Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Every Which
Way But Juice

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Directed by Tim Burton
USA 2024
Warner Brothers
UK cinema release print

Warning: Spoilers about the fate of Jeffrey Jones’ character from the first movie here.

Well this was a pleasant surprise.

Back in 1988 I went to my local cinema (which was two minutes around the corner at the time... it’s now a Tesco) and saw Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (kinda fuming then that it wasn’t spelled Betelgeuse as in real life). It was the first movie I saw by Burton and I liked it fine. When Michael Keaton, who starred as Beetlejuice, was announced to be cast as Batman in Burton’s next film and there was a huge backlash against that decision, I was pretty sure both he and Burton could pull it off and, yeah, they really did.

The next time I saw Beetlejuice would have been a couple of years later when it came out as a sell through VHS cassette tape (yeah, sell thru, as it was known back in the day) and, yeah, I think that was about it for me and that film... I saw it only twice and not again, since I kinda stopped being enamoured with the cinematic mystique of Tim Burton. He’s made some fantastic films... Batman Returns, Sleepy Hollow, Planet Of The Apes etc but, as creative as he is, I do find him a bit hit and miss these days. So, it’s perhaps no surprise that I didn’t relish the idea of, 36 years later, seeing his new sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (a title destined to give computer grammar checkers an annoying wake up call the world over). I thought it would be kinda dull and I really wasn’t looking forward to it at all. I thought it would be a good one to review for the blog though so, yeah, I figured I could get it out of the way for good in the first weekend. So I dragged myself along to it, and...

I’m happy to say that, well, Tim Burton really is on form with this movie. As are the returning actors/characters Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice, Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz and Catherine O'Hara as Delia Deetz (all of whom are really impressive here and look almost as young as they were the first time around). Along with some nice visual and musical references to the first movie, we also have a bunch of actors who are new to the franchise, who are all also excellent, including Jenny Ortega as Lydia’s daughter Astrid, Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci, Arthur Conti and even Danny DeVito in a small role.

And it’s wonderful. Once again Danny Elfman gives us a score reminiscent of the old one and utilising some of the same themes (although, alas, my favourite piece of leitmotif from the first film is, for some reason, sadly absent from the score this time around). However, once again the people at Watertower Records have not made the score available on CD at time of release (because why should they give people the actual music in proper physical form rather than just a garbage sounding streaming experience instead, eh?).

And, just like most of Burton’s work, it’s wonderfully inventive both on a visual and conceptual level. Lighting the fuse of a chalk drawing bomb to open a portal to the afterlife was a nicely executed idea. And I think people are going to like the Soul Train sequences too.

There’s also a treat for Italian genre fans because, when we get to see the back story of the person who turned into Beetlejuice, it goes full on Black and White, subtitles and does its best to resemble an early Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda movie. And Bava also gets a nice name check here too, since Lydia mentions she saw a Bava all nighter at the cinema when she was nine months pregnant with Astrid, including her father’s favourite Bava Kill, Baby Kill (review eventually coming when I revisit that one on Blu Ray).

Then there’s the elephant in the room. Lydia’s father is in this but, Burton’s regular actor Jeffrey Jones doesn’t play him, now that he’s a registered sex offender (young boys apparently) and has been somewhat cancelled. Instead, although he’s in this all the way through, his photo appears and he gets half eaten by a shark early on in the film... his plane crash and adventures at sea depicted as an animated story. For the rest of the film, as he wanders through the afterlife, the top half of his body is missing (when he speaks, blood spurts from his windpipe), the rest presumably still in the shark. I’m thinking he maybe got paid something for the use of his likeness here, though.

But, look, I wasn’t expecting much from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and was so surprised by just how good a movie it is. As I said earlier, Burton is back on form for sure and it’s a really impressive return from him and the cast in this one. I absolutely will be buying this when it comes out on Blu Ray (hopefully before Christmas) and I’ll probably reacquaint myself with the original around the same time. This one’s definitely worth seeing at the cinema so, if you liked the first one, make sure you don’t miss out on it.

Batman Returns

What A Feline

Batman Returns
USA/UK 1992 Directed by Tim Burton
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Batman: You know, mistletoe can be deadly if you eat it.
Catwoman: But a kiss can be even deadlier if you mean it.

Okay, so my second Christmas movie of the year is Batman Returns, the only sequel that Tim Burton made to one of his own movies (reviewed here), so far. This one retains Michael Keaton, Micheal Gough and Pat Hingle as Bruce Wayne (Batman), Alfred the butler and Commissioner Gordon respectively but also welcomes a whole new cast of actors/characters into the mix. This was the second time a cinema released Batman movie had teamed up super villains to try their luck against the central protagonist, following the 1966 movie starring Adam West. This time around he goes up against Danny DeVito as Oswald Cobblepot, aka The Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle aka Catwoman.

The look and feel of the movie is fantastic, far surpassing the first film (which I reviewed here) in pretty much every way. Everything is dark and cold but the way its designed and lit harkens back to, in some ways, a German Expressionist film with, also, a smattering of Russian architecture thrown in, if I’ve got my eye in. It’s also very Christmassy, not just with Gotham under heavy snow in both time settings covered in the film (pre-credits and then the main body of the film 33 years later) but because the whole film is heavily infused with Christmas iconography... mistletoe, Christmas parties, a Christmas tree lighting ceremony and even Michael Keaton’s last lines in the film... are all about the greetings of the season.

So, yeah, out of this loosely fitting tetralogy of movies, it’s this second one by Burton himself which I think is probably the best, although some of the staging and pausing to give various characters big visual moments does seem a little less subtle and inappropriately indulgent by today's standards, perhaps.

The architecture in this is not the only thing that’s post-modern either. The whole film is chock full of references to other things. For instance, Max Schreck’s company cat logo. I mean, I get it, it’s where Selina Kyle is working when she’s ‘killed’ and resurrected as the Catwoman but, honestly, why did they have to use the exact same logo as Felix The Cat. It’s one of a few things which completely popped me out of the movie, continually (because it’s used a lot) when I first saw it. I kept assuming a character would walk on at some point and explain how Felix The Cat was somehow connected to the Batman universe... pretty much expecting this culturally iconic visual theft to be somehow admitted and explained during the course of the film. I guess I was more naive in those days, expecting movie producers to acknowledge it when they outright stole something.

And talking about Max Shreck, here’s was this 24 year old sitting at the cinema, confronted with this movie, wondering why the heck the third of the lead villains, played by Christopher Walken, has been given such a famous name, that of the actor who played the title character in the famous German Expressionist movie Nosferatu - A Symphony Of Horror. I’m there in the audience thinking to myself how cool it is and waiting for one of the characters to explain that Walken’s playing some kind of ancestor of the real life actor but, no, it’s just an outright steal again. It’s been said the look of The Penguin also owes a debt to the look of the title character in the first German Expressionist film The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari and, looking at it now (and especially on some of the posters marketing the film), yeah, I think that might be right... there’s a smattering of  the look of the make up of Werner Krauss in that movie maybe rubbing off in the film here but, I think the look of Walken’s Schreck could also be said to have some similarities. It’ hard to tell for sure but, yeah, like I said... the film more than enters the realm of post-modernistic entertainment.

The chemistry of all the actors in this is great and the performances are... I dunno... maybe slightly dated but very watchable. The film starts off strongly with a set piece backed by a kind of extended 'Christmas jingly lead in' to Danny Elfman’s re-orchestrated Batman theme, which totally plays out the origin of The Penguin before the film has even started properly and one of the things the film does very nicely and quickly is to draw out all the new characters in a brisk, efficient manner. So Walken and DeVito get very quick character sketches which more than do the job. Pfeiffer gets a slightly more protracted story to show the contrast between the shy, ditzy secretary who gets transformed into the full blown super villainess (of a kind, she's not really a bad person) and this kind of approach usually works well. The post death scene after she’s resurrected by cats and wrecks her apartment, before becoming focussed on the extent of where her unhinged mind wants to take her and she transforms herself into Catwoman, is one of my all time favourite 5 minutes of film... with a beautiful introduction of her theme by Elfman which is also one of his greatest pieces of music.

However, it has to be said that her character is one of many ‘classic’ DC characters which have been fairly tampered with in terms of who they are. For instance, Selina Kyle was always more of a bad girl and in no way shy when it came to the original comics in the 1940s (heck, some of her origins in the strip in later incarnations even place her as a sex worker), so as brilliant a change it is in her character here, which really works in the film, it’s not really true to the source. That being said, one thing they stuck to was the underlying romance of her character as far as Batman was concerned... she was always using his attraction to her to get an advantage and even in the first time they meet in the comic, he kinda ‘accidentally’ lets her get away at the end of the story, if memory serves.

