Under The Silver Lake

Owl In Hand

Under The Silver Lake
USA 2017 Directed by David Robert Mitchell
Vendian Entertainment

Sometimes you come across a great movie in the least expected way. Now, I loved It Follows (reviewed here) and for a while I was waiting for a couple of things to happen... one was a sequel to this outstanding horror movie (I still can’t believe they’ve not turned it into a franchise yet) and also, to see whatever the next film by the writer/director of It Follows, David Robert Mitchell, happened to be. After a while I gave up on either option though and, I have to say, Under The Silver Lake didn’t even come onto my radar until a day or two ago (at time of writing).

You see, I love movie scores and the composer of the score to It Follows, a guy called Disasterpeace, also scored this movie. However, it wasn’t until I was reading the second volume of J. Blake Fichera’s Scored To Death books, which features interviews with a whole bunch of horror movie composers, that I realised both the director and composer had worked on another film together after that. So I immediately had to take a look at it and, around about 20 minutes in, I had to pause the movie so I could order the last cheap copy of the soundtrack CD on Ebay, because I already liked the music so much.

Now Under The Silver Lake is not a 'horror movie' but it’s a significant puzzle of a movie. I might liken it to the works of British director Peter Greenaway in some ways, not in terms of the visual or audio style but in terms of the mystery at the heart of the story and the... well, the resolution or lack of, as such. I would perhaps best describe this as a paranoid conspiracy movie set in modern times and highlighting contemporary themes and attitudes but viewed through a 1940s film noir sensibility.

Also, if you’re heavily into movies, you will find an awful lot of references to various works in film history from homages to Marilyn Monroe’s scenes from her unfinished movie Something’s Got To Give through to various Hitchcock thrillers and so on. Certainly, the hook of the movie is something which borrows liberally from a more formulaic style of movie making. Now, I’m determined not to spoil the film with any key revelations here because, more than most films, it trades on the sense of intrigue set up by the characters and situations which play out in some truly brain twisting ways on screen.

What I will say is that the lead protagonist Sam, is played by Andrew Garfield, who is nicely seen holding a Spider-Man comic in one scene (a role which he played in two previous films and will be reprising at the end of the year...assuming the post-pandemic cinema release schedules remain unchanged). He meets a girl by the swimming pool in his apartment building one night while he’s fulfilling the same role as the James Stewart character in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (a poster among many old movies posters up in his apartment) and becomes obsessed with her... more so when, the next day, Sarah (played by Riley Keough) disappears and may, or may not, have been burned to death in a car along with a missing billionaire.

From this point on, the film becomes an intriguing and very strangely shot fairground ride as Sam tries to find out what has happened to Sarah, as the film details his adventures which involve secret symbols, secret codes, a local comic book guy who produces a fanzine style comic book of the neighbourhood called “Under The Silver Lake”, a mythical naked lady Night Owl serial killer and...lots of other stuff which I won’t mention here.

The film is very well shot with slow zooms and camera movements on long shots which suck you into the movie in the way that lots of old movies used to but, few modern ones seldom do... at least using this particular aesthetic. There are even some nice, black and white animated segments which play out pieces of the comic book whenever somebody reads it.

The Hitchcock references continue with a shot of his grave stone in one sequence, a Vertigo shot where the camera is zoomed/pulled (you know, the one Spielberg later used in Jaws) and this goes for a lot of the music too, which I suspect is influenced in some of the scenes here by the great Bernard Herrmann. Indeed, a wordless and extended sequence where Sam follows three girls across town with just music is absolutely a stand in for the scene near the start of Vertigo where James Stewart follows Kim Novak’s character and Disasterpeace’s score in this sequence certainly gives off the same kind of vibe. Which is nice (and, as I said, had me reaching for ebay).

And that’s it... I’ve gone as far as I can without giving things away. The film is definitely ‘not safe for work’ as they say, in that there’s a lot of female nudity (absolutely not complaining about this) and even a couple of extremely gory scenes too, perhaps made more shocking because they aren’t occurring in a horror movie but something which is using the syntax of historic movies from a time where such violence would not be shown on screen (we’re talking almost Cronenbergian levels here, in a couple of scenes). And it’s a great movie. The ending gives us some sense of awkward resolution while, at the same time, probably leaving us with more questions than we might like. In that way, I suspect it’s a little like Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, which is another film which I believe won’t reward multiple viewings with anything like a clue as to what certain aspects of the movie were about (and which is all the richer for it). Still, I was totally captivated by Under The Silver Lake in the very best way and I would certainly recommend it to anyone with a love of cinema and an appreciation for the history of the art. And I’ll just leave it at that. 

