The Music Man

7T6 Trombones 
With A Capital T

The Music Man
Directed by Morton DaCosta
USA 1962 
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone A 

I’d never seen one of my dad’s favourite musicals, The Music Man, before... although, of course, the song 76 Trombones is obviously a musical earworm to this day. Indeed, the film and stage show is such a well known piece that, even though I’d not seen it, I was easily able to recognise that wonderful parody of one of the songs and a character featured in The Simpsons episode about the monorail. 

So I finally saw it and was not only charmed by it... I immediately leapt onto the computer to grab one of the last remaining copies of the movie version soundtrack from that well known website named after a tribe of women who used to cut their own breast off in order to improve their use with a bow and arrow (more coverage of that in a future blog probably never but, I like to throw these little pieces of dubious info in from time to time). I had to source a copy of the film on American Blu Ray because there just seems to be a dearth of the genre available in that format in the UK at the moment. C’mon people... we want more high definition musicals!

Okay... so... adapted from the very long running Broadway smash by Meredith Wilson (and including many more songs which never made it to the stage version but were indeed written for it at one point or another), The Music Man tells the story of Professor Harold Hill... not a professor but, instead, a conman who goes from town to town selling the proposition of a boy band with instruments and music, swindling people out of dollars and keeping his neck out of deep water with a little bit of oomph and pizazz.

Hill is played by Robert Preston, blessed with more than a regular helping of that particular oomph and definitely a large side order of said pizazz, who made the show his own on stage but was nearly passed up for the movie by Warner Brothers, who wanted someone bigger. It apparently took Cary Grant to both refuse the part and furthermore tell Warner Brothers that he wouldn’t even go to see it in cinemas if Preston wasn’t in it, to seal the deal. 

Preston’s love interest, the target of his initially false affections until the con backfires on his emotional wellbeing, is Shirley Jones (pregnant at the time with young Patrick Cassidy, of TV fame) who does a wonderful job. Preston’s friend, in on the con, is Buddy Hackett and, playing Jones’ very young brother, is the then seven year old Ronny Howard. Yep. The same red headed kid who would grow up to star in films like American Graffiti, hang out with The Fonz in Happy Days and, of course, be a major modern film director, still, at time of writing. 

And it’s all just wonderful. Shot in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, the film is very well designed with frames based, as far as I could see, on vertical rectangles in the composition to divide up the screen to highlight elements of the story. Not to mention some wonderful transitions where, towards the end of a scene, everything apart from the principal actors will suddenly fade to pitch black, revealing the artifice of the stagey setting in what I can only describe as a ‘soon to be’ Godardian manner. Although, I guess at that time, it’s probably more akin to Brechtian theatre? Lars Von Trier would cerrtainly know, I suspect. ;-)This technique is also used to softly pull frames out and set them aside each other in a kind of masked split-screen, so songs and their counterpoint can be put together and shown from different scenes simultaneously, at one point. 

And Robert Preston is just amazing in this. What a vibrant personality this guy has, as he fast talks his way out of everything and then makes a little, throw away hand-dusting motion every time he gets over a little hurdle in his con game. Talk about buckets full of charisma. 

And the songs are... well, you always get a couple of duds... but the majority of them are not just great, they’re multilayered with the lyrics doing an abnormally large amount of heavy lifting when it comes to plot exposition, Which sounds bad but it in no way makes them any less charming. On the contrary many of them are very clever and... I’m guessing very hard to learn with some of the dense sets of layers bounding off each other. There must have been an awful lot of rehearsals in this production.

And, yeah, I’m not going to say much more on The Music Man, I’m just going to leave it for you to discover for yourself if you haven’t already, except to say that as much as Meredith Wilson made from this show, the film and the profit percentage... it was actually surpassed by the amount of money he made from The Beatles cover version of ‘Til There Was You from this musical... which is not a song I like but, there you go. But, yeah, give this movie a go because it’s very cool. 

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

Inferno (2016)

Inferno, Rest, Trains

Inferno (2016)
2016  USA/Japan/Turkey/Hungary
Directed by Ron Howard
UK cinema release print.