Similarly, The Penguin is a greatly changed creation and really nothing like The Penguin at all. Especially in terms of his deformity with fused fingers which form flippers here... that was never a part of Cobblepot’s character although, it was played out in comics at least once after the release of this film.

One of the things which is evident though, with all these new characters being developed, is that Bruce Wayne as a character is hardly expanded on at all and, despite Michael Keaton finally getting top billing in this Batman movie, he has much less to do... although pretty much all his scenes here are absolute gold and, frankly, he’s easily one of the greatest Batman actors we’ve had on screen. That being said, the romance between him and Michelle Pfeiffer is short but nicely played and it feels like a lot more than the screen time would be able to accommodate.

One bizarre character loss was the non return of Billy Dee Williams from the first film as Harvey Dent. Dent was originally supposed to be the Max Schreck role and when Walken came along, the names were changed and the character very slightly re-written. In fact, when Walken’s character has his come uppance at the close of the movie (in a scene I won’t describe here because I want to make this review relatively spoiler free), the original outcome of what Catwoman does to him was to scar him on one side of the face, thus fully bringing on his transformation as Two-Face with Billy Dee Williams heading up the next movie (Two-Face did appear as a lead villain in the third one but Williams’ contract was bought out and somebody else played him... I’ll get to that when I re-watch it and review it). I think maybe they should have just kept Dent as the villain here, all things considered... although Walken is great as Shreck.

There are some bizarre things in it too which either don’t make sense or are just a turn off. I was hugely angry at the sequence when The Penguin manages to take over the Batmobile as, at the time it just seemed so out of place tonally and something which wouldn’t be likely to happen anyway. That being said, I’m more comfortable watching that sequence now so, yeah, while parts of the movie have aged badly, others have become more palatable over the intervening years. Although, in terms of the whole script, the film seems to have a lot of highly sexualised dialogue... far more than I think a superhero movie would get away with today. It feels bizarrely out of place now and, well, just way too over the top for the mpre general approach to the material.

Also, I am still absolutely puzzled and confused as to how Danny Devito can lay flat on his back on his bed, flap his hands together right in front of his chest and... somehow make a shadow bat directly on the ceiling above him. I mean, for goodness sake, where the heck is the light source supposed to be coming from, his chest? And furthermore, I remember at the time wondering what the heck was going on when Michael Keaton takes his mask off at the end. It’s quite obvious from looking at him that Bruce Wayne blacks out areas around his eyes to hid his eyelids etc when wearing the Batman cowl. So when he takes this off then he should look like a panda or a racoon... instead, the shot cuts as Keaton takes his mask off and all of a sudden he’s got a completely clean face. I remember raving at the time about this at the cinema and, I think I was similarly offended on the opening sequence of Spectre for making a similar mistake when Daniel Craig pulls his mask off.

The best thing about the movie though, far more than the quite captivating (if predatory) art direction, is Danny Elfman’s fabulous score. Although the Batman theme is quite present, this isn’t just a do over score and the various new leitmotifs created for the other characters and some frenetic action scoring (with a lot of musical Mickey Mousing at times) is just generally a fantastic backdrop to the whole experience. It always bothered me that the original CD release of this film sounded kind of muted (a complaint I heard of from a number of people... it’s not just me) but this was finally corrected by LaLaLand records a few years ago with their deluxe, remastered and expanded reissue of the score. Also, the Siouxee And The Banshees song co-written by Elfman, Face To Face, is sadly underused (until the end of the end credits) but it’s a good one and Elfman manges to quite subtly weave a minimalistic version of his Batman theme in among the lyrics (it’s so well done that a lot of people at the time didn’t seem to realise that his main theme was even in the song). It’s a shame this wasn’t more of a hit in the charts because it’s one of my favourites of their songs (although nowhere near as brilliant as Peek-A-Boo, for sure).

And that’s me done on my second Christmas movie of the year, Batman Returns. It was nice seeing it and it’s easily the best of that particular bunch of films but I’m not sure I’m going to be re-watching it again anytime soon. It’s definitely entertaining and fairly easy on the eye though so, yeah, possibly even Tim Burton’s most interesting movie, I suspect.

Batman

Bat’s Entertainment

Batman
USA/UK 1989
Directed by Tim Burton
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

1989 came to be known as The Year Of The Bat for many, due to the release of Tim Burton’s Batman on the 50th Anniversary of the popular comic book character. I remember the mood of the time well. I also remember the queues to get in.

This was pretty much the last time I recall queuing for a movie that was quite literally a ‘blockbuster’. It’s something that, despite the popularity of films these days, you don’t really see anymore. I remember my first experience of the power of the blockbuster, trying to get through a packed Oxford Street in London to see Star Wars at the Dominion Cinema at the tail end of 1977 (literally a day or so away from New Year celebrations... it's a theatre now). Everywhere while the film played for months, monster queues would pop up outside cinemas going on for blocks. Even the word ‘blockbuster’ was first coined for this ‘film queueing’ phenomenon, with the release of Easy Rider in 1969, if memory serves. I remember seeing Batman a few times at cinemas but, the one time which really sticks in my memory is of lining up outside Barnet cinema for a midnight screening with my friend Kerry, in a queue which literally snaked back on itself about 12 times in front of the cinema before ending several blocks away. There was a fair amount of uncertainty as to whether the cinema would have enough seats on any given night to accommodate the amount of people trying to get into a performance.

So it would be fair to say that the film was a huge success (although, I think it technically was financially in the red for decades, in part owing to the deal struck with Jack Nicholson on this film... who was also, due to his shrewd contract, being paid for the sequels even though he’s not in them... at least, I seem to remember reading that).

It was well loved by audiences and critics too, although I remember George Peppard appearing on Breakfast TV at the time and, when asked, saying that the film was terrible. Most people liked it though and that included me. I wasn’t intending to watch this one again for a while but I keep meaning to watch the sequel for a Christmas review (it being a Christmas movie) so, I didn’t want to go into that one again without this one still fresh in my mind.

Okay, so, I absolutely loved it back in 1989 but, in some ways, the film doesn’t really hold up that well today. I don’t know what it is about Burton’s vision (a director I find really hit and miss, although always uniquely creative) but, while it does kind of scrape through as a coherent whole, the film does seem to be just a series of nice looking set pieces with maybe no real downtime to give them strength in contrast. It feels like almost every scene is screaming in your face for attention and you almost can’t quite hear everything in the crowd. To be fair, though, I think that’s probably also a criticism of the whole of Hollywood cinema from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s so, in itself it’s probably unfair to bury it just for that. It’s like this is the first wave of movies to be somewhat ‘detrimentally’ swayed by the aftermath of the huge impact of Star Wars on popular culture because, sometimes the things which make a phenomenon successful are not best understood by the art that it unintentionally spawns.

That being said, I didn’t dislike the movie this time around and can understand why Batman still holds a certain place of high esteem in the hearts of certain cinephiles.

One of the reasons that this was a phenomenon, I believe, is because super hero movies were few and far between at the time and, successful ones were hard to find. The Christopher Reeve starring Superman The Movie had been a big hit but that was over a decade prior to this. Batman had been portrayed in cinemas by different actors three times before this one but, the last time had been in 1966. So, audiences of various ages were ready for a new take. They didn’t want a comical version like the last one had been though, so the casting of Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman, someone who was known more for comic roles, met with a huge letter writing campaign objecting to his involvement... boy, I wonder what would have happened if this movie was being made in the internet era. I never had a problem with the idea myself (I’d quite liked him in his previous collaboration with the director, Beetlejuice) and, when I eventually saw him in the role, I think I was justified in holding my tongue. 

Keaton is an absolutely brilliant pick for this film as so many of the actors and actresses here are. What a cast! Kim Basinger is brilliant but there are also some great character artists here, among them Michael Gough (as Alfred), Pat Hingle (as Commissioner Gordon), Jack Palance, William Hootkins and even Lando Calrissian himself, Billy Dee Williams, in the role of District Attorney Harvey Dent. I remember getting excited in the cinema when I saw this and was waiting for him to transform into super villain Two-Face before the end of the picture although, well, it didn’t happen. “Huh?” I thought when the credits rolled, “They must be saving that for the sequel.” Alas, although Billy Dee Williams was contracted to continue playing the role, his contract was bought out by Warners and when Harvey Dent finally becomes Two Face for the third movie in the series, Tommy Lee Jones took over the job.

Looking at the film now, there are some nice things about it. It looks lovely in that dark, gothic way that Burton soon became known for although, I think some of the editing on this one is a bit jarring. Sometimes deliberately so, when we are startled by a close up of a TV screen being smashed by a boxing glove and sometimes, less so, when Burton will attempt to hide the visual edit by carrying on the sound of one scene into another (on a specific sound cue like The Joker’s laughter). Incidentally, the destruction of TV sets by The Joker as opposed to, I dunno, just changing the channel or switching them off like a normal person, seems to be some kind of running character trademark here.

