Disclosure Day

Disclose Encounters

Disclosure Day
Directed by Steven Spielberg
USA/Canada/New Zealand/Japan 2026
Universal
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Well then... Disclosure Day is not the suspected sequel to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind it was rumoured to be (although it does have a couple of on screen references and could easily be taking part in the same shared world... in which case it definitely is, despite Spielberg’s protests). What it is happens to be Spielberg’s third ‘aliens on Earth’ movie after his brilliant, original, studio release cut of Close Encounters and his abysmal ET - The Extra Terrestrial movie. Disclosure Day is somewhere in the middle of the quality of those two... not quite as good as the former but walking all over the latter.

We have the various ‘everymen sucked into extraordinary adventures’ which is a particular Spielberg signature, often seen as a legacy archetype in his pictures. These are played by the wonderful Emily Blunt, Josh O’ Connor and Eve Hewson. Then you have the obligatory human villain, played by Colin Firth and the wise, helpful ally to the good guys, played by Colman Domingo. Plus assorted ‘also ran’ characters performed by the likes of Wyatt Russell and Elisabeth Marvel. 

The film is not quite, as I’d suspected, a reveal about the various alien/human hybrids living in society among us (see the Al Adamson documentary Blood And Flesh: The Reel Life And Ghastly Death of Al Adamson, reviewed here, to find out more about those, since Adamson actually met one and then died in particular ghastly circumstances sometime after, before he could finish his expose documentary... whether that aspect of his life was relevant to his death or not) but more a look at the way aliens are trying to escape the knowledge-prison of the independent task force trying to stop the leakage of their existence on Earth.

So, in terms of the plot... it’s not what I was expecting but, the sad thing is, everything else went exactly as I’d expected. It’s not a bad movie by any means and it hits some nice Spielberg moments such as an elabourate and suspenseful ‘car being dragged along on the side of a train’ chase and various metatextual references back to cinema over the years. It’s true to say that in some ways it’s somewhat of a postmodern pastiche of things we’ve seen over the years in many movies.* 

Perhaps my favourite appropriation is when Eve Hewson’s character is being psychically interrogated from afar by Firth’s sinister invasion of her mind and, she uses her crucifix in just the same manner that Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer used the rusty nail in the brainwashing sequence of The IPCRESS File (reviewed here) so, yeah, Spielberg really nailed that one. 

The film neatly bypasses the effect on mass culture of the possible lack of faith in religious practices in a way which is, perhaps, not multiculturally sensitive (although I don’t mind) and uses a direct quote from the Bible to directly allow for the possibility of alien life forms being present in the universe. So for a certain section of the audience he has that pretty well sewed up. 

I did object to the use of animal scenes in the film... not because this is not what aliens do, as documented in numerous cases (whether you believe those cases or not) but because, the logic of using those encounters out of an environment where there are only one or two humans present seems contrary to logic and not a part of, as Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp neatly put it, how aliens represent. So, atmospherically it works effectively in a spooky manner in the movie but, one or two of those scenes seem somewhat out of place. 

Now the ending is, I suspect, going to divide people. Not because you won’t see it coming... I defy anyone to not figure out exactly when the camera is going to cut to the end credits before it actually happens... but because there’s no real sense of closure to the disclosure. That is to say... how else could you end this movie? It’s absolutely the right way to end this without leaving some section of the audience bitterly disappointed in the content of the message of the aliens. That would then become a different movie and this way at least allows for that all important message to go either way, in terms of the fate of mankind, for sure.

Added to this we have an excellent, post-retirement score by regular Spielberg collaborator John Williams, who at 94 is still able to come up with one of his best scores in years. So that’s a CD I will hopefully be getting a hold of soon. 

All in all though, I’m about done with Disclosure Day. Excellent performances in a not too shoddy package with a nice bit of scoring is certainly enough to take a trip to the cinema for but, ultimately, I was a little underwhelmed by the whole experience. I suspect that’s because I’ve been around too long, though and I’m sure the younger audience... who have not seen much of the history of cinema to be as jaded by this plot as I am... will be thrilled with this one and lionise it, to a certain extent. At least until they get a few films under their belt. Not a film I’d easily recommend because I felt it pulled its punches a little too much but, not a huge disappointment either and I think it will find its audience, for sure. 

 *Although, after only a few days of the film’s release into cinemas, I’m already sick of reviewers making assumptions that the Inn-Di-Ana Motel where two of the characters stay overnight is a tip of the hat to Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movies. Take a step back and realise that the home of Roy Neary in the original Close Encounters Of The Third Kind is situated in Indiana and, maybe do a little better at connecting the dots on your film references people!

Jurassic World Rebirth

Deux Ex Machina Park

Jurassic World Rebirth
Directed by Gareth Edwards
USA/UK/Malta/India/Taiwan 2025
Universal

Just like the last few movies in the Jurassic Park/World franchise, the marketing of this latest, seventh installment, Jurassic World Rebirth, is trying to convince me that the world needs yet another Jurassic Park sequel and, like the last three movies in the franchise, it failed to do that. Of the last three films, only the final installment where the old characters from the first movie reunite to take part in the adventure, had any real entertainment value in it and, frankly, it felt like the last hurrah of a franchise dying out much quicker than the dinosaurs it lionised. So it would be true to say my expectations going to see this at my local Cineworld in Enfield (soon to be turned into flats, it would seem... not sure what I do for new releases on this blog at that point), were pretty low.

So it came as a pleasant surprise to me that, although this new installment has its flaws, it’s actually a pretty good movie and I liked it a heck of a lot more than the previous three films, for sure. And, perhaps even more surprisingly, its one big asset, way more than the tired old CGI effects and a really badly designed, genetically mutated dinosaur, is the script and the way the actors use some good dialogue to build the characters up. Finally it feels that the writing is actually good on this thing... much more than it was on many of the sequels. 

On the story front... well they’ve backtracked on the bolder global situation where those last three films took us (one of the only saving graces of the last trilogy was the direction it was heading in and the world building it took to get us there). But in this film, while we humans, as a species, are still co-habitating the Earth, it turns out that these new dinosaurs (for reasons completely a mystery to me, since their days millions of years ago), are unable to survive for very long on the majority of the planet and have made their home around the equator instead, in the places they can still exist and thrive. Places which are now legally off limits to the rest of the world. And in this world, a team of scientists and mercenaries are going in to one of these areas to obtain blood samples from three of the biggest species of dinosaurs in order to... create medicine which will cure heart disease in humans and make sure we all live longer. 

Which seems ridiculous as a plot device to me because, if anything, the world is already way over populated to be able to sustain our own species effectively but, sure, lets make sure nobody dies of heart disease. Whatever. So we have a team going in and, also rescuing a small family unit who have gotten into trouble on their way in so... when they all get split up on a big Dinosaur Island later, the shenanigans are many and the human equation is tugging hard at the peripherals of the story too. 