Not to be confused with the amazing Dario Argento movie of the same name, Inferno is the third of the big screen adaptations of Dan Brown’s popular Professor Robert Langdon series, this one being based on the fourth book... which is kinda strange but then the series started off with the second book, The Da Vinci Code and then made a sequel out of the first book, Angels And Demons (the movie of which I reviewed here). So why they’ve missed out The Lost Symbol I don’t know but I’m sure, if this series of movies continues to make as much money as the novels have done, they’ll get to it.

Like the first two movies, this one is once again directed by Ron Howard (who played Richie Cunningham in the TV show Happy Days back in the 1970s) and all I can say is, I still can’t figure out what his directorial signature is. Other than, for the most part, making some pretty entertaining and, usually, quite popular movies. My experience with the series thus far is... The Da Vinci Code was an okayish movie (and it had Audrey Tautou in it, so that helped) and Angels And Demons was an outstanding modern action thriller. This third one is incredibly entertaining too but, I think it also has some problems... just not quite enough to outweigh its sense of fun.

The movie, once again, stars the always watchable Tom Hanks as Professor Langdon (an actor I first saw in a TV movie called Mazes and Monsters and liked him in that so, you know, it’s good that he’s made a but of a name for himself now) and he is aided and abetted (character wise) by a very strong cast including Felicity Jones, who played Mrs. Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (read my review here) and who is about to become very famous heading up the release, in September, of Star Wars: Rogue One. The film also stars Sidse Babett Knudsen (who I last saw in The Duke Of Burgundy (reviewed here), Ben Foster, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, Ana Ularu and... oh yeah, they’re all amazing. You will believe in these characters and the unusual things they say and do for sure... you will have no problem suspending your disbelief here, that’s for sure. So that’s one of the huge plusses that the movie has.

The film starts off in the midst of an ongoing story and we're catapulted right into the heart of things as we have a completely discombobulated Professor Langdon suffering from hellish hallucinations based on a famous illustration of Dante’s Inferno from The Divine Comedy. The pace is, beyond anything the second movie threw at the audience, quite blistering. However, for the movie as a whole that’s a bit of a double edged sword because, although you won’t get bored here and the action will whizz by at a rate which will leave you wanting to catch your breath maybe just a little more than the director and editors allow that to happen here... you will also be as discombobulated as Professor Langdon from the outset of the film. Although things make more sense as the film speeds on, you will find yourself just wishing it will all calm down at some point.

That is to say... it’s a movie made up of mostly short sharp shots. The modus operandi here seems to be why listen to a line of expositional dialogue in a master shot when you can split it up into three totally different angles of a character when they are delivering a line. I guess it makes the dialogue more interesting but it's usually also punctuated, very quickly, by another dose of action/suspense as Hanks and Jones are hunted by pretty much every authority on the planet... as Professor Langdon tries to stop a virus which promises to unleash death on over half the world very quickly (people who are familiar with the story as it’s represented in the book, which I’ve not read myself, should be aware that this movie has a quite different ending to the original novel). As a consequence, however, it’s all very choppy and there are some points, even in scenes where nothing much is happening, where you just wish everything would slow down and go back to a single master shot at some point.

I’m guessing one of the other reasons the people who made this have decided to subject this movie to a ferociously intimidating piece of editing (although it's never dull) is because there is a so called twist about two thirds into the movie and they're maybe trying to distract you from it but, honestly, if you haven’t worked out what that twist will be within five minutes of the film's opening sequence starting you’ve not been paying attention because, honestly, Howard pretty much telegraphs this not so revealing reveal quite a lot throughout the movie. I was kinda disappointed, actually, when it happened because... well, who wasn’t expecting that? Obviously, I won’t give that twist away here but it’s exactly what most people, I suspect, are thinking throughout the movie and saying to themselves... “C’mon Professor Langdon, when’s the penny going to drop?”.

So there’s that.

However, like I said above, although there are a lot of problems with the story... or at least with the way the story is presented in this medium here, there are enough plus points to kinda outweigh it and still give you a good time at the movies.  And one of those plus points, of course, is Hans Zimmer’s amazing score.

