Scooby Doo and Batman The Brave And The Bold

A Dog Out On A Dark Knight

Scooby Doo and Batman
The Brave And The Bold
USA 2018 Directed by Jake Castorena
Warner Brothers DVD Region 2

Warning: Slight spoilers.

The Brave And The Bold was a comic book series which ran from 1955 to somewhere in the 1980s. It was originally an adventure story orientated comic book but, after a few transformations, got injected with some of the superheroes that DC had in their catalogue and became something more like their World’s Finest comic book (which basically teamed up DC’s two biggest A list characters, Superman and Batman, on a regular basis). The Brave And The Bold, before long, became a revolving team up anthology which would feature The Batman plus any one DC hero or group of collective heroes within the pages. The series has been revived a number of times since the 1980s and is currently, I believe, a regular series once again.

This new animation, Scooby-Doo And Batman - The Brave And The Bold, teams up (for the third time, for the record) Batman and the Scooby Doo gang. This one being made some 47 years after the last two shorter episodes of The New Scooby Doo Movies TV series which also featured the dynamic duo. Although this feature length production from last year was apparently inspired by those earlier team ups, this is a fairly different kind of beast with a much more self aware attitude to the main, stylistic components of its own DNA. And it’s actually quite good, if a little more juvenile in places than I had expected... mainly with the treatment of Aquaman who looks more like the 1970s incarnation of Oliver Queen (aka Green Arrow) and seems to shout “Outrageous!” whenever he gets the chance to say much of anything.

The plot starts off with Mystery Incorporated... that’s Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby Doo, to the uninitiated... as they finish up an adventure. However, when the spooky foes are unmasked it turns out to be Jon Jonz (aka Martian Manhunter) and a talking ape wearing a Sherlock Holmes style deerstalker called Detective Chimp (I really have no idea who this is and would just like to blot him out from my memory as quickly as possible, to be honest). It turns out Batman has cast this mystery as a test to see if Mystery Incorporated are worthy to join what is, more or less, a lightweight version of the Justice League of America (as it was always known when I was a kid) called Mystery Analysts of Gotham. The group comprises Batman, Martian Manhunter, Detective Chimp, The Question (a hero who has no face), Plastic Man (one of my favourite super heroes, although his sidekick Woozy Winks is nowhere to be seen) and Black Canary.

So the plot thickens when, while Scooby and the gang are helping these heroes solve an old crime, it dovetails into Batman’s one unsolved, old cold case where he failed to save the day and this new adventure sees his past coming back to haunt him. Just as bad, both Batman and Mystery Inc are framed for a crime and so are trying to finish the case while also evading both the police and the other superheroes... not to mention the lethal villain of the piece.

So, yeah, this is a nice enough, if quite childishly written (in places) caper and it makes for a diverting enough animation. There’s some nice dialogue in here too... for instance when Fred makes a device for trapping life-sized puppets, really consisting of just a net, he calls it a ‘mario-net’. Another great moment is when one of the other characters makes a terrible joke and The Question, who is featureless, says... “Just so you know, I’m rolling my eyes.”

Another nice thing about this movie is that the Batman character, while a bit angularly designed and looking like he has half of his face missing at some angles, is quite obviously an homage to the old Batman TV show in design (if not manner) and I can’t help but think that if Adam West himself had lived for just a few more years then he would have been providing the voice for this movie. As it is though, the costume with its  pale eyebrows and yellow ellipse around the bat symbol on his chest (something which actually didn’t start in the comics until the TV series first aired in the 1960s) disappear when the character flashes back to his previous, historically unsolved case in the nicest way. For this sequence the suit is replaced with the old style costume from his earliest comic book issues, with the extra long ears and the black bat symbol directly drawn onto the chest. This was a great little touch for longtime followers of the character and I really appreciate stuff like this. Also, the Batmobile in this section is one of those old, closed top versions with the big fin on the roof. Whereas in the main body of the film it’s the sixties one and it has the moving sign entry approach to the Bat Cave which people will remember from the old TV show.

Another nice stylistic touch is the little ‘highlight’ sections which pull out one of the characters such as Batman in mid punch to give a slow moving, not quite static splash page effect of the violent moments with a big musical sting behind each which is, almost, reminiscent of the old TV show and I’m pretty sure this is why this was done. The visuals aren’t quite the same but the stylistic punctuation of the fight scenes serves exactly the same effect. Also, the first time in the movie we see this done is when Shaggy and Scooby have to ‘eat their way out’ of a room full of super-villains such as Harley Quin and Poison Ivy in Arkham Asylum... with little staged moments of them chowing down on food as they evade the bad guys running. It’s nicely done, chum.

There are some problems too... like I implied, there’s no real ‘adult level’ to the scripting here and that’s a problem when it runs for an hour and a quarter. But my real problem was with Black Canary. Now, I love Black Canary but she always, almost without fail, wears fishnet stockings and that pretty much helps define her look as much as Superman’s red cloak or Green Lantern’s power ring. However, here there are no fishnets to be seen and I almost didn’t recognise her. She has pale, grey, lifeless stockings and... I’m sorry, that’s just not Black Canary. Heck, even the Lego version of her character has the iconic fishnets. Secondly... she has a super power of some kind of canary voice. What? Since when? Well, I think since sometime in only the last 30 years or so which, frankly, is a bizarre gimmick and certainly the Black Canary I know, from the 1970s (and earlier) never had any kind of canary howl. This is a pretty lame addition.

All in all though, it’s not a bad movie and the kids among you should definitely like it.

There are a couple of extra movies on the disc too, those being the two original episodes of The New Scooby-Doo Movies which featured Batman and Robin from 1972. Now, I tried to watch these on DVD a few years ago and was disgusted because, not only were they both ‘top and tailed’, as in the opening and closing credits were not present... they also had a dire, canned laughter track which made them pretty unwatchable. Indeed, the last time I tried to watch these I had to give up after about three minutes because I just can’t stand laughter tracks. Their treatment on this disc is a little bit better but it really is a mixed bag...

On the plus side, both cartoons have had their opening and end credits restored so... that’s pretty good. Also and, quite surprisingly, the first of the two episodes, The Dynamic Scooby-Doo Affair, has had it’s laughter track completely removed. Yes! High five to Warners for being able to get hold of the isolated elements and wipe the horrible laughter track from this one. Hoyt Curtin’s musical shenanigans certainly benefit from it. Alas, for the second of the two shows, The Caped Crusader Caper, it seems they’ve been unable to do this but I suspect there’s a lot less than there was on there originally and it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a sweetener laughter track which intruded onto the sound effects tape and they were just left with that one when they stripped it off. It certainly doesn’t seem as distracting as it could have done though so, I definitely think some work has been done on it. That being said, the visual quality isn’t great and these two look a little pixilated, to be honest. Although, I guess they always would seem like that when you compare them to the modern main feature on here.

Okay so... the content of these two films are... terrible. In both cases we have The Joker and The Penguin teaming up and acting completely out of character to have fun scaring those ‘meddling kids’. The 1960s Batman vibe is still definitely something which certain elements have been borrowed from though... like the same approach to the Bat Cave that the modern cartoon used and also the speech patterns of The Penguin being very much in the style of Burgess Meredith’s outstanding performance of him in the sixties. The Joker’s voice though... the less said about it the better, believe me. There is the odd good pun though, such as when the fiendish villains drop Batman and Robin into an inescapable pit in the ground. “Our pit is full... how pitiful!” quips The Joker and I have to say this high quality punning surprised me at this point compared to much of the rest on offer in these cartoons. I still haven’t figured out, though, how Batman can look through his binoculars and see the same footage we saw earlier, from different angles into the shot even, though Batman is still observing from the same viewpoint. What the heck?