On the acting front we have a mercenary played Scarlett Johansson, one of the best actors of her generation, really killing it in the character development stakes, by making her protagonist upbeat in the face of many personal bad experiences. Her fellow mercenary, played by Mahershala Ali, does pretty much the same and these two are very good at making you believe in these people as characters. And a whole host of cast actually, including Rupert Friend, Jonathan Bailey and their fellow performers are all pretty great in this.

And talking of Jonathan Bailey, when he first touches a live dinosaur on the island this lot eventually find themselves stranded on, that clarinet solo on the score is actually being played by him. The film’s composer Alexandre Desplat let him sit in on a few of the cues. And talking of that score... it’s got the obvious John Williams reference points and there are a few scenes where it needs those melodies... although they don’t always make intellectual sense in terms of leitmotif placement. That being said, it’s got a nice mix in the movie and it’s probably the best of the movie scores in the franchise not scored by Williams. And because of that mix, I was able to concentrate on it during the film a little better.

Okay so, well acted, great dialogue writing and a nice score. On the downside...

Yeah, there’s almost no peril here. The constant deus ex machina style escapes from certain death for everyone kinda wears thin very early on in the film and doesn’t really let up. The dinosaurs are... not much of a spectacle here and there are a handful of nail biting moments but, yeah, the suspense is not what it could be, I thought. And the reveal of the human villain of the piece is... something you will have figured out in the first five minutes... so no real surprises there either.  Also, the film seems much more kid friendly and, despite the odd severed limb, I think the horror elements could have been ramped up to better serve the story on this one, for sure.

Another problem is there are way too many shout outs to the very first movie in this. Some of them fairly subtle but... most of them really jammed into your face. 

So, not too much else to say on Jurassic World Rebirth other than... what Rebirth? Is this supposed to be an optimistic reference to the hoped for box office takings for the companies involved? Because I saw no rebirthing or even just birthing in this movie. It’s almost like they  threw a bunch of non sequitur titles into a hat and picked the first one that came out. However, like I said, some decent character writing in this one and I much preferred it to the last three. Worth going out to see on a big screen, maybe. 

Johnny Staccato (aka Staccato)

The Piano Player
Shoots Back

Johnny Staccato
(aka Staccato)
Air date: September 1959 - March 1960
27 Episodes. DVD Region 1

Johnny Staccato was TV’s jazz detective. Played by actor/director John Cassavetes, the show initially aired for a good half of the episodes as Staccato. Somewhere in the middle of the series, Elmer Bernstein’s roaring opening theme pitched against a jagged and memorable opening title sequence (which... well, I’ve no idea who designed it but it would have made Saul Bass proud and certainly seems ripped off from/influenced by him) is replaced by a less interesting sequence of Johnny running, then breaking a window to shoot his revolver through it. Annoyingly, the shot of Cassavetes in close up, peering through the glass, reveals a different smash pattern to the long shot, with a piece of glass hanging down in front of Johnny’s face which was absent when he actually crashes through the window initially. It’s at this point that the show is retitled to Johnny Staccato and uses a lighter theme tune... although the original, reminiscent perhaps of Bernstein’s famous opening titles for The Man With The Golden Arm, is retained for the end credits.

That being said, a few episodes using the original opening sequence occur on occasion after the show’s title change so, this probably means that the episodes were originally aired in a different order to when they were completed. Despite critical acclaim, the show was cancelled after one season so I’m wondering if, midway, the show was slightly re-tooled with an eye on a more popular reception, if the show runners got wind of the cancellation way ahead of time (although I didn’t notice any real sea change myself).

The series features Johnny, who works at Waldo’s Jazz Bar (Waldo appears in most episodes and is played by Eduardo Ciannelli) but he also takes big 'side order' jobs as a private detective. There are loads of guest appearances by once or 'soon to be' famous actors such as Martin Landau, Mary Tyler Moore, Dean Stockwell, Cassavetes' wife Gena Rowlands and, one of my favourites, Elisha Cook Jr... but the show was also noted for the musicians who sometimes appeared in minor, musical roles such as jazz legends like Shelly Manne... as well as the piano guy who sometimes takes over from Johnny when he’s off working a case, the now extremely famous composer John Williams, back when he was also known as Johnny.

The plots are simple and the show only runs for half hour episodes but they are compact stories. Sometimes Johnny will come up with a solution to the crime of the week but, sometimes, things will go wrong and the real criminal is not always revealed. The tone is upbeat but very dark as Johnny starts asking questions and getting himself in trouble as he tries to help out a friend.

Oh yeah, about that... quite a lot of the time he’s out to help a friend and more often than not, he never seems to get paid for a case, often because the person who has hired him to investigate things winds up dead at some point. Which explains why he is always short of cash, although his regular gig as jazz pianist at Waldos certainly pays him enough to give out plenty of ‘flash money’ to grease the wheels of an informant’s mind when he wants to get a jump on things.

There are also five episodes which, even if you didn’t know it from the end credits, are also directed by John Cassavetes and, wow, are they well lit and staged. Those ones must have really popped off of those TV sets and right into the headspace of the viewer back in ‘59/’60. Despite the obviousness of some of the plots (which may not have been all that obvious at the time), there is still an element of surprise to the show. Not because of the plot twists where, say, Johnny’s friend turns out to be the person who did the murder after all... but because the dark tone is just so unrelenting and hard hitting compared to what you expect from a show of the time (and perhaps a lot darker than someone might pitch a show like this today).

The show follows Johnny C playing Johnny S with Cassavetes giving the viewer a hard line in voice over which is usually also quite downbeat and cynical. That being said, not every episode has a downer of an ending. For instance, the 1959 Christmas episode, where future Diamonds Are Forever gangster Marc Lawrence (“I didn’t know there was a pool down there.”) plays an ex-con, brother to a shop Santa who he is pressuring to help commit a robbery... ends with a more cheerful scene at Waldo’s where Cassavetes breaks the fourth wall even more than usual by talking directly into the camera at the audience with a Christmas greeting.

That being said, the darkness of Johnny’s world tends to not stay in the side lines for long and I have to wonder, despite the critical appreciation it got, if the gritty edges of the storytelling helped hasten the show towards cancellation. Did they see it coming? Well, maybe. In the last episode, after failing to protect the new pianist from two guys he himself guns down, leaving the elderly widow of the man by his corpse in the street, Johnny waxes darkly lyrical in ‘voice over’ about the horrors of killing and walks off the show telling the audience... “I’m done!” So, yeah, maybe by that time they knew.