Other things of note would be the turning over of a Joker card from a deck at a key point in the narrative, foreshadowing his character’s fate... and the strangely deliberate lack of period in the film, where technology from all eras comes crashing together to give the setting a timeless appearance (much like the old 1930s and 40s Universal Horror movies which, I’m sure, Burton was probably influenced by as a kid). I especially like the way that both Keaton and Nicholson compliment Kim Basinger on her apartment with the observation that it has "lots of space"... something which obviously re-enforces the connection between their two characters as being different impressions of the same coin, in the way in which they both tend to express their psychological abberations.

There are also a lot of references to other moments of both comic history and pop culture scattered throughout the movie... such as the police file photos of Jack Nicholson’s character, which look to me like they’ve been taken from One Flew Over A Cuckoo’s Nest, or the references to Vicky Vale’s photographic work in Corto Maltese (after the famous comic book character of the same name, no doubt).

There are also some nice musical references such as the use of Beautiful Dreamer woven into the score which, to be fair, always reminds me of Mighty Joe Young but it’s used nicely here for an expression of The Joker’s more artistic side. Danny Elfman’s score is, of course, phenomenal and, although he’d already done a great score with Beetlejuice, this one really put him on the map. It is kinda clouded by comments that a lot of it may have been... let’s say ‘more than assisted with’ by Shirley Walker, who only receives a conductor’s credit in the final film. Certainly her scores for the Batman animated series sound very Elfmanesque although, to be fair, that was probably part of the brief. Now that she’s dead I suspect the truth will never come out but, I like both composers so I don’t really care. It sounds like this was, maybe, a great collaborative venture, asides from the usual orchestration work by Steve Bartek but, you know, I’m just guessing from differing viewpoints I’ve read and information which sometimes seems to come to light. Great score though, either way.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Batman. If you watch it now, it’s almost more a film about what cinema was doing at the time rather than something which holds together as all that much more. It’s somewhat flawed, I feel but, strangely watchable and certainly entertaining in parts. I’ve no desire to see it again for a while but chances are I will circle back to it again at some point in my life. At the time it was a benchmark movie and deserves a certain amount of respect for that, I think. Not to mention, it also really put cinematic artist Tim Burton on the map too, I believe. Worth a look, if only for the nostalgia rush.

Score - A Film Music Documentary + Score - A Film Music Documentary... The Interviews

The Winds Of Score

Score - A Film Music Documentary
USA 2016 Directed by Matt Schrader
Epicleff Media Blu Ray Zone A

plus

Score - A Film Music Documentary
The Interviews - Educational Edition
by Matt Schrader
Createspace
ISBN: 978-1974367412
A NUTS4R2 TWO-IN-ONE REVIEW

“… the really simple brass ‘brahms’ of Inception. Now, when Chris (Nolan) and I did those, they were a story point, an absolute story point. They were in the script. And then they sort of became ubiquitous, in a funny way, in trailer music. People were just sort of using them as transitional pieces. So the idea that they actually tell a story got lost. They’re just a sound effect. So their meaning got distorted and so there’s a sort of misuse of that.”
Hans Zimmer.


Score - A Film Music Documentary is something I didn’t think I’d get to see over here. I’d just assumed it would be one of those films that didn’t get a UK release and would sink without a trace with no other venue to watch it on other than the slight possibility of a dodgy download somewhere. However, I was very pleased to find that there is this Blu Ray release in the US (it’s also been released in the UK but only as a DVD release for some strange reason). I was also surprised to learn that there is an accompanying educational edition, book companion to the film with full length transcripts of the many interviews conducted for this... about 90% of which doesn’t seem to have actually made it into the film so, actually, it’s a very valuable resource independent of the actual documentary itself. I was delighted to be presented with this on my 50th birthday by a friend earlier in the year, before I even knew this tome existed.

There is also, as it happens, a release of Ryan Taubert’s score for this film but, alas, it’s only available as an electronic download and not as a proper CD edition so I probably won’t get to hear it away from the movie. I really do fail to see how a movie about film scores would ignore a segment of the fan base for such things and not release it in a high quality presentation on the best available media. I guess it says something about the studios who control these properties that they’re a little out of touch, I guess.

So, anyway, this really is not a bad documentary and, although it deals primarily with the state of scoring or the film industry now, it’s actually quite unique in its own way because it interviews a lot of the ‘now’ composers who are the ‘new guard’ including some of my absolute favourites like Bear McCreary, Brian Tyler Hans Zimmer and Marco Beltrami. I mean, there’s a whole host of names in here and chances are that, even if movie music isn’t your thing, you’ve heard at least a few scores by each of the many interviewees here. And it was certainly nice to finally be able to put faces to the names I have adorning the, literally thousands, of film score discs I have lining every wall and alcove of my immediate environment.

Although it’s been said by some people that the film only deals with modern scoring from the 1960s and onwards, I think that’s a little unfair as the documentary is only an hour and a half long (personally, I would have liked it to be at least four hours) and there are some deliberate nods to many of the composers who have made landmark scores in the past. Admittedly, there are less golden age composers than I thought would have made the grade (where are Korngold and Tiomkin?) but the film does acknowledge certain aspects of the past with dedicated segments to composers such as Alfred Newman, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams although, of those, the only one still living, Johnny Williams, is not actually interviewed for this movie. That being said, I’m kind of glad that the overall focus of this one is a little slanted to modern composers and their methods/practices because, frankly, we’ve already seen a lot of the other stuff countless times... I think interviews with people like Christopher Young, Junkie XL and the great Hans Zimmer are far more valuable at the moment.

The movie opens with... I think it was Marco Beltrami... demonstrating a dying piano way up on a deserted hill which is connected to a studio by loads of wires which react to the wind. So the wind and environment are helping create the musical texture and, as he says, the notes travel through the wire faster than the wind carries them so you kind of hear the echo of the notes first. This is a great opening hook to start the film off with. It then shows the importance of score by using snippets of the Rocky films under Bill Conti’s famous ‘getting stronger’ theme and really gets the message home for an audience who are perhaps unused to contemplating such things (although whether any of them would sit still for a movie about film scores is anybody’s guess).

The documentary has a number of interview snippets with various composers, mostly new guys although there are some people like Quincy Jones also added into the mix and it’s an extremely valuable bunch of excerpts for the modern film score afficionado, it has to be said. There are also numerous, valuable clips of the various composers either conducting or overseeing the recordings of the films from various scoring sessions, which makes for some interesting watching. Especially when they show the cues being performed in one half of the screen and the accompanying visuals for such movies as Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (scored by Joe Kraemer) and Casino Royale (scored by David Arnold) in the other half.

It’s also nice that you have legends like Hans Zimmer and his contemporaries paying their respects and expressing their admiration of some of the past ‘greats’ of film score composers such as John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. It’s just nice to see that the importance of these people is so well appreciated still. Plus, a good visual representation of how leitmotif works, as seen when notes of recurring motifs are highlighted during sections of Howard Shore’s score to The Fellowship Of The Ring.

There are also some very interesting choices of interviewee such as a music psychologist, Siu-Lan Tan, who talks about the way music effects us. How music can be delivered directly into the specific reward centre of the brain, the same place where sensations such as chocolate and sex are processed (ha, I knew it). Actually, I found her the most fascinating of the subjects in a way and I am now on a mission to seek out and read her books about this specific subject.

It’s also nice that there’s a lot of fun stuff in here too and if you want to see Bear McCreary rocking the Hurdy Gurdy and talking about the history of the instrument and why he used it on the TV show Black Sails, this is the place to do that. Indeed, a longer take of him playing the instrument and talking about it is one of the very nice extras accompanying the film on the Blu Ray and DVD release of Score - A Film Music Documentary.

The book, Score - A Film Music Documentary: The Interviews, is available separately and, rather than just reiterating all the great stuff found in the movie, it actually gives you way more information when it comes to each composer and their attitude and approach to the art and craft of scoring. There are a couple of slight niggles with this volume though.

One is found in the very first words of the first chapter. Each chapter comprises an interview with a specific composer and starts off by listing a few of the scores they are known for plus a list of awards, nominations and other musical affiliations but I was quite annoyed to see that the first score listed for David Arnold was for Independence Day - Resurgence, the sequel to a film Arnold actually did write the score for. Alas, as I’m sure most fans of film music will be able to tell you, the score for this sequel was actually by Thomas Wander and Howard Kloser. Now, I don’t know if maybe Arnold did actually do some work on this and his score was rejected but I’m guessing that this would surely have been known before this book went to print. So, yeah, that’s a problem. When the same kind of error occurs later in the book for Tom Holkenborg, it’s at least understandable as I think the book may have already been published before he was taken off of Justice League and Danny Elfman took over scoring duties on that one.