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Webutantes

The Amazing Spider-Man 2
2014 USA
Directed by Marc Webb
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Big spoilers in this one.

Well, I think this is going to be a short review. Let me try to figure out what went wrong here.

The Amazing Spider-Man was called that from its first issue because of that character’s initial appearance in a successful issue of the comic Amazing Fantasy in 1962. However, the version of this and various other characters that appear in this current movie bear little resemblance to those running around in the first 100 or so issues of the comic (which is about as far as I read). It’s like the company has bought the rights to the characters and just done their own thing with them... which tells me they’re not aiming for a target audience consisting of fans of the original comics, that’s for sure. That’s a shame because, believe me, those early comics are cinematic enough that they would make great movies if adapted properly for the screen.

Now this film follows a fairly good opening movie, although it’s guilty of similar problems in translating the characters and situations to the screen. My review of the first in this series, The Amazing Spider-Man, is here and it also details the impact this character has had on me over the years. This sequel is pretty awful in many ways but, before I start pulling it apart, let me find the positives first.

The casting decision on the Harry Osbourne character is awesome. Dane DeHann looks nothing like the Harry from the comics but he is credibly able to go nuts in a sympathetic manner as he did when he played the central antagonist in the excellent teen superhero movie Chronicle (reviewed here), from a couple of years ago. Unfortunately he looks nothing like the Green Goblin either, not even being green, and his father has not yet, in this version of the story, been the former incarnation of the Green Goblin.

I don’t really know lead actor Andrew Garfield but he’s a very likeable personality and does what he’s doing here very well. He’s absolutely nothing like Peter Parker but the way his character behaves and is written is very much like the way Spider-Man is when he puts on his suit. He also has good chemistry with his on screen lover Emma Stone, who is equally likeable as Gwen Stacy. So these two are probably reason enough in themselves to watch this movie.

Okay, so other reasons why you should consider taking a look at this... um... okay. Well... no. Can’t say I can think of anything else. Let me now list the other bad things about this adaptation...

We all knew they’d be doing the death of Gwen Stacy storyline (or why have this character in there in the first place) but, Sam Raimi had already done that in his first Spider-Man movie... except he didn’t, did he? He took the exact situation of Gwen Stacy’s death, the original incarnation of the Green Goblin throwing her off a bridge and forcing Spider-Man to chose between who he saved, but Raimi substituted Mary Jane Watson in her place and, instead of dying from a whiplashed broken neck like Gwen did in the comics, caused by Spidey webbing her in an attempt to break her fall and save her, Mary Jane survived her onscreen version of this issue. In The Amazing Spider-Man 2, director Webb loses the specifics of the situation but keeps the whiplash element and Gwen does die... but it seems a cheaply won death after such a mess of a movie... at least to me it did.

Electro was my favourite villain in the original Spider-Man universe and I’ve always wanted to see him done right on screen. Looks like I’ll be waiting another good long while for that then. The white dude with the yellow and green costume culminating in a kind of starfish-electricity hat has been replaced with... Jamie Foxx playing him like a meek Spidey fanboy who suddenly goes mental, acts tough and can even convert himself into raw electricity. What a load of rubbish. I was heartbroken when it came to this aspect of the character... but they’ve also taken some pretty bad liberties with The Green Goblin so, I was getting distracted left, right and centre here.

Paul Giamatti, one of the great actors of our time, is just wasted here. The Rhino is not the mutated strongman of the comics wearing a latex rhino suit. He is an exoskeleton piloted by a Russian mobster. He plays a small role at the start of the film and then is ignored for the rest of the movie, despite the marketing campaign being heavily weighted by his presence, to be brought back as a kinda cheap punchline at the end of the movie. Admittedly, the scene where Spider-Man returns from retirement following the death of Gwendy to take on The Rhino is somewhat moving and will have the audience cheering but... seriously, it was underwhelming.