What I do know myself is, Johnny Staccato is a riveting series featuring a very cool central performance by Cassavetes, some brilliant jazz scoring by Elmer Bernstein, punchy stories and is generally as entertaining as hell. Maybe if it had gone on longer it would have ended up a caricature of itself at some point but this is a show I could have certainly have watched a lot more of and I would have loved it if it had transitioned into an hour long format at some point. Still, at least the series has survived the years while many shows contemporary to it haven’t. So I’ll just be thankful for what we’ve got here and say, if you like Cassavetes looking sleek but gritty in clean, black and white photography, you need to check this one out.

Star Wars Episode IX - The Rise Of Skywalker

Merry Sith Mass

Star Wars Episode IX -
The Rise Of Skywalker
2019 USA Directed by J. J. Abrams
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I’ve decided to write this with HUGE SPOILERS in it because I’d rather this review had a little more longevity to it, since my Star Wars ones do tend to get revisited by people a little more than some of my others. Please DO NOT READ this if you’ve not seen the movie.

Okay so, Star Wars Episode IX - The Rise Of Skywalker is a mixture of good and bad stuff, although I quite liked this one but, before I get into it, I just want to reiterate my spoiler warning above. There’s stuff revealed here that you won’t want to know (even if you’ve already figured it out anyway) before seeing the movie... so just don’t read this until after you’ve seen the film.

Right... so if you’ve been keeping track of my Star Wars reviews over the years you’ll know that I really didn’t think much of Episode VIII - The Last Jedi. I think it was a huge wrong turn of a movie with some brilliant set pieces but an absolutely terrible story and direction for all of the characters. In terms of Star Wars films I’d stick it down with Attack Of The Clones and Revenge Of The Sith as being one of the absolute worst of the series. And, while nobody from the production of the movies has said it outright... although it has been heavily implied by some of the big names behind and in front of the cameras this last few months... I think the producers probably recognised that The Last Jedi was a huge mis-step for the franchise too. Just speculating here, mind but... that’s how I see it as playing out when people have been interviewed. Abrams himself has said this movie is something of a course correction and, yeah... absolutely... The Rise Of Skywalker does spend a lot of its time, perhaps a hugely disproportionate amount of time, backtracking and erasing elements of The Last Jedi. Sometimes though, it does throw the baby out with the bathwater, it has to be said.

To do this, Abrams has had to set up a story beat which I believe he always planned to be there but, because of the way the last movie went (my understanding is that he had little involvement or knowledge of the story of the last one when it was being made) he actually uses the opening crawl to set up the return of Emperor Palpatine where if he’d have done the whole of this trilogy, I believe he would have heralded Palpatine’s return in a much more subtle and surprising way. I don’t have too much of an issue with this, however, because that’s what the title crawls did in the first two movies when they were released in 1977 and 1980 so, it’s not a new thing to bring in new information in this manner.

The fact that Palpatine returns from the dead here is handled in a way that is credible to an extent, if you don’t mind the movie dipping into 1930s/1950s Universal Horror territory... there really is a kind of alchemical ‘weird science’ vibe that’s not been visited before, to my memory, in the Star Wars films but... I think it finds its place in the series and certainly brings a ‘pulp literature’ element with it. And the lighting on Palapatine’s face in his introduction scene reflects this in a wonderful manner too.

Now we get in to the real spoilery stuff so... to quote Edward Van Sloan in Frankenstein... well, we warned you.

A week or two ago, when I realised that Abrams was going to jettison the idea that Rey’s parentage wasn’t important... which is just as well because it was set up so well in the first one that she knew exactly who her important family tree were in The Force Awakens... I was talking to my friend and said, “You know, she’s probably not a Skywalker like you keep saying but Palpatine’s granddaughter. The ‘Rise’ of Skywalker is probably Kylo Ren redeeming himself in a similar way to Darth Vader in Return Of The Jedi.” And, yeah, I so totally called it... those things come to pass in this movie. And it all makes sense except the last little scene on Tatooine where Rey refers to herself... as you know she’s going to because of the way the stroy beat is presented... as a Skywalker. Well she totally isn’t but I guess, because she holds all of the past Jedi in her now, she can maybe take that name and, lets face it, if she calls herself Rey Palpatine she’s going to have some serious hate mail. It all works... just... but I do think the ‘pendulum swing’, as Abrams puts it, of The Last Jedi really did hurt this new film with its legacy and things could have fit together in a lot more smoother manner without Episode VIII.

How Abrams cushions the blow and gets the franchise back on course is to completely borrow (see how I’m nicely not using the word ‘plagiarise’ here) a load of elements from a fair few previous films in the franchise. People who love the series will literally recognise scenes taken almost wholesale from the original trilogy and sometimes it’s done in a referential, loving homage kind of way such as Luke lifting his X-Wing from the sea while Yoda’s theme from the similar scene in The Empire Strikes Back plays out in exactly the same orchestration that it might even have been needle-dropped in and... sometimes it isn’t. There was one scene, for instance, when I leaned over to my friend (who had already seen it earlier in the day) and whispered... “Why didn’t they just CGI Don Henderson into this scene if they were going to do this?” So, yeah, some of the stuff was not that subtle and felt... not out of place, just very familiar and, well... there are a lot of bits in this movie where fans of the films will find themselves in very familiar territory.

But you know what? That’s what Star Wars has always been about. Swiping stuff in a postmodern manner from other things. George Lucas couldn’t secure the rights to make a Flash Gordon movie (Flash Gordon already borrowing heavily from Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter of Mars books) so he wrote Star Wars and the films have always been full of iconic and often ‘borrowed’ ideas and images which the films have assimilated into their own cinematic language. So I really don’t have a problem with what Abrams is doing here. There are a few things I did have a problem with, though.

Like the introduction of a new droid. Frankly, it’s fun but has no purpose in the plot and feels like a fifth wheel most of the time. It just seems there to sell toys.. as does the clunky (or should that be McClunkey?) bikes that launch the flying stormtroopers. “They fly now!” say three of the characters... somehow oblivious to the fact that their nearest stormtrooper equivalents did in the prequel trilogy too. Didn’t think this added anything to the action scenes but then again, the action scenes were another problem for me.

They felt, somehow, anti-climactic and flat a lot of the time. Ironically, the action sequences in The Last Jedi were far more interesting and impactful. There’s nothing as cool as the throne room skirmish or the battle of Crait in The Rise Of Skywalker, for example. However, the action sequences in this one, although not as exciting, felt more organic to the story and not just slotted in because they felt like they needed something to happen (for the most part). This movie covers a lot of story at a fairly fast pace and so there’s less action but more integrity to the Star Wars universe I felt.

There was a lovely ‘shock’ character death fairly early on in the film but it turns out it was just a dupe and, frankly, lifted from the baskets scene in Raider Of The Lost Ark. I totally bought it for a while before they revealed a certain character was alive. Oh, and for the record, the force energy coming from people’s hands, especially in the later scenes, looks terrible compared to how it looked in the 1980s. Just rubbish and too wispy. Needed to be much more dense, I think.