The other slight problem I have with this book is the amount of typos. There are absolutely loads of sentences which start off with a lower case letter dotted around the book. At least, I hope these are typos and not some bizarre attempt to change the way English grammar works, at any rate.

In spite of all that though, the volume is something which I think most film score junkies will appreciate. It’s true there are some things you expect certain composers to talk about... so included in David Arnold’s section is his enthusiasm for using Monty Norman’s James Bond theme at various points in a Bond movie and director James Cameron talks about the importance of the temp score and working with James Horner. However, there’s also a lot of stuff which people may find less familiar and it’s in these words by the people in the front line that you gain the real knowledge from.

For instance, Quincy Jones starts off talking about how hard it was to be a black composer in 1960s Hollywood. But it’s interesting to learn how he'd make a conscious effort to get away from representational music (what we would call ‘Mickey Mousing’) and to score something more in touch with mood and feeling/setting (something which Bernard Herrmann used to do, I believe). Similarly, the composing team of Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) and Atticus Ross talk about completely coming at the score from a soundscape kind of sensibility to ensure that each section is appropriate for the mood and tone of a picture and scene. Being an admirer of their score for the US version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I found their interview section very refreshing and informative.

It’s also interesting to read about the contradictions between composers talking about their work too. Some think the sole job of the score is to just illustrate what’s already on the screen but others, such as Hans Zimmer, more correctly talk about the music enhancing rather than supporting the film. Filling in bits to give the audience emotional direction, for example.

Another interesting point is when the great Bear McCreary makes a really good case for why composers have to use orchestrators and why it’s actually, in the long run, more preferable to the lifestyle than doing it on your own. It’s something I’ve never been quite comfortable with in terms of the artistry of the profession but Bear more than justifies this practice here. He also talks about how you should put the directors in a very comfortable state of mind and connect with them to have the most productive dialogue in the first place.

On the other hand another of my favourite modern film score composers, Brian Tyler, is not a fan of letting what he writes go to orchestrators and mixers and, although he kinda admits it’s a necessity, he will sometimes go and remix it all again afterwords anyway. He also cherishes the imperfections of timing and performance because that's how the music feels "alive and original" which is nice. When you see a concert I’ve always been conscious that this is the only way you will ever see it performed exactly a certain way... no repeats, it’s always going to sound different every time. It’s interesting to see Tyler celebrating this natural phenomenon as being extremely beneficial to the final performance recording of the art form.

And then there’s Garry Marshall. Now, it could be that I was reading his section with the wrong tone but he seemed to come across, at least to me, as either a complete nutter or a total idiot. For example, if he wants a sequence in a film to seem like something is important... he’ll just put in a song by U2. I don’t know, maybe he’s just got a really great sense of humour and I was reading it incorrectly but... yeah... if I were a composer I might have second thoughts about collaborating with him on the strength of his words here, that’s for sure.

However, the book is, as I said, a really useful and insightful tome, in spite of the occasional piece of misinformation and rampant typos . An excellent companion piece to Score - A Film Music Documentary. If you’re a fan of the art of motion picture music then chances are you would have already seen/read this one or added it to your list. If not, then you really should and both the book and the film are certainly good for people who have no idea about the art and want to get up to speed. I’m really happy to have both the Blu Ray and the paperback and these get a big, raised conductor’s baton thumbs up from me. They’re certainly noteworthy.

You can read my review of a Hans Zimmer concert here and a review of a Brian Tyler concert here.

Justice League

Beleaguered Leaguers

Justice League
2017 USA Directed by Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah, there will be some spoilers in this one, I think.

Okay, so let me just say up front that Justice League is not a terrible movie by any stretch of the imagination... it’s just not a very good one either. It has its great little moments and a whole bunch of problems but, out of the five films to date making up the story arc of this particular set of interlocking DC superhero movies, this is about halfway up the list in terms of being an effective and entertaining movie.

DC’s track record hasn’t been all that great since the fantastic last part of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Night trilogy, it has to be said. Man Of Steel (reviewed here) was just dreadful. Batman Vs Superman - Dawn of Justice (reviewed here) was a fair bit better but ultimately not very well received by critics and audiences alike, it seemed to me. Suicide Squad (reviewed here) was... okayish but really wasn’t making people that happy either. But then we had ‘the movie’. Wonder Woman (reviewed here) isn’t just the greatest superhero movie of all time (and, yeah, I know that’s a brave and bold claim to make but I promise this is not a knee jerk reaction to it)... it’s also one of the best movies in the past few years, period. It’s also flattened all the competition at the box office for the forseeable future (or just maybe until the new Star Wars movie premieres next month) and it more than deserves its success.

The thing is, though, everyone was kinda hoping that Justice League would somehow live up to the almost impossible standard that Patty Jenkins set with Wonder Woman and, frankly, that would be hard to top even by her, when she comes to work on the sequel. So I guess it’s no surprise that this movie comes nowhere near as close to the dizzying heights that Professor William Moulton Marston’s amazonian princess scaled to in her own solo movie adaptation. A shame, though, that Justice League doesn’t come close to the Batman VS Superman movie either.

Now I’m not going to go into the production problems this film had, what with Zack Snyder leaving for very understandable reasons and Joss Whedon reshooting the thing in places... firstly because I would be no good at figuring out which bits were directed by whom and, secondly, because it’s the film we’ve ended up with, for better or worse. Given Snyder’s reasons for leaving, there’s absolutely no point in having an autopsy on why this theatrically released cut doesn't really cut it.

Okay... so lets look at the good stuff first and get that out of the way...

Well, some of the action was okay, especially the Amazon’s fighting the villain of the piece, Steppenwolf, near the start... and also in the bank scene where Gal Gadot’s Diana saves a bunch of people by doing some cool action stuff. That being said, I did miss the sudden glow of orange as the metal on her wrist bands cool down after a bullet hit, which was a nice detail in Patty Jenkins movie during the alley scene in London... itself an homage, presumably, to the alley scene in Superman The Movie. Gadot is just wonderful again here, as she was in her previous two movies with this character because a) she looks just like she could do all this stuff in real life and b) because she performed it in such a way that she doesn’t betray the character as set up in the previous two films.

Similarly, say what you will about Ben Affleck but I think he makes a brilliant Bruce Wayne/Batman and I really hope he doesn’t leave the role after this. I think he could really do well in a solo Batman movie and I would really like to see it.

Henry Cavill... well I hated Superman in Man Of Steel but that’s more because of the script than Cavill’s performance and I certainly warmed to him more in Batman Vs Superman - Dawn Of Justice. He’s great here too and you really believe in his character, who he portrays with the same kind of honourable presence as some of the great actors who have played the part before him... and I’m specifically thinking of Kirk Alyn and Christopher Reeve here. Now if they’d only bring back the ‘S’ kiss curl and the red trunks then the illusion would be complete.

Jeremy Irons as Alfred has about as much screen time as he did in the previous movie but I think his character makes a bigger impact here, with various ironic comments thrown at Bruce Wayne which I found fairly entertaining.

 It was also great seeing a Green Lantern in the sequence flashing back to a battle on Earth which took places many hundreds of years ago, too. It’s been suggested that the cloak on him was a reference to the original Golden Age iteration of the character in comics but, the people saying that might do well to remember that the original Green Lantern’s costume was red (yeah, I know that’s ridiculous but don’t blame me... I didn’t write those things).

And that’s mostly the good stuff.

Now we also have three new members on the team...

Ezra Miller does okay as a really bizarre and teenage angsty version of the silver age version of The Flash (aka Barry Allen) and he was getting a good reaction from the audience at my screening. Personally I didn’t find him all that easy to identify with and I could take him or leave him, to be fair. Then we have Cyborg, who was a member of the Teen Titans the last time I read of him (sometime in the early 1980s) so goodness knows what he’s doing in the Justice League of America (as the supergroup was always known in the comics... until maybe recently). He’s played here by a guy called Ray Fisher and, although he turns in a solid performance, I couldn’t help but think that the script wasn’t doing him any favours. He just comes across as a bit dull, to be honest.

Jason Momoa’s version of Aquaman is a more fun character but, honestly, is nothing like the Aquaman I used to enjoy reading about when I was a kid (I even had a little action figure). The clean shaven, blonde version of Superman with the blue eyes, orange suit and green legs and gauntlets has morphed into what is presumably a more contemporary comic book version of the character (well... at least he still has both of his arms here). Again... he was okay but I really would have preferred the version of the character I grew up with here.

Okay... let’s get to the really bad then...

