42:00.001-07:002016-04-03T14:15:50.943-07:00Batman v. Superman: Dawn of JusticeHold onto your hats, folks, this one is going to be long! And I'm just going to say spoilers, spoilers, spoilers: do not read this if you don't know and don't want to know what happens, especially at the end of the film.<br />
There has been a fair amount of negativity about this film: others are entitled to their opinions and I to mine, and I enjoyed this film. OK, I'm coming at it more from what I think of the score and I am not for a second going to claim this it is perfect or even great. Yes, it has problems, not least some weird gaps in its logic and the fact that Wonder Woman needed about ten times the amount of screen time she got. On the other hand, I like the central idea of exploring what happens when you get two superheroes fundamentally distrusting the other's methods and motives, and although the movie's biggest problem is that it does not offer a remotely convincing explanation of how that problem is resolved, I thought the problem itself was well set up in the first part of the film. Also, I would happily watch Ben Affleck bagging groceries, so I have no issue with watching him being Batman; and even though I think Henry Cavill is funny looking, I continue to like his Superman.<br />
Anyway, I enjoyed it and found it entertaining: I did not go to watch it to have my world view either confirmed or denied, and that is just as well, but I liked it enough to watch it twice in order to start getting to grips with the music. Alas, twice is clearly not enough as there is loads going on and I already know, despite having sworn I was done writing about superhero movies, that I am going to have to sit down with both <i>Man of Steel </i>and this one when it comes out on DVD and write something a bit more formal. And even longer.<br />
Why do I like it? Because I'm an old fashioned girl and I like a nice theme, and this has bucketloads of them, intertwined and inventive and oh my goodness, just occasionally (and perhaps significantly, especially when he shares the composer credit with someone else as he did on <i>Batman Begins</i>) Hans Zimmer writes a good score. <i>BB</i>, he co-wrote with James Newton Howard, this one with someone bearing the improbable name Junkie XL. Says the woman called Steve Halfyard.<br />
So, themes. Well, actually, let's start with a joke because another thing I like are musical jokes. When Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent meet for the first time at Lex Luthor's party, the music playing and being sung in the background is Cole Porter's "Night and Day". Cute, huh?<br />
Other fun stuff: Bruce Wayne, especially his nightmarish visions/dreams (oh, we are so being set up for a sequel!) is haunted by the sound of the World Engine that nearly destroyed Metropolis in the climax of <i>Man of Steel</i>. It reverberates through the sound design and score (again, I like the way that Zimmer and his team often make it difficult to tell which is which) at the edges of the visions, reminding us of why he hates Superman so violently. and considers him such a threat. Nice touch, gentlemen.<br />
So, themes. Superman retains his themes from <i>Man of Steel</i>, or rather his theme group: several themes that all start with a rising perfect fifth, the interval of the (Super) hero as defined by - well, I was going to say John Williams but actually Beethoven got in there long before him. The group includes his emotional theme (used for his parents and for Lois) which starts with the fifth, almost always on a soft piano, and then falls back downward, a gentle little musical sigh; and his big hero theme, where the fifth is then expanded with a series of wider leaps to major sixth and seventh and finally, when he is particularly successful, to a rather beautiful octave in different harmonizations.The sense of striving and the way 'arrival' at the final musical goal is emotionally transformative as we shift into a new harmony (hurrah for the mediant shift is all I can say, and if that makes no sense to you, buy my book and read the section on Dexter in the penultimate chapter!) is my favourite part of this theme, but it also plays to the thing that many of this film's detractors do not like and which they seem to have noticed less in <i>Man of Steel</i>: the theme makes it clear that everything is hard for Superman. It takes effort to haul that note ever upwards, like Sisyphus and his rock, striving and yearning for the goal. Williams's <i>Superman</i> theme positively bounced up to its goal notes, effortless and optimistic: this one makes it hard, and the goal uncertain, especially as another theme in this group does not rise at all, but sinks from a rising fifth to a rising fourth, and does not make it to the top of the musical mountain poor old Clark is always having to climb.<br />
There is also a member of his theme group that involves a high, aching series of minor seconds/ falling and rising semitones, usually heard on brass and high strings, heard at moments of particular stress and conflict. This is one of the ones I have not yet fully got to grips with and need to track its use through both films in more detail; but it is important because this is the interval that connects him to the themes of his allies in the film, Batman (eventually) and Wonder Woman (oh, hurrah, again) both of whom have themes involving prominent rising and or falling semitones.<br />
Wonder Woman gets the most kick-ass theme of the film that then provides the bedrock of the final battle scene with the Zod-beast, or whatever it is officially called. So, she is an ancient Amazon warrior woman, and part of her theme is a 'primitive' driving drum riff of epic proportions in its volume and ferocity. You go girl, so to speak. But she is also able to present herself as thoroughly modern woman and hero, so over the top of this is a contrastingly modern but no less ferocious electric guitar riff that combines elements from Batman's group (rising minor key broken chord - tonic, minor third, perfect fifth) and Superman's semitone motif, as the broken chord is followed by a big, loud, long lean onto the tritone (so a fall of a semitone from the perfect fifth) and back up again. The timbre of the drums and guitar make this theme absolutely and unmistakably hers, but the melodic elements place her as a bridge between Batman and Superman (something that made me laugh, second time round, at the exchange at the start of the battle when Supe asks Bat "is she with you?" and Batty replies "I thought she was with you". The answer the music gives is simultaneously "yes, she is", and "no, she's with her").<br />
So, to the Batman. He, too, has a group of themes, although his are distinct rather than interlinked the way Superman's are.This an old Batman; and this is not entirely the Christopher Nolan Batman, either so, even though Zimmer wrote the music for those films, it does not reappear here and instead Bruce/ Batman's music almost literally takes it cue from an old Batman score. At the start of the film, which turns out to be a combination of memory and dream, young Bruce is seen being lifted out of the well into which he fell by the flight of hundreds of bats around him; and as he is lifted into the light, we hear a theme so close to Danny Elfman's Bat-theme from 1989 that I refuse to believe for one second that the allusion is not intentional. One of the things that Elfman did with his five note motif was to create multiple variations of it, and the theme used in this new film is the version we hear in the 1989 film a) when Batman terrifies poor Vicki Vale in the Batcave after rescuing her from the Joker and b) in the triumphant finale. This is the version with a rising minor broken chord (see WW above), ending with a semitone rise to a minor sixth (so a semitone in the opposite direction to WW). But to anyone who knows the 1989 film well, it is unmistakably an allusion to the oldest of our film Batmans. Batmen. Hmm.<br />
So, this is his 'character' theme; but he has two others. Firstly we have his agency theme, a three note motif (the tonic/ root in the bass, with the melody over this as minor sixth falling to minor third, rising to perfect fifth) that takes key intervals from the character theme and reorders them - but note, the minor sixth/ perfect fifth combo in both character and agency theme give us that prominent semitone interval that connects his music Superman and Wonder Woman. The agency theme is, as my name for it suggests, the theme we hear when Batman is actually doing stuff: and for most of the film, that is plotting to kill Superman, so it initially presents more as a "Batman's vendetta" theme. However, after his change of heart (of which more in a second) it continues for his participation in the battle to defeat the Zod-beast, so its meaning shifts to a more encompassing idea of Batman as man of action.<br />
Batman's third theme is actually some of the first music we hear, a theme for the loss of his parents that has a fair amount in common with Zimmer's music for <i>Batman Begins</i>, especially in the use of a high voice (soprano rather than boy treble this time, I think) as a marker of innocence, loss and longing. We only hear it twice, once at the start of the film and then it is recalled at the crucial moment when Batman has the opportunity to kill Superman, but is deflected from this by Superman's revelation that if he dies, Martha will die too. This is the most problematic moment of the film, in that up to this point, both superheroes have been convinced that the other is a danger that needs to be contained and/or destroyed; and Batman's sudden decision to come over to Superman's side seems rushed and unconvincing, relying on the fact that both of them have mother's called Martha and that by inadvertently invoking Batman's mother, suddenly Batman decides Superman is a good guy after all. Huh? How does his mother's name stop him and his god-like powers from being a potential totalitarian threat? Interestingly, on my second watching, when I was listening to the music much more actively, the sequence worked far better and more convincingly, as this theme that was first used as young Bruce watched his parents die is revisited at length alongside shots from that earlier scene; but that, alas, is not really good enough. Whilst I am all for films where you get more out of them on rewatching, that is not quite the same as a film where a gap in the logic seems less pronounced second time through - we perhaps needed some revelatory moment where they both realise that they are being manipulated by Luther and can therefore unite behind the idea that he is the true enemy, and that simple does not happen. Nonetheless, being more aware of the music second time did genuinely help this seem more logical than the first time. Alas, the same cannot be said for the process by which Lex makes the Zod-beast, but that's another story.<br />
So, we have all out heroes' themes set up and the final battle is a marvellous melange of Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman motifs dancing around each other as the three bring down the Zod-beast together.<br />