Ultimately, Scooby-Doo And Batman - The Brave And The Bold is a fairly fun time and with all three crossovers to date of the title characters included, this DVD (and also Blu Ray in the US, apparently) is a nice little package. It’s a shame there weren’t any documentary extras on here too as I was curious about the history of this team up and the decisions that brought the original TV productions to life but, alas, the two episodes are the only bonus features present. Still, if you are on the lookout for unusual team ups then this one definitely fits the bill and the main movie, at least, should give you something interesting to look at. More ‘Zoinks!’ and ‘Jinkies!’ than you can shake a stick at in this one.

The General

Rail Of A Tale

The General
USA 1926
Directed by Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray Zone B boxed edition

It’s been quite a while since I sat down and watched a silent movie and even longer since I last had a look at The General. For some reason I’ve always preferred, in terms of early silent movie US comics, people like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd over people like Charlie Chaplin and Keaton especially appeals to me, perhaps, because of the stony faced visage which he constantly presents throughout the course of his pictures. I don’t remember if he ever smiled during one of his movies and this reminds me of myself, to a certain extent.

Now, I’ve never really been much into laughing at comedy movies. My absolute favourite writers and performers of the genre would be Woody Allen and The Marx Brothers but even when I am watching their films I tend to not really laugh so much as watch all the details intently and analyse the way in which the comedy works. Therefore, honestly, I’m not a fun person to take to a comedy because, at least when I’m looking at something like a horror movie in a similar fashion, it doesn’t matter too much to others that I don’t laugh (although, truth be told, I might be more likely to laugh during a really bad exploitation picture or modern horror tale).

The General is based, I’m guessing quite loosely, on events during the American Civil War when a similar incident involving a soldier stealing said train (The General) to further their own, nefarious ends took place (depending on whether you are rooting for the blues or the greys... I never know the difference). In this version of events, Keaton plays the driver, Johnnie Gray, who ends up going after the stolen locomotive, with all the expected and often unexpected comedy shenanigans and, more importantly for lovers of Keaton’s work, I suspect, all the ingenuity that his particularly clever brand of visual comedy brought to the story.

The set up is of Keaton courting girlfriend Annebelle Lee, played quite resiliently given some of the things that happen to her, by Marion Mack. However, war breaks out and when Lee’s father and brother go to enlist, she urges Keaton to do the same. Alas, when he gives his profession as railway engineer, he is deemed too important to be allowed to go and fight. Although he doesn’t quite know this yet because the reveal of that info is only for the audience and the stigma of him not being able to enlist is enough to keep his sweetheart from ever talking to him again until he is in uniform.

Time passes and the train is stolen by the Union army. However, due to unforseen circumstances, Keaton’s girlfriend Annabelle is also along for the ride as a prisoner of the soldiers. The movie then turns into a ‘chase, rescue, escape and tell the confederates of the upcoming attack before the union soldiers can stop us’ kind of affair... filled with all your favourite gags and cleverness that you expect from Keaton.

There’s also a lot of danger involved in some of these films and you have to wonder sometimes how these things ever got made at all. There’s no way a studio would let some of the things Keaton does in this be performed by any of the actors these days... you’d be liable to lose your leads. The amount of running and climbing along the speeding train Keaton does, for example. Or the wonderful moment where he is sitting on the crossbeam by the side of the wheels and the train chugs into motion, taking him with it. Or the time when he jumps out the train, clears a bit of wood out of the way, keeps it in his hands as he sits on the cow catcher and then throws it at another bit of wood, catapulting it off the track just in time. There’s some good stuff here and, of course, a lot of the actors get caught up in the ‘spirit’ of these films. For example, when the pipe to fill up with water comes off at the other end and Marion Mack is suddenly knocked over by the force of gallons of water, she was kept in the dark as to what was about to happen to ensure a more lifelike reaction to the proceedings.

The newish Blu Ray restoration from Eureka Masters of Cinema is the absolutely best presentation I’ve seen of this movie. The running time is a little longer than that listed on the IMDB but I suspect that’s because the film is actually running at something approaching the correct speed for this presentation. Which I’m guessing is a really hard thing to do because, if memory serves, a lot of these silent films were hand cranked and so the speed was kinda up and down depending on how good the camera operators were at keeping a certain rhythm going and also how tired they were at the time of the shot. The presentation of the movie on here uses the Carl Davis score for those of you who are interested in such things. So, yeah, this new one is pretty much the definitive version to own, from what I can see (although it’s taken me so long to get this particular review up that I believe the same company are already bringing out another reissue very soon... so that’s possibly the one to get).

A bit of a short review but The General is definitely a good place to start if you’re unfamiliar with the work of Buster Keaton and I really wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of modern stuntmen weren’t still getting inspired by this guy now. Whether they would have been allowed to do some of them, however... or even if they’d need to now, in the ago of CGI... is another question.

Wild Cards - Texas Hold 'Em

Bubble Mum and
the Beautiful Dreamers

Wild Cards - Texas Hold 'Em
Edited by George R. R. Martin
Tor Books
ISBN: 978-0765390592

So here we are at the 26th of the George R. R. Martin edited Wild Cards mosaic novels, Texas Hold ‘Em. Now, I’m usually quite positive and enthusiastic about pretty much all of the Wild Cards novels, which I’ve been reading since they first started in the 1980s and, this time too, I’m going to be just as enthusiastic. I do though... and this is quite unusual for me in terms of the series in general... have one, possibly three, slight criticisms. I’ll get to the other ones in due course but the first one is based purely on my expectations and it is this...

Since, I think, Tor Books have been publishing the later novels (and, I think, reprints of some of the earlier novels), they have kind of retroactively bunched both these and all the old ones into clusters of  named story arcs. Now the previous ‘trilogy’ was called The Fort Freak Triad and it was pretty heavy and dramatic for all the active players in the contemporary Wild Card universe (and you can read my reviews of it here, here and here). It started off soft and then got really heavy, very quickly by the end of the second volume. This current trilogy, which is the last of a trilogy called The America Triad, started off with a very dramatic and moving story promising lots of future consequences for some of the characters, called Mississippi Roll (reviewed here) and then went full steam ahead to a completely unrelated time travel story for the next volume, called Low Chicago (reviewed by me here). Now, I commented at the time that I was going to assume that, like the last trilogy, the final tome in that sequence would bring all the loose ends from these two together and close out the trilogy as recognisably a single arc. Well... I’m wondering just who is it is imposing these collective cluster titles on the books now because, frankly, this third volume really has nothing much to do with either of the previous two novels. So, there you go... that’s one grumble.

Okay, so the plot set up is very simple for this one. The Amazing Bubbles, who went through such a hard time at the end of the last trilogy, has been talked by her Deuce daughter Adesina, into being one of her high school joker jazz band’s chaperones for the national jazz band competition finals in Texas. This book covers just under a week of the incidents that happen to the kids and the competing bands while they are staying at the hotel for the competition and, perhaps somewhat predictably, deals almost solely with the issues surrounding ‘joker prejudice’ and is pretty much, in some ways, dealing with exactly the same kind of not-so-much-of-a-stretch metaphors that the original 1960s The Uncanny X-Men comics were dealing with when Stan Lee first created them. And... well I have to say that it’s a very light and frothy, for the most part, mosaic tale with the various writers concentrating on certain characters in mostly short bursts and then handing over the next crossover of characters to the next person before returning back to them... and most of the writers span the whole length of the novel with just a couple of exceptions.