There’s also a dubious scene which, funnily enough, I was talking to someone about a couple of times over the course of the last few years but I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be able to do it for this film. I said to my girlfriend that they really needed to somehow get Han Solo back in it for a resolution to his son’s character arc but they wouldn’t be able to do it because they would somehow have to coax Harrison Ford back and, also, there’s no precedent in the series for a ‘non-force’ ghost. But, what the heck.... they did it anyway. They must have paid Ford quite handsomely for his little ‘cameo’ here and his appearance is treated in almost exactly the same way as Kevin Costner’s ‘memory ghost’ appearance in Batman Vs Superman. They did it and... it’s a bit questionable but it’s nice to have it and it worked for me.

There were also a lot of voice cast returns of a load of the other Jedi from previous films. I was ridiculed on Twitter by someone for spotting that Liam Neeson’s voice was in the teaser trailer and was told it was Mark Hamil. Nope, it was Neeson, as I’d said. This film would have been a lot better had it brought back full-on force ghosts of a fair few Jedi from the previous movies too but, alas, I guess voice rates must be cheaper and the producers didn’t want to spend the extra money, is my guess.

My biggest gripe is not knowing how in hell they got Luke’s old light sabre still, after that terrible throw away line in The Force Awakens about it being a good question for another day. This was a question I really needed answering and the film makers have just ignored it... which I think is the only way in which Abram’s two movies disrespect the fans of the original films.

One thing I did love about this movie is... finally C3PO was cool again. He’s the least irritating and most witty he’s ever been in the franchise and his character really worked well here. Alas, R2D2 is hardly in it again and I wish they’d used him more but, I’m guessing it might have damaged the story flow in some way and so they chose to do with him what they did here. It was great how they worked C3PO though... really good stuff here.

And, it goes without saying, that the cast in this were all pretty much outstanding... including the new characters although, I wish Keri Russell had turned in her performance without a mask covering her head... she was a cool character. My only grouch about the casting would be that none of the original trilogy characters had much to do and were hardly in it. Carrie Fisher wasn’t integrated nearly as seamlessly as they said she was and, they totally lied about not CGIing her in one scene where, frankly, you couldn’t have had the training scene with Luke and Leia done any other way than to de-age them (and make them look vaguely unreal and cartoony). Luke and Han (who was admittedly a mostly unexpected bonus) hardly have any screen time, Yoda is practically non-existent other than a voice and a brief glimpse and I just felt Billy Dee Williams was kinda wasted in this. He was cool... just under utilised but, at least he got to say a specific line which is pretty much in almost every Star Wars movie, so there’s that. I could also have done with a lot more of Kelly Marie Tran’s character being in here because, frankly, she was one of the best things about The Last Jedi.

There’s probably going to be a lot of criticism of Abrams on this one about how the power of The Force is used in certain scenes but I was fine with it all... especially the cool way in which Rey passes a light sabre to Ben Solo. There actually is a lot of back up in the history of the saga which means this kind of magical stuff is just a slightly different looking iteration of exactly the same kind of thing so I think Abrams and the writers made a good call here. It’s also a really cool moment too so, yeah, again it works for me.

As far as the music goes... John Williams’ score soars as he builds on the themes he introduced in The Force Awakens in exactly the way he didn’t in The Last Jedi. I can’t wait to give the CD a spin fairly soon. I hope they give him an Oscar for this one. He deserves it.

And that’s me pretty much done. I didn’t absolutely love this on first viewing but, like The Force Awakens, which I gave an absolutely terrible review to and regretted doing that as soon as I saw it a second time, I suspect The Rise Of Skywalker will definitely be something I get more out of on future screenings (probably sometime towards the end of next week... I just wish Kerry had been around to see this one). If you are a fan of the franchise then, I think you’ll really like this one. It’s not top tier Star Wars but it’s not bottom tier either which means it’s pretty great, right? But then again, you already know that because you wouldn’t be reading this spoilerific review if you hadn’t already seen it, I hope.


Star Wars at NUTS4R2

 Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 

Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones

Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith 

Solo

Rogue One 

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi 

Episode 7: The Force Awakens 

Episode 8:  The Last Jedi

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker

Images

Splitting Head Fakes

Images
UK/USA 1972
Directed by Robert Altman
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

It’s been a week between me first seeing Images and writing this review and I’m still, I’m happy to say, thinking about it.

I’ve always found Robert Altman a bit hit and miss as a director but I’ve been wanting to see a decent print of his film Images since I first became aware of it in early 1980. It was in that year that the BBC showed their wonderful documentary (which I don’t think has ever been repeated or made available commercially) called Star Wars - Music By John Williams.

Now although this documentary was using the hook of the Star Wars films and the upcoming ‘second episode’, The Empire Strikes Back (some of which you see Williams conducting as he records against the images), as a hook for audiences, this is much more a long film about John Williams and his music and not, as you might first think, just his Star Wars scores. It’s an excellent documentary and one of the film clips they showed in this piece, along with films like Jaws, The Guide For The Married Man, Jayne Eyre and The Towering Inferno, was a brilliant sequence from Altman’s Images.

Now, that first vague impression of the film and the score stuck with me for many years until, a couple of decades later (at least), a CD replicating the original vinyl soundtrack release of Williams score was made available for a short time. It only took me one play to realise that, although the atonalism on display here was somehow a little sweet and syrupy compared to some other composers working in that style, it was easily the great composer’s best work. And now, finally, after a wait of 38 years* since seeing that clip, I have finally seen the movie. And it’s easily one of Altman’s best creations.

The film is about... well that’s kind of hard to pair down. Susannah York plays a character who is somewhat fragmented in her mind. After a series of unsettling but minor incidents she gets her husband to take her back to her childhood home (in a location unspecified, although the film itself was shot in the beautiful landscape of Ireland) where she continues to have more ‘episodes of a disturbing nature’ building to a point where she finds herself guilty of something she has had no knowledge of knowing about (and probably the audience doesn’t either, until it’s revealed at the end).

From the outset, the director uses lots of different visual ploys to start slowly disorienting the audience as to the trustworthiness of both the sound and images York is seeing and hearing. Asides from William’s quite striking and deliberately nerve jangling score, the director will do things like using zooms (yeah, he’s not afraid to use zooms like a lot of directors and DPs seem to be today) cut against static shots and then highlighting various objects which hang down from something... such as wind chimes, chandelier fittings, glass beads etc. Meanwhile, Susannah York starts quoting from a children’s book, In Search Of Unicorns, which the actress was writing at the time and which Altman found out about and incorporated into the script. I could find little significance on first watch with either Altman’s visual fetishes or with the narrative sections, other than as fragments of unrelated and persistent things which he could rub together to continue to keep the audience on their toes.