I kinda liked Zimmer’s score to the first movie in the series but wasn’t completely crazy about it. His second score, though, to Angels And Demons, was simply a fantastic modern work and certain tracks from that are never off my iPod or CD player for very long. This third score is better than the first and certainly holds it’s own with the second... although I need to hear it as a stand alone performance before I can decide whether I like it better than the second or not. The music obviously uses Zimmer’s already established Robert Langdon theme but, also, it seems to use a lot of references to the action themes from Angels And Demons in some of its slower passages too... especially through the first third of the movie, which surprised me because that means I’ve now got absolutely no idea how the leitmotif works with this set of films. Why the heck was that in here? I haven’t got a clue but I do know a good soundtrack when I hear it and this one is pretty cool. As to be expected from the pacing on the movie, there’s a lot of action music and percussion so it should be quite a ‘rocking’ listen when I finally get the CD to this one. I’ve come to respect Zimmer a lot over the last decade or so, after initially dismissing him at the early stages of his career. He also knows how to rock a concert venue as you can read in my review of his London concert from earlier in the year here. 

All in all, although Inferno is quite predictable, a bit choppy and aggressively edited (not to mention quite noisy for a lot of the time), it’s also got some beautiful visuals (when you get time to focus on them), some great acting, an amazing score and, frankly, there are a lot worse big budget type popcorn movies you could be spending your cinema cash on at the moment. I’m not hearing a great critical reaction to it at the moment but I’m hoping that it will do enough at the box office so that Ron Howard and Tom Hanks will reunite for a fourth one (and preferably with Hans Zimmer in tow). Hopefully they’ll sink their teeth into The Lost Symbol next.

Rush

No Good Speed Goes Unpunished

Rush
2013 UK/Germany
Directed by Ron Howard
Studio Canal   Blu Ray Zone B 

You know, I really never expected to be reviewing a movie like Rush for this blog. It’s not that I don’t like Ron Howard because, even with the spectre of Richie Cunningham from Happy Days hanging over him, I actually think he’s a pretty great director. He makes popular films for Hollywood (although this one is actually a British/German co-production, I was surprised to learn) in a very professional and competent way. Films which always have a sense of emotional engagement inherent within them. In fact, when you take my favourite of his movies, Angels and Demons, the sequel to his adaptation of The Da Vinci Code (and which you can find reviewed here), I have to give him credit for taking what is basically a not too subtly dressed up version of the tired old “run the policeman around key points in a city looking for the bomb before it goes off” plot and turning it into a thoroughly entertaining spectacle.

The reason I am surprised to find myself reviewing this particular movie is because, my fondness for John Frankenheimer’s movie Grand Prix aside, I have no real interest in either motor sports or, really, cars in general unless they happen to be associated with a film or TV series. I remember having a small Corgi or Dinky toy of Emmerson Fitipaldi’s black John Player Special when I was a kid and a basic Scalextric track but... that’s where the interest started and ended I’m afraid.

My dad, however, is a different kettle of fish. Over the years, especially the last decade or so, it’s become very clear to me that the man loves watching motor racing and follows it with a kind of “passion hidden behind a veneer of indifference” which I’d never really noticed before that period. So, when it came time for the bizarrely conceived, commercial celebration known as Father’s Day, I slipped a copy of Rush, a film I knew he’d not seen (neither had I), in with his ritual bottle of Port. And, of course, since it was Father’s Day... well... I had to watch it with him, didn’t I?

The film deals with the rivalry between two racing drivers, James Hunt (played by The Mighty Thor... um... I mean Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (played by Daniel Brühl, who was so good in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds) in the six years prior to and culminating in the 1976 Grand Prix. Now I kinda remember Hunt and Lauda after the fact, but only as names looking back from this end of the historical telescope... although I think Hunt may have appeared on television shows during my childhood. The thing is, when Niki Lauda had his famous “near death” crash in 1976, I was dealing with a car crash problem of my own. I was eight years old and I had been standing with my mum, talking to some friends on the pavement at a crossroads in Edmonton (firmly off the road and far back from the kerb, I’ll have you know) when two cars from the opposite sides of the crossroads hit each other at speed and both ploughed up the pavement and into us all. I probably had the most serious injury out of everyone involved in that my jaw got broken (I was wearing a thick duffle coat with a hood up and it would have been my head rolling if I hadn’t been wearing that, the doctors told me) and because it was broken in such a way that the doctors couldn’t wire it, I had to spend a couple of years off of school. Unlike Lauda I wasn’t permanently scarred, at least not in any way which is visible to the naked eye, but obviously James Hunt and Niki Lauda were the furthest people from my mind at the time... which means I knew relatively little about what qualifies as story content in this film before going in full throttle and watching it.

Howard’s film is something of a more intimate look at the characters in play in this real life drama. It  feels epic because, compressing the six years into a couple of hours means you have to make a lot of broad strokes and then skip to the next important thing... but the film really gives you a sense of who these people were (Niki Lauda claims the film is totally accurate, although insists people used to make more of the rivalry between the two than was actually there... which figures, knowing the way the press and publicity machine works) in a more up close and personal way than you might expect from a film looking as slick and Hollywoodified as this. So the characters and the relationships they make with other people is the focus of the movie and a camaraderie between the two main characters is often felt lurking behind their words. The director and the two lead actors do really well to capture this quality in the performance. Both are likeable characters and, even though it’s played up that nobody really liked Lauda, you can feel where each of the protagonists is coming from in their quest to win the world championship and I felt really pulled into the movie.

The racing scenes are another matter in that, for a film with a back drop of Formula One motor racing, they are few and far between and over very quickly. They’re good... don’t get me wrong. Shot and edited in a way that both conveys the speed and danger while giving you a feeling of excitement and anticipation, thanks in part to Hans Zimmer’s appropriately propulsive scoring. They’re no match for graphic designer Saul Bass’ wonderful racing montage sequences in the aforementioned Grand Prix (sorry, I can’t help but compare the two here) but they are great pieces of “speed on film” machismo... however, they just don’t go on for long enough and there’s not enough of them... at least that’s the impression I got.

Now I’m not saying this is wrong for the film, far from it. It may be that editing in longer race sequences would have harmed the drama and the flow of the film and Howard has probably made a shrewd decision here... but just go onto this one forewarned not to expect too much of the “vroom, vroom” in this movie. I read recently that the original draft of the script had been written without being commissioned and, because the writer assumed that anybody picking it up would not have much budget at their disposal, deliberately excluded any racing scenes throughout the whole of that first draft. Of course, when you get someone like Ron Howard on board, you’re going to get a hefty budget, I should think. It might have been that the insertion of racing scenes was a bit of a tightrope walk for balance with the dramatic writing so I’m guessing not a whole heap was done to change that in later drafts... relatively speaking.

And anyone who thinks Howard is going to take a big huggy feely approach to all the aspects of the story can think again. The scenes where the burnt beyond recognition Niki Lauda, barely surviving the human inferno he became for over sixty seconds, is having his lungs repeatedly vacuumed out in intensive care, really gives you a sense of the downside of the risk involved in this kind of “profession” and, also, the quite nasty way in which James Hunt beats up a reporter for his verbal attack on the post-crash Lauda after a press conference is also quite brutal in its intensity. Howard of course, being that he’s Howard, still manages to make these sequences also look really nice but... not to the point where they are too glossed over.

I was really taken with Rush and, by the end of it, felt that the two main protagonists were both honourable and likeable people who had both been dealt slightly unfortunate blows by life. I was educated a little by the dramatised “on screen history lesson” of the film but, more than that, entertained and enthralled by a picture about a subject I’m not much interested in... aka, all and any sports (except for maybe Rollerball, that’s a cool sport). If you’re into motor racing you’ll probably really like this movie and, if like me it’s not your thing, well... I reckon this movie is still worth some of your time. Sail on past that chequered flag as a fan of movies rather than anything else and I reckon this film will end up qualifying for you for sure. One to watch.

Angels and Demons

Pipped At The Pope!

Angels and Demons US 2009

Directed by Ron Hoard

Columbia Region 1

I remember that when The Da Vinci Code came out in the cinemas I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to see this movie. I’d... well not exactly read the book... but I had listened to the “talking books” style CD of the novel being read to me in the car on the way to a holiday destination one year and, quite honestly, couldn’t see what the fuss was about. I remembered buying my mother the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail for a birthday present when I was about 11 years old and I thought to myself, as I listened to Dan Brown’s huge bestseller being read to me, that this was all just the same old Knights Templar stuff rehashed all over again... and that as a rule I found the Blind Dead movies a lot more fun.

