The Awakening
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1687901/
I saw two films this week: I was actually seeing The Awakening for the second time, as it is a film with a twist that made me want to go back and see it again to see if there were clues that I had missed about the true nature of what was going on. There were indeed a few, but only a few, and although I enjoyed the film, and thought that all four central performances were really very good, the twist is a problem in that it reveals two separate previously unsuspected truths. The first of these has some hints and clues earlier in the film, the second has really nothing at all to prepare one for the sudden eruption of a whole new story line in the last 15 minutes of the film, where there is an awful lot of sudden revelation and explaining in a way that feels terribly contrived, grafted onto what, up to that point,was a very well crafted story. I would still say go and see it, just forgive it the heavy handed denouement.
Musically, it is similarly well crafted yet slightly clumsy. The score of this British film is by British composer Daniel Pemberton, who has done quite a bit of TV and several computer game scores, but very little film scoring, and it does show slightly in places. Some of his ideas are lovely, and stand up to scrutiny very well on a second viewing/listening when one has the chance to listen more closely and can start start to understand his ideas better (this is often the way with film scores: you really cannot concentrate on both story and music first time through). At the start of the film, and again after the first scene, where plucky Florence has unmasked a gang of charlatan spiritualists and their fake seance, we hear a slow, quite disjunct piano melody, practically unaccompanied, a theme which returns at various points as if haunting Florence, and which is finally revealed to be the nursery rhyme tune emitting from a fabulously creepy rabbit-headed doll as we head towards the denouement. A second, more sweeping theme, is associated with the school that Florence goes to, to discover the truth of their apparent haunting, and again, this is intelligently tied in to the importance of the house the school occupies and its history in that same denouement; and a pair of melancholy, ostinato themes are used to describe Florence's deep sense of loss and despair throughout the film, and are finally used in the same context for another character during the denouement in a way that reveals unsuspected aspects of Florence's loss (desparately trying to avoid spoilers here, as it's a film that you need to see without knowing what has happened). An intelligent score, then, that in its own way, is helping to give clues about the truth of what is going on in the haunted school that, as with the other, more visual clues, one understands on a second viewing. Where it falls down is a tendency to go slightly overboard and feel a bit uneven as a result. Pemberton does some lovely things with unusual timbres in the haunting sequences, especially with a mysterious dollhouse that keeps appearing in different parts of the school, containing little doll figures that recreated thing Florence has done or is in the process of doing, and generally scaring the wits out of her; and he has a very nice line in musical stingers that make you jump. However, he overuses the voices in the score. Voices in this kind of score are a bit of a bit of a cliche anyway: it is very common, in a film where the are children in danger, for one to find children's voices in the music, and when he limits himself to one voice, it is all appropriately creepy and thrilling. The larger choral moments work less well, partly because the voices are clearly singing words, none of which are quite audible (although they feel like they should be) and partly because it just seems too much in relation to what's happening on screen at times, a bit too busy, trying a little bit too hard. But I am mostly being picky: although both film and score have their flaws, I was quite happy to see it twice.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1324999
From things that go bump in the night, to large bumps growing under Bella Swan's T shirt. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Well, it's my own fault for going to see this incomprehensibly overhyped film. I liked the first of the Twilights (sorry, I know, clear indication of moral turpitude), the second was less entertaining, and I found the third something of a trial, but this one outdoes itself in truly unmitigated awfulness, and the really sad thing for me is that its biggest problem is the music (although the dialogue, especially the discussions about whether it's a foetus or a baby, and the sudden shift into a scene from The Lion King when the wolves start talking to each other are also impressively terrible moments). This plot is really very dark and quite twisted on a number of levels, but you could be forgiven for not noticing this due to the wall to wall schmaltz provided by the songs and score. Bella, 18 years old and barely able to give informed consent, marries her vampire boyfriend and goes on honeymoon, still a virgin, then has sex with him knowing that he is so much stronger than her that he could easily kill her by accident, and is happy that she ends up with just an array of purple bruises and a comically destroyed bed (hoho!) after her wedding night. She then finds she is pregnant and that her vampire hybrid baby is killing her from the inside, but refuses to contemplate doing anything that might harm it; finds that the only food she can ingest is blood; goes into labour and is given a Caesarean without a working anaesthetic by a vampire who is then overwhelmed with the desire to drink her blood; has the baby bitten out of her by husband and apparently dies in agony; but is turned into a vampire in the nick of time, which is where Part 1 ends. All good rollicking fun for the teenybopper audience. This film is a 12A! Possibly the people responsible for giving the rating lost the will to live during the interminable wedding/ honeymoon scene, which takes up at least the first 45 minutes of the film, and rated it on the basis that no child under 12 should be allowed to see such appalling sentimental wallowing, but if they'd watch the rest with music turned off, I think the rating might have been higher. I rather imagine the producers realised that without a hefty dose of aural cottonwool to staunch the trauma, the target audience would have a damn hard time with all this, and so the combination of moody soft rock songs and equally saccharine scoring from poor Carter Burwell (not a fun gig for him, I suspect) serve as the equivalent of a perpetual soft focus lens, smoothing out the bumps (as it were) to make the messy, twisted nastiness of all this (let's not forget Bella as the poster girl for anorexia) into a sweet story of true love conquering all, even if only by the skin of Edward Cullen's teeth as he bites into her abdomen. Run, don't walk, away from any cinema showing this.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Immortals
Immortals
I went to see Immortals 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 Buffy and the Orpheus myth will realise. Also, I did actually rather enjoy 300, despite its distinctly dodgy historical authenticity, and this was very much hyped as from the same stable.
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.
Oo, rant. I'm supposed to be talking about the music. Relentless, mostly bombastic and utterly unmemorable. The musical highlight was the Müller 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 Pirates of the Caribbean and Galaxy Quest. Full of wünderful stuff, as the tag line said. I should have gone home after the trailers.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Adventures in sound design
I'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, James Harrison. 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,
We Need to Talk About Kevin
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1242460/
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, Contagion, and.....
The Ides of March
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1124035/
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). Kevin, Contagion 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.
We Need to Talk About Kevin
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1242460/
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, Contagion, and.....
The Ides of March
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1124035/
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). Kevin, Contagion 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.
What 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.
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.
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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