For me this all came to a head the first time her husband, played by a young Rene Auberjonois, returns to the room seemingly played by another actor, Marcel Bozzuffi. This scares the life out of her and happens more than once in the narrative and the transformation is less than clear when it’s ‘explained’ that he is, in fact, the visual and audio echo of York’s dead, ex lover. In fact, at various points, actors appear in the place of others and you are never 100% sure if the crossovers, which I assumed were inspired by the works of Bunuel but which Altman credits to Bergman, are split into two or more identities or are themselves a visual echo of a single identity at any one time. The difference between the two seems to change at various points of the film and it doesn’t make matters any easier when the actors are on screen in two different personae at the same time.

When York is driven out to her ‘other’ home, we watch her sleeping in the car from different perspectives (including shots of her reflecting in the rear view mirror) while we still hear her narrating the book she is reading (although a lot of the film is dialogue free). This sequence is wonderful enough but then Altman tops it by having her waking up because the car has stopped. She walks up a hill to find her husband who has got out because he wants to hunt some quail and tells her to drive on to the house without him before pursuing said birds. She looks down from the hill at the house which is her destination only to see the car she is standing in front of arriving at the house in the distance. She watches as she sees herself getting out of the car and then we finish off the sequence from the other version of her exiting the vehicle and looking up to see a distant figure watching her... the figure we know to be herself. We carry on with the ‘arrived’ version of her but we still sometimes catch glances of the previous version on the hill, watching her as she looks out the window. This is great stuff and I love the way that a director could have cleverly handled this as a visual transition to York’s arrival but Altman seems to indicate, “No, it’s not just a scene transition. Now you figure out what’s going on.”

The director continues to throw the audience off guard and this includes the use of some beautiful shot set ups where he uses verticals and natural splits in the interior of the house to separate people and environments. So you can see an accidental fire started in one room while watching an oblivious York working in the kitchen in the room beyond in the other two thirds of the screen. Or he’ll have York and her husband doing a jigsaw which is obviously a metaphor for the fragmentary nature of the main protagonist’s mind (the last piece of which contains an image you might well figure out before the end of the movie) but they are shot from afar, looking through some stair bannisters which are in the foreground. He also makes use of mirrors to double and triple up the actors and actresses throughout, to further wrong-foot the audience. 

Things get harder for York’s clearly suffering character as she comes face to face with fragments of her past when out walking in a forest, such as a long dead dog she used to own and, at more than one point, the other version of herself who we started off the film with.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this one for me is that Altman’s signature of using overlapping dialogue on screen is present but, when he uses it in this movie which is itself visually confusing, he does it not to obfuscate the clarity of that narrative but to make sense of a particular scene, as York’s inner narrative is pitched against another person’s recollections. So Altman manages, by the point at which he employs this technique, to maintain the confusion of just what it is the audience is seeing while he is actually using this trademark element to clarify a specific situation. So deliberately going against what could be, even at this point in his career, a reasonable expectation of the way in which he shoots and presents a film.

Another thing he does, though, and this is definitely helped by Johnny Williams’ truly gorgeous score, is use the language of the horror film to tell his tale... perhaps suggesting that the visual ghosts that York is seeing are just that, although I think it’s pretty clear that they aren’t and this is not, in fact, a horror film. I could see the temptation for certain kinds of audience members to grasp onto that as a way of making sense of the narrative issues, however, which are deliberately kept anything but neat and tidy.

Ultimately, Images loses traction after a while and I thought it got a bit flat in the final third. However, it maybe because I found the earlier scenes in the movie so overwhelmingly brilliant that I was expecting all sort of shenanigans to lead on from it. I think it’s fair to say, though, that on the whole I really enjoyed this movie and can see myself revisiting it a few more times in my lifetime, if able to find the time. Definitely it’s a film for lovers of the art of the cinema and a very strong recommendation from me. Easily one of Altman’s best movies, without question.

*At time of writing the first draft of this review sometime early last year.

Solo

Corellia Warfare

Solo - A Star Wars Story
2018 USA Directed by Ron Howard
UK cinema release print.

Warning: At some point near the end of this review there will
be a big spoiler. I’ll warn you about it again as it approaches.

Okay, so I’ll be honest and say I really wasn’t expecting the new Star Wars spin off, Solo, to be any good. In fact, after hearing about the troubled production history of this particular film and adding in the fact that I didn’t think much of either Rogue One or The Last Jedi, I was pretty much expecting this movie to be almost unwatchable. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found that this was one of the very few of the new wave of Star Wars movies I actually quite liked.

Alden Ehrenreich stars as the young Han Solo and I have to admit that, when I first heard this casting news I was really happy about it because I’d recently seen him in the wonderful Cohen Brothers movie Hail Caesar! (reviewed here) playing a singing cowboy and I thought he might be able to pull this kind of role off... would that it were so simple. However, as more damaging ‘on set’ stories emerged about him needing acting lessons and a, frankly, not so great couple of trailers where he looks and acts nothing like Han Solo (I noticed some of those moments were thankfully absent in the final cut off the movie), I was beginning to get very down about the whole thing.

As it happens, I needn’t have worried. Ehrenreich is superb as the young Corellian and he really does look... and act... exactly right in a lot of the scenes here. Everyone is saying that Donald Glover’s portrayal of a young Lando Calrissian (one of my favourite characters in the original trilogy) is the one to watch and, although he’s kinda okay (if somewhat more of a caricature of the original rather than something that convinces me it’s really the same character), I thought Han was definitely the scene stealer in this.

And Chewbacca, played in this one by Joonas Suotamo, is even cooler.

I have to say that when a certain scene comes up and Han is in peril, I realised about 30 seconds before Chewie entered the movie what was going to happen. It doesn’t matter though because he knocks it out the park here. Of course, in terms of the chronology of the characters, this is Chewbacca’s second appearance in the saga, after helping Yoda escape from Chewie’s homeworld Kashyyk in Revenge Of The Sith. The version of Chewbacca here seems strangely skinnier but maybe that’s because the situation he finds himself in is not an ideal one. He’s great in this movie, though, and it’s nice to see him forming a bond with the young Han Solo as the running time progresses.

There is also a wide range of new characters who all work very well in the film and have good chemistry with the lead, including Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton, Paul Bettany as the villain of the piece and Han’s lost love Qi’ra, as played brilliantly by Emilia Clarke.

And... it’s an okay movie. It’s not great Star Wars in terms of feeling but it is close and even when I had pause for thought during the first sequence, I remembered the prequel trilogy’s opening chase scene from Attack Of The Clones and realised the high tech Blade Runnerish feel of this moment was acceptable, at least  in terms of staying near to the spirit of what has gone before. There are also a lot of fan moments where various parts of the mythology pop up, including two returning characters from another film in the series, one of whom I will most definitely... and in the most spoilery way... get to soon. But, yeah... stuff like the dice, the mention of bounty hunter Bossk, the spice mines of Kessel and various other things are all touched upon here (although I was sad that this is the first ‘Star Wars’ film not to include C3P0 and R2D2 in it... they could have easily had them appearing in this one). It also doesn’t make the mistake, at least in this particular film, of ruining the exact line reading of Han and Lando’s past relationship from The Empire Strikes Back. It come close to getting it wrong but the lines in Empire will still, just about, read right... at least in this movie, as it stands.