And I don’t know how this scene could have possibly been underwhelming when the movie was so slow and the villains, for the most part, so weak. The pre-amble to the creation of Electro was too long and, frankly, all the scenes with him in it, before and after his elevation to the status of super-villain, just seemed slow and boring to me. I took my parents to this one and they got so bored with it I had to keep nudging them awake. The action scenes with Electro were far from spectacular and, since you pretty much knew The Not-So-Green Goblin was going to kill Gwendoline Stacy in this, his scenes also felt like they lacked the necessary danger element.

Also, no J. Jonah Jameson (though he is alluded to), no Betty Brant, no Liz Allen and no Mary Jane Watson (although she would have been around in the same timeline in the stories as Gwen Stacy... they even resembled each other quite a lot). We have been teased with a character called Felicia who is quite possibly the same Felicia who will turn into The Black Cat... although she is lacking the white/silver hair here.

Even Has Zimmer’s music seemed to be all wrong for this picture. Jimmy Horner, who has a certain negative reputation with a certain segment of film score fans (including myself) did a credible and exciting score for the first movie. Zimmer, who is a composer I’ve really gotten into in recent years, delivered something that, on the few occasions I could actually hear it... since it was so buried in the sound mix beneath the various sound effects... seemed out of place. Now, I’m going to buy the album if it gets a release because I would like to actually hear what he did for this without the competing noise, but my judgement on it in the context of the accompaniment of the film was... not such a hot score. Which is kind of a shame because I really wanted to like this one. Maybe I still will, if the score album makes it into my player anytime soon.

And that’s pretty much me done with this movie. It was slow and boring, for the most part, and the only sequences which held any interest for me were the two handers between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy and, again, Peter Parker and Harry Osborne. Oh, and the one other good thing was the ghost of Captain Stacy haunting Peter and flooding him with guilt every now and again... that was a nice touch. But, seriously, this is not a movie I would recommend to anyone with an interest or love of the main title character. I think I’d probably rather be watching something like Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge from 1979 than this thing. Plaudits to some of the cast and some of the dialogue writing in certain scenes but, ultimately, I’d say don’t bother with this one and go see Captain America: The Winter Soldier (my review here) instead... it’s much, much better.

‘Nuff said.

The Amazing Spider-Man

Pale Spider


The Amazing Spider-Man 
2012 USA 
Directed by Marc Webb
Playing at UK cinemas now

Warning: Okay... so there will be some slight spoilers in this one but, be warned, they may well be spoilers from what happens in the sequels to this film. If you’re worried about that, then come back and read this in a few years time.

I guess, since I’ve never reviewed a Spider-Man movie on this blog before, I should probably give you a brief history of my reactions to the character in various forms over the years. That may give you some idea of where I’m coming from with this review.

Also, I will say now, right up front,  that this actually isn’t going to be a bad review of the movie. I kinda liked it, to be fair. I will almost certainly, however, be a little negative in my outlook because... oh, wait. I’m getting ahead of myself here...

I always loved Spider-Man as a kid and began reading his adventures when I was five years old when the "UK printed" Spiderman Comics Weekly first came out in this country in 1973. I remember these were black and white reprints of the original US 1962 Spider-Man comic book with, I think, a The Mighty Thor back up strip (?). What really made these special and “glam” as a kid, however, was that the first 6 pages or so, which featured the main Spider-Man strip of the week, predated the colouring style of Frank MIller’s Sin City years later in that there was also a third colour, a traditional Spider-Man red, run as a special hue in the print set up. This really made the look of the comic stand out (any of my readers remember this?). I remember the first issue had a free paper mask in it which I used to wear while pretending I could climb walls.

Pretty soon, UK television began running episodes of the good old original Spider-Man cartoon show. I used to get a bit miffed, even at the age of six, that the animators couldn’t be bothered to draw all his webbing on except for the mask but the neat voices, action and, mostly, the distinctive jazzy scoring (the music masters now lost to time due to studio stupidity, is my understanding) was a seductive combination and I was an avid watcher whenever I knew it was on. Many cartoon adaptations followed over the years but none of them were ever as cool as this one.

Then, in 1977 (although I seem to remember it as being much earlier to be honest) there came The Amazing Spider-Man live action TV series with Nicholas Hammond in the title role. This was pretty bad and came to us first over here as one of three motion pictures which hit our cinemas comprising “sewn together” episodes called The Amazing Spider-Man, Spider-Man Strikes Back and Spider-Man and the Dragon’s Challenge (which was the best of the three in that it at least had some decent fights in it). They were often quickly re-released as parts of double bills with the likes of such movies as Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger. This practice of giving the UK “movies” made of stitched together US TV shows is something which happened relatively quite often over here... with the likes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E, Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers also following the same basic release practice. I didn’t feel so bad about it just recently when I realised we were doing the same with some of our TV shows in cinema releases in other countries (such as The Avengers).

To be honest, the live action TV show was pretty dire and made in a time when DC comics scored big as films and Marvel comics were the kiss of death in big and small screen adaptations... something Marvel have really turned around in the last ten years or so. But it was an attempt and that was good enough for me.

What wasn’t good enough for me was the disappointment I experienced when Sam Raimi directed the first of his recent Spider-Man trilogy. They took enormous liberties with the original 1962 source material and even went so far as to make Spider-Man an X-Men-like mutant in that he could spin his own webs from his body. A logical extension of the character, perhaps, but not what Spider-Man was all about. At least not to this, less than avid, viewer.

And Betty Brant didn’t feature! She was kinda in them but she’s supposed to be Peter Parker’s love interest long before Gwen Stacey or Mary Jane were on the scene and a few cameo appearances really didn’t make up for this... especially since, if memory serves, the whole Doctor Octopuss storyline in the original comics initially started with the involvement of her character.

But as the series of movies progressed, I found each successive Spider-Man movie a lot easier to stomach and thought they got progressively better. Alfred Molina’s turn as Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2 was pretty standout and by the time Spider-Man 3 came around I was actually rooting for James Franco’s Green Goblin character by the end, just like I was supposed too (even though I’d hated him in the first two movies... I now, strangely enough, respect him much more as a fine actor than I did when I first saw him).

Which, if you’ve not forgotten the point of this post, leads me to the new reboot.

Now I have to admit to some excitement because they were titling it after the original comic that Spider-Man made his second appearance in, The Amazing Spider Man (the title being a nod to the original Amazing Fantasy Issue 15 comic in which Spider-Man made his debut appearance). And I’d heard they were ditching the mutation and going back to the science-based web shooters from the comics. This was sounding good... except. Well I have to say that, now I’ve seen it, it takes even more liberties with the original source material than the last trilogy did.

The Peter Parker’s parents storyline is slotted in there and I can’t say how accurate that part of the movie is since it didn’t appear in the comics until... ooh... at least three decades into its run I think. But I do know it shouldn’t be slap bang rubbing shoulders with the “origin story”. Secondly... no Liz Allen, no Betty Brant and no J. Jonah Jameson (although JJJ is at least mentioned I think). Well... I say no Liz Allen but the version of Gwen Stacey they’ve got in this one does seem to be playing a mongrel/cross breed version of both Liz Allen and Gwen Stacey... go figure.

There are a lot of negatives about the quality of the adaptation part of the writing and I could go on for hours, I’m sure, if I didn’t mind writing pages and pages here. What I will say though is that the Curt Connors character when he takes his Lizard form, looks much more like the old Spider-Man character The Scorpion than he does The Lizard. They’ve lost the snout (not very visible, adsmittedly, on the cover of his first appearance pictured above) and you rarely see him keep his white lab coat on (again, purple on the cover for some reason) as The Lizard because they’ve also got him growing in size and splitting his clothes Hulk-style. So there’s that.

And there’s also the fact that Spider-Man doesn’t kill Gwen Stacey... at least not yet. While he was blamed for the death of her father Captain Stacey in the original comics, she lets him off the hook here and doesn’t go down that route with him in this movie, although her father does meet his death in this one (though not in the same way as he did in the comics). But the fact that Gwendy doesn’t die in this one was somewhat disappointing to me. I’m thinking that maybe they’ll save that one for the sequel? In the original comics, the Green Goblin throws Gwen Stacey off a bridge, just as he does with Mary Jane in the first Sam Raimi film which was transplanted wholesale from that issue of the comic book, until they wimped out on killing off Mary Jane at this point in the movie in the same way Gwen dies in the comic.