Now, I usually like the lighter, whimsical stories in the Wild Cards universe and they are often a refreshing and welcome respite from some of the heavier issues but, in all honesty, this does somehow give this particular tome a kind of ‘young adult’ vibe and, well, I normally wouldn’t be caught dead reading something written especially for such a dubiously titled section of the audience. This novel is great fun and that’s fine but... it just feels like there’s absolutely nothing at stake. In the last ‘trilogy’ the whole world was almost obliterated and even in the previous volume in this trilogy, the whole world was at risk of being completely rewritten. Heck, even Mississippi Roll, which was much more a lighter tale, was extremely moving and you cared about the characters because the stakes to them personally were quite high. Here, the stakes are... I dunno... maybe trying to win a competition and trying to figure out teenage hormones, I guess. Which, frankly, makes the big finale, set piece battle of the novel seem kinda superfluous.

I did enjoy the inclusion of Creighton, the shape shifting detective who is ‘popped’ over by Popinjay to help clear up the ‘behind the scenes’ sabotage at the competition. I love the fact that he often uses old movie stars to base his character on so when he changes to Dwight Frye, the James Arness incarnation of The Thing (From Another World) and the William Powell version of Nick Charles from The Thin Man films, it’s always a pleasure to read his antics. And there are some great comic moments too when he has to impersonate Bubbles and babysit her grounded daughter while she has to go and take care of some business herself. This is not a bad novel by any stretch and, certainly, there are no really bad Wild Cards novels... but it’s possibly the most trivial of the series for sure.

So, as I said before, the story has a big action set piece at the end of it and, don’t get me wrong, it’s a pleasure to read. It involves Creighton who has gotten so drunk in his impersonation of The Thin Man that he has morphed into Mighty Joe Young and is rampaging his way towards The Alamo and, well, the way he’s stopped from obliterating this historical landmark is something that I’ll just say that anyone who is a fan of the original version of that particular movie (I’ve not seen the remake and don’t even talk to me about that) will absolutely love and applaud. And I don’t know why I didn’t see it coming even sooner than I did because it’s frankly the only solution that would do in this case. I have the original movie on Blu Ray now so I’ll probably revisit it sometime later this year and do a review here.

However, although this sequence is, again, a joy to read... the whole thing felt like it was just tacked on because the writers or possibly editor felt like they needed to have some kind of big ‘potential carnage’ scene at the end and, it doesn’t really have any consequences to do with the rest of the novel at all. It’s just a piece of spectacle similar to what Hollywood might add on to the end of a film to make it seem a little more punchy. However, brilliant as it is... it really doesn’t add anything to the book and, in all fairness, with so little at stake, there doesn’t seem to be much point to any of it.

So there you have it. Texas Hold ‘Em is another, hugely entertaining tome in the Wild Cards shared universe but, in all honesty, it’s also one of the worst and, almost certainly the least relevant of the series. Regular readers may like to know that there are no new Croyd Crenson sightings in this book but the character is referred to at least twice over the course of the story. However, with only a few Aces in sight and mostly just a bunch of jokers and the odd deuce, there’s not really a lot going on in this one. However, if you are a regular reader of the series, like me, then of course you will love it and want to read it for sure. So that’s me done and I’ll hopefully get around to reading the next novel in the series - which jumps back right to the beginning of the series but taken from a British viewpoint - sometime fairly soon.

Killing Eve Series Two

Villian Hell

Killing Eve Series Two
BBC - Eight Episodes

Well this is an impressive follow up to last year’s pretty great TV show Killing Eve. In fact, I’ll even say that I enjoyed it much more than the first series. Although, it does have its problems....

For instance, the story is a little played out and once you have the basic premise explored in Series One, where the two main protagonists - secret service woman Eve (played by the great Sandra Oh) and crack international psychopath assassin Villanelle (played equally brilliantly by wide eyed Jodie Comer) - are clearly obsessed with each other and wanting to make some kind of, presumably intimate, connection - it gets a little flat. So the story takes on a lot of extra distractions to compensate, by way of new characters and ideas, to keep the suspense of that particular ‘relationship’ in play while trying to not draw attention to that padding in some places. However, the writers and performers (yeah... and everyone else) are all pretty successful holding the interest in both the characters and the shady, John Le Carre like shadow world in which they operate.

As the first series, the writers give a nice mix following both Eve’s domestic life grounding and then contrasting it with the almost surreal world inhabited by her nemesis/hero. There are also a few surprises which show up over the eight episodes comprising this second series including at least one character you might not have been expecting to see again in this one (yeah, don’t worry, this is a spoiler free review so I’m not intending to elaborate on that). There are also some, admittedly drama fulfilling, new characters brought into the mix but they are the best kinds of distractions when it comes to bringing in new things to fill the episodes with... that is to say, they are entertaining ones.

My favourite thing about this one is that it takes it’s time (at least two, possibly three episodes) to deal with all the fall out from the last 5 minutes of the final episode of series one before it gets all the main characters back to, at least some kind, of status quo. And the writers are still having fun with the dialogue in this, with some witty exchanges between various characters along the way.

And, getting back to those characters, some of them do have their interesting quirks which, as the first series, make this a pleasurable and pretty fast paced watch. The real problem with them, though, is that you can figure out just what purpose they are serving within the drama and so, yeah, a lot of what you are watching becomes fairly predictable for a lot of the time. It’s not totally the writers’ fault though because, clearly, when you’re weaving a story where treachery, deceit and the business of keeping your secrets close to your chest are the common currency in which this shadow world operates, you are bound to be expecting things to not be quite as they seem in the first place. So, yeah, alarm bells may begin to ring on this one from very early on but, frankly, this is still quite skillfully done with the audience at least still having to play guessing games about the intentions of some of the characters when everyone seemed to be fully revealed by the end of the last series.

So, for instance, Eve’s boss Carolyn, played by Fiona Shaw, is still one of those people where you are never really sure whose side she is on and whether the manipulations which are, to be fair, part and parcel of her job, are being played out for the right reasons or whether she may, indeed, be a member of the mysterious, ‘The Twelve’ which we keep hearing about (I expect we’ll get to that by the end of Series Three... they can’t keep circling these things forever). There’s also a nice cameo by Zoe Wannamaker as her boss in one episode.

Now, while I remind you that I loved this series and thought it was even better than the first one, I would have to say my biggest disappointment in Series Two was the last few minutes of the last episode. I don’t want to say here what happens but it’s both very predictable and also seems like it’s insulting the intelligence of the viewers, bearing in mind some of the things we’ve seen in the previous episodes. The ending feels kind of fake and only like it’s there to have a resting point. In fact, in some ways it felt like the end of Avengers - Infinity War (reviewed by me here) where you knew that things would not be left as they were and that’s very much the case here. Without giving too much away, we’ve seen miraculous recoveries and resurrections throughout the story so this one feels like it’s definitely not what it seems and there may even have been some collusion deliberately held back from the audience here to try and give some dramatic tension and to also allow a ‘stunning reveal’ next series. And I’m pretty sure there will be a ‘next series’ if you’ve already seen this one and know what I’m talking about here. I just hope they don’t deal with the fall out as clumsily and nonsensically as Marvel did with Avengers - Endgame (reviewed by me here) and that they treat certain characters more like they did at the start of this series.