But the main thing which stuck out to me about the novel was how uncinematic it was. I knew, by this point, that they were making a movie out of it and my impressions of the novel were that there was far too much exposition and people standing around in the same rooms talking for lengthy periods of time to make a decent visual narrative. So I was more than a little wary when I was dragged along to see the first movie, grudgingly letting myself be lead along to see it because Audrey Tautou and Jean Reno were in it. However, it has to be said that The DaVinci Code, all in all, made for a dull movie even with the presence of these two icons of cinema and, of course, the presence of the consummate professional Tom Hanks as the main protagonist, symbologist Robert Langdon.

My girlfriend at the time was besotted with the score and I certainly didn’t mind it, but I was not as much into Zimmer as I am now... I think the work he’s been doing since then is a vast improvement. But it wasn’t exactly a terrible score either and it was absolutely appropriate for the movie it was supporting.

The other thing I remember thinking was... well, why the heck were they adapting the second book in the series first? I’d not read the original first book in the series, Angels and Demons, but doing a movie adaptation of The DaVinci Code first seemed to me to make about as much sense as starting off the Bond series of movies with Dr. No. That is to say, totally illogical.

So, as you can imagine, when the sequel (and it is treated as a sequel rather than a prequel in the movie, with references to the first movie thrown in although the fictionalised events in that movie actually took place after the events in the sequel) came out I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to see it. Especially after finding that the BBFC had got it sliced for various sequences (the first movie also suffers from serious censorship issues in this country, with the sound being dialled down in certain areas to reduce the intensity of events on screen).

However I remember being completely bowled over by this one so I finally git around to tracking down the US extended edition of the movie (so I could see it totally uncut this time) and I have to say the sheer watchability of the film is not in any way diminished on subsequent viewings (I think I saw that one twice at the cinema anyway as I recall).

Angels and Demons is a totally different animal to the previous movie and while there are certainly moments of protracted exposition within the film, it rushes along at a heady pace and that’s quite a necessary response to the timeline of events in the novel (even though, as I confessed earlier, I haven’t read this one) as those events all take place within the space of just a few hours. Langdon has been called in by the Vatican police to help work out where the antimatter "God Particle" created by the Large Hadron Collider, but then stolen, has been put before it goes off after four kidnapped candidates to be the Pope are summarily executed, one hour after each other, by the Illuminati (gosh, it’s been a while since The Eye In The Pyramid!). As part of the ritualistic trappings of the killing, the assassin is having to leave cryptic clues about where the next death will take place and its these clues which Robert Langdon can puzzle out, and then hopefully dash to where things are about to happen and save lives.

What this means in practice is you get a kick ass movie which resembles nothing other than one of those old 70s cop TV shows where, inevitably, you will have an episode where the main protagonist has to run around the city from phone booth to phone booth by a certain time limit in order to stop a bomb going off somewhere. The last time I saw this plot approached in a fairly modern movie was when the villain used it as a distraction for the police in the third Die Hard movie, Die Hard With A Vengeance.

Here the plot is pretty much played straight, though, but coupled with some pseudo-religious trappings, some shoot-outs and daring escapes and two large dollops of intrigue and humour (in equal measure), you end up with something which is actually quite gripping and intriguing... and all with an absolute masterpiece of a score by the aforementioned Zimmer, which includes some of his most exciting compositions to date (you should all go listen to the track 160 BPM).

True, the few twists and turns there are in this movie are ones which you will see coming a mile off, but there’s really no substitute, is there, for a really well made, action thriller, and that’s exactly what Angels and Demons is. Of course, it also has some great actors in it with the likes of Ewan McGregor and Stellan Skarsgard lending their formidable talents to the proceedings. Also, as you would perhaps expect from a director who used to be Opie Taylor in The Andy Griffith Show and then Richie Cunningham in Happy Days (that is to say, someone who’s been around long enough to know the difference), the framing of the beautifully lit shots and the editing all make for a movie which makes the sum of its parts add up to a marvellously quasi-ancient atmosphere filled package... this is a classy action movie if ever there was one.

This one is certainly recommended for a viewing and all I can say to those of you who, like me, were spectacularly unimpressed with the previous movie in the series, is to not judge this movie by its predecessor and take a look at this one. You might just find your faith rewarded with a great little future DVD for your shelf.