Anna Karenina

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1781769/

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.  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.

But the thing you cannot get away from is the beauty of the production. The majority of the action is filmed in a 19^th 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.

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.

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.  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.

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.

Well, 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 (Avengers, Cabin in the Woods, even Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter) and some of which I have not (Snow White and the Huntsman, Red Lights). 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 (The Hunger Games 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. The Avengers 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. Cabin in the Woods 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). Snow White 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 Red Lights: 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 The Dark Knight after the fabulous score for Batman Begins, 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 Dollhouse. Whoop whoop!

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/

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.

And really good music! The score is by James Newton Howard who has always been 'steady' and essentially interesting (liked his work on The Sixth Sense and  Batman 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.

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.

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 Three Movements for Orchestra (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. 

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.

Happy Birthday Mr Williams!

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, Tintin and Warhorse are not necessarily two of my favourite scores (although the main title of Tintin is knockout and better than every note of The Artist 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: Star Wars, Superman, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter; but don’t forget his disaster movies that preceded those – The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno are probably the reason he got the gig to do Jaws, resulting in his first Oscar for original composition (he got one for his adaptation work on Fiddler on the Roof, 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: Close Encounters, E.T (Oscar), AI, Minority Report; the dramas – JFK, Saving Private Ryan, Empire of the Sun, Born on the 4^th of July, and, of course, Schindler’s List (another Oscar, thank you); and the comedies – Home Alone, The Witches of Eastwick, Hook (is Hook a comedy?), Far and Away (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 Catch Me If You Can – 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 Far and Away….

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.

The Iron Lady and J. Edgar

It seems to be the season for quasi-political biopics: The Iron Lady, J Edgar, and W.E. have all graced our screens of late. I have no desire to see the latter, but I have made it through the other two. J. Edgar 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.

The Iron Lady is a mighty strange film. I enjoyed it; it is musically interesting; I was disturbed by it on a number of levels.

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 Buffy and Frank N Furter in the Rocky Horror Show) 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.

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.

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.

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 The King and 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, Norma: early in the film, we see young Margaret, not looking very comfortable at all, at a performance of Norma with Denis and a lot of men in suits. Norma 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; Norma 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....)

Shame

Shame
http://www.imdb.com/rg/em_share/rt_ipad/title/tt1723811
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.
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 Stepmom, 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 Hannibal. 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.
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.

The Artist

The Artist
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1655442/

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 The Artist, 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 The Sting (1973), set at a similar time to The Artist, 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 The Sting 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.

Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1515091/
I am a bit disappointed by the new Sherlock Holmes 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).
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.
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.
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 Dark Knight, but again it was a very lazy score and not a patch on his Batman Begins).
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!).