Superman is apparently dead at the end (didn't buy it for a second, and the final coffin shot supports that thesis) but this gives us a fabulous cue for his death at the hands of the Zod-monster, which also dies in the process. Because, of course, we have been here before: Superman is killing Zod for the second time. The cue revisits the music from <i>Man of Steel</i> for when Superman battles and eventually kills Zod the first time round (if you are interested, it's the cue "If you love these people" on the OST for <i>Man of Steel</i> and "This is my world" on <i>Batman v. Superman</i>). Both times, killing Zod is tragic: the first time because Superman has to kill the only other remaining member of his race, the second time because he has to kill himself too, both times to save humankind.<br />
It is also the music that links him most strongly to previous filmic versions of Batman. There are several motifs and melodies in this cue: one harks back to the "big theme", almost never heard, from <i>Batman Begins</i>, with huge, almost unsingable leaps over a strangely baroque ground bass (read all about that here, if you wish: <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HdktAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA171&lpg=PA171&dq=cue+the+big+theme+halfyard&source=bl&ots=N_5FcbTqMo&sig=7t4TVF2JbHd9-AYiNAYGUtzMGBg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjqxKzrmvLLAhVGnRoKHfHgBDoQ6AEIITAD#v=onepage&q=cue%20the%20big%20theme%20halfyard&f=false" target="_blank">Link to Cue the Big theme</a>). Another is a five note motif that is note-for-note identical to Elfman's principal Bat-theme from 1989 (if you want to recall that, just sing the first five notes of Irving Berlins's "Let's face the music and dance" specifically the ones to the words "There may be trouble [ahead]" - there is something about these five notes which seemed to speak of troubled times in darkness). It's differently harmonised and places its emphasis on the final note, where Elfman places it on the fourth one, but I just throw it out there as perhaps the archetypal motif - the museme, if you will - of the tragic, troubled (in this case, dying) superhero being superheroic nonetheless. Connecting Superman to Batman this way (not as a specific gesture of this film but revisiting one from the previous film) humanises him: he suffers, he feels pain, he sacrifices. All of which puts him a long way from the infallible and endlessly optimistic figure of John Willams' Superman but hey, we of the 21st century live in apocalyptic times (as several people, not least the endlessly brilliant Stacey Abbott, pointed out at a conference on the 21st century horror Film at Sheffield Hallam this weekend) and our superheroes reflect that.<br />
So: to my surprise, a rather good score. Way too much of it, of course: the ears were profoundly grateful for the relatively rare moments of musical silence, but that is the price you pay for films obsessed with spectacle over plot and character development. But that, again, is another story.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-34332421879334122062016-03-12T02:03:00.002-08:002016-03-12T02:09:09.623-08:00<h2>
<i>Music in Cult TV: an introduction</i></h2>
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<i><br /></i></div>
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Hurrah - well, it's finally happening: my book on music in cult tv is coming out next month and is currently available to preorder via Amazon. It's all a bit useless at the moment as they both have the blurb I wrote as part of the proposal about 5 years ago and the book has changed significantly since then, not least because <i>Hannibal</i> aired whilst I was writing and utterly blew me away. Oh, and the U.K. site cannot spell music.....! So the actual blurb is below, and these are the links to the two sites. Currently half the price ($14 rather than $28) in the US than it will be after publication, no idea why!<br />
US site: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Music-Cult-TV-An-Introduction/dp/1784530298">http://www.amazon.com/Music-Cult-TV-An-Introduction/dp/1784530298</a><br />
UK site: <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1784530298">http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1784530298</a><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-68395950209487573102016-01-08T03:01:00.000-08:002016-01-08T03:01:15.377-08:00Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Composer: oh, who do you think, John Williams, of course!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">So, the bad news is that I have suddenly come down with a cold and feel
absolutely blinking awful. The good news is that this week I finally saw <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens</i>, a film
I can happily admit to loving with a fiery passion. In fact, I saw it twice,
and musically speaking, that was an interesting experience in and of
itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Spoilers ahead: for crying
out loud, why are you reading this if you haven’t seen the film already? Do you
know how much time I have spent avoiding on the internet since December 17<sup>th</sup>?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">At my first viewing, I failed to notice a single new theme (and there
are three big significant ones for Rey, Kylo Ren and the Alliance, as well as
various smaller others). All I noticed, musically, was the old themes: The
Luke/ main title theme; the ‘triumph’ chords that so often punctuate action in
the original trilogy; the Force theme; Leia’s theme, and the Leia/Han love
theme. Each one jumped out at me and my ears greeted it like a long-lost,
much-loved friend, starting with the main title (grin the size of a slice of
watermelon on my face), then the triumph chords as we see the Millenium Falcon
for the first time (hello, Millenium Falcon!), the Force theme as Han remembers
Luke, the Leia theme as we see the lovely General for the first time,
transforming into the Han/Leia version as they talk to each other; even a quick
blast of Darth Vadar’s Imperial March as we see the remains of his ruined mask on
Kylo Ren’s little altar. Oh, my lovelies, how I’ve missed you! But new themes
utterly passed me by: I was aware of the recurrence of these themes throughout
but otherwise, was just too busy watching the film.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Second time round, out they started popping, as well as other things,
such as the first time we get the Luke/ main title theme in the score is when
Finn makes the decision that effectively sets the narrative rolling and tells
Poe Dameron that he is going to help him escape – some of Luke’s agency in that
moment seems to be passed on to Finn, a fascinating character who has had
rather less attention as the first major black character of the franchise (do
not get me started on Lando Calrissian) than its first female hero, Rey. However,
I am going to focus in particular on Rey and Kylo Ren or we’ll be here forever.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Kylo Ren’s theme<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzP7D2Yjkd8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzP7D2Yjkd8</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Kylo Ren has a classic ‘label’ theme of the type that Adorno and Eisler
detested, seeing it as the musical lackey announcing the person we can all very
well see is there. But the general stasis of this five note motif which we
repeatedly hear in basically identical form throughout the film actually does quite
a lot of work. It’s short and unchanging – this unchanging nature reflects his
rigidity, his desire to hold to his path and I could make a possibly slightly
fanciful argument about this being how he hears himself, the aural image of
what he wants to be, sternly foreboding, a musical anchor that pulls him back
to the dark side from that oh so tempting path of light. The motif is angular
and chromatic – sorry, my notation software is up the spout, so I shall have to
do it by description. Five notes: G, F sharp, C , E flat, G again, an octave
down from where it started. So, we start with a falling minor second (G to F
sharp), which then falls to the tritone<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(F sharp to C) symbol of musical evil, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">diablous in musica</i> – no villain is a proper villain without a nice
tritone in his theme; then rising by a minor third (C to E flat) before
dropping down a minor sixth (E flat to C). It is almost entirely descending and
therefore a theme for the dark side: heroic themes, by contrast, tend to be
primarily ascending, constantly pushing upwards towards ever higher goals (e.g.
the Luke/ main title theme and indeed the Force theme: nice bit of analysis
here that demonstrates the idea well: <a href="http://www.filmmusicnotes.com/john-williams-themes-part-1-the-force-theme/">http://www.filmmusicnotes.com/john-williams-themes-part-1-the-force-theme/</a>). All the intervals in KR’s theme are either minor or chromatic – again,
culturally coded towards the negative end of the spectrum, compared to the
major key and unchromatic<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Main
title and Force themes. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Rey’s theme<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><a href="https://youtu.be/nTmP0iBQUkA">https://youtu.be/nTmP0iBQUkA</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Rey, by contrast, has a very long theme made up of several motifs; the
opening rapid figure is derived from the (as you will learn!) all-important
last three notes of the melody of the main motif. That main motif (6 notes in
all) is the opening of a long winding melody that meanders all over the place,
shifting and slipping into different keys, the melody becoming submerged in the
textures and then re-emerging again: note already, therefore, the extreme
contrast to the rigid brevity of Kylo Ren’s theme. Rey is unfixed, unformed at
this point: unawakened!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Rey’s motif appears in so many different keys that I’m going to give it
here in the version that best makes my point about its relationship with Kylo
Ren’s. This gives us a theme that goes: C, E flat, G, C, F, G . [C up to E
flat, down to G, back up to C, then up again to F and G]. So: the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">last</b> three notes of KR’s theme are the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">first</b> three of Rey’s; where his sinks <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">down</b> to the low G at the end, her’s
rises <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">up</b> to the high one; where his
motif <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">starts</b> with a chromatic <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">fall</b> from G to F sharp that in turn produces
the tritone, her’s <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">ends</b> with the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">rising</b>, non-chromatic F natural to G.
There is both a reversal of the order of phrases and of the direction of the
two notes at the start of KR’s and the end of Rey’s, which means that where his
theme has only one ascending interval, her’s has only one descending one. These
motifs are so astoundingly mirrored around each other that I do not believe for
a second that its just one of those coincidences, because our John is
altogether rather too clever for that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The lack of chromaticism and the primarily ascending contour give Rey’s
motif <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>much more potential as a
heroic signifier. However, at the start of the film, it just ain’t heroic: its
actually pretty softy-sweetie-girlie, in terms of its Hollywood cultural
musical coding. Lots of woodwind and strings, nice overall sense of up-and-back
down phrase shaping in the cue as a whole, smooth, legato feel – all things
that good ol’ Philip Tagg (where would I be without him) identified as
female coded musical characteristics in his 1987 study, which you can find here
if you have never read it: <a href="http://tagg.org/articles/xpdfs/tvanthro.pdf">http://tagg.org/articles/xpdfs/tvanthro.pdf</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">But her motif has potential to be heroic: its has the kind of open
intervals around tonic and dominant (the C and G) that are commonly found in
Williams’ hero themes; it is ascending; and it is strongly linked (as I am not
the first to notice) to the force theme, in that it has identical harmonic movement
and several similar intervals (he actually juxtaposes them in the final minute
of the end credits cue, just in case you hadn’t noticed, something that brought
another watermelon grin to my face as I stood by the exit door to let the poor
ushers clean the cinema! Having working in one, I am acutely aware that people
who stay to the end of the credits are pretty annoying for the ushers). The
identical harmonic movement means that in the more extended Rey theme (going
beyond her first six notes into the second part of the theme) both this and the
Force theme move from a minor tonic chord to the major subdominant (so here,
from C minor to F major). Technically, in C minor, the subdominant should be F
minor, so the brightening of the shift into a major chord gives it a sense of
hope (A New Hope! The Force Awakens! Woohoo!) that again pushes this toward the
heroic. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">And that latent heroism and the force awakening in Rey gets its musical
realization in the final battle scene between her and KR, which you can hear
here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnvaA984uIc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnvaA984uIc</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I will confess that I was getting mightly frustrated by the end of the
film: we got the Force theme with the heroic bras (solo horn) mostly when
people were talking about Luke -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>when it was used for Rey, back came the strings and woodwinds;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and her own motif also kept on coming
back on strings and woodwind. For crying out loud, John (I was thinking) when
are you going to let her be a hero? And then, hurrah, in this cue, we finally
get both the Force theme and her motif transformed into a properly brass-led
heroism as she comes into her own and takes down KR. I may have cried a little
at the sound of massed brass around 2.40 in the above clip.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">And so, to the crazy speculation. Why do Rey and KR essentially share a (mirrored)
theme? Why is the very first thing Leia does when she meets Rey is to clasp her
in a fierce embrace? Could they all be – gasp – related??? I seriously do not
know how I am going to get through a year and nine months without knowing the
answers to these questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-70741811808435179742015-11-06T14:17:00.002-08:002015-11-07T13:21:33.158-08:00<h2>
<i>The Martian</i></h2>
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I am clearly on a roll: second post in the same week!<br />
I'm afraid I'm going to be really rather picky about this film because I really liked but it was not quite as good a film as it might have been on the musical front. Matt Damon turns in an impressive and engaging performance as the guy accidentally left for dead on Mars, reminding me of just what a jolly fine actor he is, and which he needs to be as a lot of the film is just him and his potatoes and a lot of red dust. The film starts with some semi-subtle allusions to <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>, with a planetary sunrise set to some low drones sounds that recall, perhaps, some of the Ligeti in Kubrik's compilation score; and then the first obviously musical sounds we hear are a rising open fifth, à la Strauss <i>Thus Spake Zarathustra,</i> but then the music and visuals leave that particularly vision of space behind (and undoubtedly a good thing too, but I enjoyed the nod).</div>
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Things start out promisingly musically, and after Mark, our hero, is abandoned, the music and sound design initially do a good job constructing his subjective experience as the only man on Mars. In particular, the sound design gives a range of slightly disconcerting hums, some evidently ambient, some more ambiguous; a lovely little tinnitus moment when Mark more or less blows himself up in the process of trying to grow his potatoes; plus there is some fabulously incongruous disco music which is the only music he has access to, a fact that causes him at one point to declare that he is definitely go to die here if he has to keep listening to this. The fact that he does keep listening to it suggests, probably quite rightly, that when you are completely alone on a planet, 100s of 1000s of miles and potentially four years from anyone else, any music is better than nothing. But here in lie the seeds of the problem. By my calculations, Mark is actually on his own for about two years, and by the end he is definitely starting to go a little crazy, but the underscore music rather undermines this by being pretty much wall to wall through most of the film. The film's makers might have chosen to use musical silence and sound design to help us understand his isolation and the constant threat of death that he is under, and to encourage us to see the ways in which Mark starts to fall apart, a process that begins when his crops are destroyed. Damon is acting his socks off but the music actually makes his performance of a man holding on to his sanity by his fingertips toward the end seem kinda cute, and that seems to me to do his acting a disservice both here and elsewhere: the music does too much work for us in glossing his emotions into something generally simple and easy to identify with, whereas the situation is astoundingly complex and not something I imagine most of us can begin to think ourselves into. The sounds design is, frankly, also acting its socks off: the sounds of the various storms and the sense of the habitat pods being under constant threat of destruction really begs for more musical silence in which to make itself felt, but instead I cannot remember the last time I was so conscious of being emotionally manipulated by a score (Oo, will he die? Hurrah, he's ok! Can he make it work? yes, he can! He's so plucky - cue the Kleenex). I am not blaming the composer: Harry Gregson Williams will have written music for where he was told to write it, doing what he was told to make it do; but the film ended up too cosy for me, like a revisiting of <i>Apollo 13</i> as a fun adventure film, or <i>Mission to Mars</i> with a happier ending. He's complete alone on a planet and is an odds-on favourite to perish! It is genuinely scary! A wee bit more silence now and then, a dose of the uncanny, would have made this an altogether less comfortable and frankly better film. It's a good film; it has great acting; but the musical strategy plays it too safe in how it directs the audience toward emotion and away from allowing them to glimpse how completely terrible it would be for someone to spend two years on their own on Mars with no guarantee at all of rescue.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-67745792177570648522015-11-03T11:18:00.001-08:002015-11-03T13:46:00.499-08:00Crimson Peak (2015)<div style="color: #454545; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Director: Guillermo del Toro</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Music: Fernado Velazquez</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sound design: Randy Thom</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #454545; font-family: "uictfonttextstylebody"; font-size: 17px;">It is an incredibly long time (literally, years) since I blogged about film music but today, in celebration of finishing the proofing on my cult TV book, I </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #454545; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">went to see </span><i style="color: #454545; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">Crimson Peak </i><span style="color: #454545; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">and for the first time in a very long time I am inspired to write. Not much has inspired me in film music of late. </span><i style="color: #454545; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">Crimson Peak </i><span style="color: #454545; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 17px;">is a marvellous gothic romp of a film, with ghosts literally coming out of the woodwork (and the floorboards) and more blood than you can sha</span></span><span style="color: #454545; font-family: "uictfonttextstylebody"; font-size: 17px;">ke a stick at: even the opening titles are drenched in a wash of red, and the film takes its name from the fact that the red clay of the hill on which haunted house is built turns the snow bright red in winter. The titles are accompanied by the sound of a child's voice singing an unaccompanied, haunting and slightly creepy song amidst massive electronically manipulated reverberation. Immediately, we are pointed toward horror: children's voices often feature in horror soundtracks where the film concerns a child in danger, so that the sound of a child singing from the soundtrack paradoxically indicates the threatening evil as much as the innocent child victim. Here, it's an interesting double bluff: in the first scene after the title we meet our heroine, Edith, as a ten year old at her mother's funeral, so the winsome child's voice is, we might suppose, Edith herself, the girl in peril at the centre of the narrative. But no, it's cleverer than that - oh, I do so love a clever score! Spoilers ahead. Much later in the film, we hear the same melody being played as a Chopinesque piano fantasia by Lucille, Edith's new sister in law, who turns out to be the agent behind the evil and the horror driving the narrative. Lucille reveals that the melody is a lullaby she used to sing to her brother (now Edith's husband) when they were children; and near the end we learn that as a child, Lucille murdered their mother with a gigantic cleaver she has kept ever since as a memento of that happy occasion. The child's voice we hear in the titles is therefore arguably Lucille's and rather than the voice representing Edith, the child in danger that it usually does (for example, <i>Alien 3, Sleepy Hollow</i>), we belatedly discover that it is the voice of evil itself, the voice of Lucille as a child.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The other really interesting thing about the music of this film is that we effectively have two scores. On the one hand we have a sumptuous orchestral score that represents all things to do with the real world and the living, no matter how horrible, and the lullaby slips from diegetic to non-diegetic music throughout. On the other hand, we have sound design operating as music, using electronic sounds and electronically manipulated noises (drips, knocking sounds) to represent the Otherness of the many and various ghosts. The first appearance of this other sound world, when Edith's mother returns after the funeral to warn her about Crimson Peak (unfortunately, she should have warned her about Allerdale Hall as Crimson Peak is just a local nickname and Edith has already married and moved in before she hears it for the first time). In this first haunting, the sound design is at its most overtly composed, with very little obviously real sounds, and lots of electronics, but it establishes the extreme difference of the ghostly soundworld. In other haunting sequences, the boundary between sound design and musical composition is much less clearly defined, and the sound operates both as the sound of the ghosts themselves as they bump and slither around the house, and as a musical atmosphere and ambience for their presence. There is even, in the credits, a member of sound design team credited with "atmospheric sound design". This duality in the scoring strategy is itself a marvellously gothic construction: if the classic gothic castle is a site of decadent domesticity above with dank and dangerous cellars below in which God alone knows what lurks, then here the orchestral music presents us with the sumptuous world of the living 'above' and the noisy, unnatural and manipulated sound design of the dead 'below'. I really enjoyed this film: it's silly, over the top, quite revolting in places and having rather too much fun with itself at times but Mia Wasikowska as Edith does a knock up job of not just being a victim in need of being rescued (and turns out to be handy with shovel) and I could happily watch Tom Hiddleston reading the telephone directory, so watching him being tragic, bad and tormented all at the same time is a joy. And the music/ sound was deeply satisfying: inventive, interesting and rewarding to listen to. Hurrah!</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-79254679173329014652012-10-04T07:08:00.000-07:002012-10-04T07:19:25.994-07:00<h2>
<i>Anna Karenina </i></h2>
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1781769/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1781769/</a></div>
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Yikes, it’s been a while: sometimes, life just catches up
and there’s no time for thinking about it. Which I supposed (caution: glib
segue ahead!) is Anna Karenina’s problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I am having mixed feelings about this film overall: mostly, I liked it
very much, but it looses its way at the end and (I don’t often say this)
probably needed to be about 20 minutes longer. One minute, Anna has left her
husband and is living with Vronsky; there is some vague mention of her wanting
a divorce; within about 10 minutes, she’s addicted to morphine, become a raving
paranoiac and suddenly throws herself under a train for no clear reason. And
poor old Vronsky is a bit of an empty space: he’s very pretty but one doesn’t
have a clue if there is anything going on between his ears, nor what he
actually feels for Anna – his love for her is oddly unconvincing. So, sorry Mr
Stoppard, but somewhere between what you wrote and whatever happened to your
script in the edit, characters got a little thin and plot got a little rushed.</div>
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But the thing you cannot get away from is the beauty of the
production. The majority of the action is filmed in a 19<sup>th</sup> century
theatre, which they constantly redress to provide us with various people’s
homes, workplaces, ballrooms, streets, railway stations, tea rooms, ice rink, even
a race-course at one point. Oh, and every now and then it gets to be a theatre.
It’s very Brechtian, especially at the start, the stage machinery quite
literally revealed, with the result that we are very aware that we are watching
a narrative, a story told by actors, the self-conscious artifice of it keeping
us at an emotional distance – it’s a game, a process, a story with a very
visible frame (sometimes, literally, the proscenium arch of the theatre). And
the music works as part of this as well. There are two basic types of music in
the film: dance music, which draws attention to itself, and more conventional
underscore, although the two cross over in significant places. The dance music
predominates at the start – it’s quirky, hints of the Shostakovich jazz suites,
self-consciously stylized in the same way that the action is at the start. As
one scene ends, we make a transition from this, set in Anna’s brother’s
offices, to him and his friend Konstantin going to dinner in a restaurant. The
office workers strip off the top players of their clothing, and are transformed
into waiters; the actors move scenery and props out of the way and bring in
screens to create the restaurant; the camera, in a long tracking shot, follows
all this as we move from one side of the theatre space to another (or do we
just go around in a circle?) and as the camera tracks, so various musicians – a
clarinettist, a tuba player, a singer, pass in and out of view, making clear
that the music we are hearing is not simply underscore but is also within the
scene as well. It is overtly theatrical: I spent the first 15 minutes of the
film wondering why they’d bothered to make a film at all, rather than doing
this on stage. The music by Joe Wright’s usual composer, Dario Marianelli) has
a very Brechtian role in defining and drawing attention to the narrative space:
later, after Konstantin has made his failed proposal to Princess Kitty (yes,
that really is what she is called), he leaves her salon, where a ball is
beginning, and climbs up onto the gantries above the stage: this is the ‘street’,
outside the salon which occupies the stage. The music follows him: in the
salon, the violin melody was that of a somewhat vibrato-heavy waltz; as he
climbs to the catwalks, populated by the common people, it is transformed into
something folkish, Klezmerish. From the catwalk, he looks back down into the
salon, and as the camera follows his gaze, the violin seamlessly moves back to
the elegant waltz. </div>
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And then the music stops for a while, and we have a series
of scenes, in which we first meet Anna, where there is a great deal of
conversation and musical silence, as if to try and say “OK, we have established
that, for budgetary reasons, we are shooting this whole damn thing in a theatre
rather than on location, and it’s all very arch and camp, sorry about that, but
we had to make the theatre thing work somehow; but now we want to get on with
the real story and get you emotionally engaged with it so no more music, let’s
have some proper acting”. And I am in two minds whether it really works: the
Brechtian distancing that arises from spending a lot of our time visibly in a
theatre makes it a little difficult to really engage with the story, to start
seeing the characters rather than the actors. It is apparent that we ‘see’ the
theatre and its machinery much less clearly in the scenes involving Anna,
Karenin and Vronsky on their own – there is a definite attempt to avoid
distracting (alienating) us with the frame when we are with these characters. </div>
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Musically, the central theme is the waltz heard at the
fateful ball where Vronsky dances with Anna and throws over Kitty. Here,
obviously, the music is diegetic – everyone is dancing to it so obviously they
can hear it, although there is no visible sign of the orchestra. But here
again, they play a lot of games with theatrical artifice: when Vronksy
persuades Anna to dance with him, all the other dancers freeze as they take to
the floor, and only come back to life as the couple pass them; and the dancing
itself is gorgeous and bizarre, made up of languidly nonsensical hand and arm
gestures more than anything else, as if the dancers are becoming physically
entwined, tied in knots that they weave and then extricate themselves from – it
is graceful yet suggests an underlying anxiety, a highly stylized, abstracted
set of gestures that might have started out as some kind of fight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The waltz theme then becomes the love
theme for Anna and Vronsky, sliding from ‘real’ diegetic music at the ball into
the nondiegetic undescore; and seems to suggest that their tale is, like the choreography,
a convoluted, anxious, elegant but unsettled dance that we know will not have a
happy ending.</div>
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The only happy ending is the one for Kitty and Konstantin, who do finally get married and go to live in the countryside. They are also the only ones who ever seem to escape the theatre into the real world: Konstantin at one point literally walks out of the theatre onto a snow covered landscape, and pretty much all the location work concerns him - he has an actual house (rather than a home created out of a corner of the theatre); and he and Kitty also have proper non-diegetic underscore, as if they are the only conventionally 'real' people in the whole film - they do not want to be part of the performance, but to get on with life away from the labyrinthine workings of the theatre that Anna singularly fails to escape.</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-35084545853660294612012-07-09T01:00:00.002-07:002012-07-09T01:03:51.033-07:00Well, I was kidding myself if I ever thought I'd post anything in May or June, the two busiest months of my year. However, have managed to see a few films, several of which I have enjoyed very much (<i>Avengers, Cabin in the Woods</i>, even <i>Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter</i>) and some of which I have not (<i>Snow White and the Huntsman, Red Lights</i>). The Abraham Lincoln film was on one level enjoyable hokum and on another rather distasteful (it's fine that all the confederate troops were slaughtered at Gettysburg because they weren't actually men at all, you see, they were naughty vampires trying to take over America). Musically, nothing much has grabbed my attention in a big way (<i>The Hunger Games</i> rather spoilt me, raised my expectations too high). Nice little love theme for Abe and his missus, which is then picked up near the end for the Union troops getting killed on the first day at Gettysburg, which worked rather well, and a rollicking hero theme for Abe swinging his axe at the vampires. <i>The Avengers</i> has another lovely hero theme from Alan Silvestri, working very much with the classical trope with its rising open fifth, and in the minor key as tends to be the norm these days (superheroes can't afford to be too happy, you know: this superheroing tends to leave you all moody and conflicted); and it was a damn fine film with some killer dialogue (Doth mother know thou wearest her drapes?) that had the audience in stitches both times I saw it. <i>Cabin in the Woods</i> had fantastically forgettable music for the most part, although there was a lovely little sequence where the scary old loner from the gas station was on the phone to the scientist techies in the underground bunker, speaking in dark and menacing tones of doom and sacrifice with suitably ominous music, which suddenly cuts as he says "am I on speaker phone?" (which he is, and the three scientist are all cracking up listening to him). They apologise, tell him he's off speakerphone, and he continues his monologue, the music resuming: and then it cuts again as he says "I'm still on speakerphone, aren't I?", which of course he is. Anyway, that made me laugh. The whole film made me laugh, as well as making me feeling rather ill (I don't do slasher horror well, not even Joss Whedon's postmodernly funny slasher horror). <i>Snow White</i> was turgid and paint-dryingly dull at times, and Bella Swan (or whatever the girl's name is) CANNOT ACT. The final scene was horrific: her coronation, where she stood in her pretty dress holding a symbolically flowering tree branch (i.e. large twig) and the expression on her face mostly seemed to be "I feel ridiculous". And she looked it, too. Struth. And just don't get me started on <i>Red Lights</i>: killer cast, diabolically bad film.
Anyway, I have a summer of superheroes ahead of me: more Batman, more Spider-Man, I'm happy. Having been quite disappointed with the music of <i>The Dark Knight</i> after the fabulous score for <i>Batman Begins</i>, I am only dimly hopeful that Mr Zimmer will have bothered to do more than phone in his score for the last film, but you never know. The all new Spider-Man (didn't we just have one of those?) has a James Horner score which means it might be interesting (he has not done a big superhero franchise score before, although he's done lots of fantasy and lots of hero scores) - I shall just have to find out later on this afternoon! And then I'm off to the utter joy that is the biennial conference of the Whedon Studies Association, where I will be delivering a paper on the music of <i>Dollhouse</i>. Whoop whoop!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-85058175837488704462012-04-13T15:07:00.002-07:002012-04-14T14:17:24.111-07:00The Hunger Games<div style="font: 19.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><b>The Hunger Games</b></span></i></div><div style="font: 19.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/</a></span></i></div><div style="font: 19.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Let's just start by saying no, I haven't read the books and I appreciate there are a lot of people out there who have who are really disappointed by the film to which I would just say a film is not a book and there simply is not time in the scale of a film to deal with the discursive level of commentary and critique underlying the narrative of books set in dystopian alternate realities that you all seem to be so miffed about not being properly addressed in the movie. You have to do things differently, and that sometimes leaves things feeling too compressed, too much missing from the much-loved book. A film is not book. This was a very good film. It did not need to discuss the poverty and oppression of the districts: we could see it - and that general point could be made about many of the other criticisms I have read from disappointed fans. Films are primarily visual: the basic rule of film and TV is "show, don't tell". And this film showed very well. Fantastic cast, well drawn characters, and a particularly credible and marvellous heroine.</span></div><div style="font: 19.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">And really good music! The score is by James Newton Howard who has always been 'steady' and essentially interesting (liked his work on <i>The Sixth Sense</i> and <i>Batman</i> films) but has never really set my world alight before. This, however, is a very intelligent score. The film has three environments. We start in district 12, Catniss Everdeene's home, a poor rural mining community surround by forest where Catniss hunts for squirrels and the occasional deer. We then move the capital city, a wealthy, hi-tech enclave of privilege; and from there to the arena in which the Hunger Games are conducted, which is also a forest but not an entirely real one - it is controlled and fabricated by the Gamemakers. The music responds to these environments, but most of it belongs to Catniss. At the start of the film, in district 12, the music has a distinctly folkish feel to is, voices and strings; and then Catniss goes to the forest to hunt. As she retrieves her bow from its hiding place in a tree, the folk music is punctuated by a single harp note, a monotone that repeats at the beginning of each musical phrase. In scoring Catniss, JNH hits on a sublimely simple and lovely metaphor, connecting the idea of Catniss's bow with its single string to plucked strings which we hear in various guises throughout the score in her music, whether it's the monotone harp underneath other textures, or the use of plectrum dulcimer, guitar or banjo - all manner of plucked string instruments are heard in the score. But her bow can operate on a second level of musical metaphor, because although the archery bow is 'plucked' the musical bow is used to play the other string instruments, so the strings that characterize the folk music of district 12, and Catniss's own music, are therefore also potentially part of the same extended metaphor that places Catniss and her bow at the heart of the narrative.</span></div><div style="font: 19.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The music of the capital city initially intrudes diegetically into district 12 as the music accompanying the promotional film that the inhabitants of 12 are made to watch before the two tributes are selected. This is classic film score music: a full orchestral score in a quasi late romantic idiom - it could have been written by John Williams on his day off. We hear exactly the same music during the tributes parade, confirming its function as a piece of source music associated by the Capitol with the games. Other than the contrast of folk strings with orchestra between these two music, the important difference is also one of drive. The music of Catniss and district 12 is thoughtful, sombre, subdued and utterly lacking in rhythmic drive; that of the Capitol is grandiose, overblown by contrast with the quieter folk music of district 12, and typically has an obvious drum beat under it, and so the sense of moving from one environment to another is captured in the contrasting tone and feel of the rural and urban spaces sonically as well as visual.</span></div><div style="font: 19.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">When we get into the arena where the hunger games are conducted, we are in a hybrid space: it looks like Catniss's much loved forest, but is in fact created and controlled by the city, so both types of music - the folkish and the pulse driven - are found here: but the sense of contrast as we move into the new environment is achieved through a slightly bizarre use of a piece of music by the composer Steve Reich, and extract from his <i>Three Movements for Orchestra</i> (1986). I say bizarre because for me it was a "who let Steve Reich in here" moment, the music simply too recognizable to sit comfortably within the film, shocking me back out into my own reality for a second, but I realize I am probably in a minority.... and in fact, the extreme tonal difference has that same effect of letting us know that we are somewhere quite other than before: it has the pulse driven element of the city music, but the woody percussion of the marimbas is a completely new timbre, perhaps evoking the forest, but certainly achieving that same shifting of tone for the new environment. </span></div><div style="font: 19.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">But perhaps the thing I loved most about this film was its use of silence. One of the criticisms (as well as one of the main functions) of mainstream Hollywood scoring is the way it can evoke fairly specific emotions in the audience: the music can tell you how to feel, which is why directors often use it so much, as it can impose an interpretation on a scene that might otherwise be ambivalent, or heighten the emotion in a scene that otherwise lacks the emotional punch it needs to have. Without music, audiences tend to have to work harder to understand what is going on, and silence can also be unsettling and make one too aware of things around you in the cinema other than the film - the result is that a lot of mainstream films have huge amounts of music in them, and it becomes like wallpaper, pleasantly ignorable (as Satie would say) and is so busy filling up the gaps between the car chases and explosions that it never gets a chance to do anything particularly interesting . But not this film: part of the strength of the score is connected to the fact that most of the film's intense and emotionally charged moments are allowed to play without music chipping in to tell us what to feel, although the musically silent scenes are no less affecting for it. The result is a kind of stripped down emotional rawness: the acting, the scripting and the shooting are all sufficiently good that we don't need music to tell us how to feel and this very 'difficult' narrative (let's get kids to murder each other and turn it into a game show) has a stark emotional honesty as a result. Film music can easily become devalued by being overused, lazily used: I love it when a film doesn't (literally) overplay the music - it leaves both film and score stronger. Played without music, the choices that Catniss is forced into remain terrible and painful: they do not suffer the sentimentalizing gloss that music is often asked to bring to difficult situations in film. And that is something that the people who loved the book should take comfort from - those silences speak volumes for the seriousness with which this film has taken its story.</span></div><div style="font: 19.0px Arial; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 22.0px;"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-68251209316747540942012-02-08T10:07:00.000-08:002012-02-08T10:07:13.435-08:00Happy Birthday Mr Williams!<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-GB</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">I have just spent two minutes on local radio singing the praises of the marvellous JW. And he is marvellous – how many other 80 year olds have two Oscar nominations this year? OK, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tintin</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Warhorse</i> are not necessarily two of my favourite scores (although the main title of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tintin</i> is knockout and better than every note of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Artist</i> put together), but hey, this man is the most nominated individual in the history of the Oscars, with 37 nominations since 1968, and five wins. And marvel ye all at the astonishing consistency, imagination and versatility of the man. When I think of him, it’s the big adventure scores that come to mind: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Wars, Superman, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter</i>; but don’t forget his disaster movies that preceded those – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Poseidon Adventure </i>and<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> The Towering Inferno</i> are probably the reason he got the gig to do <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jaws</i>, resulting in his first Oscar for original composition (he got one for his adaptation work on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fiddler on the Roof</i>, of all things, in 1972)and the first full score he wrote for Spielberg, resulting in the most enduring director/ composer relationship in Hollywood, even more so (significantly more so) than Herrmann and Hitchcock or those Johnny come latelies, Burton and Elfman. Then there are his sci-fi (always with a twist or two) scores: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close Encounters, E.T </i>(Oscar)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, AI, Minority Report</i>; the dramas – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">JFK, Saving Private Ryan, Empire of the Sun, Born on the 4<sup>th</sup> of July</i>, and, of course, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Schindler’s List</i> (another Oscar, thank you); and the comedies – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Home Alone</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Witches of Eastwick</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hook</i> (is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hook</i> a comedy?), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Far and Away</i> (I know, I’m the only person who likes that film). And then out of the blue, after he’s turned 70, he comes out with the score for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Catch Me If You Can</i> – the sheer jaw-dropping genius of which is that it doesn’t sound like a John Williams score. Still inventive after all those years. And of the one’s I have mentioned (the man has 139 scoring credits in IMDB) every film I have mentioned so far got him at least an Oscar nomination. Well, except <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Far and Away</i>….</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s been an astonishing career, and not over yet: he’s working on Spielberg’s bio-pic of Lincoln as we speak. Talented, yes; innovative, certainly; important, beyond a doubt. But perhaps above all – what a work ethic! The dedication of this composer, the sheer hard work required to churn out so much topnotch film music for more than 50 years - I take my woolly hat off to you, Mr W, which in this blasted freezing weather is a mark of my thoroughly genuine respect for everything you have done for the art and craft of the film music that I love so much.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-77248086682853024032012-02-05T10:25:00.000-08:002012-02-05T10:25:08.844-08:00The Iron Lady and J. Edgar<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It seems to be the season for</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">quasi-political biopics: </span><i>The Iron Lady, J Edgar, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and</span><i> W.E.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> have all graced our screens of late. I have no desire to see the latter, but I have made it through the other two. </span><i>J. Edgar</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is a wee bit on the overblown and dull side. There is a tentative and slightly half-hearted attempt to explore a possible relationship between Hoover and his right-hand man, but unfortunately the movie itself is so clearly uncomfortable with it that this just ends up a bit snigger-worthy (and indeed, there was a certain amount of sniggering from the audience when I went to see it). Oh, and then there's the latex. Making no-longer-quite-so-youthful-as-he-used-to-be Leonardo DiCaprio and the gorgeously smooth skinned Mr Armie Hammer (as Clyde Tolson) into doddering old men by means of a truckload of latex does nothing to stifle the sniggers. The score, such as it is, was composed by the director. Someone really needs to take Clint Eastwood to one side and point out that whilst he writes a lovely moody jazz-inflected melody, he really is a rank amateur when it comes to scoring films, and his rather uneven music does nothing to lend this film the modicum of pace it so desperately needs. I suspect that the type of clout he has in Hollywood makes that kind of conversation rather unlikely.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><i>The Iron Lady</i> is a mighty strange film. I enjoyed it; it is musically interesting; I was disturbed by it on a number of levels. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Enjoyment: the entire cast turn in jolly fine performances. Jim Broadbent is a delight as the ghost of Denis Thatcher (!), and of all the people might have I expected to crop up playing Geoffrey Howe, Anthony Head (best known for playing Giles in <i>Buffy</i> and Frank N Furter in the <i>Rocky Horror</i> <i>Show</i>) was not high on my list, so that was a little treat; plus Richard E Grant puts in a marvellously unctious turn as Michael Heseltine. Its generally well paced, there is humour and pathos, as a work of fiction it has much to recommend it. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">That, of course, is where the first level of disturbing kicks in, as this is not entirely a work of fiction but a very odd biopic of our longest serving prime minister. Love or hate Maggie, I have to side with the critics who have used the word "tasteless" to describe making this film whilst she is still alive, because a substantial amount of it takes the form of a fictional representation of what she is like now. The film is ostensibly set in almost exactly the present, as we are told that it is 8 years since Denis died (he died in the summer of 2003); and much of the film is centred around Margaret, suffering from dementia, hallucinating that Denis is still living with her. She knows he is dead, she knows that other people cannot see him and that talking to him therefore makes them regard as her loosing her marbles, and the end of the film sees her quite literally sending him packing - she bags up all his clothes to go to Oxfam, but packs him a suitcase, with which she sends him off into the bright white light. Unmitigated fiction, whatever we may or may not know about her current mental state. The other part of the film, therefore, is her flashbacks to particular episodes in her past, getting her place at Oxford, fighting and losing her first election, meeting and marrying Denis, getting to parliament, deciding to run for leader of the party, and various episodes from her time as prime minister, notably the miners' strike, the Falklands, and the poll tax riots (so many happy memories of my teenage years and university days) before being ousted as leader in 1990. All things considered, I would have liked rather more of this than the fictional elderly Thatcher shuffling round her flat in her dressing gown.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Disturbing level 2 is that this all makes her very sympathetic. I would not claim not have strong emotions about Thatcher, even thought she was a significant presence in my formative years (I was 12 when she came to power, 23 when she left) and I blame her personally and her Great Education Reform Bill (the largely forgotten GERBill) of 1988 for the mess that the English education system, both schools and universities, currently finds itself in; but I was never one of the rabid Maggie haters. Nonetheless, I am a little disturbed by how much I like, how sympathetic I find the Meryl Streep version of her.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Anyway, MUSIC! That's what I'm supposed to noodling about, and this is actually not at all bad. For me, the interesting stuff is the music that is used within the story itself, and there are two principal pieces here. One is "Shall we Dance" from <i>The King and I</i>, which we hear at several points, and is positioned as a piece of music that Thatcher likes, and that she shared with Denis - but it has a nice little element of commentary, the idea of the not-high-class woman who finds herself among powerful men and gives them a piece of her mind, who changes the way they do things and (literally or otherwise) gets them dancing to her tune. The second interesting piece of music acts as a counter balance to this, because while again being something sung by a woman, this time it is the cultural and emotional opposite, but still has a parallel element of commentary. This is the opera, <i>Norma</i>: early in the film, we see young Margaret, not looking very comfortable at all, at a performance of <i>Norma</i> with Denis and a lot of men in suits. <i>Norma</i> is a typical 19th century opera in which the woman dies at the end; but Norma herself is a woman with power, the high priestess of her people, who is betrayed by the man she loves and voluntarily sacrifices herself at the end to atone for having loved him (she's a priestess, you see: not supposed to do that). In the scene near the end of the film where Thatcher leaves Downing Street for the last time, having resigned as prime minister, she does so to Norma's most famous number, "Casta Diva", and so it evokes that idea of having been betrayed and falling on her sword when required. "Shall we dance" gives us the happy, empowered Thatcher; <i>Norma</i> the betrayed one. I do so like it when there is a very clear reason for having chosen a particular piece of music in terms of making little comments on the narrative! Go music editor! (that normally being the person who makes these choices, and in this case, the plaudits therefore probably go to James Bellamy and Tony Lewis, but it's very hard to know....)</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-66477143557668949282012-01-28T13:40:00.000-08:002012-01-28T13:58:45.869-08:00Shame<b>Shame</b><br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/rg/em_share/rt_ipad/title/tt1723811">http://www.imdb.com/rg/em_share/rt_ipad/title/tt1723811</a><br />
It has been a long time since I felt the most appropriate adjective for a film was "powerful". Of late there have been a few that have qualified as intriguing, tense, poetic or evocative, and also quite a lot that I could at best describe as trite, rubbish or simply disappointing but it's been a good long time since there was a "powerful" coming at me off the big screen where I have been riveted from start to finish. This is in many respects a really simple film: there is practically no plot, no special effects, not even that much dialogue. A man lives alone and works in an office. His sister comes to stay, which upsets his usual routines and he starts to unravel. By the end, his life appears to have returned to normal, more or less. That's it. But the performances of the brother and sister by Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan absolutely bowled me over; and, even better, the music is intelligently used in a way that genuinely supports and enhances the narrative.<br />
The siblings, Brandon and Sissy, each have their own type of music. Brandon listens to recordings of Glen Gould playing Bach (you can tell these are the Gould recordings because you can hear the pianist humming faintly in the background in the final track used). Sissy listens to popular music and sings jazz standards in posh bars for a living. This distinction in their musical choices reflects their characters, at least on the surface. Sissy is a free spirit, emotional, extrovert, dressing in brightly coloured, multi-pattern vintage clothing. Brandon is up tight, controlled, orderly. His apartment is tidy to the point of impersonality, decorated in the same muted blues and greys that he also wears. Typically, Hollywood uses a classical versus popular music association to make comments on characters - this is, after all, exactly the same pattern of association as in <i>Stepmom</i>, where lovely, free-spirited and put-upon Julia Roberts listens to popular music and up-tight old meanie Susan Sarandon listens to Rossini, a clear indication that she lacks the emotional authenticity of Julia; but finds her rehabilitation as a character by giving up that awful classical stuff and dancing to retro pop songs with her children. This kind of rather heavy handed use of classical music to suggest that there is some moral flaw in a character is very common, and in fact the first piece of music we hear Brandon listen to is the same Goldberg variation that we see and hear Hannibal Lecter playing at the start of <i>Hannibal</i>. But interestingly, in Shame there is no sense that the music is being used to comment on Brandon's morality - it is simply part of how his and Sissy's almost diametrically opposite natures are articulated, even more surprising given how easy it would be to start making moral judgements about him.<br />
Neither sibling is quite what we might first think. Carefree Sissy is a basket case, insecure, chaotic, needy; Brandon is a sex addict. While Sissy announces her presence in Brandon's apartment by playing a record whose repeated words are "I need your love" (little clue there, obviously), Brandon is unable to connect to anyone on any level other than sex, and this makes his relationship with Sissy highly problematic as she is clearly off limits - although it is never directly broached, there is a tension in their relationship that suggests he is deeply uncomfortable around a woman he cannot have sex with. Underneath their surface differences, the siblings are actually very similar, just dealing with things differently. Sissy writes her vulnerability in large letters, her big musical moment being her rendition, in a bar, of "New York, New York", very slow and sparsely accompanied, leaving her voice fragile, slightly insecure, exposed. Brandon's music also conceals a message about his own vulnerabilities. While the use of Bach articulates the contrast with Sissy, the use of the Gould recordings is also pointed: Gould was notoriously eccentric and found it very difficult to engage with the professional musical world, retiring from performing at the age of 31, and focusing instead on almost obsessive recording and re-recording of Bach's music. These exquisite recordings conceal (barely, thanks to the humming) his social disfunction, working here as a metaphor for the way that Brandon's controlled veneered conceals an obsessive sexual disfunction. Why he is like this is never explored or explained: near the end of the film, Sissy says "we're not bad people, we just come form a bad place", suggesting there may be some trauma from their childhood that has left them this fabulously messed up, but there is no exposition, no explanation, just as the is no moralising. In fact, the work that the other music in the film does is to focus us not on the sexiness of the sex (and Brandon really does have quite a lot of sex in this film, not all of it in person (some online), not all of it successful, and not all of it with women) but on the desperation of it. The music at the start of the film is a slow, sombre piece for string orchestra, very beautiful but saying as clearly as possible that this is not going to be a happy and uplifting film - it scores our first sight of Brandon as he wakes, gets up, goes to work on the subway and very nearly picks up the married woman sitting opposite him. It comes back again at the end of the film as he wanders around the city, picking up a random man and going to the back room of a gay bar with him before visiting two women in their apartment and having prolonged sex with them. It is incredibly graphic but the slow, searingly tragic music takes away any voyeuristic titillation and just makes it all seem utterly desperate,with the sheer beauty of the music lending a kind of poetry to the idea that he is suffering, that there is no pleasure in the sex, only a terrible, driven need that never goes away. By no stretch of the imagination are Brandon and Sissy nice people but by the end of the film, I only felt desperately sorry for them. Film is very good at using music to impose an interpretation of the visual imagenon its audience,and from that point of view this film is no different. But the extent to to which the music works against the obvious meaning in the images and renders Brandon sympathetic rather than simply condemning him, makes for a genuinely powerful film.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-72808298568144251842012-01-19T02:03:00.000-08:002012-01-19T02:15:54.735-08:00The Artist<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><b>The Artist</b></i><br />
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1655442/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1655442/</a><br />
<br />
It turns out I'm a miserable old curmudgeon who just likes to pick holes in things. The critics all seem utterly in love with this film but I am slightly less enthusiastic. I liked it, not denying that: it has a whimsical charm which manages to stop on the right side of cloying, but musically it was unexpectedly disappointing, given that it is busy sweeping the boards for best original music with a Golden Globe already in the bag and a BAFTA looking likely. It got off to a very good start (and this was typical of a number of sonic double bluffs and sleights of hand which cropped up at regular intervals) as we began with a dramatic episode of what was evidently our hero being tortured by evil Russians, only to take a step back and discover we were watching a film within a film, and that the orchestral music we were hearing was the live orchestra we now saw playing along to the film in a 1927 movie theatre. Only it wasn't: it became rapidly obvious that the music we were hearing could not be coming from the visible orchestra as the conductor's beat was not quite synchronised and the movements of the players did not match the sound; added to which there was a complete absence of any kind of sound coming from the variously gasping and laughing members of the audience. Welcome to the world of <i>The Artist</i>, a mostly but not quite silent movie that paradoxically tells the story of how the talkies killed off the silents. Other diegetic musical games are played elsewhere, most notably a dream sequence in which the hero, George, discovers that everything and everyone can make sounds except him, so we hear the sound of a glass as it is placed on a table, we hear footsteps and laughter, but George himself talks, then shouts, utterly silently. Finally, he sees a feather falling gently through the air, which touches the ground with a shockingly loud crash as George screams soundlessly and wakes. The sequence at the end also allows sound back in, but otherwise this is, if not a genuinely silent film, nonetheless a diegetically silent film in that other than these episodes, the only sound is the music that accompanies the image. And the music is not great, alas (sorry not to be as taken with it as wveeryone else seems to be). Ironically, the most successful sequences are often those written to accompany the films within the film, where Ludovic Bource scores more obviously to the action, and uses a more varied palette of musical gestures. The problem with the bulk of the score is that it is simply too repetitive, a series of often quite long cues that use a single riff ad infinitum for an entire scene. It reminded me a little of the music used in <i>The Sting</i> (1973), set at a similar time to <i>The Artist</i>, which used a series of arrangements of piano rags by Scott Joplin to evoke the period and provide a fairly light, emotionally understated and rather charming underscore that I am very fond of. A similar strategy is less successful here, because the understated musical sound of the <i>The Sting</i> was balanced by all the other sound in the film, and here there really is no other sound for the majority of the film. Some of it is scored more dramatically, especially in the latter part of the film but overall it just isn't particularly interesting music: Bource largely pastiches 1920s dance music and to some extent pastiches what I think we assume silent movie music would have sounded like, and its all terribly charming, but I'm not convinced its particularly interesting. Some of the most striking moments are actually when the music stops and we have a period of absolute silence as the characters "talk", not only soundlessly but without even the ambient, background sound of the environment in which we see them - it's shockingly disconcerting when suddenly the only thing you can hear is the shuffling and breathing of the other members of the audience around you and you suddenly realise exactly what Adorno was talking about when he described a film experienced in silence as 'uncanny'. The dream sequence is one of those moments - no music at all, just the sound design (quickest gig for any sound designer in recent history, I imagine) and is really effective as a result. But alas, although I enjoyed both the film and the experiment, the fact that I can't help listening to the music meant that I found some of it desperately annoying in its relentless repetitions, curmudgeon that I am.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-17935145641768368892012-01-18T13:52:00.000-08:002012-01-18T13:52:09.674-08:00Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows<b>Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows</b><br />
<a href="http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1515091/">http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1515091/</a><br />
I am a bit disappointed by the new <i>Sherlock Holmes</i> movie on many counts, alas. Loved the first film with a passion that if not exactly fiery was certainly sincere: good characters, suitably convoluted plot, some well handled set pieces, genuinely both funny and dramatic, which is surprisingly hard to do well, very good pace sustained over a fairly long movie, some fabulous special effects, especially those involving Sherlock's ability to think through the moves of an encounter in advance - all in all, hard to fault, added to which the sound design (again, especially in relation to Sherlock's thinking through) was gorgeous and the music was, if not the most fantastically lovely score ever written, nonetheless full of character and very original in its timbral palette (and ruthlessly pastiched - I hesitate to say ripped off - by the BBC's TV series, broadcast shortly after).<br />
The second film is a poor copy in almost every respect. Irene Adler, one of the most interesting characters of the first film, is written off in the first ten minutes and female interest is taken over mostly by Simsa, a gypsy woman, who never really gets a chance to be much more than a plot device (although the newly married Mary Watson has a couple of great scenes, not least with the sublimely naked Stephen Fry as Mycroft, and her dry wit on discovering that there is a second Holmes is one of my fabourite lines in the film). The only competitor for the humour of the first film is Sherlock's attempt to develop a new type of urban camouflage, which is so utterly ridiculous that it has to be seen to be believed. Literally.<br />
Musically, it's all very bitty. The first time I saw it (yes, indeed, went back in order to listen properly) it seemed rather nondescript and mostly what I noticed were the moments when the Sherlock theme from the first film came thumping in (and boy, did it thump); and the again delicious sound design which is playful and unusual in the way it distorts, exaggerates and represents the likely sound of an event in a very abstract way, bordering more on electroacoustic composition at times than sound design in the more traditional, foley sense. On second listening, there are musical themes, principally a Moriarty theme that grumbles away in the bass every time we see him or someone talks about him (yawn); rather less of the Sherlock theme than I expected, just occasionally so thumpy that it's all I remembered from first viewing; and what I think may be an Irene Adler theme that therefore disappears after the first 10 minutes once she exits the story and is never heard again. But the are lots and lots of individual ideas in cues that appear once (occasionally twice in quick succession) and are then abandoned, and this keeps going right the way through, including two brand new ideas in the last ten minutes of the film. <br />
Granted, I have no doubt that pretty much no one except me and the other fusty old purists even noticed this, but to a fusty old purist such as I it seems both very uneconomical and actually rather lazy. Why keep inventing new (not hugely interesting) material when you have perfectly good existing themes that can be reworked and reinvented to bring more depth to the overall narrative? For example, I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say the film's climax is the original Conan Doyle plot device of Sherlock sacrificing himself to defeat Moriarty by throwing himself, with the villain, into the Reichenbach falls. Hans Zimmer gives us brand new music for this (which he's borrowed from something I can't place, incidentally). But musically, wouldn't it be much more logical and satisfying to use a transformed but recognisable version of Sherlock's own theme? Takes more thought and work and imagination, perhaps, but that's the type of thing that makes film music really good and interesting and meaningful, and why people employ a particular composer to score a film rather then just using stock cues from music libraries. Hey ho. OK, rant over. Loved the sound design, and it passed a reasonably entertaining couple of hours, but alas, I think Mr Zimmer does not actually know how to score a sequel (I know everyone was terribly impressed by <i>Dark Knight</i>, but again it was a very lazy score and not a patch on his <i>Batman Begins</i>).<br />
One other interesting thing in this film is that there are a number of set musical pieces: various Lieder about fish (which ties in well with various things going on in the plot, including poor old Sherley (as Mycroft calls him) getting rather hideously hooked by Moriarty at one point; but less explicably, have an Irish reel as the music for a set piece fight involving a Kossack, a French gypsy and Sherlock, and a little bit of Don Giovanni later on which didn't quite work: it seemed to be trying to make a connection between the plot of Mozart's opera and the events going on in the film at that point, but I couldn't work out what (and I'm the blasted musicologist in the audience!).Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-87708138562269430262011-12-01T14:17:00.000-08:002011-12-01T14:17:55.522-08:00Ringing in the ears<i>Take Shelter</i><br />
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1675192/<br />
Everything got in a bit of rush and I ended up getting to the cinema late, and couldn't remember the name of the film I wanted to see, and because the trailers had been on for 10 minutes it had already disappeared from the boards. I told the guy on the desk it was called something like "impending doom" and he managed to get it from that, which kind of tells you that this is not a hugely jolly film, and not a very comfortable two hours of viewing, but that's not a bad thing in this case. A guy appears to be going crazy - there's a family history - and has terrible dreams and hallucinations about a coming storm with weird rain that turns everyone into psychos wanting to kill him. Paranoid delusion, anyone? He builds an elaborate storm shelter in his garden, pretty much much destroying his life in the process, which you see coming from the word go. Not going to give too much else away, other than to say that is definitely worth seeing and that the ending left me with a strong desire to say "oops". <br />
The score is by David Wingo, not a name I've come across before, who has worked on half a dozen or so films to date, three of them directed by David Gordon Green. <i>Take Shelter</i> was directed by Jeff Nichols, who has already signed Wingo up to do his next film, <i>Mud</i>, in 2013, so they both like him and I can see why. The scoring strategy is built around a clever little musical conceit that actually works really well. Curtis, the central character, has a daughter who is deaf. It is evidently a fairly recent occurrence. She, therefore, has lost her hearing, while he is starting to suffer from aural delusions: he starts hearing the sound of thunder on cloudless days. Hearing sounds that have no external cause? Well, that's potentially a definition of tinnitus, from the Latin for ringing, and the same root as tintinnabulation, the sound of bells. The score picks up on these ideas of hearing, of sounds which may or may not be there, the idea of tinnitus and of ringing, and the result is a score that uses the gentle sound of bells (he's a bit Mychael Danna in terms of his attention to specific timbral detail), especially in scenes involving the little girl and Curtis's concerns about the storm, and piercing sine tones, sometimes (briefly) uncomfortably loud in scenes associated with his fears that he is going mad, and his horribly real dreams. It's a good score, a subtle piece of writing that doesn't overplay its hand but manages to be very unsettling nonetheless. Mr Wingo could be one to watch (or listen out for, as the case may be).Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-64720141765479518312011-11-26T09:21:00.000-08:002011-11-26T09:26:53.651-08:00Things that go bump....<i>The Awakening</i><br />
<a href="http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1687901/">http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1687901</a>/<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1</i><br />
<a href="http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1324999">http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1324999</a><br />
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.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-85132075336571312472011-11-17T08:37:00.000-08:002011-11-17T08:45:07.961-08:00Immortals<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Immortals</span></i></b></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1253864/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1253864/</span></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I went to see </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Immortals</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> with a certain amount of trepidation, having seen the trailers and wondering what strange revisiting of Greek mythology they might be up to: Theseus with a bow? Fighting Hyperion? Really? But then, I'm all for re-imagining mythology, as anyone who knows my work on </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Buffy</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and the Orpheus myth will realise. Also, I did actually rather enjoy </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">300</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, despite its distinctly dodgy historical authenticity, and this was very much hyped as from the same stable.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Well, so much for trepidation: I need not have worried. This film was infinitely worse than anything I could ever have begun to imagine. Let us leave aside the fact that the what it owes to Greek mythology is primarily the names Theseus, Phaedra, Hyperion and Zeus, names which have simply been pasted on to characters in the film who bare no resemblance whatsoever to their namesakes. Let us also leave aside the ludicrous design (merchant ship? Really? And what's with all the ridiculous hats? If I were a god, I would not parade around looking like a Christmas tree decoration. And why is Hyperion wearing a Venus Flytrap on his head?). Let us also leave aside the gut-wrenching scenes of violence, torture and maiming that seemed to belong more in a slasher movie than a historical-fantasy epic (I do not often close my eyes when watching a film, you know); and cast a veil over the chronically wooden script and two dimensional characterization (Theseus appears to only have smug and angry modes, although poor Henry Cavill does his best with the part; while the caricature evil warlord played by Mickey Rourke is deadly boring after about four minutes). No, my real problem is what they did to the gods. Firstly, the pantheon on Olympus is reduced to six. No Hera, no Aphrodite, no Hermes, no Artemis, Hephaestus, Hestia, Pan or Dionysus. Instead, we just have Zeus, Athena, Ares, Poseidon, Apollo and...er...Heracles. Not actually a god last time I checked, just one of the many mostly-human progeny of the gods. Only not in this film, because here a whole tranche of Christian mythology has been superimposed on top of the Greek. Here, we have a Zeus who will not interfere in human affairs (free will, don't you know) and forbids the other gods to do so either, killing Apollo (I think – it was very difficult to tell who was whom, and I'm not at all sure which of the gods had a gem encrusted hammer as his weapon of choice: maybe Hephaestus if he were feeling a little giddy) when he helps out Theseus by dispatching a few enemy soldiers. I'm sorry, since when did the Greek gods, capricious, selfish and vengeful bunch that they are, ever give a monkey's about not interfering in human affairs? That's what most of the myths are about, not this sanctimonious “thou shalt not interfere but leave them to make their own choices” business that has clearly been imported from more recent ideas on the nature of the divine. At the end, Theseus dies to save us all and is bodily assumed into heaven (we see him shoot up into the sky in a comet of golden light); and the film ends with his posthumous son surveying a set of bas-reliefs, with one of them showing Theseus apparently crucified with one weeping women kneeling beside him and three others standing in a group to one side. Hmmm. Where I have seen that before? They manage to shoe-horn the image of him slaying a minotaur in a labyrinth into the film about halfway through, though I honestly don't know why they bothered. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Oo, rant. I'm supposed to be talking about the music. Relentless, mostly bombastic and utterly unmemorable. The musical highlight was the M</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ü</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ller yoghurt advert before the film began, where all the people on screen are gradually transformed into classic cartoon characters having a wonderful time, to a witty pastiche of the main themes from </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pirates of the Caribbean</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Galaxy Quest</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Full of w</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ü</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">nderful stuff, as the tag line said</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. I should have gone home after the trailers.</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-50169155213966699272011-11-16T03:35:00.000-08:002011-11-16T13:14:36.752-08:00Adventures in sound designI've become increasingly interested in sound design over the last few years, especially since I discovered that one of my old students is a real live professional sound designer, <a href="http://uk.imdb.com/name/nm0365639/">James Harrison</a>. In fact, he's more or less the reason I stared teaching film music courses: when I was a postgrad at Birmingham University, he was one of a group of four friends who, knowing I was interested in film music, came up to me one day and asked me if I would offer a course on it for the following year, because they would all take it. So I did, they did, and the rest is history. A couple of films recently have had some really stand out sound design,<br />
<br />
<i>We Need to Talk About Kevin</i><br />
<a href="http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1242460/">http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1242460/</a><br />
Oh, this was a good film. And right from the word go, really sonically interesting. The composer was Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, and the sound designer was Paul Davies, but it was really difficult to know where the music ended and the sound design began due to the way Greenwood works. His music isn't thematic in any conventional sense, but very textural. The opening sequence really sets up this sense of integration between sound and music, and that's the approach for the whole film. The score is very sparse: I've been really encouraged recently by the lack of wall to wall music in several really good dramatic films recently, this one, <i>Contagion,</i> and.....<br />
<br />
<i>The Ides of March</i><br />
<a href="http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1124035/">http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1124035/</a><br />
<br />
One of the things music does in a film is tell you how to feel, tell you who people are and how you should feel about them (for example, music will often tell us who the love interest is, or who the hero is, and just identifying someone musically as the hero of a film automatically starts telling us how we should feel about them). <i>Kevin, Contagion</i> and this film all reduce the music to something that largely appears at transition points between scenes and montages of sequential events with no dialogue. Here, music acts to provide continuity, and sometimes a sense of pace or tension, but it doesn't tend to score specific characters and their actions in a way that starts interpreting the narrative for us. Things are left open: we have to make up our own minds, work harder to make sense of events and decide how individually to interpret what is going on and what we think of different characters. Very important in this film, as music could too easily tell us who the good guys are and who the baddies are, and here the characters are not black and white, so not using music allows those complexities and ambiguities to exist more easily. There is, however, one particularly fabulous sound design moment. In the second half of the film, Molly, a young intern (Evan Rachel Wood) commits suicide following an abortion of Governor Morris's (Clooney) child, the result of a one night stand that he instigated. Myers (Ryan Gosling) helped arrange the abortion (unknown to Morris) but had just been sacked from the campaign for a political mistake he made. At the press conference where Morris and his campaign team attempt to limit the damage that the suicide has caused, Morris's phone stars to vibrate, and he sees that the caller is apparently the late Molly. As he looks at the phone, and then around the room to see if the caller is there, all the ambient sound starts to drop out. He sees Myers, phone to ear, watching him. By this point, all the surrounding sound has gone except for the buzzing of the phone and the clicking of the press cameras. It's a fantastic sonic creation of the physical feeling of blood draining from the face, bottom dropping out of the world. It's a moment unlike any other in the film, and arguably it is the (or certainly, a) 'ides of March' moment, a reference to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, who was assassinated on the ides of March, dying with the famous "et tu, Brutus?" as the man he thought was loyal to him also stabs him to death.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4193690635041089313.post-13891326933460684222011-11-16T02:53:00.000-08:002011-11-16T02:53:13.757-08:00What I'm watching....So, the point about this blog is that my mate Mel is regularly subjected to me going on about the music and sound design in the most recent film or TV programme that I've seen, and has on more than one occasion told me that I should start blogging about it. Whether this is because he thinks what I say is good, or because he's hoping that if I have another outlet for my musings and rantings I'll shut up about it when I am with him, remains to be seen. To kick off, here a some highlights from things I've seen in the last month or so.<br />
<br />
<b>The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn</b><br />
<a href="http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0983193/">http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0983193/</a><br />
A jolly old romp of the film, although it was hard to forget about the technology - I seemed to spend a great deal of time studying the characters faces rather than concentrating on what was going on (maybe that was the point...) but the music was a terrible disappointment. The score composer is allegedly John Williams (who has scored all but one of Spielberg's films: the exception was The Color Purple), but I have my doubts. The main title is brilliant, a zippy, quirky, jazzy flight of fancy that recalls the type of energy Williams found for <i>Catch Me If You Can</i>, a really knock our score. Alas, the main title bears no obvious relationship to the rest of the score, which I can only describe as substandard Indiana Jones. The is a theme there, but it has none of the punchy distinctiveness that any of the early heroic themes (<i>Star Wars, Superman, Indiana</i>) all had managed, and whilst it's entirely competent, I would be utterly unsurprised to learn that Williams did no more than provide some thematic material and let someone else get on with it (the man is almost 80, for heaven's sake, and writing a film score is an intense and stressful process).<br />
<br />
<b>Melancholia</b><br />
<a href="http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1527186/">http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1527186/</a><br />
Lars von Trier, 2011<br />
This did not get universally positive reviews, and I can see why: it is definitely a film where you have to work pretty hard to engage with the frankly weird stuff going on, but the central musical idea of the film is stunning and, for anyone who gets the music, does actually transform the message of the film, I suspect. The movie opens with an astonishingly beautiful montage sequence set to the entirety of Wagner's act one overture to <i>Tristan and Isolde</i>, which is around 10 minutes of slow music, endlessly winding upwards through a single motivic idea. Against this are a sequence of sometimes quite surreal images that turn out to be either recreations of sequences from later in the film, or visual realisations of things that characters describe later in the film, and the slow process of the 'rogue planet' Melancholia crashing into and destroying the earth (so no surprises about what is going to happen at the end of film, then). The same music, in short fragments, is then used in the rest of the film (there is no other music in the underscore) and is very much connected with Justine (Kirsten Dunst) who suffers from depression (i.e. melancholia). <i>Tristan and Isolde </i>is an opera about an impossible love between the title characters, where Tristan ends up going mad and dying and Isolde - well, hard to say what happens to Isolde. She is 'transfigured' in the moment of her apparent death: the moment of her death is not a moment of doom or defeat but of some kind of deeply mystical consummation of her spirit and Tristan. And this is very much what is going on in <i>Melancholia</i>: while everyone around her is falling apart with terror, Justine experiences a kind of ecstasy in the knowledge of her coming death, a transfiguration and a peace as Earth and Melancholia collide. This is her moment of union, her consummation as the Earth is consumed by the massive Melancholia.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0