Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Ebbing, Easier Screwed

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
2017 USA/UK Directed by Martin McDonagh
UK cinema release print.

You know, I nearly didn’t bother with this movie.

I'd read on Twitter from a few people that the film was completely devoid of emotion and also, on the IMDB, that it was not much better than a TV movie. Well... I should have probably already remembered to not let the conclusions of people on Twitter, bad or good, be a factor in deciding whether I should go see a film or not... and in the case of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri... well it’s a good reminder to always take what you read on the internet with a modicum of salt.

As it happens, this is one of those damn near perfect films that come along every once in a while. Consequently, this may be a somewhat short review because I don’t really have too much to say about it but let me press on for a minute or two here.

So the film’s inclusions in this years Oscar nominations were mostly another nail in the coffin for me because a film’s acceptance for a potential industry award is so often completely off the mark in regards to the organisers making value judgements on the year’s cinematic art that it's really not to be taken seriously. As it happens, though, Carter Burwell... who is a composer I feel is a bit hit and miss when it comes to effectively scoring a movie... was nominated for his contribution and so I thought I might as well go an hear what he had to offer. As it happens, though, the score is probably one of the least deserving of Oscar attention that I’ve heard and, if this is in this year’s awards then there’s definitely something wrong with the system here... although, to be fair, the fact that Wonder Woman (reviewed here), Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (reviewed here) and A Ghost Story (reviewed here) didn’t get nominated for at least 15 categories each proves that the whole Oscar thing is a joke... put together by people who just don’t seem to understand or appreciate the art of film. It’s all very strange.

However, for this reason I ended up in the cinema to see this thing and it really is a great little movie.

The film starts off with some fairly strong visuals showing us the three billboards from various angles and master shots to establish them as the defining motif of the film... one which we shall come back to, in terms of the shot content, time and time again. However, this is undercut with this totally rubbish song which started getting on my nerves from the very start and which is joined, at various places in the film, by various other irritating songs that almost managed to kill the scenes they were in... so there’s that.

We then join Frances McDormand’s character, Mildred, as she drives into town past the three billboards of the title, stops the car and then gets the idea to rent them out to poke the police who have kinda given up on solving the recent rape and murder of her daughter. This is what the film is about... the battles she faces keeping the billboards up and using them as a force to keep the police’s mind focused on her unsolved murder. However, this film is not a one trick pony of a movie, it turns out.

It’s a particular work of art which is populated by a very strong cast. Joining the always brilliant McDormand we have Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, the underused, chameleon-like Caleb Landry Jones, Abbie Cornish and Peter Dinklage. They’re all fine actors and all brilliantly supported by a cast of character actors who are all as fine as they are. Despite comments I’ve seen, you would think that these performers, between them, could conjure up the necessary emotion and you’d not be wrong. It’s true, McDormand plays the character of the mother as a somewhat tough and muffled person but... she’s certainly not lacking in emotion and her turn here packs one hell of a wallop, I can tell you that.

I think what impressed me most about the film is that it’s not populated by black and white characters. The writing of the characters... and I’m not necessarily talking about the wonderful dialogue here but the way they are structured... is all very much portraying them in shades of grey. For example, one might say that there are two characters on the police force who could be seen as villains but, as you get to know them, you realise that its not that simple and they more than redeem themselves at certain points in the film, completely changing your perceptions of them. And it’s a similar situation with Mildred’s character... even though you are rooting for her the whole time, you can’t always say that she follows a good and righteous path to her ultimate destination and, by the end of the movie, you may not even be sure what that destination is supposed to be anymore. It’s phenomenal writing and that’s why you need these strong performers to handle the different shades of right and wrong which are inside every character.

The performances also help with the dialogue too. The comedy in this film is brilliant and, though it is a bit of a ‘movie review’ cliché to say this, there are scenes in this movie which will have you laughing your head off one minute and then stone cold sober the next. Such as a moment between a mother, an abusive ex-husband and their son turning from everyone being two seconds away from serious bodily harm to being tempered and turning back into comedy again with the stupidity of the ex-husband’s 19 year old girl friend accidentally diffusing the situation. This stuff requires a deft touch by everyone, I would guess (including the editor) and that’s exactly the kind of perfect attention to getting things exactly right that this film seems to possess in spades. You really don’t know how the characters are going to behave here and some of the drama, especially in a scene where Sam Rockwell’s character is on a phone while holding a shotgun, comes from the various characters never really knowing what is going through each other’s heads. It’s a big strength of the script and the way in which it’s shot. It also means the occasional, visceral violence that punctuates the story is entirely unexpected until various incidents happen. Which is a good thing.