So much of the dialogue between Batman and Diana feels forced and, bearing in mind the amount of times that Steve Trevor’s name is bandied about, it somehow seems disrespectful of the truly marvellous solo Wonder Woman movie what came out earlier in the year.

Another thing which felt out of place was that the background story about the ‘mother boxes’ seemed like it came completely out of the blue and Diana never once goes to Thermyscira to consult with the Amazons. Indeed, she even goes so far as to say that they cannot leave their island... which is a completely redundant and contradictory idea in terms of their purpose on Earth, to be honest. This film so badly needed a scene between Diana and her mother and it similarly needed ‘the amazon horde’ to come galloping in for the somewhat bland (as it is here) action finale too. Especially since their own battle with Steppenwolf near the beginning of the movie was a heck of a lot better.

The way Superman is brought back to life is really stupid Doctor Frankenstein stuff and I couldn’t help but think it all seemed just a little too optimistic and contrived. “Gee whiz... wouldn’t it be great if we could use this mother box technology to bring Superman back to life with?”... well, okay, it wasn’t quite like that but it was pretty close. It felt like the whole thing was written by a small child at this point. What was worse than that though was... Superman and Batman were allies by the end of Batman Vs Superman. In fact, Batman saved Superman’s mother’s life. So why the heck would the newly woken Superman be so aggressively hostile to Batman and the others and try to kill them all? It made no sense. It was like watching that truly dumb scene in Superman III where he splits into two and the evil and good halves fight. It just made no sense.

And then they trot out Amy Adam’s Lois Lane to calm him down? Honestly, it felt like her role was really pushed to the back in this and the scene where she and Diane Lane as Martha Kent were talking in the newspaper offices felt like it was shot quickly in the director’s favourite room in his house one afternoon. The set dressing and feel of the scene seemed to be completely unconvincing.

The music is perplexing too. Danny Elfman has been tapped for this one but I felt like either Hans Zimmer or, especially, Rupert Gregson-Williams (who had provided real emotional depth to the Wonder Woman movie) should have got the gig here. Instead, Elfman uses various themes from films gone by to weave a new musical direction for the franchise and... it just felt wrong. Okay, so he uses Zimmer’s Superman theme from Man Of Steel at one point and he similarly uses Zimmer’s “Is She With You?” theme for Wonder Woman in a less striking arrangement (but without using Gregson-Williams gorgeous thematic material). However, he also uses John WIlliams' Superman music at one point too plus... he even uses his own 1980s Batman theme for some of Ben Affleck’s Batcentric shenanigans. None of that really made sense... what’s he trying to evoke here. It’s a nice enough score, when you can hear it over the noisy sound effects but... it doesn’t knock it out of the park like some of the films in this series do.

Okay, last thing I’ll highlight here is the running time. This is the shortest of the recent DC movies, clocking in at one minute shy of two hours. But you are dealing with six superhero characters, not to mention the big bad guy and the introduction of the mother box on the narrative. How do you cram all that into two hours without losing sight of something? Short answer... you don’t. This film feels like it should be a lot longer and, I dunno, less flippant and somewhat darker in tone considering the events that have birthed it in the previous films. Things felt somewhat rushed... especially when it hurtles to a climax that is less than interesting.

Also... you have continuity errors like the mother box being used to bring Cyborg to life being in the previous film, which makes no sense. Or the fact that the third mother box was found during World War I when, if you check out the epilogue scene included on the home video version of Wonder Woman, you’ll know that Etta Candy and the others were tasked with the mission to find it after the end of the war depicted in that film. Thins like this just seemed a bit like sloppy writing to me, it has to be said.

So, yeah, that’s my review of Justice League. All in all I’m glad I went to see it... if for nothing more than to see Gal Gadot totally slaying it as Wonder Woman. However, the film didn’t blow me away, for sure and it certainly felt a little more anti-climactic than I was expecting. All in all, if you loved Wonder Woman then you’ll probably want to see this one anyway. I can’t really recommend it to anyone on any other basis though so... make of that what you will. Old school DC comics fans, though, would do well to look out for the first of the two post-credits scenes if they want to see a familiar homage and... don’t miss the end if you want to see what happened to another character from a previous movie in the series.

78/52

Shower Power

78/52
2017 USA Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe
UK cinema release print.

78/52 is an unusual documentary in that it spends an hour and a half examining what is, after all, a scene which last less than a minute in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho... the (in)famous shower scene. Of course, the power and initial shock (on first viewing) of this sequence more than justifies the importance and influence it has had on cinema history and modern pop culture but... well, if anything I could have done with a slightly longer movie on the subject (but I’ll come to why I think that in a minute or two).

The film is certainly interesting and the writer/director Alexandre O. Philippe has obviously put in a lot of time and effort piecing together small pieces of footage from a wealth of interesting people from both behind and in front of the camera... giving us a kind of collective ‘expert witness’ of the quality and visceral effectiveness of this effective short sequence. This includes some interesting little moments from Janet Leigh’s body double, who spent a lot of the time filming the scene... her body is in the majority of the short scene, which took seven days to film. Basically, if you see any shots without her face in clear view in the shower scene in Psycho (including the dead body in the clean up following the murder), you’re almost certainly looking at actress/model Marli Renfro, playing the part of the ‘cut down before her time’ character of Marion Crane.

And there are some interesting nuggets to be found during the vivisection of the sequence, some of which I actually didn’t know and some of which are, if you watch the film, self evident. For example, the awkward cut back one last time to the shower head in the pan away from Marion’s body before you get to the money is picked up on by one of the people being interviewed and then explained by another as a mistake in that it was later found that Janet Leigh had taken a visible breath. So that moment had to be eviscerated from the movie as quickly as Norman Bate’s knife made short work of the red herring of a character whose demise is depicted in the scene in question.

There is also a great little moment where the relevance of the painting that Norman Bates (played in Psycho by Anthony Perkins) moves out of the way to reveal the ‘spy hole’ is explained, in terms of both its relevance in the world of art but also its purpose in its placement in the film. I won’t go into it here because... you know... you can watch the film and find out for yourself but, basically, the voyeur is removing a famous interpretaion of a voyeuristic scene to be a participant in the very act that the painting is depicting. And this is all very interesting and revealing, to be fair.

That being said, I did find the documentary to be lacking in many ways, too.

For instance, the long list of people included, most of them extremely briefly, like Mick Garris, Walter Murch, Danny Elfman, Guillermo Del Toro, Neil Marshall and Peter Bogdanovich... are people you would trust to make an observation on this movie but there are others in here who, while very enthusiastic, well... you have to wonder what warranted their inclusion. Presumably, for instance, Elijah Wood is here mostly to comment on the acting in the parlour scene (which is also discussed here) since he’s played a notable psycho or two on screen himself (such as in the recent remake of Maniac or as Kevin in Sin City). Some of the others, however, you have to wonder about.

The biggest problem with the people interviewed, however, is that most of them have such a limited amount of screen time that I would have liked to have seen and heard more from all of them and I reckon the film could have done with being another half an hour longer, in all honesty.

Another fairly large problem with the movie are the re-enactments of certain scenes in Psycho which make you wonder why the director bothered with that when he could have just tracked in scenes from the original. Similarly, the film has a lovely string soundtrack by Jon Hegel (which I really wish was on CD so I could listen to it out of context) and it’s playing over everything, including clips from Psycho and... well you just have to wonder why they chose to go with an original score for this when Bernard Herrmann’s powerful score to Psycho, which the score to 78/52 is obviously trying to invoke in some way, was surely available. I also think that Bernard Herrmann’s astonishing contribution to the film could have been covered a little more in depth, especially since the story of Hitchcock’s insistence that the shower scene needed no music on it until Herrmann proved him wrong is nowhere in evidence in this documentary.

Another thing which is absent here is the very obvious ‘elephant in the room’ of the fact that, as far as I can tell from sorting out various bits of second hand testimony and evidence in books and interviews over the years, Hitchcock didn’t actually direct the shower scene himself but, instead, left it up to the scene’s designer, Saul Bass (one of my hero’s). Now there seems to be a lot of contrary evidence to both support and disregard the claims of both Hitchcock and Bass that they directed the scene and this film doesn’t mention this to weigh in on either version of events. It simply ignores it although, to be fair, it does take a little time to show a few of the many gazillions of story boards that Bass designed for his shoot... I know who I believe but I guess that’s an argument for a different time, especially since, as I said, the auteurial ownership of the scene does not come up in this piece. In fact, it would also have been nice to see the original shower scene actually played out before us in one piece as a reminder of the visceral power of it too, it seems to me. It’s surely been a while since a lot of movie goers watched Psycho.

Another thing which might have been made clearer... and I don’t remember it coming up in the film itself although it might have been so quick that I somehow missed it, is the reason for the title of this film. Apparently, according to the IMDB, it’s because the short scene under scrutiny here, is made up of 78 different camera set ups and 52 edits... which could have done with a little clarification, I think. I suspect some people are going to be walking away from the screenings on this one puzzled about it.