Some of the stuff in this film is absolutely brilliant, like the train heist scene (why the heck would a light spacecraft owning civilisation be using trains?) and the way in which Han is portrayed as the ultimate good guy who thinks he’s the bad guy but... there’s also some bad stuff too. The structure of the film seems somewhat loose and doesn’t feel like it’s leading up to anything in terms of the way the action works. Also, the celebrated (by some viewers) Kessel Run scene, which we’ve been hearing about since the first movie in 1977, was really confusing and anticlimactic for me. Even the music in this scene sounds a little like warmed over John Williams... which it kinda is. John Powell’s score at this point starts quoting various Star Wars action motifs all muddled together (including one of my favourite John Williams cues, The Asteroid Field) but it somehow seems somewhat diluted here. I don’t know if this was because it’s deliberately dialled down in the mix, played by a smaller orchestra or even if it was the sound set up in the screen I saw it on that was amiss but, this scene felt like it could be a little punchier than it is here, that’s for sure. That didn’t detract so much from my appreciation of the movie though so, yeah, nearing the end of the movie I was in the state of mind that I was having a fun, relatively Star Warsish feeling, kind of good time and that it was one of the better of the late entries in the saga.

And then the thing happened...

And this is your big spoiler warning folks. If you haven’t seen this movie, do not read past this point.

So we already know the person who the lead villain of the piece is answering to is the ‘real’ villain and, after a not so surprising twist in terms of the allegiance of one of the characters in the movie, we finally get to see who the real 'menace' behind the scheme was and... my jaw totally dropped. There are few movies that manage to surprise me like this one did because there, on the hologram talking to one of the other characters in the film was... Darth Maul. Yep... the same Darth Maul we saw young Obi Wan slice in half with a lightsaber decades before in The Phantom Menace. He’s got robotic legs so it’s shown he’s survived somehow and, apparently, if I’d watched the Star Wars cartoon shows The Clone Wars and Rebels, then I would know how that character managed to survive his seemingly mortal wounds. I did get very excited for a minute because I realised this could maybe explain the lineage towards the villain of the first two films of the latest trilogy, Snoke. However, I then also realised that Maul couldn’t possibly have retained his woggly, baby making equipment after the wounds he received so I’m somewhat less excited about this reveal now. It is an interesting turn of events though but, alas, I can’t quite see how they can follow through with a final showdown between this character and our heroes in any future sequels because he’s already been killed off again by Obi Wan on Tatooine in the cartoons, apparently. Nice idea though and it certainly surprised me.

End of spoiler zone!

And that’s me done on this one. John Powell’s score seems a little less Star Wars than I thought it would be but certainly seems consistent with a lot of this composer's other work. I like this guy a lot but he’s not who I would have picked to score a Star Wars movie, that’s for sure... the score is still nicely done though and maybe giving it a different feel was kinda the point (it certainly plays better as a stand alone listen than The Last Jedi CD... asides from the awful song... but, for goodness sakes, why do they keep missing off the end title music on these things... oh, right, they want us all to double dip an expanded CD edition in five to ten years time. Got it.). Who knows what’s in the minds of the people bankrolling these things at any given moment? All in all, though, Solo is an enjoyable bit of light space opera and, like I said, probably the best of the series we’ve seen since the release of The Force Awakens. I’ll probably revisit this one again before it leaves the cinemas.
Star Wars at NUTS4R2

 Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 

Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones

Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith 

Solo

Rogue One 

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi 

Episode 7: The Force Awakens 

Episode 8:  The Last Jedi

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker

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.

The Post

Haste

The Post
2017 USA Directed by Steven Spielberg
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very light spoilers, of a sort, in here if you are not familiar with the subject matter.

I quite like Steven Spielberg.

Pretty much since seeing his TV movie Duel on an old black and white set back in the early 70s.

I think he’s a director who, for the most part, makes consistently good films, sometimes great films and whose star status behind the camera dwarfs most actors and celebrities he works with. I’ve not seen all of his work but I’ve seen the large majority of it (barring a few films) and, asides from stuff which were real clunkers and which I could never quite bring myself to watch again (like E.T - The Extra Terrestrial and A.I) then you are usually on to a winner if you take a trip to the cinema to see one of his movies. He’ll also, usually, get to show you a moment or two of things which are unique or inventive.

Now, The Post, is a pretty good movie. It’s not a great movie but it is, at the very least, entertaining. I thought it was less gripping than a more recent cinematic outing into investigative journalism from a couple of years ago - Spotlight (reviewed by me here) but this is still genuinely compelling in places... especially if, like me, you have absolutely no first hand (or even any second hand) knowledge of the real life events that are being depicted in the movie.

The film opens strongly as we follow a soldier called Daniel Ellsberg, played by Matthew Rhys, on a stint in the Vietnam war. As his patrol is ambushed and all hell breaks loose we have a nice transition where the footage is revealed to be him flashing back to this chapter of his life as he rides a presidential plane in his current job. We then see him, a few years later, start to abscond with... and then have photocopied... various documents which show a history of American presidential regimes have been lying about the success and expectations of that particular war.

We then meet some of the other key characters in the film, the main two being Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee, an editor or head of department for The Washington Post (someone who I believe both Hanks and Spielberg knew socially at some point in their lives) and Meryl Streep as Kay Graham, the owner of the family business that The Washington Post was. Now, we have a few things going on at the start of the film... declining sales, Kay Graham’s decision to launch the newspaper on the stock market and, amongst all this, Bradlee’s hunch that a crack writer at one of their rivals, The New York Times, has been silent lately and so must be working on something really important. These threads are followed and pulled together as we flit between the team of reporters working on their assignments and Kay’s social circle, where it’s highlighted that she knows some of the players about to be embroiled in what happens when, as Bradlee gets wind of, The New York Times are going to publish Ellsberg’s 'Pentagon Papers' and reveal the dark underbelly and legacy of the US politics.

When The New York Times are threatened with a cease and desist document from the American government while they seek to sue them, one of Bradlee’s people find the source (Ellsberg), gets the photocopies of the documents from him - which are almost to hot to handle (as it happens, the real ones from the actual incident were used in all the scenes where they are seen in the film, it seems) - and the film then becomes about whether Kay should greenlight printing them in this manner and, very briefly, the outcome of the court case in light of her decision.