Another thing that struck me was that the director sometimes opts to use shots that are very high in contrast... in that you’ll have a lot of dark and light in a shot. He’s not afraid to turn the lights off and use an outside source to pitch against the darkness, for example. Like when Mildred is reading a letter that Sheriff Willoughby ( played by Woody Harrelson) has left her and she is in a completely dark interior but the windows (she is nicely framed in one for this shot) are a contrasting light source which pitches her into silhouette.

Similarly, there is a scene later where one of the characters is reading a different letter from Willoughby, in a darkened room where he is not supposed to be, having let himself in at night. Because his back is to the windows, he doesn’t realise the building has been set ablaze by molotov cocktails until he is blown forwards by the last of five bottles. But while we watched him reading the letter, the light from the fire outside those windows is what gives the shot this similarly strong contrast and I couldn’t help but wonder if the director had used this kind of composition with strong areas of light and shade to provide a counterpoint to the complicated greyness of the characters. Probably not but it would be a nice thought if this probably serendipitous to and fro between the intricacies of the character’s internal, psychological make-up and the bold, simplicity of the shot design was a conscious decision.

Carter Burwell’s score is... serviceable when it’s not being undermined by needle-dropped songs on the soundtrack. It’s similar in melody to the terrific score he did for Carol (reviewed here) although it doesn’t... ahem... ‘homage’ Philip Glass in its constitution like that score did. Certainly, there were a lot more scores worthy of Oscar attention this year although, ironically, not many (if any) made it into the 2018 nominations list, it would seem.

And that’s me just about done on this movie. The film ends with something which, almost, leads onto a sequel but you know there’s no way you’d actually want to witness the possibilities implied as to what comes next. It is, however, a good ending and that’s another big win for the director here, as far as I’m concerned (I’ve not seen any of his other films so I’ve got no idea what he’s normally like). Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a phenomenal motion picture and I’m really glad I had the opportunity to still be able to catch it at a cinema. Definitely recommended for lovers of the art of film-making, for sure.

Top Ten Soundtracks of 2016

When The Note Comes In

Top Ten Contemporary
Score CDs of 2016

Well, it’s that time of year again when people start asking me what I thought the coolest scores of 2016 were and, I’d have to say, I’m kinda disappointed with my list this year. One of the problems with that is I limit myself, quite strictly, to what is allowed to go on this list.

It goes without saying that I don’t include the redundant, vinyl only releases of the year and nor do I include the evils of the electronic download as a viable alternative to the magic of compact disc as the required format for any soundtrack listener worth their sort. So that sort of “but it had a (insert either of the two evil formats here) release" isn’t going to cut it with me. It has to have had a compact disc release in the year the movie came out to be eligible. Something which has scuppered my number one spot this year, as I’ll go on to explain.

Apart from this, my other rule is that the score has to be from a movie released this year in the UK or US. There are gazillions of good archive scores released nowadays from small, boutique labels of restored old scores, most of which would run rings around anybody’s pick of soundtracks from just one year... with this year being no exception. I would love to put a proper listing together for the many resurrected film scores coming out in any year but it would just take me too long to properly compile the damn thing. There are a lot of ‘holy grail’ type releases coming onto the market, often monthly, and there is just so much stuff now getting released that every soundtrack listener’s wallet is under threat... with companies like Intrada, La La Land, Quartet and Varese Sarabande putting out some truly great stuff (although many of my personal Holy Grails seem to have been left untouched... cough cough... The Final Programme, Work Is A Four Letter Word and proper releases of Doc Savage and Blade Runner).

Okay, so my biggest problem with this year’s listing, asides from the fact that it seems to be all American scores this time around, which is not a great thing, is that the score that would easily take the top spot, Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s amazing The Girl With All The Gifts, has not even made it onto one of the lesser useful formats as yet, let alone a nice CD release. This is a shame but I’m going to have to leave it off because, without the CD to give it some ‘stand alone’ context, I really can’t, in good conscience, include it.