Other than that though, Killing Eve Series Two is a pure delight to watch and, if some character deaths within Eve and her husbands non-work life and the introduction of a new female assassin, not to mention another psychopath character (which the new assassin definitely isn’t), seem somewhat obvious and lazy, well... at least they add to a lively and interesting series of entertainments and this thing certainly had me gripped right from the start, for sure. There are some nice dramatic set pieces and at least one wonderful, breakneck paced method of execution involving a lorry which is nicely staged and is as much about Eve’s reaction to what she just saw across the street from her as it is about anything else. People who loved the first show should eat this one up and I can only hope the third series will be with us sometime soon. This is one of the more high quality shows the BBC has been involved with.

Brightburn

Tyger Tyger

Brightburn
USA 2019 Directed by David Yarovesky
UK cinema release print (brutalised by collusion with the BBFC).

Brightburn is a movie produced by James Gunn, written by his brother and cousin - Brian and Mark Gunn - and directed somewhat brilliantly by David Yarovesky. The film takes place in the fictional town of Brightburn in Kansas and it’s clear that the location is this story’s Smallville. This is one of those 'superhero goes wrong' stories (like Chronicle, reviewed here) but it’s a concept which hasn’t been done too often on film... although, to be fair, it’s probably been done to death in various books and comics over the decades.

This one, in fact, is not afraid to wear it’s influences on its sleeve and there are many references in origin and similarity to the famous DC comic book character Superman. This is because the movie makers really don’t want you to forget this here... it’s what the film is really about. In fact, this is almost, in some ways and in all but copyright evading names, characters and situations only, a typical example of a DC Elseworlds comic book writ large on the big screen. To further extend that analogy, this time in a Marvel comics concept, it’s a What If...? story. Except the premise here, as you will no doubt know from the iconography of the crashed spaceship with it’s infant cargo landing in Kansas in the trailer, is... “What If Superman Had Crashed On Earth As An Infant But, Instead Of Choosing To Use His Alien Powers For Good, He Goes Psychotic At The Age Of Twelve And Uses Those Powers To Kill People In Fairly Unpleasant Ways”. Except, you know, Brightburn is a lot shorter title and really works a whole lot better, I suspect.

Now, this is very clichéd, to be sure. All the set ups within the plot such as the main antagonist’s personal Kryptonite (nicely saved to a point where it becomes tenuous as a weapon by the end of the movie) and the way the central antagonist, young Brandon Breyer (played with an impressively sinister demeanour by child actor Jackson A. Dunn), is shaped by negative experiences at school and also the influence of the remnants of his alien heritage reprogramming him... are easy to spot coming a mile off. Both Elizabeth Banks and David Denman as his parents, Tori and Kyle, are equally impressive as two individuals who want to do right by their son and fail to see him, at first, as the psychopathic alien monster he has become. Everything falls into place nicely but...

... but it is still very clichéd and there aren’t any real surprises. But here’s the thing with that... Brightburn is still a very interesting and completely entertaining film and, since it’s one of the first to really get to grips with this on the big screen (and especially within an almost strict Superman template)... it really does need to be clichéd and play to those expectations to keep the audience interested in the characters. To keep the audience in suspense. Which it does, in no uncertain terms.

One of the director’s ways of doing this was, it seemed to me, a little odd. In that, he takes an overtly voyeuristic stance. He’ll go from an establishing shot and either cut or move the camera to take you in further to pull you into a scene but... and here’s the thing... he does it a lot and, sometimes, even within a scene that already playing out. So he’ll cut away from the mother, say, to bring the camera back from another, distant vantage point... and then slowly pull you back to her again. Normally this might be a little distracting but the way he manages to pull it off here, without really popping the audience out of the action... indeed, using this technique to draw them in further... is very well executed and I’m wondering now if this particular way of shooting around a scene, which gives the camera a very distant, fly on the wall kind of voyeuristic atmosphere, is something this particular director does in every film he works on.

Also, there’s a lot of cross-cutting between two separate scenes in this, almost too much... and he uses this to accomplish two things. One is the obvious thing where he uses two adjacent sets of events to make a visual metaphor about some subtext of the film but, the other thing he does with this... and I guess it’s kind of a traditional thing to use this way of editing things together but it really works well here... is to build suspense when you don’t know just how close the lethal boy is to walking/flying into the other sequence and letting loose his child-like wrath.

Talking of which, when he does let loose said wrath, it gets pretty grim and disturbing. Now I knew before I went to see this that the film has been edited for violence in two places by the film company in collusion with the accursed BBFC in order to get it a lower, 15 rating. Normally I would just boycott the film accordingly but, like Aquaman before it, I was very interested in seeing this so, in those kinds of instances, my cinema trip basically becomes a window shopping trip. I know I’m not really watching the film but I can see roughly what it looks like so, when the US edition of the Blu Ray comes out, which will be an uncut version, I can just import it over and have that version instead (and probably before it even gets released in this country, I suspect). So yeah... definitely one of my ‘try first’ before buying the real deal trips and, in regards to this film, yeah I’ll definitely be grabbing a US edition of the film at some point.

Now I’ve got that out of the way.... even with those two cuts here, the film is still truly gory and violent. It’s not just the normal grimness you get when you see a young, sinister kid committing murders... these are elements of goriness which are especially graphic with human flesh and bone mangled into something it’s not supposed to be on characters who, more often than not, don’t die quickly. Now some of those set pieces you will see coming... every kid has wondered just what Superman could do with his heat vision if made angry... others you won’t, especially in terms of lingering on the violence and playing with it once the initial physical assault is committed. There’s a lot of bloody demise here so I’m truly interested in seeing what the BBFC suggested the company removed. Time and heinous US postal fees will tell soon enough, I guess.

So, yeah... really not much to say in criticism of Brightburn, to be honest. At least not in terms of negative criticism. The audience I saw it with were on the edge of their seat and I thought this was a perfectly good attempt at making a horror movie which is, in all the obvious ways, an anti-superhero movie. A super-villain movie, I guess... in a year where we’ve already had Glass (reviewed here) and with a Joker movie soon upon us. If you’ve seen the trailer for Brightburn and liked what you saw... well, this does exactly what it says on the tin but in a way which doesn’t run out of steam and is not overly long. An easy recommendation from me for fans of both horror and superhero movies. I’m hoping we’ll get some kind of well made sequel to this one at some point in the future. I can see how this could be expanded in a few directions.

Double Life

Hold Miklós

Double Life -
The Autobiography
Of Miklós Rózsa
by Miklós Rózsa
The Baton Press ISBN: 0859361411

Miklós Rózsa is, or rather was, one of the great film music composers of Hollywood from the 1940s through to the 1980s. He was much loved by the studio system the older he got and, by the time he moved over to MGM studios and signed a contract with them, he was pretty much allowed the pick of most MGM scores he wanted... or at least that’s what I’ve heard in the past. Rózsa tells it slightly differently here in terms of receiving projects in a more hap hazard manner but, either way, his music is always brilliant and stands alone as great composition.

For me personally, while I love the scores I’ve heard by him over the years, I have to say that he’s not a composer whose style really changes as time goes by but, since the style of the movies most certainly did, he does seem to be better serving the needs of the films he wrote for on the scores he penned back in the 1940s, 50s, 60s and even some of 70s as opposed to, say, the late 70s and 80s. What I mean by that is that, while I love his later scores such as Time After Time and Last Embrace, these just look to me like 1980s films over-scored with 1940s style music. I know many would disagree with me (and one or two of the directors of these movies themselves would certainly disagree outright with that sentiment) but that’s just the way I see/hear it. That being said, he is a fantastic composer... who can forget his scores for great movies like Salvador Dali and Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound or William Wyler’s Ben Hur. 