In that comic, as Gwen Stacey falls to her certain death, Spider-Man catches her by webbing her foot, only to find that the act of stopping her in this manner snaps her neck and she dies. It was a death which ended her 8 year run in the comic (1965 - 1973) but which was so shocking at the time that it echoed throughout the storylines right through until the present day, with various Gwen Stacy clones turning up over the years (and I do mean actual clones and not just stand-in characters people!).

Now that doesn’t happen in this latest movie either... and as I said earlier, I can only hope they’re saving it to be the dramatic impetus of the inevitable sequel to this one (something I’m hoping they’ll call Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man after one of the many other Spider-Man comic titles over the years). If not, I’m probably going to be a bit more upset about the way they’re treating the characters, I suspect.

Right then, so after all that griping, what did I think of the new The Amazing Spider-Man movie.

Well I kinda really liked it actually. It was a shock seeing former Doctor Who alumni Andrew Garfield in the role of Peter Parker since he looked nothing like the character as he did when I used to read him in either the 60s or 70s artwork in the comics. I do seem to remember though that he did look a lot like the way he looks in this movie in the 90s or later, so I think I can let the people behind this one get away with that. Especially since, adaptation problems aside, the dialogue and storyline is actually pretty good and the performances of Garfield, Emily Stone (as Gwen) and all the rest of the supporting cast are all pretty... well... amazing.

It’s quite frenetically edited but not frenetically paced... so I think some of the audience for this one are going to get a little restless as they wait for Spider-Man to actually suit up for the first time. Gone are the days, alas, when a contemporary cinema audience didn’t need an origin story before they could emotionally invest in a super-hero character... at least that’s the verdict the film studios seem to have decided. And I think some of the people going to see this will find it a little slow compared to what they are used to... at least in terms of “getting on with it”. I know this is how the people I went to see it with perceived it and, to be fair to them, it does seem to take at least half of the fairly lengthy running time to get to a point that took only the first few pages in the original Amazing Fantasy comic issue.

But this kind of slow burn really doesn’t worry me and it certainly gives some time for the drama to play out and develop at its own pace. It also builds up a certain amount of anticipation to the first time you see Spider-Man in his proper costume and doing some characteristic web slinging... a point which is killed completely for me by the scoring, as it happens.

Now I’m not going to bash James Horner too much here because I used to like him a lot in the early stages of his career and, also, I do think he’s given this movie a really wonderful musical score... except for that one moment. I’m sure you all know the reactions to Horner’s... um... well loved ability to repeat himself (and others) in his work, constantly... and I state this is only as my opinion (a popular one though, it seems to me). There’s a big moment in this film where you see the full costume as Spider-Man lands on a window and the music suddenly goes into Prokofiev-mode, filtered through Star Trek 2: The Wrath Of Khan (and filtered and filtered through many other Horner scores) and, for me, this really popped me out of the moment of the movie when I really didn’t need it (they might have just as well played the theme from Star Wars or the stab music from Psycho here and it would have had the same result). This movie wasn’t directed by Godard, so I’m assuming that wasn’t the intention here.

Saying that, however, it’s not always the composer’s fault when these kinds of things happen. If they’ve been asked, say, to stick to the original rough-cut temp track, for instance, then a composer’s gotta do what a composer’s gotta do. Don’t shoot the musical messenger. And as I said, I really liked this score, I think it’s one of Horner’s best efforts of the current millennium and I shall be giving it quite a few spins on the CD player before the rest of the month is out. Power to him.

My only other real criticism of the movie is that the action sequences are extremely fast... you can just about follow them though. Just don’t accidentally blink during them or you’ll be lost. Especially during the Stan Lee cameo appearance which, to be honest, is one of his best appearances in a Marvel movie. It works really well.

And that’s all I’m going to say on this subject for today I think. The Amazing Spider-Man movie... if you’re a big fan of the original 60s and 70s comics then you run the risk of maybe hating it... or at least being quite a bit irritated with it. Similarly, if you’re someone who likes to get to the point early on with a movie, then you’re probably not going to dig this either. However, if you’ve got no real stakes in either of those camps then you might just find that this is one of the better summer studio tent peg movies of recent years. You might get a kick out of it. I know I did.