So here we go... my top ten score CDs from contemporarily released movies of 2016 in reverse order.

10. Nerve by Rob Simonsen
There either seems to have been a resurgence in electronic music in films over the last few years or I’m getting older and noticing it more. The film is an okay movie but the score on this one is phenomenal... easily the best of a bunch this year (many of which seemed to be trying to sound just like late 1970s John Carpenter... which is no bad thing... but not quite getting there) and as accessible for someone like me as, say, the Tron Legacy score was a few years back. Definitely worth picking up. My review of the movie is here.

9.  10 Cloverfield Lane by Bear McCreary
One of my favourite modern TV composers, Bear’s score for this spin off from the original Cloverfield is fraught with tension and some interesting and melodic atmospheres... plus he uses the musical instrument known as the 'blaster beam' (which is rumoured to be able to give women spontaneous orgasms). Check out my review of the movie here.

8. Inferno by Hans Zimmer
Zimmer’s synth heavy score picks up where his masterpiece, Angels and Demons, left off. It’s not as strong a work but it does its job in the movie (which wasn’t the best of the series) and it's very listenable away from the movie. His Professor Langdon theme gets referenced here, of course, but so too does his chase music from the previous movie. Not 100% sure how the leitmotif on these films works but, who cares when it’s so much fun? The movie review to this one can be found here.

7. The Forest by Bear McCreary
Bear’s second and final entry into this list sees him providing some incredibly eerie atmospheres and a lot of his, almost trademark, drumming. Set in Japan, the score somewhat reflects this and is easily one of the most satisfying listens of the year. I reviewed the movie here.

6. Rogue One by Michael Giacchino
Giacchino’s score to one of the most frustrating Star Wars movies of all time (so far... my trust in Disney has gone right down after seeing this) is equally frustrating... both in the movie and as a stand alone listen. The composer has a lot of the musical language down but there aren’t enough big themes to make it totally sound like a John Williams Star Wars score (some would argue that it shouldn’t). Also, the choice of leaving off the opening title crawl, with the familiar main theme, was a bad call. At least it’s on the end titles but... astoundingly... on the album it isn’t. Honestly, this is absolutely a terrible thing to do... like leaving the latest James Bond song off of a James Bond score. Which is something else they’ve started doing of late. This is a quite good stand alone listen which grows on you with repeat listens but it really needs a proper, full length CD release. My review of the movie is here.

5. Hail Caesar! by Carter Burwell
Burwell’s affectionate look back at Hollywood in the Golden Age, filtered with a little of today’s sensibilities, is a beautiful and fun homage to the scores by the likes of Miklos Rosza and the kinds of songs of Comden and Green used to turn out in their heyday. Just a completely ‘smileriffic’ album which stands up away from the visuals as much as it supports them in the movies. My review of this completely underrated movie, one of the best of the Coen Brothers, is here.

4. The Nice Guys by David Buckley and John Ottman
This Shane Black movie set in the 1970s gets exactly the score it deserves. This sounds like a dozen funky TV cop shows from that era without actually pinpointing any of the influences down. It’s slick and, maybe a bit short for an album release but it certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome. This movie probably wouldn’t be sunk without the funk but, man, it has it in spades here. Crucial grooves from a movie which I reviewed here.

3. Doctor Strange by Michael Giacchino
Given the amount of superhero movies we’re getting on our screens every year, you’d think that a few more of them would have made it into my top ten. However, this is the only one which managed that trick in 2016. I was really looking forward to a Brian Tyler score for this movie, especially since he seems to be the only guy who was able to bring a semblance of musical continuity to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Alas, he seems to have mysteriously parted company with Marvel (although I’ve heard nothing official, it’s just my observation based on a few things and I sincerely hope I’m wrong) and so we have Giacchino scoring Doctor Strange and... it’s really pretty good. The main theme and the beautiful end statements of it, especially in Go For Baroque and Master Of The Mystic End Credits would elevate it to this list most years and its’ supported by some nice stuff. My review of the movie can be found here.

2. Arrival by Jóhann Jóhannsson
Jóhann Jóhannsson is not someone whose work I’m very familiar with and so I’m inevitably going to compare it to his similarly atmospheric score for Sicario. This one really suits the subject matter with some interesting moods and a modus operandi which really fits in with the idea of language and the way it can sometimes be seen as a code... the patterns made by the music reminding the audience of this at key points and also, if you’re anything like me, frightening the  audience half to death when the sheer density of the music kicks into high gear with a more thunderous wailing than the quieter passages of musical texture around it. My review of the movie is here.

1. The VVitch by Mark Korven
At times a jarring but absolutely riveting score and quite popular with those who actually liked the movie. This score sounds very simple but it holds a power reminiscent of some of the choral work of one of my favourite composers, György Ligeti. Lay your head down in a darkened room with this and it’s pretty much guaranteed an unsettling atmosphere will develop. Simply one of the best horror scores since the 2015 score to It Follows... which is high praise indeed. My review of this film is here.

And that’s my short contribution for this year. Hope you find some time to delve into these soundtracks. If you do, let me know in the comments section below. Happy listening.

Anomalisa

New Lisa Life

Anomalisa
2015 USA
Directed by Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman
UK cinema release print.

Welcome to my very short review of Anomalisa, a film that I went into totally unprepared for... which is usually a good thing. I’d seen someone recommend it on Twitter and I liked two other films written by Charlie Kaufman... Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. All I knew about the film itself, however, is that it was not a children’s film and that it employed stop-motion animation in the pursuit of the story, as opposed to live action filming.

As it started, I realised my experience wouldn’t be a totally negative one, at any rate, because there is a line or two of dialogue referencing Darren McGavin as Kolchak - The Night Stalker... so I was pretty happy about that. Another thing that I was happy with, after about a quarter of an hour, was the dawning realisation that the main lead was being voiced by one of my favourite and much under-rated actors, David Thewlis. So this was all good. What I didn’t pick up on until I waited for the cast list at the end, however, was that the Lisa of the title, Anomalisa, was being voiced by one of my favourite actresses too... Jennifer Jason-Leigh... so this was all good.

Another point of note is that there are a large number of characters, many of them quite minor, appearing in the film but the entire voice cast of the movie is only three people in total. Of those three, Thewlis and Jason-Leigh only play one character each... which means all the rest of the characters in the movie, male and female, are voiced by another underrated actor, the original Francis Dollarhyde himself, Tom Noonan. So a curio of a movie and I would expect nothing less than that from the mind of Charlie Kaufman, to be honest.

However, that being said, I can’t say I was totally enthralled by the movie I saw, either.

The problem with the film for me comes not from the basic idea or the voice acting (the three are amazing, as you’d expect) and even, the ‘acting’ of the stop motion models is pretty convincing... you might even find yourself forgetting you are watching puppets at some points. The main problem for me was just that it was a little dull in places. It wasn’t because the story is quite down beat and depressing, dealing as it does with Michael (David Thewlis) who is staying in a hotel for a night before addressing an audience about the keys of customer service... I can handle downbeat just fine and often prefer that kind of movie over anything which feels false. It just didn’t really go into a totally unexpected realm until one nightmarish sequence when one of the characters turned out to be dreaming. I thought it was going to go full tilt into paranoia and fantasy at this point but... nope, it just came right back into the hum drum reality of the characters again, as Michael spends his evening having a kind of meltdown, one of the symptoms of which is his one night stand with the title character.

All that being said, however, despite my ambivalent attitude towards the on-screen shenanigans of the animated characters, I didn’t exactly hate it either and I was surprised to find the end of the movie had gone so quickly... the hour and a half of the screen time felt like a little over 40 minutes to me... so I must have been getting something out of it. Perhaps it’s my ability to easily put myself in the shoes of the central character which made the film a bit less lustrous in terms of plot or story content (not that I’m the biggest fan of story, either).

There is, obviously, much to recommend and admire in the film, though...

I’ve already mentioned the incredible voice talent but Kaufman’s regular composer of choice, Carter Burwell, provides an appropriate if, not entirely, memorable score... at least in the context of its mix in the movie itself. It's the craftsmanship of the models, however, which really stands out in this movie and, more importantly, the way their movements and mannerisms have been observed. Little throw away moments that people seem to exhibit in their day to day existence seem to be captured in the way the models move and react to both each other and their immediate environment. There’s a sex scene which, I’m reliably informed, was the longest thing to film and get right. It certainly shows it was laboured over because it’s a nicely observed sequence where humanity at both its best and worst comes together as two people try and capture their own personal lightning. It’s a nice moment in a film full of ‘moments’ but, ultimately, it brings no real peace to the main protagonist, Michael, and the next morning Tom Noonan’s voice is pitched against Jennifer Jason-Leighs saying the same lines simultaneously. This is a clear indication, as we are obviously experiencing things from Michael’s perceptions, that Lisa is maybe less standout and special in Michael’s world than he (or she) at first thought... which is a shame and one of many downbeats in the film which races towards an ending of... well not much closure. The only sequence in the movie where a kind of 'anti-closure' is given is the final scene of the film, which is the only scene in the movie not to feature Michael, as it happens.

Ultimately, I’m glad, as an observer of cinema, that I got the chance to see Anomalisa. It’s probably not going to set the world alight, I suspect, but it is interesting and shows us a juxtaposition of technique and content that, while not exactly new, is at least unusual and rarely glimpsed. Not something I would rush out to see again but fans of cinema might do well to at least take a little look at this exploration of humanity and, frankly, I want to see (and hear), David Thewlis in more lead roles. America seems to have really wasted his talent, in some ways.

Hail, Caesar!

Hot Hail

Hail, Caesar!
2016 UK/USA/Japan
Directed by The Coen Brothers
UK cinema release print.

Ha! You know, when I first saw a trailer for this movie on the internet sometime last year, I thought the idea of this one looked promising but I was in no way expecting this to be a good movie. It looked like a whole bunch of actors and film-makers having a whale of a time and, quite often when this happens, you often find the people making the movie are going to have a far better time than the audience who are going to be watching this. I might cite the 1967 version of Casino Royale or 2015’s Mortdecai (reviewed here) as examples where this tactic seems to seriously backfire on the studio.

Another problem I have, and which made me fairly wary is that, much as I love some of the Coen’s movies dearly, I do find them a bit hit and miss and, over the last five or six years, I have found their movies definitely in the miss category, for me. I love the Coens of The Big Liebowski, Oh Brother Where Art Thou and The Man Who Wasn’t There but some of their other stuff seems to be less emotionally involving to me.

Well, I needn’t have worried on either count, as it happens, because although it took me 20 minutes or so to warm up to their latest opus, Hail, Caesar!, I absolutely loved it, once it got going. The film stars Josh Brolin as famous Hollywood ‘fixer’ Eddie Mannix, a fictional version of the real person who works here in a made up studio where thinly disguised ‘Coenised’ movies from Hollywoodland’s rich legacy are in production. When famous film star Baird Whitlock, played by George Clooney as a kind of Charlton Heston via Victor Mature type, is kidnapped from the set before the completion of his latest movie Hail, Caesar!, it’s up to Eddie to get him back while still trouble shooting other problems with various stars who work for the studio.

In a nice touch to the William Wyler version of Ben Hur, the fictional Hail, Caesar! shares the exact same subtitle of that movie, A Tale Of The Christ. There’s even a hilarious scene where Clooney is trying to channel the same look of reverence that Heston does in Ben Hur, when Christ gives him water on his journey to be a galley slave, although the roles are slightly twisted around here, just like a lot of other stuff in this movie is nicely subverted... such as the gay subtext highlighted with a joke in the sailor’s song and dance number performed by Channing Tatum as Burt Gurney, this film’s equivalent of Gene Kelley.

Other people who populate this film are Tilda Swinton in a kind of dual role playing a kind of ‘twins’ version of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, Ralph Fiennes as Laurence Laurentz and Scarlet Johannson doing a kind of earthy version of famous water dancer Esther Williams. The character which made it completely watchable for me though, is the role of Alden Ehrenreich as ‘singing cowboy’ sensation Hobie Doyle. I don’t know who this guy is but he’s phenomenal. Sure, he gets some good laughs in scenes with Ralph Fiennes character as the studio attempt to ‘change his image’ but it’s his other role in the film which really help bring this all to life.

Hobie is obviously a parody of the Roy Rogers/Gene Autrey cowboy stars of yesteryear and can perform some neat tricks as demonstrated here. He even has his very close parody of a Gabby Hayes style sidekick who, obviously, gets all the laughs from the fictional audience when he takes his date to see one of his films. And about that ‘date’. This movie is very much a film watcher’s movie... like a Quentin Tarantino piece, a lot of the pleasure in watching it is derived from how many famous movie references you can pick up on. A real movie spotter’s pursuit, is this. We only hear her name teased a few times in the movie, for a while, and as soon as I heard her name, Carlotta Valdez, my brain was on fire. I spent the next twenty minutes or so of the movie agonising where I’d heard it before until it finally kicked in and I realised that this was the name of the fictional, historical figure that Kim Novak is pretending to be channeling for the benefit of James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo. Oh my gosh, I thought to myself, are they going to go the whole hog and make her look like the ‘Portrait of Carlotta’ right down to the iconic hairstyle in the Hitchcock movie?

As the film wore on and I realised the Coens weren’t taking the strength of their parody too seriously (I’ll get to that in a minute) I then started thinking that maybe they were going to have Hobie dating a parody of the Mexican Spitfire, Lupe Velez, herself. As it happens, it turns out Hobie is dating a version of the famous actress Carmen Miranda and, it has to be said, Veronica Osorio, the wonderful actress playing her here, makes it more than apparent who she’s supposed to be in her very first scene. She is an absolute delight in the role and her scenes with Alden Ehrenreich, as Hobie entertains her with both a real lasso and, later, a spaghetti lasso, are just so charming they will probably win your heart right over. However, Hobie’s solo scenes as he goes after the kidnappers are equally great and... I’ll briefly mention those in a little while.

George Clooney, of course, is also brilliant in his role and when it turns out he’s kidnapped by communist writers, his scenes with them are pretty funny too. And it was nice to see Patrick Fischler as one of those writers... I always wondered what had happened to that guy who played the video store clerk in Ghost World and... here he is. He has a very distinctive face which makes him a good person if you want someone to stand out and add texture to a crowd. Clooney is marvellous, though, and the more stuff he makes these days which border on almost parodying himself, to an extent (with a little bit of stretch), forces me to admire him more and more as both an actor and a star as the years go by. Some people might be afraid to take on this kind of role but, as usual, Clooney gives it his all.

Now there are some problems with the parody in this movie, to be sure, and I’ll highlight those soon enough, but one of the things which made me stop worrying about the authenticity of a lot of the stuff on show in the movie is that, it soon becomes obvious that the Coen’s just don’t worry too much about making it all authentic. These are broad strokes which create a brief impression rather than full blown homage and, as such, it kinda works at its own level. Where it’s less satisfying is when some aspects of a parody are finely tuned to the smallest details but maybe slightly tarnished by another element being less so...

For example, the sailor’s song and dance number, headed up by Channing Tatum, is an incredible movie moment. It’s clear that the choreography and dialogue of those big MGM mid-fifties numbers have been studied here to the nth degree. And Tatum has obviously been looking at Gene Kelly and the way he moves, the way his face expresses (or doesn’t always) and the way he delivers his lines... it all works really well. As does the consistency of the simplicity of the colour scheme of the set being used. However, what doesn’t work about this scene is the veracity of those colours themselves. The MGM films used to be... well, over the top and almost over saturated beyond belief in those movies... the colours here, while simply wrought, have none of the luminosity of the hues used in the films the Coens are trying to emulate in this scene... which kind of spoiled the overall effect of it, for me.

Another example would be Carter Burwell's score throughout the movie. Now this must have been a dream job for a composer to work on as he has to cover a range of musical styles due to the nature of the content... but I noticed that he was more successful in some styles than others... although that might not have been his fault. For instance, the music he delivers for the Hail, Caesar! movie within a movie scenes are typical in structure and tone of the kinds of scores these films were getting by the likes of Dr. Miklos Rozsa but... well, they just don’t seem to have the same punch or over the top-ness, over scored quality of the originals. However, like I said, it might not be the composer’s fault, it might just be mixed too far back into the background compared to the way the music would have been mixed into a genuine Roman/Religious epic of the mid 1950s so... well I’ll find out once the CD arrives.

The composer does do some really great stuff here too though and, getting back to Hobie going after the kidnappers, the scenes where the Coen’s get almost metatextual and use the vernacular of the 1940s and 1950s film noirs to tell that part of Hobie’s story is faithfully backed up by Burwell with something which really does the trick in those sequences. So, yeah... looking forward to this score arriving in the post sometime soon.

And that’s what I thought of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar! Once it starts coasting along the movie is a real breath of fresh, or maybe that should be reconditioned, air midst a cinematic climate where no other film is being made quite like this one at the moment. So as far as subject matter and approach are concerned, there’s nothing else like it out there currently... so if you want to see something different then check this one out. I, for one, had a great time with this movie and if you’re a fan of old school Hollywood movies then you’ll probably have a good evening with this one. Definitely a big thumbs up for this one... if I had a massive, giant thumb to do that with.

Carol

Aird Today, Gone Tomorrow

Carol
2015 UK/USA/France
Directed by Todd Haynes
UK cinema release print.

Exquisite.

That’s probably a good word for this movie, if I’d been asked to sum it up immediately after seeing it at my local cinema.

I don’t think I’ve seen any movies directed by Todd Haynes apart from his other 1950s set film Far From Heaven... which was pretty good and lured me to the cinema with the promise of an interesting Elmer Bernstein score. In the case of Carol there were a number of factors which compelled me to pick this one out among others for my Sunday trip to the local picture house this week.

For one thing, I’d not read a single tweet about this movie from people who had been to see it at the London Film Festival that was, in any way, negative. They’d all been downright through the roof in terms of their positivity, in actual fact. There was also the promise of a new score by Carter Burwell, a composer who I quite like, although I do find him a bit hit and miss. The few tweets I’d seen about the score, however, were also extremely enthusiastic... and so I decided to see this one as soon as I could to see what I thought of said score, in case a purchase of the CD was necessary.

Of course, I’d be lying if I didn’t say a major draw to going to see this movie was the prospect of seeing the villain from Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull indulging in hot ‘girl on girl’ action with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo but... heck, nobody asked me so I shall refrain from mentioning that aspect of the story unless politely asked.

So this movie is based on a novel Patricia Highsmith wrote under a pseudonym in the early 1950s (which is the period in which this movie is more or less set) called The Price Of Salt. Well, I don’t know what that title’s got to do with... um... anything ;-) but, whatever, it was retitled Carol decades later when it was reprinted under Highsmith’s own name. Alas, it’s not a novel I have read so, in terms of the quality of the adaptation, I can’t tell you how true it is to the source novel... although I understand the ending is not far off, in fact.

What I can tell you is that, with Carol, I’ve seen an absolutely amazing movie and one which will easily slide somewhere into my top ten for this year. The film centres on the intense, loving relationship between the two main protagonists Therese Belivet (pronounced Tirez), and played by Rooney Mara and the title character Carol Aird, played by Cate Blanchett... and the devastating effect it has on both their lives, especially when it is used against Carol to bolster an injunction to prevent her seeing her daughter during a messy, divorce child custody hearing. Both actresses, of course, are absolutely perfect in their roles... Blanchett coming over as a bit splashier than usual but, frankly, I could watch her ‘til the cows come home (so to speak) and with the pixie-like Mara playing almost an Audrey Hepburn/Breakfast At Tiffany’s kind of role, at least in terms of channeling a gorgeously delicate, waifish visual reference that makes up the look of the character.

Watching these two and the chemistry they bring to this half hidden lesbian relationship, and the subtlety of their facial expressions and body language... with the writing often leaving out unnecessary dialogue to accommodate the silent aspects of the performance... it seems pretty clear that the director couldn’t have asked for two more perfect actresses performing their central roles than these two do here. What they bring with them in terms of professional performance is absolutely astonishing.

What’s more rewarding here though, is that the visual design, the editing and the sound design all work in perfect harmony and are used to enhance the performances to the nth degree, with Haynes meticulous control over the look and sound of the film being quite evident in every frame which flickers past the eyes and ears. This is amazing cinema and the director is doing some really cool but controlled things here.

I say he’s meticulous because he’s using pretty much every vertical (and the occasional curve) to split the screen and chop it up into sections throughout the entire movie. Using the lines in sharp contrast, even when they are a background element, and placing the various actors within these sectioned off spaces to lead the eyes of the audience to go exactly where he wants them to in order to pick up on the details of the rich performances littered throughout the canvass of this extraordinary work of art. It’s quite startling how much he does this all the way throughout the running time too... pretty much most, if not all, of the time, I would guess. It’s like watching an Italian giallo from the late 1960s/early 1970s or a movie by Sergio Leone. Everything is compartmentalised and framed within a specific section of space... blinding stuff.

Another thing he does, not quite as often but certainly enough that it keeps cropping up again and again throughout the movie, is to have the camera eye of the collective audience look through something (or occasionally peak out from behind something in terms of camera movement to fulfil the destination of the final frame in a sequence) such as a sheet of distressed glass or a curtain or some such transparent, textured material. This gives the element to a lot of the movie of each audience member being a voyeur rather than just naturally following the drama in the way one normally would. We are collectively eavesdropping on conversations and moments of expression as we observe through a secondary layer and this, of course, makes the audience feel more empathy with the characters even as the director uses the distance of that intermediary plane, combined with the compartmentalising of the screen I’ve already talked about, as a form of visual tension. And, of course, in the many shots where he doesn’t use this tactic, we are suddenly, through that style of entrance into certain scenes of the characters who inhabit the movie, brought into the midst of the action with no barrier to empathy at all. This is because the contrast between shots where he does this and shots where he doesn’t conditions us to feel completely relaxed and in the moment.

He also uses sound quite brilliantly.

For instance, he has a cleverly constructed sequence at the start which he sets up to be a potential book end device for the film and from which most of the action of the running time takes place in flashback. When we see an emotionally fuelled moment early on in the proceedings, which we know will mean a whole lot more to us when we see the back story of the two leading protagonists, Therese finds herself whisked away in a taxi and looking out the window in a possible moment of deep regret (and yeah, of course, we are observing her from the outside of the window which has rain trickling down the glass). As we sense the tension building, the director has the natural sounds of the street, cars and alarm bells from passing premises, coming up in volume on the foley with all the kind of impact that a whistling kettle has when it’s near to boiling point. This perfectly re-enforces the tensions of the emotions the viewer senses he or she is supposed to be feeling while simultaneously signalling the affirmation of alarm as the key tone of the character at this point. And, again, this is a tactic the director seems to use a few times during the course of the film.

And staying with this opening sequence... the other clever thing he does, by using this flashback formula, is set up an assumption that we are seeing the end of the movie when, in fact... well I really don’t want to spoil this one for you but the opening sets up an emotional tone which doesn’t necessarily reveal the true ending of the movie. To quote a cliché, it isn’t over until the fat lady sings and all I will say about the conclusion of this particular ‘forbidden romance’ is... it’s not what I was expecting and I’m a sucker for this kind of ending. So I was really pleased with the way the story content in this movie turned out.

And, of course, we have that score.

Carter Burwell’s score.

Which, to be honest, really was the main reason why I was so curious to see this one. What can I say? It’s brilliant, moving, comes and goes at just the right times in the mix (in between the various 1950s song standards that litter the soundscape) and heightens the emotions beautifully. It is rich and vibrant and I’m pretty sure that as a standalone experience it will be truly wonderful... I know this because I was toe tapping practically the whole way through the movie like I was watching some kind of rock video. However, it has to be said... it’s also a complete copy of the compositional style of composer Philip Glass. I don’t mean just the minimalistic, short cells repeating to bind a slower melody hiding in a faster rhythm approach that Glass uses either... I mean the orchestration of it too. It’s absolutely pseudo-Glass from a specific period which dates it, to my mind, as having come from any or all of his theatre or opera works from the early to late 1980s, in tone. I don’t mean this as a slur to Burwell, who I have admired as a composer ever since I heard and then bought his score for Psycho III on vinyl all those decades ago... I’m sure this is a result of either a strong voice from the director or a case of the temp track taking over at the 11th hour and finalising the style. However, I’m not alone (it turns out) in recognising the fact that this score sounds like it was written by Glass and it does make me wonder just what went on during the post-production of this movie.

That’s okay by me though. I absolutely love the music of Philip Glass so there are no complaints from me here. A friend of mine has told me he’s getting me the score for Christmas and I am really looking forward to picking a few tracks out to play on Christmas morning, time permitting. A truly great piece of work, whether Burwell owes a debt to Glass or not, and absolutely supportive of the images while enhancing and elevating the tone of the emotions. It’s truly amazing stuff and that’s really all I’m going to say about this picture now. Carol is an absolute knock out of a movie and if you call yourself a film buff, a cinephile or, like me, just a plain old cinema goer, then you owe it to yourself not to let this one pass you by. An absolute treat of a movie by a director I’m really going to have to look out for more in the future. Just marvellous.