Double Life, his autobiography, is something I’ve wanted to read for many years but I’ve only just gotten around to it, thanks to finding a very cheap, second hand copy at The Cinema Museum* for the princely sum of £3.50. In this, Rózsa at the very end of his career divides the chapters of his life first into locations and, when he finally gets to America due to having to finish Korda’s famous The Thief Of Baghdad in Hollywood, it’s split into tenures at studios and so on. I’d just assumed he’d named his autobiography after his famous score to Double indemnity but, in actual fact, it derives from a film he scored called Double Life and he uses it here as a metaphor for his own double life, by which he means the two kinds of musical artist he was. So, the scores he wrote for films for the studios versus the concertos, symphonies etc that he wrote purely as musical entitles in their own right, for concert performance. This book gives a healthy balance of both and, at one point when his contract with MGM was about to expire, details the lengths he went to in order to achieve a high standard of writing for both projects.

And it’s a book chock full of little sketches of people and situations as he journey’s through his life, mostly in chronological order with the odd flash-forward or flash-back to add an appropriate commentary about something else he’s talking about. So you have things like his chance encounter with a ‘growing in popularity’ Adolf Hitler in Paris and his disbelief at how the rest of the world were just not catching on to just where that was heading when, in the places he was passing through, it was being made pretty obvious that invasion and war would soon be coming. My favourite story here is when he gets to London in the 1930s and he immediately sees a newspaper headline reading, “Great Britain Under Attack”, which promptly scares him and gives him visions of having to flee our fair isle when he’s only just arrived. He hastily bought a copy of the newspaper and read it from cover to cover, expecting the worst (which was to come but... not before he was already living in Hollywood) and then found, finally, that the headline was talking about the cricket scores. This has got to be a good demonstration of just how ‘British’ our country is and I love this... it’s just so typical, even today, of my snoozy country’s mindset.

Rózsa made the decision to try and pursue a career in films because, although a very successful and critically recognised composer, you just couldn’t make any money from composing for the concert hall. A little anecdote he tells of his time in France is very pertinent to the sentiments I see expressed almost every week on Twitter in regards to working in the arts and it’s when he asked what a composition of his would pay out for him. He was told that... “In Paris, you do it for publicity!” His response? “Well publicity is fine but it is difficult to buy groceries with it.”

The book also tells of his friendship with the famous movie making family of the Kordas, of course and how he went with them to America to finish up on The Thief Of Baghdad and ended up staying there for over 40 years. It also details some of the political intrigue and things he was asked to do or, in some cases, ways in which he pulled the wool over certain studio staff’s eyes in order to get results. Such as the way he ousted Strauss as the composer for The Thief Of Baghdad and the way he fooled William Wyler to keep the music he’d written for the famous ‘rowing speed’ scene in Ben Hur by letting him reject it and then reintroducing it as it was later in exactly the same levels and mix which, he was told, was much better.

One of his pet hates, it seems, is the use of the term ‘main titles’. This is because, as he says, it harkens back to silent movies when the opening credits and titles weren’t the only titles (or inter-titles) throughout the film and are a completely meaningless thing today. Something I’d not thought of before but I’m happy to be educated by one of the best. Another thing I learned of was his absolute dislike of the click track on a film (which is a device used in Hollywood to help composers keep time with the events of a scene) and he only ever had to use one on the odd occasion for certain scenes. He declared it a mechanical device and, therefore, anti-musical.

In fact, my biggest surprise when reading this was that... Rózsa just wasn’t into films. He sought them out to try and put bread on the table and he liked some of them and had good words to say about a few of the projects he got involved in. Most of them, though, it seems he didn’t have a great deal of respect for, including many of the ones he personally scored but, similar to more or less the same sentiment I’ve heard expressed by Bernard Herrmann on one occasion, he never did anything but his musical best for them... so at least I can take comfort to the fact that he wasn’t ‘writing down’ for his pictures. Instead, he was doing what every other score composer does, I guess... try to elevate them and make them better.

Similarly, he doesn’t have a lot of good things to say about most of the Hollywood composers of the time although, he’s always quite discreet in that he often doesn’t name names. He does, however, mention some of his film composing friends who he did have a lot of respect for so... he talks about André Previn and there’s a very typical Bernard Herrmann story in there. He also says a lot of good things about the musical writing talent Frank Skinner, who is probably not best known for writing scores to A list pictures but, frankly, is another score composer I love and I was genuinely surprised that someone like Rózsa appreciated him so much.

So there you have it... Double Life is a charmingly written autobiography, which is nothing if not polite but also very witty and conjures up a man who wasn’t afraid to tell the odd studio executive off and who carved a niche writing some very distinctive periods of styles of film music in his career (Noir, Epic etc.). He seems somewhat shy about writing of his personal life in Hollywood and you won’t hear too much, if anything, of his wife and children and although he mentions the music from The Killers being ‘acquired’, shall we say, for the TV show Dragnet, he doesn’t mention his successful law suit against it or say much of anything about certain types of problems in his life. This is not a kiss and tell book... but it does give some idea of what it was like in different countries in certain decades and, at the very least, its invaluable for this stuff. I thought it was a great read and anyone interested in both film music and any other kind of musical composition could do a lot worse than get their hands on a copy of this book and read it cover to cover. I’m glad I did and I’m not even a musician.

*Details of further stalls, screenings and events can be found at the Cinema Museum’s website here.

Stan And Ollie

Lorra Laurel Laughs

Stan And Ollie
UK/Canada/USA 2018
Directed by Jon S. Baird
Entertainment One
Blu Ray Zone B

I skipped Stan And Ollie when it came out in cinemas... primarily because I knew I’d probably end up watching it with my dad on Father’s Day and I wasn’t so sure it would be any good, or at least not good enough to sit through a second time. As it happens, now that I’ve done exactly that on Father’s Day, I have to say that this is a beautiful movie, both in content and on a technical level too.

The film hasn’t made a huge amount of money given its budget but it has more than doubled it on worldwide box office and so, honestly, the film has not done that badly. It could... and certainly should... have made considerably more but I can understand why fans of both Mr. Stan Laurel and Mr. Oliver Norvell Hardy would be somewhat horrified that anyone would try and catch their particular brand of lightning in a bottle these days. Also, I’m pretty sure that not enough kids nowadays know about this dynamic, comedy duo who made a gazillion silent movie shorts followed by about another gazillion talkies (and the odd feature film), many of which were remakes of those early shorts, if memory serves.

When I was a kid, Laurel And Hardy shorts were playing on TV pretty much all the time throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. It was almost impossible not to catch at least one Stan And Ollie movie a week and, frankly, that was no bad thing. Everybody loved them. They were as much a fixture of daytime/early evening TV as the abundantly aired Tom And Jerry cartoons which also seemed to have disappeared from our screens around about the same time. And that’s what happened to Laurel And Hardy... they disappeared and suddenly stopped being broadcast due, I believe, to complicated legal wrangling about who owned the rights to the transmission of their films and it’s been only up until recently that they’ve started to be televised again. Alas, modern TV is not the beast it used to be and rather than be bombarded with these wonderful little films like I was when I was growing up, you have to go out of your way to look for these now and get lucky if you want to see one... although there is still the wonderful world of physical media such as DVD and Blu Ray if you want to do them right.

So most of the intervening generations between the 1980s until now just wouldn’t have had too much of an opportunity to be exposed to their films and I suspect this sad fact also played a role in the box office performance of this movie (although personally I think more than doubling your money is more than enough of a good thing).