Something else which would have been nice to have been touched upon, since Marli Renfro, the cover girl of the September 1960 Playboy bunny girl, was on hand... was the mysterious and bizarre story of her apparent murder and the confusion of a killer who actually murdered the wrong ‘girl in the shower’ stand in... or some such. I actually don’t know the ins and outs of that story myself (the book on the subject is in one of my many ‘to be read’ piles) but it seems like it might be, at the very least, of passing relevance here. 

All in all, I quite enjoyed certain parts of 78/52, such as the sequence showing the stabbing of different kinds of melons to establish the perfect sound of a knife passing through human flesh and it was nice to hear Jamie Lee Curtis’s own thoughts on her mother’s demise in the scene in question. It’s something which fans of the movie should probably take a look at sometime but I did come out of the cinema feeling fairly unsatisfied with the production. On the other hand, it did provoke some discussion between me and a friend who I saw it with in the pub afterwards... so that was a good thing. This won’t be making any of my top ten lists this year but, as I say, if you are a Hitchcock or Psycho fan, then you might want to give this one a go.

Before I Wake

Am Mad Butterfly

Before I Wake
USA 2016 Directed by Mike Flanagan
Intrepid Pictures German Blu Ray Zone B 

I don’t know how I managed to miss this one last year.

I first became aware of  Before I Wake earlier in the year when Varese Sarabande released a very limited pressing of the score on CD. Since it was by The Newton Brothers and had themes by Danny Elfman, I figured I’d pick it up in advance of the inevitable cinema release of the film. However, I then started wandering the internet and realised that it had already been out at the cinema in this country... according to the IMDB it got released in the UK in April of 2016 so, since I like the odd horror movie or two, I am surprised I totally missed this one when it came out. Especially since it was written and directed by Mike Flanagan.

Flanagan is someone who I have a weak track record with at the moment. I saw his Occulus movie with Karen Gillan (which also had a cool score by The Newton Brothers) and I wasn’t much impressed. Nor was I tempted to go and see his prequel to the US version of Ouija after the original movie had been so dire (although I’m told Flanagan’s movie is pretty good). I did, however, love one of his first features, Absentia (which I reviewed here) and so once I’d found out this was by him, I felt on more familiar territory than when I watched the trailer... which makes the film look like a glorified version of that old tale, The Monkey’s Paw. Which it kinda is, actually, with just a little more window dressing.

I ordered a German Blu Ray for the princely sum of £6 because the UK doesn’t have a Blu Ray release of this yet and, if the marketing of this movie continues in the way it has, I doubt if we could expect one anytime soon, either.

The film itself stars Kate Bosworth as Jessie and Thomas Jane as Mark, a bereaved mother and father who have lost their only child, a son, in a freak drowning accident in their bathtub. So they have decided to adopt a child, which is where their new foster son Cody, played by Jacob Tremblay, enters the picture. Cody has had a number of troubled placements with previous families and we already get more than a hint of just how troubled they were from a pre-credits sequence showing one of the previous foster fathers going to shoot Cody dead in bed.

Now, one of the nice things about this movie is that there are no twists around the corner for you to puzzle over and, inevitably, be disappointed in when you get them an hour before the end of the piece. Instead, everything is up front and out in the open so it’s not that long before Cody, who tries to stay up without falling asleep every day and night, falls asleep and the things of his dreams are manifested to those closest to him, in this case his new foster parents. At the start this seems a benign gift rather than the curse it appears to be later... he dreams of beautifully colourful butterflies and they appear to Jessie and Mark until he wakes up. After a few more nights of this strange behaviour where he gets more surreal in his dreaming of the butterflies as his impression of them grows (there’s a nice scene with brightly coloured ‘light bulb butterflies’, for example), things start to get a little out of hand as he dreams up Jessie and Mark’s dead son. Rather than report all this, though, in a stunning display of unbelievable stupidity from the central protagonists, the couple decide to accept these occurrences as fairly normal, rather than go through the obvious denial and evidence gathering stage.

Mark realises, after a few visitations, that it’s not really his dead son but Cody’s imagination toppling out of his mind. Jessie, however, wants to carry on with theses manifestations so she gets a doctor to prescribe her child some sleeping pills for the evening. Alas, what she doesn’t know is that Cody also has a monster that eats people living in his head and it's this which brings the peril right into Jessie and Mark’s house....

And that’s as far as I going with the story set up, other than it’s got no twist ending (as I said earlier) and it’s a fairly straight forward arc to the end, especially when it strays away from that Monkey’s Paw angle a little. Another thing that’s nice about it in terms of the story is that, although it’s not particularly twisted or unpredictable, it does do a couple of things at certain points which are not the usual things you would see in a cosy, American horror movie. There are genuine sacrifices made by the characters at specific moments and that gives the film a lift in certain places where, honestly, it sometimes needs them.

The only weakness I could find was the muffled and unrealistic reaction the main adult protagonists have on finding out their new foster son dreams things alive but if you are okay with this, then some of the surreal imagery, like the two light bulb butterflies who swarm together with many others and become the demonic eyes of some nightmare creature, are quite rewarding. Also, the director resists the usual Hollywood horror fetish of constantly moving the camera around like you’re on a roller coaster ride. There are loads of static or extremely slow tracked/panned/zoomed shots in this and it gives the film a nice leisurely pace. Whether that’s necessarily a good thing for a horror movie to possess is something which is perhaps better left for another discussion but it makes a change from some of the other stuff you see in modern horror movies so I felt this was a good move.

And yes, the score by The Newton Brothers and Danny Elfman is pretty good as a stand alone lesson and certainly appropriate as you get into the movie. Again, it’s not ‘quite’ your typical horror movie scoring sessions here although, as I’ve said a few times above, it does have its moments.

Before I Wake is not the best Mike Flanagan movie I’ve seen, for sure. Absentia still takes my number one spot in terms of that. It is, however, fairly good fun and if you like low key horror movies with not too many scares (it has to be said) but a nice tone and some inventive creations thrown in, then this is probably a film you’ll be okay with. I’m now wondering if it’s time I tried to find this director’s other feature that I haven’t seen before, Hush. Maybe I’ll try to catch up with that one next.

Greatest Christmas Music

Christmas Needle Drop

So it’s that time of the year again when seasonal shoppers trample peace and good will into their fellow consumers, as they hastily clamber over their fallen bodies to snatch up the best bargains they can in the name of completing that long list of Christmas shopping requirements. Thankfully, it’s also the time of year when a fair few people get an extended holiday away from work and so the anticipation of this annual absence from the drudgery of the real world (for the most part) suffuses most of our hearts with a feeling of peace, well being and joy... blocking out thoughts of the gazillions of people who die in Christmas shopping traffic or those expiring from hypothermia as the winter bites down hard.

One of the things I always look forward to each year is the start of December because that’s when I feel I can legitimately start playing all my Christmas themed music without getting too many funny looks. So this year, I thought I’d do something new, for my blog, which is pull out and highlight my all time favourite Christmas sonorities for you all to consider listening to at this most festive time of the year. To make things more easier and less agonizing in deciding what’s what, I’ve put my eleven favourite Christmas albums, in reverse order of course, first and then made a second list for absolutely unmissable, stand alone Christmas themed tracks which aren’t on any of those albums listed. Before I start though, a few caveats...

You won’t find Johnny Williams’ two, almost certainly excellent, Home Alone scores on here. Why not? Well simply because I’ve never heard the scores or even seen the movies (and I still have no desire to see Macauly Caulkin do an impression of a work by Edvard Munch, thanks very much). I’m sure these are very good, Christmassy albums but, honestly, I can’t personally recommend them without having heard them.

Also, you won’t find Danny Elfman’s score to Edward Scissorhands on here. Yes, I know it’s been used in a gazillion seasonal adverts and has become almost synonymous with the yuletide season (and dodgy perfume) over the years and... it is a great score... there just wasn’t enough of a Christmas link for me to be able to justify extending my list to twelve, as far as I’m concerned. Elfman’s score for The Nightmare Before Christmas is similarly missing in action but for a simpler reason... I think it’s a bit rubbish and you can hear another, much more interesting musical's influences coming through from the temp track... at least I think I can. Either way, it’s just not for me. However, Elfman fans can relax because one of his Christmas scores did make it in here, so make like a snowflake and chill when it comes to that particular composer.

Okay so first up we have...



The Top Ten Coolest Christmas Albums

11. Everly by Bear McCreary
If you love the music of composer Bear McCreary as much as me, especially his amazing stuff for the last incarnation of the Battlestar Galactica TV show, then you’ll no doubt love the score to this Christmas set shoot ‘em up featuring a machine gun toting Salma Hayek. The icing on the cake is a bunch of Christmas songs with vocals performed by Brendan McCreary and Bear’s wife Raya Yarborough (seriously, her version of Silent Night is well worth the price of the CD). This album is quite new to me but it’s going to be spinning every year in December for me from now on.

10. Die Hard by Michael Kamen
This much loved Christmas action movie has a sequel which also takes place at Christmas. However, Kamen’s music for this first film is much more seasonal as, asides from quoting musical source material like Beethoven’s Ninth and Singin’ In The Rain, he also weaves in some festive tunes which mesh perfectly with the underscore and are manipulated in a similar way to how Kamen manipulates the audience’s emotions. There’s a wonderfully sinister interpolation of phrases from Winter Wonderland in here which will change the way you receive the spirit of the music.

9. Scrooged by Danny Elfman
Danny Elfman’s take on the classic Bill Murray update on Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol uses a lot of Christmas melodies and is a perfect summation of Elfman’s ‘Yuletide stylings’. My one complaint would be that the four note melody from Ronald Stein’s score to Roger Corman's ‘Lovecraft masquerading as Poe’ movie The Haunted Palace, so famously (and allegedly) stolen by Toto for the score to Dune, also seems to play a prominent role in this score. Still, a great listen and a fun album.

8. A Christmas Carol and A Child is Born by Bernard Herrmann
Double header from Kritzerland of two phenomenal Christmas scores, including songs, written by my all time favourite composer Bernard Herrmann. It’s a limited edition and probably out of print now but well worth grabbing if you can get hold of one.

7. Gremlins by Jerry Goldsmith
The late great Jerry Goldsmith’s famous score to Joe Dante’s ‘almost horror’ movie is a bit of a masterpiece. Again, the sequel to this was also set during Christmas but that score can’t hold a candle to this one. Asides from the Gremlins and Gizmo themes, of course, there’s some great seasonal tunes encoded into the DNA of this thing and it’s always going to be on my stereo throughout the season. The FSM expanded version of this score is a must-have.

6. Krampus by Douglas Pipes
What an incredible score to a newish Christmas movie. There’s some great, traditional tunes from the Xmas genre which are used to counterpoint and metamorphosise a horror film, and score, which is like a much grimmer version of Gremlins in tone. It’s kind of lazy to say that Pipes score is reminiscent of Elfman at his most Christmassy but he is and I honestly think he out Elfman’s Elfman in some passages. A grim and unsettling but ultimately fun and addictive listen.

5. It’s A Wonderful Life by Dimitri Tiomkin
Kritzerland finally gave us a limited edition of the music from this much loved, and rightly so, Christmas movie... blowing away all the pseudo compilation imitations on the market. It’s a great job they do on this score, considering the age of the master tapes... just put it on and find yourself transported back in time to a black and white Bedford Falls. How cool is it that we finally have this music released?

4. Doctor Who: The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe by Murray Gold
This Christmas special set in the 1940s is easily the most moving and emotional episode of Doctor Who ever and Gold’s music, presented by Silva Screen as a double header with music from the Christmas special The Snowmen, is absolutely heart rending. It doesn’t take many minutes of listening to this music before I’m a blubbery mess, crying into a handkerchief.

3. Star Wars Christmas Album - Christmas In The Stars
How can you not love an album of very strange songs sung by See Threepio, R2D2 and their alien friends to celebrate Christmas in a galaxy far, far away. It even has a young Bon Jovi on at least one track. Despite its absolutely infuriating lack of continuity with the rest of the Star Wars canon, something which my mind can’t even conceive, especially since the Christian faith surely wouldn’t exist in a universe with Jedi in it, it’s hard not to repeatedly play an album which has such cool songs as “What do you get a Wookie for Christmas when he already has a comb?” on it. I’m so glad this album is back in print and on CD.

2. A Charlie Brown Christmas by Vince Guaraldi
Jazz legend Vince Guaraldi’s amazing Christmassy score to the very first Charlie Brown animated special is absolutely spellbinding and something I will always come back to every Christmas. His slightly downbeat version of O Tannenbaum is the most powerful performance of that particular seasonal standard and this is also the first Charlie Brown score to feature the less Christmassy but much loved and popular Linus And Lucy theme. This is an album everybody should have on in the background on the approach to Christmas.

1. Christmas With The Chipmunks by David Seville
There is simply never going to be a better Christmas album than this outstanding volume of Christmas with The Chipmunks (now known, on Amazon, as Christmas With The Chipmunks Volume 2, for some reason). I’ve been listening to this every Christmas since I was born in 1968, originally on the first pressing vinyl and then, from about the mid 1990s, on a CD my friend in America sent me one year. It’s absolutely unbeatable and make sure it’s this version of the album you get because it has the most moving, “there’s something in my eye” rendition by Seville of Silver Bells that you’re ever likely to hear.



Bonus Beats - more unmissable single tracks

9. The Christmas Wine by John Barrry from The Lion In Winter
A very traditional arrangement which is almost hymn like in its rendition but it’s a beautiful side of John Barry from his prime which a lot of listeners may not be familar with. I’ve never seen the film but this is a cool album and this is a great track.

8. A Christmas Song by John Barry from The Last Valley
Another lovely score from a Barry scored movie I’ve never seen... this one sung in a language I don’t even understand (perhaps Latin?). This is another, peaceful hymn and is a good companion piece for my previous pick.

7. December Will Be Magic Again by Kate Bush
The ultimate queen of modern popular music brought this song out very early in her career... which is cool because it’s become a Christmas standard and transports me straight back to the 1970s... even if I did only discover her music from the mid 1980s. This is classic, early Bush and should be played at least once at every Christmas party to make said party more bearable.

6. Birth Of A Penguin by Danny Elfman
Absolutely astonishing, jingly, snowy, Christmassy track which serves as a prologue (and pre-credits sequence) to Tim Burton’s Christmas set, second Batman movie. This fun track tells of two parents throwing away their newborn where he floats into the sewers in a basket before being raised by penguins. This leads into a dynamic version of the Batman theme and it’s a great album to get because it also features the gem of a musical piece that is used to accompany the ‘transformation’ of Selina Kyle into The Catwoman. The expanded La La Land edition is definitely the way to go here because the original release of the score was always sounding muddy and muted... the two La La Land editions don’t.

5. Dragnet Parts 1 and 2 by Stan Freberg
This double header of a Christmas sketch parody of the original Dragnet TV show by Stan Freberg trumps some of his other Christmas themed stuff and also features Miklos Rozsa’s four note theme from The Killers (Rozsa successfully sued the makers of the original Dragnet for nicking this part of his score). It’s a bit of a masterpiece and what more can one say about the inimitable Freberg other than... most people call them Green Onions but really they’re called scallions.

4. 7 O'clock News/ Silent Night by Simon and Garfunkel
The most chilling and depressing version of Silent Night you’re ever likely to find, from Simon and Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album. This cross-fades some horrendously chilling news stories such as a serial killer strangling and stabing student nurses and President Nixon’s response to the anti-Vietnam war protests against the classic hymn, with the grimness of the news broadcast getting louder and louder until the carol is almost fighting to be heard underneath. Jaw dropping stuff and a timely reminder that not everyone is having a great Christmas.

3. Troika from Lieutenant Kijé by Prokofiev
I first became aware of Prokofiev’s Troika as a pre-teen when it was used as the opening title music from Woody Allen’s masterpiece Love And Death. Since then, of course, I've noticed it’s also one of those “Christmas tunes to go to” when it comes to sampling a bit of the main melody and sticking it into your Christmas song. The original composition and orchestration is, however, a beautiful piece which will always conjure up the sound of sleigh bells in my mind.

2. Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown? by John Barry from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
I’ve never understood why more people don’t realise this but the John Barry song Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown? from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service isn’t just one of the greatest Christmas songs ever recorded, it’s also, without doubt, the greatest James Bond song ever released. Sure, Goldfinger, From Russia With Love and You Only Live Twice are great songs... but they pale in comparison with this masterpiece, sung here by Nina of Nina and Frederick fame (they did a cool version of Little Boxes too). On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is easily the greatest Bond movie by a country mile and, though it also has a more famous song sung by Louis Armstrong (of which I’m not a big fan), it also has the coolest Bond song ever... this one.

1. I Wanna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek by The Go Gos.
Oh wow. you can’t go wrong with this wonderful piece by the GoGo’s. You will hear all the love for a Dalek that you can get in this song, and even hear one join in on occasion, asking for Mince Pies and stuff. It’s a silly song but most Christmas songs are and this is one of the silliest... therefore the greatest and most entertaining Christmas song ever recorded. Why there aren’t a gazillion cover versions of this I’ll never know but, this one is just perfect so you can just play it on repeat for about 15 times before moving onto Christmas With The Chipmunks... a powerful combination, for sure.