It’s good stuff and, as you would expect from Spielberg and the team of craftsmen he surrounds himself with, it’s all put together pretty well including, of course, the excellent performances from a wealth of great actors. Of special note, naturally, are Streep and Hanks and, since I don’t have too much to say about the way the movie has been put together, let me just focus on these two giants of modern acting for a moment.

Streep is someone who I haven’t seen that much but she’s always struck me as being completely convincing in any role I’ve seen her in (starting for me, I think, with her role as Woody Allen’s lesbian ex-wife in his classic Manhattan). Now, I have to say, I found her character a little infuriating here... because she seems so, how do I put this... measured here, in her delivery. It’s like the character takes time to process every thought and sentence and I had a real desire to just shake her and tell her to get her words out quicker. Which tells me two things... one, the real life person she’s playing must have had some element of that inherent in her personality (or there was a good reason for playing it like this) and, two, she must be a bloody good actress (which I think enough people know by now).

Hanks surprised me a little. I’ve always liked him since I started pointing him out to people as some one who may go far after seeing him in a TV movie called Mazes And Monsters when it was broadcast in the UK in the early 1980s. I was thrilled when he got a big feature film role in Splash and, yeah, I guess the rest is history... and he’s always been an actor I’ve liked but he’s also someone who I equate with being a ‘movie star’. That is to say, he plays more or less the same type of person in every film and he’s generally someone you wouldn’t mind hanging out with in a bar. So I was astonished at just how different the character he inhabited here seemed. I mean, yes, it’s still Hanks and he feels all Hanks-ike as usual but, there’s something extra here somehow. An edge to the character where he would say and do things and I would think... I wouldn’t expect Tom Hanks to say or do that in quite that way so... yeah, there you go again. Another great actor and also a joy to watch.

Now, Spielberg is someone whose films I have mostly enjoyed (as I mentioned earlier) but he’s one of those rare director’s who I’ve never really been able to identify as having a discernable signature style in his work. Other than always being amazingly competent and providing nice compositions which don’t call attention to themselves. Now I’m sure he wouldn’t have it any other way either but... looking at this... I kinda noticed something which I think may actually be something he does in other films... I just can’t think of a single example off the top of my head right now. However, in The Post, I caught him doing this...

He will switch out from a general shot of lot of hubbub where a fair few people are doing things which are fairly distracting (almost like a mini version of a Robert Altman movie but... not quite that distracting and disorganised) and then one character, often not the main character, will be given a task which becomes his or her purpose for the rest of the shot and quite possibly the next scene. And then the camera will filter everything else out and go hell bent for leather with that person as he or she completes her task to fill in, usually, an important plot point. So, for instance, Hanks character might grab an intern and tell him to do some stuff over the background miasma of a noisy office and then, suddenly, we follow that intern with a certain speed and purpose which dominates the scene for the next minute or two... I dunno. I just go the feeling that it’s a genuine Spielbergism and I’m going to be watching a few more of his movies this year (hopefully) and see if it’s a common factor. This idea of splitting away from a general ensemble atmosphere and then suddenly intensifying the focus onto just one character for a minute at the exclusion of all else.

The other big star and character in this, if you will, is the wonderful score by Spielberg’s regular musical collaborator, composer John Williams. Now, I have been a big admirer of this composer and have been following his career and going to concerts by him since the 1970s. When he scored Star Wars - The Force Awakens a couple of years ago, I thought it was one of the best things he’d written in many years and he really would have deserved the Oscar for that one (alas, I believe Oscar politics may have gotten in the way of things that year). Even my friend who is a big Williams devotee and who used to even travel to Boston in the United States to see him in concert too, agrees with me that his music for The Last Jedi was a real patchwork of a score and a bit of a career lowlight.

However, having now seen this movie, I’m baffled as to why he got an Oscar nomination for his new Star Wars score when, frankly, his score for The Post is way more deserving. I think, of many Spielberg films, this really does need the supporting score to drive home its points. It’s not particularly subtle but it really helps the film that it isn’t, I think. I said last year that Zimmer’s score for Dunkirk was the only thing which provided the underlying tension of that film and, if you took it away, the movie would fall flat. I think the same thing applies to The Post. There were sequences here where Williams is using... well not exactly 1950s B-movie stingers but certainly a close cousin as he highlights conversations and sequences with a building menace which, frankly, I would not have realised were supposed to be in any way suspenseful without the score there to spell it out for me. It’s probably because I don’t understand and don’t really care about anything political, in terms of not knowing I was supposed to be feeling lurking dread but, thankfully, Williams provides it all here and this is a real example of a score doing more than just supporting the film, I think.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this one. The Post closes out with, more or less, a reconstruction of the opening sequence of the classic film All The President’s Men and, I’d have to say, although I don’t think this movie is quite as powerful as that one, it would make one hell of a good double bill playing before it at cinemas. So there you have it, Spielberg gives us, not a great film but a fairly good one and, with his track record, that’s really not bad. If you enjoy movies of this ilk then you’ll no doubt like this one too so... catch it at the cinema to get the best of that Johnny Williams score, is my advice.

Star Wars Episode VIII - The Last Jedi

Kylo And Stitched

Star Wars Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
2017 USA Directed by Rian Johnson
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I’m not even going to attempt to write a spoiler free review of this movie because I believe to do so would remove any elements worth talking about in a series of films which have gone on this long. So... yeah... spoilers right from the outset. If you don’t want to know then don’t read. You have been warned.

Okay... so The Last Jedi, the latest film in the Star Wars franchise, is not what I was expecting. Which is not necessarily a bad thing at all except... I was kinda expecting something a little more lively and satisfying, truth be told. I actually really like Rian Johnson’s work as a director (especially Brick) and this is not a terrible film, by any means. There are some truly nice moments in here but there are also a fair few things that got the blood boiling and, neither of those sets of issues has anything to do with my main takeaway from this movie which... I’ll get to a little later.

Okay... so let me highlight the good stuff here first.

The performances were all pretty good although, after she was so good in The Force Awakens, I was kinda left with the feeling that the wonderful Daisy Ridley didn’t really get too much of an opportunity to shine here as she could have been given. That’s okay, though... I suspect the next movie will really need her to carry things so it’ll be an interesting role progression for her, I think.

Mark Hamill was truly excellent. I know he was critical of the direction in which they’ve taken Luke but, given the ‘history’ of events as we know them to have depressingly panned out from the previous chapter, it actually makes a lot of sense. And, as it happens, the Luke Skywalker who has a ‘visitation’ to help out the rebels at the end is now very much the old Luke who is played just as he was in Return Of The Jedi and also... and I think some people may have missed this or just not had time to process the information as yet... now very much believing in the spirit of the Jedi again after the events at the temple burning scene, where Yoda basically finishes what Luke went there to start.