The film had me right from the opening, it has to be said, with a beautifully designed shot after the opening credits which starts out as a static composition of Laurel and Hardy on the two sides of the screen in front of their make up mirrors during the making of Way Out West, with a void of dead area at the centre of the screen. As the two converse with their backs to the camera, we can see each of their faces reflected in their mirrors talking across the screen from each other. It’s a dazzling shot set up which completely threw me off listening to the content of their conversation at this point but then the shot doesn’t remain static, as the two get up and walk out of their dressing room... and then out and then back in through a studio for a long tracking shot as the conversation keeps going. It’s a gorgeous opening and it all just works really well because... not only is it technically brilliant and more than easy on the eye... it’s also wonderfully performed by the two actors. I’ll get to the performances in a little while.

The film then, after Stan has a brief run in with Hal Wallis (played by Danny Huston), who kind of put the two together in the first place and produced their films, shows us a little of the making of the film’s famous dance scene and then gets a little darker as Stan’s contract runs out and he tries to get Ollie to break his contract and come over to 20th Century Fox with him.

The story then jumps the 1950s and the rest of the movie concerns the two’s originally shaky but ultimately successful triumph on their last theatrical tour of the British Isles, before ill health forces Oliver Hardy to retire, a few years before his death.

The beauty of that first shot is built on throughout the course of the film and there are certain echoes in other shots as the director sets up a few things where reflected surfaces feature heavily in the way you watch the two interact, from time to time. It’s almost voyeuristic in the way it sometimes uses reflection as a distancing device but the ultimate expression of the strong sense of ‘fly on the wall’ effect you get here is in one of the last scenes in the movie, where Stan and Ollie are once again re-enacting the little dance they performed at the start of the film on the stage in Ireland. The director brilliantly keeps panning back from their feet to dwell on the shadows of these two projected behind them before coming back to them and then doing this a few times. It’s amazing how much tension this creates in the movie because, each time the camera slides back to the dancing silhouettes, you feel like this could be the moment Oliver Hardy takes a fall and it would be just too horrible to watch as anything but the visual metaphor of a projected shadow. As it happens, things don’t play out exactly the way I thought they would but, obviously, I’m not going to spoil that experience for you with this review.

So let’s get to those all important performances...

I’m not exactly the biggest fan of Steve Coogan so consider me doubly impressed with his performance here. Yeah, everybody will say it’s easy to ‘do Stan’ but it’s really not going to be as easy as people think. Coogan looks, sounds and acts so much like the real Stan Laurel that it’s almost impossible to tell them apart. This way of giving the ‘real life’ Stan characteristics which he may or may not have had in real life but certainly had in his on screen characterisations (so probably did, I guess) pays dividends when we get to the actual drama and dark sections of the picture. He’s as believable as you could ever hope for and the same can also be said of the great John C. Reilly. Reilly is always watchable but here he’s also unrecognisable as himself and there’s very little you could latch on to, to try and distinguish him from Oliver Hardy. He’s played absolutely perfectly here by Reilly. Well... wait... my dad did make the comment that he couldn’t look at the camera and treat it like an intimate friend in quite the same way as Oliver Hardy could but, frankly, it’s more than good enough for me to complete the illusion and nobody is ever going to get these things 100% right... that would be impossible.

So yeah, these performances are tip top, as are the more caricature-like cameo performances of past actors such as James Finlayson and Harry Langdon. However, let’s not stop there because, although there’s not much to compare them to, the wives of Laurel and Hardy are equally impressive, with the always wonderful Shirley Henderson playing Mrs. Hardy and the equally enthralling Nina Arianda as Mrs. Laurel. Frankly, it would have been easy for either or both of these two characters to be upstaged by Coogan and Reilly here, given the nature of their performances but... these two do a fantastic job of portraying two wives who don’t really get on that well but who are an absolute rock for their respective husbands. There are so many good acting turns in this movie but these two are definitely two of the best.

The film also has a pretty nice score by Rolfe Kent which does some interesting things. I wasn’t sure about it first as, although the main Laurel and Hardy music that everyone associates with the two characters (The Cuckoo Song) is used only sparingly throughout the film and, pretty much, only as source (or diegetic) music, Kent goes off on a different tack. However, it’s pretty good and what he seems to be doing... and I’m not great at analysing music or expressing it in words so go easy on me here if I’m saying this the wrong way... but he takes the base rhythm of the famous music in a much understated orchestration and weaves that into the fabric of the score to give it a lighter touch than you would expect but, as it happens, it works beautifully and is never heavy handed or inappropriate throughout the film.

So yeah... that’s me done with the Stan And Ollie biopic and, frankly, it’s a great one. Fans of Laurel and Hardy should definitely brave this one, I think, as it’s never once disrespectful of the great men being portrayed and performances, sets, lighting, editing, music and cinematography all come together to compliment each other nicely here. Definitely one for all the family and a very moving film too, as it happens. A wonderful job here by everyone involved.

Men In Black International

Women’s MIB

Men In Black International
USA 2019 Directed by F. Gary Gray
UK cinema release print.

Well now, Men In Black International is a surprisingly better sequel than anyone had a right to expect from this franchise, I think.

The Men In Black films, based loosely on the comic book mini series by Lowell Cunningham, are usually not great films but neither are they ever in any way terrible. They’re fun, entertaining pieces which usually just about manage to rise above the level of mediocrity, truth be told and they do so with a certain amount of style... even if they don’t always make perfect sense or maintain their own continuity.

And this new spin off/continuation of the franchise pretty much falls under that same category, it has to be said. Well... except it makes a little more sense now than the first one (in light of the events of the third film) at any rate. Also, instead of going ahead with the two leads of the previous movie, this one gives us a new partnership and, it’s a pretty shrewdly cast one too. Both Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson have been imported over from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, hot from their on-screen partnership as Thor and Valkyrie as seen in Thor: Ragnarok (reviewed here) and Avengers: End Game (reviewed here).

Once again, the two prove to have good chemistry, with Hemsworth basically importing over the version of Thor from the later MCU films and Thompson playing it slightly differently but, again, making the perfect straight man... err... straight gal for Hemsworth’s charmingly imbecilic shenanigans and, more often than not, coming to the rescue when he gets himself in trouble. Which he frequently does.

Actually, it’s a very positive role for Thompson because, right from the start, she’s not only playing a strong woman but also a very smart one and, frankly, her character is a good example of a lady in a genre movie working her way to the top honestly with a nice combination of brains and tenacity. Although, with Emma Thompson reprising her role as the new head of the MIB organisation, we also have to suffer the inevitable and mostly necessary questioning of the gender bias of the film’s title but, you know, after a few references and even a ‘me too’ reference if I’m remembering things correctly, it doesn’t push the whole gender agenda in your face and manages to keep an equal balance exploring these issues without turning the film into some kind of catalyst for a preachy subtext so, yeah, all for it.

So this is a totally different Men In Black here... the London branch, in fact, with Liam Neeson in charge of the UK side of things and some nice little ideas thrown into the mix. It’s also a little more globe hopping than the previous films and this gives Danny Elfman and his co-composer Chris Bacon some more scope for different orchestrations on the scoring front. I’m not sure how much of Elfman is in this score (aside from the obvious use of his main Men In Black theme) but I seem to remember in an interview around the time of the second movie that he was kinda implying that he was just doing it by the numbers and so I suspect there’s a lot more of the always excellent Chris Bacon in here than I might at first have suspected. I think this one is getting a CD release at some point soon so hopefully I’ll be able to give it a listen away from the film.

It’s nicely put together and there’s some real good comedy moments from the leads and supporting cast... including a surprisingly interesting character played by Rafe Spall, who actually gets a chance to progress considerably in the story, considering his short amount of screen time scattered throughout the film. The film is not without one problem however...

Although the story is a lot simpler maybe than the previous films, which is not necessarily a bad thing, it does make the ability to surprise the audience a lot harder for the writers. Indeed, there’s a so called twist towards the end... two twists technically... which are only surprising in that the movie makers obviously thought we were supposed to not know this stuff already when, honestly, most people are going to figure out both these things about two of the characters within the first half an hour for sure. If you are going to go down that route... especially given the way the film is structured in the way it reveals and hides certain information... then maybe the story should be a little more convoluted to distract the audience from the obvious conclusions.

So, yeah, you’re not going to be surprised by anything in this movie but at least it’s fairly entertaining and that, pretty much, means it’s at least ‘on brand’. I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing a sequel to this one with these same characters at some point but I don’t know how likely that is having seen some of the word of mouth on the film via Twitter. We shall see, I guess. After all, they’re making a sequel to the recent Tomb Raider film (reviewed here) and nobody I know liked that one other than me.

At the end of the day, Men In Black International is not the greatest film out there but it does rise to the occasion and give us something which is humourous and never boring. It’s possibly a little longer than it needs to be (some of the motor bike sequence, for example, could have been pruned down a bit) but it upholds the standards set by the previous movies and if you are a fan of those outside of just being hung up on whoever the main leads are, then this film should be right up your street. Definitely worth giving a look at if there’s nothing else you want to see at the cinema this week.

Goblin - Seven Notes In Red

Steep Bread

Goblin - Seven Notes In Red
by Fabio Capuzzo
Ajna Bound ISBN: 9780972182096

Goblin - Seven Notes In Red was a very expensive book to import over from the United States and I’d just about given up trying to find a copy which didn’t have an unbelievably hefty post and packing charge. However, that’s when I found Norman Records in Leeds, who were shipping the book at a fraction of the postage and, although it admittedly took them around 6 months or more to get it, I am very grateful to them for managing to obtain this relatively rare (at least in the UK) edition of what is, pretty much, the only book about the famous band Goblin that is available and translated into the English language.

Okay so, it has to be said... grateful as I was to have finally acquired a copy, I was less than enthusiastic about the contents. I actually started reading this, admittedly weighty, tome last year and got to a point where I was so fatigued by the writing style that I actually took a break from it and returned to it this year. I don’t usually leave any book I start unfinished but, I have to admit, that’s the first time I’ve ever felt the need to take a break. So, yeah, it’s probably the most boring book on music I’ve ever had to read (so far) and that’s a shame because the band Goblin, known best for their scores for Italian genre films such as their work for Dario Argento on Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), Suspiria and, okay I’m going to call it even though they weren’t allowed to call themselves Goblin for this recording, Tenebrae.

Now, I don’t want to knock Fabio Capuzzo, the writer of this impressively thorough tome because, frankly, the amount of research that has gone into this book is incredible. Also, although I found his writing style incredibly dull, this might not actually be his fault because it was originally an Italian book and it’s clearly been translated into English. Now, I’ve had a lot of problems with things translated from Italian in the past... usually soundtrack CD liner notes... but this book doesn’t read much better than some of the slaughtered sentences one finds on a lot of those, it has to be said. There are a heck of a lot of ‘list sentences’ in the book where the author will reel off a list of things which a particular person or band has worked on and some of these, believe it or not, go on for over a page. And that’s just for a single sentence! This is coupled with the fact that the large majority of these are listing titles or films or albums or song titles in Italian... and the amount of unwieldy, long Italian names, really isn’t a good thing to get too bogged down with if you want the reader to continue the journey of the book, methinks.

Okay so, despite a writing style that makes you want to throw your hands up in despair (and drop the book and lose your place when you are doing so)... it’s actually a very, very detailed, at least in terms of facts about band line ups and collaborations, look at the band’s quite convoluted history. Goblin over the years is... very complicated. The figurehead I always have in my mind for Goblin is maestro Claudio Simonetti but he hasn’t always been part of the group, coming and going as much of the rest of the line up, which seems to have been in an almost constant fluid state since the band’s beginnings as Oliver and then Cherry Five. These personalities were constantly clashing and the friction between the band members saw a lot of moving to and from other bands in the crazy Goblin timeline. Put it this way, I thought there were now two separate versions of the band Goblin in rivalry with each other producing albums at the moment. I was wrong... there are currently four (at the time this book was updated and translated into English over a year ago) incarnations of the band out there at present... and I don’t think that includes Simonetti’s wonderful tribute band Daemonia or the ‘resurrected with a different line up’ group who have inherited the name Cherry Five. It’s confusing to say the least.

Fans of Argento and other Italian directors will find a little to get their teeth into here but there’s not so many of the kind of entertaining anecdotes about the directors or working on the scores to these things as you might expect. This book is more or less focused just on the music and each Goblin album mentioned includes a track by track critical take of the contents, followed by critical responses to any bonus tracks or remasters added by various record companies (more often than not, Cinevox) over the years. There’s also a fair but of criticism for Cinevox actually, which I wasn’t expecting since I’ve always thought they were quite good with getting Goblin albums out there. These track by track critiques can also be quite wearing, however... one wonders how many times one can read about a ‘slicing guitar’ before one gives up on the text for a while (well, not long as it turned out in my case... I had a long rest between starting and finishing this tome).

However, if you are heavily into Goblin, you will almost certainly find this an invaluable reference work and it also has a full, long and very detailed discography at the back of the book where every conceivable release from these band members is faithfully highlighted. The design of the book is fine with a lovely cover of various versions of the logos and a fair amount of pictures used to slice up sections of the text at various points on the interior of the book. I did catch one sentence where the leading had split the lines by being much greater but one case of a forgotten ‘soft return’ is not that big in the scheme of things and so this element of the book, at least, is well in order. As for the title... why is it that people who write about a specific subsection of Italian cinema seem to title their work with something which is very specifically from a completely different work. For example, Tim Lucas’ truly excellent tome on Mario Bava is called All The Colours Of The Dark... except All The Colours Of The Dark was a famous giallo directed by Sergio Martino, not Mario Bava. Similarly, I can only assume the title of this book, Seven Notes In Red, is a satire of the Lucio Fulci film title Seven Notes in Noir (or Seven Notes In Black aka The Psychic)... which didn’t have a soundtrack by Goblin at all so... you know... go figure.

At the end of the day, Goblin - Seven Notes In Red is pretty much a book for die hard Goblin fans only but, being as it’s the only game in town as far as book bound information about this group goes, you might want to keep this one handy on the shelf until any other works on the band come along.

Ma

Game, Vet and Matched

Ma
USA 2019 
Directed by Tate Taylor
UK cinema release print.

Warning: This review will contain some story spoilers. Read at your own risk or, you know, come back and read it after you saw the movie, perhaps?

So, Ma, is one of those movies that tries to do a few simple things at once and, mostly, succeeds at the majority of them on some level. It stars Octavia Spencer as the titular character, a veteranarian's assistant... and she puts in a good performance in a movie that is both trying to paint a character who is justified in becoming the twisted individual she has progressed to when we join her in the story and then give us a few lurid thrills over the course of the movie and in the end game... as Ma goes on a kind of roaring rampage of revenge, to quote a much loved movie.