The Girl On The Train

Carriage Return

The Girl On The Train
2016 USA Directed by Tate Taylor
UK cinema release print.

Oh dear. You know, I’ve been in a similar situation with a much anticipated movie based on a best selling novel before and I really should learn to trust my instincts more. I’ve only got myself to blame, I guess. I saw the trailer for The Girl On The Train a while ago and, frankly, it looked like a dull, Hollywoodland ‘almost-thriller’ that I could easily bypass as being an unremarkable film. And that’s what I should have done. Instead, just like my previous bad experience with Before I Go To Sleep (which I reviewed here), I bought into the idea that it was a much loved ‘modern classic’ of a novel... or at the very least a phenomenal best seller... and so I squashed my gut reaction and decided to give this one a go. Besides... it has a terrific lead actress and new score by Danny Elfman so... it seemed like the sensible thing to do.

So here I am now living with the fact that I’ve wasted my time on another clunker of a movie when I could, instead, have used that time for some genuine cinematic art... however, as I learned a long time ago, it’s necessary to see the really useless stuff to be able to harbour an appreciation for the good stuff too, so... I guess it wasn’t a completely wasted journey.

The Girl On The Train alleges to be a thriller and, although it kind of comes from an interesting structure in terms of the way it slowly reveals things in the past of the three main female protagonist’s lives in a non-linear fashion, it is still quite a dull movie. Now I don’t mind slow paced films... put me in front of a Russian movie where the highlight of the film is the quick condensation of heat from where a coffee mug had been left on a table and as long as it’s got great cinematography and intrigues me with the way the camera explores the situation, I’ll be fine (and you get an extra point if you can work out exactly which movie I was thinking about there). The pacing on The Girl On The Train is fairly slow but it’s not the problem here.

Neither is the story, to some extent, which looks at three women who find themselves fighting back against male antagonists that subtly, and less than subtly, brutalise them and make them question their beliefs. It’s got a positive message so that’s all good.

And the acting is really sound too, with Haley Bennett, Rebecca Ferguson doing a cracking job and with Emily Blunt playing the title character, really doing some good work here. Blunt has a tough time and is the main focus of the film, giving us an interesting study of a struggling alcoholic which is actually, almost cleverly but, you know, not quite that cleverly, used as a plot point later on in the movie. No problems with any of this and the construction is almost like a giallo in some moments... although it’s a pretty toothless giallo, to be sure. I did find myself wondering, about half way through the movie, what would have happened if they’d have given an old Italian director who used to crank out gialli back in the late 1960s or early 1970s the same kind of material to work with. I suspect it would be a lot less plodding than what we have here.

I don’t know for sure but I’m guessing the book is a lot more gripping than the film, where you can presumably be more in tune with the thoughts of the various characters. Unfortunately, although I totally believe in the ability of good cinema to portray, wordlessly, the inner struggle of the characters on screen in what I call the ‘cinema of reflection’... the director doesn’t really manage to catch that here, I would say.

Everything seems so obvious, to be honest, and I was waiting for some kind of twist to rear itself at the end of the movie to bite me on the backside for being so complacent during the rest of the time but, in all fairness, there is no twist ending. This is literally just a whodunnit kind of movie and, although there are a fair few suspects who might have been able to facilitate the film’s central crime, the killer is telegraphed somewhat early in the set up of the movie, it felt to me, and I was left with a movie going experience which, unfortunately, left me far from the edge of my seat.

Danny Elfman’s score is a bit low key too. It’s far from one of his big, splashy compositions he’s known for and this harkens back more to his scores for smaller movies like A Simple Plan, in some respects, although, certainly within the context of the movie, I found this less enjoyable. That being said, when Emily Blunt’s character starts piecing things together towards the end of the picture, the score’s rhythms and hues come more sharply into focus to heighten the sense of tension that the film is struggling so hard to achieve. I suspect the score is one of those compositions that work better away from the actual 'venue of the imagination' it was initially written for... so it might be worth a pick up on CD at some point.

And that's about all I’ve got to say about The Girl On The Train. Sorry about the short review but nothing else comes to mind. I’m sure the book must be better than this and, despite having a great cast who mostly do a bang up job, it’s not really doing much for me as a movie and I can’t say I’d recommend it myself. I won’t be making the return trip from the same carriage anytime soon.

Alice Through The Looking Glass 3D

Hatterstician

Alice Through The Looking Glass
2016 USA Directed by James Bobin
UK cinema release print.

Hmmm. Okay... I didn’t like the Tim Burton version of Alice In Wonderland much. I didn’t review it at the time (I think it just missed the birth of my blog by a whisker) but I did do a short review of Danny Elfman’s score when I was trying to write about music (which you can read here). The score was a triumphant masterpiece, as far as I was concerned. The movie, however, was overdone, emotionally inappropriate in the wrong places and just seemed to me like a Hollywood contrivance which the audience ‘better like, or else’... if you know what I mean. So why, you may ask, did I go and see this sequel?

Well, as much as I love most of the actresses and actors in these two movies, it wasn’t their presence that got me back into the cinema for this one. Neither was it the director... not Burton this time, although he did produce this one. No... the blame for me having to endure this slightly better but, in no way any good, sequel has to be placed fairly in the lap of the aforementioned Danny Elfman. He’s back to score this one and I really just wanted to see what he did with the musical follow through.

Now, I can’t remember if I ever read Lewis Carrol’s Alice In Wonderland sequel, Through The Looking Glass, as a kid but what I can tell you, and you can work this one out for yourselves just by watching the trailer, is that this one has almost nothing at all to do with the original source material. Other than the same characters are back and there is, actually, a looking glass that transports the movie’s title character back to Wonderland. If I further told you that this movie starts off with Alice in the real world performing large scale stunts with her ship and her crew to evade the chasing pirates... you might realise how far afield this is from what you might reasonably expect... although this opening sequence is quite strong, to be honest.

If I further told you that the main plot involved Mia Wasikowska’s Alice stealing a time travelling device from Time (played by Sacha Baron Cohen) and then using it to travel through the past in Wonderland to solve the mystery of the Mad Hatter’s missing, presumed dead, family and defeating and resolving the childhood issues of the Queen of Hearts... then you have certainly been fairly warned that this movie is not for anyone who is expecting a half decent adaptation of the original classic. However, I can’t place the blame for this entirely at the fault of the writer and director since, if memory serves, a lot of the core of the original novel was already sourced and twistedly used in Tim Burton’s prior movie... so I’m guessing there wasn’t really a lot left to play with, to be honest.

What I do know is that, as good as actors like Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway and Johnny Depp are... they really can’t do much to save this movie and its unfortunate inheritance by way of the last installment. Alas, Depp once more portrays the Hatter as an emotionally involved and sympathetic character... putting on meat where there was originally nothing but bone and continuing to do something completely different with a character that was probably not meant to be given any depth, anyway, to speak of. He plays an interesting character well, once again, but this really isn’t the Mad Hatter (I’d like to see him try his hand at The Joker in a Batman movie sometime, though).

The spectacle of the thing, however, is truly great and the special effects team, concept artists and everyone else involved should be congratulated on a really splendid vision making its way to the screen. Unfortunately, this only goes to prove that you can marvel at something but still feel empty because it’s not supported by an entertaining or especially well written story. It makes things bearable but that’s really no substitute for a tale that pulls you in tight, hugs you to its bosom and doesn’t let go until the final credits begin to roll. I feel bad about the cast and crew going to all that effort to pull this one off because, frankly, as splendid as it looks it really doesn’t do much to stir the blood... which is always a shame after everyone has obviously tried so hard to make it work.

The only real take home, again... and it is something I will literally ‘take home’ because I’ll order the CD... is Danny Elfman’s amazing score. Once again he weaves his brilliant Alice theme into the texture of the score and, once again, comes out with something both appropriate and pleasing to the ear in support of both the movie itself and, I strongly suspect, as a stand alone listen. Fans of the lyrics of the song, however, are forewarned that only one word, from what I could tell, of the lyrics makes its way into the score and then, only right at the end. I’m guessing you can probably work out which word that is already, though, if you’re a fan of the song. I won’t confirm that here.

At the end of the day, Alice Through The Looking Glass is a surrealistic ‘romp’ through time as our heroine strives to find the solution to the Hatter’s problem and also, as you would expect, gains strength from her adventures when she’s away from her fantasy realm. As far as I’m concerned, though, it really left me cold and in no mood to see any further additions to the story. Hopefully this one won’t become a franchise and the cast and crew can direct their obvious talents to something more interesting and captivating. Alas for Alice... this wasn’t it.