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.
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0983193/
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 Catch Me If You Can, 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 (Star Wars, Superman, Indiana) 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).
Melancholia
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1527186/
Lars von Trier, 2011
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 Tristan and Isolde, 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). Tristan and Isolde 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 Melancholia: 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.
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