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.
I AM LEGEND March 2, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 1 comment so farFunny thing about hype and movies- very often moviegoers are suckered in on opening weekend, fooled by millions of dollars of marketing hype into paying money to watch a turkey. We’ve all been there. But very often the opposite can also prove true- negative word about a film can lower your expectations to such a degree that you end up pleasantly surprised.
This is what has happened to me with I AM LEGEND; after being turned off by the casting of Will Smith (I like Will, he’s a good actor but his rep has been sullied by too many Holllywood ‘blockbusters’ for my liking) early word was negative and reviews poor. I thought I’d put it off to a DVD rental in the Spring but recently watched it anyway, as I’d started to hear word that it wasn’t all that bad.
Well I have to say I was really impressed by it- I thought it was a superior ‘blockbuster’, with an intimate and effective first act with the kind of CGI effects that do all the right things… flawless cityscapes that boggle the mind and really fool you. Of course the film performs a Jekyll and Hyde with the second half with the CGI Vampires demonstrating all that can be bad about CGI in movies, but I’d been warned about the CGI creatures and found them less annoying than I had feared. I was thinking, in the film’s first half, though, just how powerful CGI effects can be when it serves the film without resorting to being too flashy and distracting.
In truth though I thought the most impressive thing about the film was Will Smith- the scene where he breaks down in a video rental store, pleading for a shop mannequin to talk to him, was so at odds with what you would expect from a Hollywood action hero. I was also impressed in the early scene where he follows his dog into a darkened apartment store building, and is decidedly terrified as he plunges deeper into the darkness- hardly your typical action hero. It’s a pity the second half of the film couldn’t live up to what the first half promised. It is certainly unusual to see such a big brash genre blockbuster turn out to be such a quiet, studied film about isolation at the End Of The World.. at least until it mutates into typical big brash genre fare at the end. It’s as if the films producers panicked at spending $150 million on a study of despair and isolation and needed a get-out-of-jail-free card (and bought it from the guy who did THE MUMMY movies).
There is an alterantive ending for the film that will be featured on the DVD release. The ending is described in an issue of Cinefex but I won’t reveal it here, suffice to say though I don’t think its really any better than what the film’s final version was. Will be fascinating to see it though to be sure- the wonders of DVD! Perhaps the day will come when two versions of the same film will be shown in cinemas- you get to choose which screen you go to depending on what kind of endings you like on your films, happy/sad/conclusive/open-ended.
I must make comment on the fantastic soundtrack by James Newton Howard, it is a beautiful, sorrowful score that has a very restrained use in the film but is all the more effective for it. Howard is increasingly busy in Hollywood. His music is certainly a fresh change from hearing Hans Zimmer muzak all the time- I have no dislike for Zimmer but his music has, for me, reached saturation-point for me in movies. It’s as if movie producers only temp-track films in progress with his music to the exclusion of all else. Has the lack of imagination and the safe option in modern film-making resulted in ’safe music’ these days?
At anyrate, for at least half of it’s running-time, I AM LEGEND doesn’t play it safe, and should, for all its failings in it’s latter half, be commended for that. I’d recommend it.