And then we have Kylo Ren... I didn’t know who Adam Driver was before the previous film and I initially hated both his performance in The Force Awakens and, as it happens, the character. However, after having seen him in a few other things and understanding just how great an actor he truly is, I’ve looked back on that last Star Wars role and found there was more going on there than I had previously realised. The pay off to the character comes in this film, where Driver gives a superb performance and the character he plays almost but, not quite, redeems himself in a truly appallingly telegraphed moment where you know he is going to kill the ultimate bad guy, Snoke. However, the punchline to that is, where he appears to shift allegiances, he just creates a new villain by inheriting the mantle, kind of, of Snoke. And he’s finally got rid of that silly helmet in this one so... that’s a good move too, I think.

Okay, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac and Kelly Marie Tran were all good in their roles but their story line felt a bit like it was made up to take out time... just something to do while we kept cutting back to the real character work going on elsewhere in the film. I think Isaac, especially, was very much short changed in his part of the movie where he just felt like a second-hand Starbuck from the 1970s incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, to be honest. I’m wondering just where the heck they are going to go with this character in the concluding chapter of this final trilogy.

Carrie Fisher, though, was very good here and she also gets to ‘use the Force’ in a way we’ve not seen before. It was a nice performance and it was a shame it was relegated to one of the story strands, such as they were, that I was least interested in because... it just all felt like it was filler, to be honest. Although, I have to admit, I think the comedy in this one works very well and I especially, for instance, loved the moment when Chewbacca is trying to eat a Porg. That was nicely done, like many scenes here.

My last good thing was the music by the great John Williams. I need to hear some of it in isolation but it was a beautiful and appropriate score. That being said, I don’t think it was anywhere near as great as his work on The Force Awakens (and I’m only saying this after one viewing so I might change my mind here). It did feel kinda like a ‘greatest hits’ album in some ways and, though I certainly admired the way he was able to catch some of the orchestrational style of the very first film in some of the new music here (especially in the quieter and reflective moments of the story), there were some things I found questionable. For example, unless it was the speakers in the cinema I saw this one in (ODEON Leicester Square in London), the main title crawl seemed somehow a bit clunkier than some of the versions we’ve had over the years. Also, I couldn’t work out why the piece of music directly following that over the first shots of the film was pretty much the dead spit of the equivalent musical moment in the very first movie. I think this is the first time the post-crawl intro has been, effectively, repeated in a Star Wars movie. Also, the cue from the very first film originally known as Ben’s Death And TIE Fighter Attack is used here and it seems to have become a leitmotif building block for the Millennium Falcon in these new films... which is interesting but puzzling since it was used in a scene in Return Of The Jedi in an entirely different context during the sail barge rescue (although, admittedly, it’s use in that sequence was an alternate rescore from what Williams had originally written for it). Also, the thematic hits seemed less subtle and more ‘in your face’ on this one. The moment where it suddenly goes into the Luke And Leia theme from Return Of The Jedi and then quickly transforms itself into the Han And Leia motif made me frown at one point.

Okay... so that’s the, mostly, good stuff. Onto the not so good stuff...

If you’re going to have a Force manifestation give Princess Leia some ‘dice’ from the Millenium Falcon as a remembrance of Han then... well, they’re going to disappear pretty quickly and are not much of a remembrance at all, are they? They’ll just wink out of existence pretty soon. Not cool.

The big fight scene with Rey and Ren fighting back to back was a truly nice beat or the film but the choreography seemed a lot less interesting than some of the sabre fight choreography in the previous films. It almost seemed like the two actors were either not capable of doing a more challenging choreography and the camera was just cutting from shot to shot to make it feel like there was more going on or... the editing was just plain bad and hurt the scene in general, perhaps? I don’t know which, if either, of those conclusions is correct but I found stuff like the Darth Maul battle in The Phantom Menace to be much more exciting.

Also, a lot of the intriguing set ups like Rey's 'classified' status and the way Luke's original light sabre was recovered were either solidly turned into an anti-climactic red herring or just plainly ignored. I felt betrayed by the direction this film took after investing emotionally in those kinds of elements, to be honest. I also found it kinda weird that, after so many episodes, Luke uses the throw away term 'laser sword' instead of light sabre. Star Wars fans have been correcting casual viewers' use of that term since 1977 so it kinda felt like a sharp jab in the face, to be honest.

The timelines also didn’t make sense but that’s not necessarily the director's fault. He presumably wanted to open on an action set piece and he did (a particularly non-interesting one, as far as I’m concerned) but that scene seemed to be taking place weeks after the end of The Force Awakens... we then cut back to Rey confronting Luke at the end of that film and... it just didn’t make sense. I met a friend who had just come out of the screening before I saw the next performance and he made a comment about the timeline that seemed a lot more critical of it than something I would say (although he liked the movie a lot more than I did, to be fair) but I think the problem was that, as far as I’m concerned, the last chapter should have finished with Rey flying off in the Falcon. Luke really didn’t belong in that last installment, I think. I understand that J. J. Abrams may have got lynched by fans if he hadn’t put Hamill into it but... no, I just don’t think that helped the art of the story line and this movie is kind of left trying to work around that decision. I don’t think it works it out too well.

One last thing...

Finn was wounded at the end of The Force Awakens. So in that relatively long period of, what, a day or so after the final battle, it makes sense that his two best friends Poe and Rey would have visited him in hospital. And they certainly would have come into contact with each other in the room with the map reveal by R2 and BB8... so why are we being asked to believe that Poe and Rey are only just laying eyes on each other at the end of this one. That makes no sense and really stretches the credibility of the film more than a lot of the other bad stuff here, I would say.

Now all of this and the next thing I’m gong to say is going to come with a caveat that I learned when I first saw and reviewed The Force Awakens. I hated that film when I first saw it but, as soon as I saw it a second time, I really loved it. Now that didn’t happen to me with Rogue One (which I still think is a fairly weak film) but it has happened with other films too (Avengers - Age Of Ultron, La La Land, Ant Man) and so there’s a good chance that this one will grow on me very quickly. As it is, though, I’ll get onto my main take away from this one which is... it just felt like a very dull, slow film and I felt the same thing with Attack Of The Clones when that was released. I’m more used to my Star Wars movies moving from one scene to the next at a blistering pace, just like the old 1930s serials they aspire to be... but I found myself getting really bored with this one. Again, that will hopefully change on my second viewing where I hope I will appreciate things a little more but, for now, that’s how I felt about this one. If I was going to recommend a jumping on point for any Star Wars first time watchers it certainly wouldn’t be The Last Jedi and, as it happens, without knowing the back story here you’d probably be lost anyway. Not my favourite of the Star Wars saga, that’s for sure but... not my least favourite either.


Star Wars at NUTS4R2

 Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 

Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones

Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith 

Solo

Rogue One 

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi 

Episode 7: The Force Awakens 

Episode 8:  The Last Jedi

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker