A long, long time ago… April 30, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 1 comment so farFunny thing happened yesterday. It was my nephew’s birthday, “the big one-two”, as he called it. Twelve years old. I remember back when I was twelve, I told him, when his Dad and I bunked off school one February afternoon back in 1978. If I remember rightly it was my birthday week and my Dad took us both to the Odeon cinema in town to see STAR WARS. The Odeon was one of those big old cinemas with a huge lobby and foyers and a fantastic large screen, with the seats for Screen One being the balcony seats (Screens Two and Three being in what used to be the stalls down below). It may not have had digital surround sound like multiplexes today have, but boy did that place have character. It was a Picture Palace, a Dream Theatre. It’s been a Bingo Hall for the last twenty years.
And yeah, I loved STAR WARS. The rest, as they say, is history.
On the subject of STAR WARS, anyone else seen the new issue of Empire with the pictures from the new CLONE WARS animated feature? Dear God, Lucas, give it a rest. I may be proved wrong but it looks just awful. Back in 1978 I was transported to another galaxy, with real actors, real sets, great miniature effects, and now it’s just a computer cartoon. It’s very sad, and STAR WARS’ place in cinematic history (hell, the version I loved back in 1978 doesn’t even exist anymore according to Lucas) is being repeatedly tarnished by its own creator. Very sad indeed.
Everybody loves the ALIEN April 24, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 4 commentsI love ALIEN. I know its just a simple dumb ‘b’-movie sci-fi flick at heart, but I absolutely adore this film. As soon as it begins and that wonderful title sequence starts I’m lost in it’s dark, gothic world.
I actually think that ALIEN boasts perhaps the finest title sequence of all. It’s so subtle, so atmospheric- it’s just gorgeous, the ‘ALIEN’ logo slowly building on the screen as the credits roll, the screen a dark moody green as the camera passes over the planetoid, the music full of dread and forboding. Jerry Goldsmith hated using this music cue over the main titles (he composed a greatly different main title cue which was rejected), but I think he missed the point- ALIEN is all about mood, and the title music draws you in. It’s the perfect example of using main title graphics and music to set the tone of the film that follows. As soon as that credit sequence starts I’m gone. I recall a review at the time nailed it perfectly- it was as if instead of Lovecraft’s Elder Gods coming to Earth, we had gone to them. With Giger’s incredible creature designs looking like nothing on Earth (excepting perhaps the subtle pseudo-phallic tone of the imagery) the film was genuinely disturbing and remains so to this day, and no-one has equalled the film’s production design in a space movie.
When ALIENS arrived in 1986, I hated it. For me it seemed the Anti-ALIEN. Scotts film was slow, all about mood and tension, and the creature was an inhuman, indestructible killing machine. Camerons film was really a space-based Rambo movie that hijacked the Giger Alien. Incredibly tiresomegung-ho space marines against a horde of dumb soldier-aliens, Cameronintroduced the travesty of a Queen Alien that disposed of the alien-ness of the original, replacing it with a more familiar bee/ant-like Terran lifecycle. The original, even without the cocoon sequence, was unexplained, mysterious, beyond our understanding. . . Cameron’s movie was just too neat, explained too much. I detest the whole concept of the Alien Queen, all that mother/hive nonsense. It spoiled all the later films of the franchise and tainted the original. I still have a smouldering hatred of the film, and watch it very rarely. For me you could have subsituted the Alien for any other creature design and it would still be the same movie. I know many fans prefer ALIENS to the first film, but they are just plain wrong.
ALIEN 3 was a better effort. Much-maligned at the time, I really enjoyed the film even in its flawed original cinema version. There is much to admire here- that familiar sense of doom and dread, a return to the single, deadly Alien, brilliant production design and a simply magnificent score. The film would actually get improved by the eventual DVD recut (described as an’assembly cut’ while not officially a ‘directors cut’ as David Fincher pointedly kept his distance, still hurt by the making of and reaction to the film). This altered cut was more faithful to what Fincher originally envisaged, and was in my eyes a very superior version. ALIEN 3 in better circumstances could have been a classic but it was doomed from the start, as the making-of doc on the special edition DVD testifies.
Infact if the ALIEN 3 making-of doc is a lesson in how not to treat your franchise, describing how ALIEN 3 was doomed and suffered a painful gestation, then what happened after is a lesson in how to kill your franchise and trample it into the gutter. ALIEN RESURRECTION was a poorly conceived attempt to kickstart the franchise following the poorly received third film, and is really just a bloody mess that makes ALIENS look like a classic. The NewBorn Alien at the films’ end is perhaps the most ill-judged idea in the franchise, but that distinction is debatable considering the two ALIENS VERSUS PREDATOR films that followed. When the first AVP was mooted I honestly thought it was a joke, I could not believe the series could fall to such a low (but then I hadn’t banked on AVP:REQUIEM, for which the reviews have been so universally damning I don’t think I can ever bring myself to watch it).
But we’ll always have the first film. It shines as brightly as ever, and indeed, seems to get better with age as the years pass and more inferior films in the series get released. Any hope that the franchise would return to the grandeur of the first film vanished some years ago, when Ridley Scott and James Cameron got together to make another ALIEN film. In a typically smart move 20th Century Fox ditched it in favour of AVP. You got to love Hollywood. What a madhouse.
Jack Lemmon: Save The Tiger April 19, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 1 comment so farThere’s a wonderful story about SAVE THE TIGER, recounted by the film’s director, John Avildsen, on the DVD’s commentary track. It was 1972, and Paramount had left the film on the shelf, not sure what to do with it. It was a harrowing film, documenting 36 hours in the life of Harry Stoner and his nervous breakdown as his clothing business faces ruin and he contemplates turning to crime via arson to survive. It’s not easy viewing, and Paramount had doubts about its chances of success. So before Paramount took hold of the film and recut it, John and the films writer, Steve Shagan, thought that if they could show the finished film to Jack Lemmon, and if he liked it, then maybe he would carry enough clout to convince Paramount to leave it alone. So they took the film to Rome, where Jack and Billy Wilder were making AVANTI.
Just imagine it; it’s 1972 and Lemmon and Wilder are in Italy making that wonderful romantic comedy. Just imagine that moment in time, one of the best actor/director partnerships in Hollywood history working together on that sunny comedy and they sit down in a small theatre outside Rome to watch a troubled ‘little’ picture called SAVE THE TIGER.
So they watched the film and when it finished and the lights came up, there was silence for awhile, and then Billy Wilder said, “There’s only one thing wrong with this picture,” to which he could see Avildsen react in horror, and then he added, “I didn’t direct it.” Probably, John Avildsen recalls, the sweetest thing any director could say to another director. So SAVE THE TIGER was left alone by Paramount and Jack Lemmon went on to win an Academy Award (Best Actor, 1973).
When watching SAVE THE TIGER, I often find myself thinking about TAXI DRIVER. They are both seem to be about the American Dream turning to Nightmare, and both are such definitive examples of 1970s filmmaking. They are both low budget, both with excellent scripts, both graced with astonishing acting. Jack Lemmon’s performance is a tour de force, like watching THE APARTMENT’s CC Baxter in frustrated middle-age, his hopes and dreams of 1960 thwarted and his life ruined. America has changed.
Harry Stoner is facing a ruined business, a marriage on the rocks, a daughter in Europe, and he constantly thinks back to happier times, simpler times when everything made sense; Stoner’s reminisce falters, his voice trails off, his eyes wistful, elsewhere, seeing memories… and Lemmon carries it off. As his breakdown takes hold he thinks back to his Wartime days, the men who died there, the pointlessness of their sacrifice in the face of what America has become. Stoner starts seeing things, his dead wartime buddies, and is visibly falling apart, increasingly lost, much as Travis Bickle in Scorsese’s later film. The film’s end is so typically 1970s- there is no neat conclusion, and Stoner is probably more lost than ever. It is a very powerful movie, as relevant today as it ever was, and one of Lemmon’s finest.
Jack Lemmon: Avanti April 16, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 4 commentsWe all have our guilty pleasures, and AVANTI is one of mine. Released back in 1972, it appears now as a quaint time-capsule, an example of a forgotten kind of movie. They simply don’t make them like this anymore. Many will see that as a good thing… but not me.
It’s an oddly charming movie, perhaps it’s the thirty+ years between then and now. The music is wonderful, the setting gorgeous, the acting a delight… it’s magical. Like a fairytale from thirty years ago. You watch thinking it doesn’t work, and yet by movies end you are in love. Well, that’s how it caught me anyway. I think I smiled all the way through the film. I don’t think, even in 1972, that it would have been considered a realistic adult comedy-drama… it’s pure romantic fantasy, and now, in 2008, distanced by time, it appears more fantasy than ever. It’s timeless now.
Jack Lemmon plays a self-centered, all-business American, Wendell Armbruster, who arrives in the idyllic Mediteranean to collect the body of his late father in order to return it to America in time for a huge society funeral. Armbuster’s father was in the Big League, head of a huge business with big political connections. It turns out however that his father was not alone when he died in a car crash- he was with a lover, a woman whose daughter, Pamela Piggot, played by Juliet Mills, has also arrived to see to her mothers funeral. The illicit romance is no surprise to her, and it becomes apparent that the affair had been going on for years, much to Armbruster’s shock and disgust. His father, it seemed, led a double-life. A consumate father, husband and business mogul in America, every year for a month he retired to the Med where he led a romantic affair with an Englishwoman, the two of them treated like Royalty by the islanders.
The beauty of the film is in how Lemmon handles his characters arc, as he arrives one man and departs another. Armbruster completely transforms before our eyes, emulating his father just as Pamela emulates her mother, the two of them falling in love with each other amidst the peaceful sun-drenched idyll of the island. It is so subtle you hardly notice as his cold heart melts away, but you are suddenly aware, as the film ends, that this is not the same man who arrived at the film’s start.
The script is warm and whimsical, the comedy light, the music bewitching… the film is a guilty joy. It’s a film to return to on any wet, grey, afternoon/evening, just as the island is a place for the two characters to return to every summer. You won’t see AVANTI on many peoples lists of favourite Billy Wilder/Jack Lemmon films. Thats understandable- this is no THE APARTMENT or SOME LIKE IT HOT. It is somewhat overlong, some of the humour can fall flat, it is dated to a degree… but neverthess there is a romantic warmth to this film that is hypnotic. I could sit down and take it all in again already.
Jack Lemmon: The Out Of Towners April 12, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , add a commentFive years before THE PRISONER OF SECOND AVENUE, Jack Lemmon appeared in another Neil Simon-penned movie, THE OUT OF TOWNERS. It would share, with the later film, the setting of New York, but from a different perspective, as the title suggests. Whereas in the superior 1975 film Lemmon and Bancroft played a New york couple who stay in the city in the face of crisis, in THE OUT OF TOWNERS the protaganists are the Kellermans, outsiders from Ohio for whom New York simply is the crisis. Jack Lemmon plays George Kellerman, due for a life-changing job interview in New York whose plans unravel into a chaos of diverted airflights, lost luggage, being mugged, losing their Hotel room, getting soaked in a rainstorm, caught in the midst of a robbery… It’s one of those days/nights in which everything goes wrong.
Although it is one of his lesser films, Lemmon nevertheless shines with a comic timing that is typically natural and seemingly effortless. He had a gift for comedy so great that he would perhaps always be frustrated, as an actor, that he was famous as being first a comedy actor above all else. This was unfortunate and patently untrue, as other films so greatly demonstrated, but in the case of very average films like THE OUT OF TOWNERS, that great comedic talent could save a film from mediocrity. In truth, the Neil Simon screenplay is basically one joke stretched over the length of the film, but it is saved by Lemmon’s performance. I really can’t imagine anyone but Lemmon succeeding in the role of George Kellerman - compare the flawed original to the vastly inferior 1999 remake starring Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn and you’ll appreciate what Lemmon brings to the original.
Lemmon had been in far better films before and would many times after, but THE OUT OF TOWNERS stands as a testament to his talent at comedy and ability to raise material above it’s own limitations. Even a poor Jack Lemmon film is still a good way to pass away a few hours, and the film guarantees a good few laughs. The DVD is predictably poor, since we’ll never see a Special Edition for a film like this, but on the whole the picture is fair and the widescreen format makes it superior to the usual pan-and-scan television airing.
Jack Lemmon: The Prisoner of Second Avenue March 30, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 1 comment so farThis is a wonderful film, I first saw it by chance back in the late ‘eighties when it turned up on afternoon television. I was unemployed at the time, at a low point in my life, and I instantly made a connection with Jack Lemmon’s remarkable portrayal as Mel Edison, a New York executive who is made redundant and slowly sinks into depression and mental breakdown.
It sounds like a depressing movie, right? Well, actually it’s a comedy, one of the greats, one of those comedies that can make you laugh one minute and cry the next- sometimes in the very same scene. Written by Neil Simon and based on his own play, the script is witty and sharp, full of one-liners and wonderful observation, almost as much a drama as it is a comedy. And New York in the ’seventies looks just beautiful. It’s a New York that is lost now. It’s a pre-9/11 New York, and it looks and feels like another world.
Jack Lemmon shines in one of his best screen performances. He is funny, scary, weak, charming, brave… “I still have value, I still have worth!” despairs Lemmon, frustrated by being dumped on the scrapheap. You feel his pain and root for his salvation, while the film kicks him again and again. Lemmon is just perfect, and makes it seem so effortless. There is a truth to his performance, no melodramatics, no straining for laughs. This one of those films, one of those characters, in which you just know watching it that no other actor on the planet could do better.
Anne Bancroft is simply a revelation as his suffering wife, deeply in love with her husband but increasingly worried as he slides towards his mental breakdown. It’s an endearing performance, and I think this is one of her best movies- indeed, she was actually nominated for a BAFTA Best Actress award for it, so someone noticed back then..
And the genius of the film is the ending, it isn’t perfect- by which I mean there isn’t a complete absolution for our hero and his wife. They have each other, and are laughing at the insanity of the world, of what is happening to them, but Mel still hasn’t got a job, and his wife has just lost hers. But having each other, and the strength of each other, is enough. It’s all they need. We know that somehow they’ll get through it, that they will win. A modern version would be more literal, it would have them win the lottery or Mel finding a better job than he had lost, but back in the ’seventies films had better endings.
The ’seventies was a great decade for films and great acting roles, but this film was a surprising failure back when it was released in 1975, and Jack Lemmon’s performance here is overlooked by many when they look back at the mans great career. Indeed I may be in a minority in my love for the film- it seems forgotten now, available only on a fairly bare-bones R1 DVD. Some might say it is famous more for its cameos -Sly Stallone, F.Murray Abraham and M. Emmet Walsh- than anything else. That’s a great pity, because I think the film is as timely and resonant as it ever was.
Indiana’s Doom March 25, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 2 commentsFlicking through the channels on Easter Sunday I came across INDIANA JONES & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM starting up on BBC3. Been years since I saw it, so i watched a little of it, remembering that I’d got the DVD upstairs somewhere and deciding that I’d have to give it a go.
So last night I dug out the DVD and watched the whole movie. Well, I’ve never been the biggest fan of the film and to be honest, it has not aged well either. It’s just too silly. It’s just too dark. I don’t know- is it the most schizophrenic film of all time? It doesn’t know if it’s a kids adventure film, an horror film, a comedy… at least with RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK there was an even tone throughout. TEMPLE OF DOOM lurches from one extreme to another and comes across as a very ill-judged film. It also informs the worst excesses of the later LAST CRUSADE. And increases fears about the upcoming KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL.
Good points? Well, it’s always a marvel nowadays to see Harrison Ford back in his prime, exuding his genuine on-screen charisma and presence. It’s amazing how much he fits the old matinee-idol persona that the Indiana Jones and Star Wars films aim at. Also Kate Capshaw impresses- as well as looking beautiful she shows great comic timing and is probably, in hindsight, the best of the Jones girls. The film isn’t a disaster, it has it’s moments - the opening sequence in Shangai is good fun, and infers that a movie-length Shangai Adventure would have been a far better movie. But really, as far as good points are concerned, thats really about it. The fights don’t thrill, most of the stunts are just too OTT to take (the leap out of the plane? What were they thinking?), and the big villain of the movie just doesn’t engage the viewer.
So anyway, the DVD went back in the case and the case went back upstairs. I may never watch the film ever again. Maybe I sound too harsh but, hell, I just don’t get what some people love about this film. Some people think it’s their fave Indiana Jones movie. I just cannot understand that. As it is, it rates as one of Spielberg’s weakest efforts in my opinion.
Mighty Beowulf March 24, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , add a commentWell I’m shocked. I hesitate to introduce the film as a cgi spectacle as it’s really much more than that- thanks to the excellent screenplay by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary it’s a great historic adventure and a very dark essay on heroism, myth and the very human desire for immortality, if only in song. All I expected was the usual cgi-demo visuals and little else, which is why I held back from seeing it at the cinema and waited for the blu-ray. Oh well, my 32-inch lcd may not have the size of a cinema screen but the blu-ray certainly has a flawless HD picture (is it just me though who thinks the DVD and Blu-ray box art is just terrible?).
Beowulf is a tale of the Old World- a world before Christianity championed the weak and the powerless, a pagan world of heroes and mighty deeds, where might was right and supernatural forces plagued the world. Life is full of darkness, hard and bitter, mortality bearing down on the petty lives of men.
Beowulf strides through this world like an insolent Titan, brash, confident, hell-bent on being a hero such as tales are told of for centuries, as were Alexander and Achilles before him. There is certainly something of Baron Munchausen about him, as he recounts his tales of heroism with more than a dash of exuberance and poetic license.
But Beowulf is only a man, as flawed as any of us, and his downfall is a she-demon that takes the form of an impossibly-beautiful seductress that, in return for him fathering her a son, promises Beowulf the power and immortality that he dreams of. And getting everything he dreams of is of course a curse that taints him and all those that he knows and loves, and denies him the son that would give him the only true measure of immortality that any of us can ever really attain. Like Neil Gaiman’s own Sandman, this is a deeply melancholic tale.
And history, of course, repeats itself endlessly. Beowulf is cursed just as King Hrothgar was before him, and, at films end, it seems the same fate awaits Beowulf’s successor. Indeed, there seems a subtext of Angelina Jolie’s demoness representing the sexual temptations of woman as the downfall of men. Is that straying into the homo-erotic territory of 300? I don’t know, but either way, this is a far more complex and rewarding film than I had expected.
Regards the cgi animation, there is good and bad- most of the main cast, particularly Beowulf and the Demoness that seduces him, are frankly astonishing, but some of the lesser cast slip into Shrek territory. The definitive cgi film still lies some years ahead of us, but like the Final Fantasy-The Spirits Within, this film is certainly a step towards it. As it is, it is a surprisingly rich tale… mighty Beowulf indeed.
Modern film scores are terrible… March 17, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 2 comments…says a report by Dalya Alberge, arts correspondent in The Times today. How odd is that? Makes my post the other day about movie music seem strangely prescient. The report states that “Most film music written today is terrible, with few scores lingering in the memory like the underwater menace of Jaws or the whimsical Moon River from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, top compsers have told The Times.” It goes on to quote Hans Zimmer and Anne Dudley who bemoan the blandness of the majority of modern scores, and that many seem to have scores by committee.
Indeed that’s a familiar criticism of film-making in general, from the script to the casting, resulting in a ’safeness’ and me-too trend in movies. I recall that the excellent Gabriel Yared score for Troy was dropped completely following preview screenings, the producers rushing to James Horner to produce a last-minute score that was familiar and easy on the ears- what nonsense. Yared’s score really was magnificent. A few months ago I asked why every super-hero film since Tim Burton’s BATMAN seemed to require a Danny Elfman soundtrack. And while Hans Zimmer is complaining, he must recognise that he, and his Media Ventures outfit, is partly to blame. Most films seem to be temped by Zimmer music, considering how their finished scores turn out. How many films have that ‘Gladiatior’ sound?
Too many of modern scores seem to be written by keyboard players with computer skills, the article goes on to say, rather than musicians trained at college. There certainly might be something to that argument. Certainly the great composers, Herrmann, Williams, Goldsmith, all spent many years refining their art, on radio as well as television. There are a lot of young turks with keyboards operating in Hollywood these days, in film and television, who really have much to learn. The question is, are they being ill-served by the modern film-making process? Are the cuts too tight, the pace to fast, for decent music to be written? Why did James Horner not score a single film released last year? Is he tired of trying to make his scores work in films today?
Movie Music Memories March 15, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , add a commentPerhaps the most intense cinema experience of my life was back when I was about nine or ten years old, when my Aunt (sadly gone, now, bless her) and Uncle took me to see JAWS. That was the wildest, scariest film… it shook me to the core. I had bad dreams for weeks. No small part of that experience was the music, the main theme of which became an icon of sorts at the time… still is, I guess, like the PSYCHO theme before it. In JAWS you hardly ever actually saw the shark, really the tension was from the unseen threat lurking under the water, and my imagination of what lurked out of sight, and the music was a major part of that. John Williams really was the shark.
What really got me into movie music though, like many of my generation, was the score for STAR WARS. Back then, films took a long time to reach our shores. Although released in May of 1977, it would be Christmas before it premiered in London, and early 1978 before it finally left the city to cinemas out in the country proper. This was the biggest film of all time, remember, so it might be hard to believe to contemporary cinemagoers that we used to have to wait so long, even for the biggest movies. So anyway, it was February of 1978 that I finally got to see STAR WARS, long after having devoured the comics. Naturaly I loved the film, havng being a space-geek all my then-short life and a devout STAR TREK fan.
Of course one of the big things about STAR WARS is the incredibly evocative score by John Williams. It was my birthday in February, and my parents bought me the soundtrack album on cassette as my present. Sobering thought, really- remember cassette tapes? I really am getting old. Actually I still own that cassette, a piece of my childhood that I can hold in my hands- anybody who also owned that cassette (moulded in green plastic, how weird was that?) will remember the inlay-card that folded out for what seemed forever with extensive colour photos from the film. Back then, any television airing seemed impossible, if not several years away (some films took over ten years to drop onto tv back then- at that point GONE WITH THE WIND had never been aired on tv), and VHS, and owning a film, as fantasy as STAR WARS itself. So young movie-fans like myself back then would remember a prized movie by listening to the music and looking at photos and re-reading the comics, over and over. Nowadays you just wait 3 months for the DVD. Thinking about those old days makes me feel postively prehistoric.
STAR WARS has an incredible score, romantic and full of energy and adventure, it takes the film to another level. Old buggers like me often remark about movies saying “they don’t make ‘em like they used to”, and the same is true about movie-scores… as movies have changed, so has their music. One thing I hate about many modern films (SPIDERMAN etc I’m looking at you) is that the film ends and we are assaulted by a rock song rather than an overture of the music score… it takes me right out of the movie. But back then the music itself was different, even STAR WARS has a slower pace than films now, and that pace gave composers an opportunity to write genuinely memorable music. Nowadays films are edited so tight there is little room for music to breathe or, it seems, for themes to develop, and STAR WARS has such wonderful themes. The Force theme, Princess Leia’s theme, I used to sit down listening to it fueling my own daydreams as well as images from the film.
So anyway, from STAR WARS, I was hooked on movie music. It helped that those times were great for movie music. On my next birthday my parents bought me the SUPERMAN:THE MOVIE album, this time a gatefold double-lp. Many feel that this is John Williams’ masterpiece, although I feel that title is deserved for a score that came out a few years later. SUPERMAN though certainly had amazing music- a memorable main theme that was so good it was used in SUPERMAN RETURNS decades later, and tracks like ’The Flying Sequence’ and ‘Leaving Home’, poignant, emotional music that lived beyond the movie. I used to love listening to ‘The Fortress of Solitude’, bewitched by its magical peace and then thrilled to ‘Chasing Rockets’ whilst daydreaming of super-feats.
It was, as I have said, a remarkable period for movie music- scores like CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, ALIEN, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and my own favourite, the in-my-eyes-unequalled THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. My God, when I hear the Imperial March… I swear that film’s music is pure opera, full of William’s finest music. ‘The Battle in The Snow’, ‘The Asteroid Field’, ‘Hyperspace’… just incredible music. It’s probably no mere concidence that that the finest STAR WARS film also had the finest score. Listening to it today only confirms my belief that it is the finest score by John Williams, and probably the finest movie score ever. I love that music.
Truth be told, when I consider my favourite films, or at least, the films I enjoy, the common thread that runs through them is great music. Some people like films by certain directors or starring certain actors, for me though it seems to be films with great music. Even if a film is flawed in other ways, if it has great score, I tend to really connect with the film on an emotional level and enjoy the film. Films like CONAN THE BARBARIAN, John Carpenter’s THE THING, THE THIN RED LINE, BRAINSTORM, GLORY, GATTACA; some of my fave films are guilty pleasures but I really find they have extra resonance thanks to their superior scores. For me, music is as important an element in films as the actors or the visual effects. Do I owe that to listening to that STAR WARS cassette back when I was twelve years old? Yes, I guess I probably do.