Well, it’s certainly not a terrible film, for sure and I did kind of enjoy it because it rambles along at its own pace and it’s just intriguing enough to hold the attention while Spencer and a bunch of teenage kids, played by people like Diana Silvers and McKaley Miller start having alcohol fuelled parties in Ma’s basement. Silvers plays Maggie, who has moved into town with her mother Erica, played by Juliette Lewis, to start a new life and, within a day, is invited to join the local kids in their shenanigans and, after they are trying to get adults to buy their alcohol for them... have their first meeting with Ma who enters their lives and, ultimately, refuses to leave.

The film does the, perhaps obvious, thing where they set up just how Ma’s mental state can turn on a dime fairly early on in the proceedings, to keep the audience on edge... and then goes on cruise control for a while as it establishes the parents of the kids, including Luke Evans who was so great in Professor Marston And The Wonder Women (reviewed here) and starts weaving plot threads together with a series of flashbacks, not all of them linear in nature, to show the audience how connected things really are and why this chance meeting with Ma may not necessarily be as spontaneous as the various kids thought.

Okay so... it’s not breakneck but pacey without resorting to peril every five mins and it involves enough suspense in it, via the old cliché of “the forbidden area” of Ma’s home, to hold the interest. The performances are okay and, surprisingly for a film of this nature... and this is one thing it gets really right... you don’t completely hate the various teenagers who are put in peril. The usual way these movies work these days is to somehow have a bunch of teenage characters that only teenagers can relate to... thus rendering the empathy for the teen protagonists completely non existent and you’re usually cheering on the malevolent antagonist to get on with their work. Here, the kids are mostly quite sweet and so you do feel yourself getting at least a little pulled into their world and the threat that Ma brings to it.

It’s definitely a film which roots itself firmly in the thriller genre rather than horror... there’s no supernatural presence or inhuman monster to bring a sense of terror to the shenanigans... and sadly, it fails to be as potent in both the violence and the final reveal of the trigger from Ma’s past that’s made the switch in her head flip and set her on her ultimately murderous course.  By that I mean that when you realise that the flashbacks are building to a certain kind of denouement, what the audience can imagine happened is probably far worse and icky than what you ultimately see. Also, some of the things that Ma does to various teens in this world maybe loses the impact when you can see exactly the same kinds of things done as leisure activities on various dark porn sites on the internet. It’s not that some of the stuff isn’t nasty... it’s just that you do get a feel by the final sequences that this film is perhaps a little out of step with its time and that maybe, if the same film was released in the early 1960s, it would have been a much more potent and possibly influential film than it seems to be now.

That being said, there are some genuinely well executed jump scares in the movie and, as I said, it’s sufficiently entertaining to breeze its way through to the final set piece without getting dull for the paying customers. It’s the kind of thing that goes down well with teenage audiences and I can’t imagine it won't make its budget back fairly quickly, to be honest. That being said, if you are expecting a well oiled horror movie or even a competent teenage slasher movie... you may be a little disappointed with Ma. It’s not that it’s not well done but perhaps that’s part of the problem I had with it a little bit. It doesn’t have any kind of raw edge to it and, sometimes, a film of this nature can be a little too polished. All in all though, I thought the film was nice enough for a one off watch... charming even, so if you’ve got no other films at the cinema that you want to see, this one’s maybe worth a look. 

X-Men - Dark Phoenix

50 Shades Of Jean Grey

X-Men - Dark Phoenix
USA 2019 Directed by Simon Kinberg
UK cinema release print.

Well, my credibility as a reviewer is tested again as I seem to be of a completely opposite opinion to the rest of the world about this movie. I can’t remember hearing as much negative word of mouth about a film as I have about X-Men Dark Phoenix and, I have to say, since the continuity of the X-Men series was completely destroyed early on in their run, I have found the series to be a bit hit and miss, to say the least. And news just came in that the box office on this one is a disaster so... yeah, I guess I’m a bit out of synch with people in general. This one, however, is one of the better entries in the film series as a whole as far as I’m concerned and, I have to say, I really wasn’t expecting that.

The film is yet another adaptation... and I use that word in a very loose sense here... of the Dark Phoenix story arc from the comics and the first time around they tried this with Marvel Girl (aka Jean Grey), was way back in the first real mis-step of the series... X- Men - The Last Stand. In that film, Jean Grey was played by the wonderful Famke Jansenn in what turned out to be... definitely not the super-group’s last stand. Here she’s played by Sophie Turner and, over the last few films, I’ve really got used to her in the role and here, where she has to carry big chunks of the plot as the film is literally centred around her and her ‘Dark Phoenix’ incarnation, she proves herself more than capable of carrying the movie.

And, like the title implies, it’s a dark film. Well... mostly. It maybe is a little too light at the end but there is the death of one of the major characters fairly early on in the movie (no, I’m not going to spoil it and say which one) and, although I was kinda hoping for a Blake’s Seven style bloodbath at the end here, it does lighten up a little on the aftermath. Also, this is definitely the last of the X-Men films as we have come to know them. In a final twist coming in hard from the real world, this part of the Marvel Universe owned by 20th Century Fox is now owned by Disney (who now own Fox) and so when the characters inevitably return, I expect they’ll be going for a completely different look and feel so they can dovetail them into the current Marvel Cinematic Universe so, yeah, end of an era.

What this also means is it doesn’t make good on the post credits sequence of the previous movie and nor does it have its own post credits tease. More annoyingly, perhaps, is that the developing plot line of Quicksilver being Magneto’s son without the father realising yet is never finished off. No resolutions on that front here so... it’s kind of a shame they didn’t sort this loose end out.

However, almost everything else about this movie... I liked. The strong cast of regulars supporting Sophie Turner such as James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult etc were all great... as was Jessica Chastain as the lead alien villain of the piece. The action set pieces were good and the story was a little smaller in its focus but there is still a sense of something huge at stake here... not just the future safety of the Earth but also the impact of the consequences of events here flipping public attitudes to mutant-kind back to those of non-acceptance and intolerance (something which I don’t think was credibly resolved at the close of this film, to be honest).

There are also some nice shot compositions and transitions too, including a nice moment where, after pulling a wooden chest out and revealing his Magneto helmet, Fassbender pulls it down onto his head as a way of showing the audience he’s coming out of retirement which then immediately cuts to a similar close up of McAvoy as Professor X pulling off his Cerebro helmet.

There’s also Hans Zimmer’s score which, even though I love this composer (see here for a review of one of his wonderful live shows), I was somewhat sceptical of. As it happens, he does a really good job here and I’m looking forward to grabbing the CD of this one as soon as it goes on sale (it’s rumoured there will be a proper CD release sometime after the stupid download and I hope this is the case here... although the company might have a change of heart after seeing the box office if we’re extra unlucky).

The special effects look pretty good too and even the Magneto stuff, which I sometimes find a bit rubbishy looking, was pretty amazing this time around.

On the downside, this film continues to throw continuity to the wind and, after the events we heard hinted at in Logan (reviewed here), totally fails to conform to them in this movie and has you wondering just who the heck is green lighting writing decisions such as these.

However, despite the odd grumble, I have to say that this is easily the best Marvel movie so far this year.... after the not too terrible Captain Marvel and the, well, way too terrible and disappointing Avengers Endgame. X-Men Dark Phoenix walks all over them, in my opinion and I am just breathing a sigh of relief that, even though it’s had its ups and downs, the franchise is definitely going out on a high note here... despite what other reviewers would have you believe. Will definitely be picking this one up on Blu Ray the week it comes out over here and, you never know, might go back and have another look at it at the cinema too (the IMAX 3D was quite good on this one, for a change). Definitely a darkish film, like a few of its predecessors (one might even say a Dark Grey film) but that’s definitely a strength and it looks like a solid entry into the franchise to me.

Assigned!

Time Pieces

Assigned!
The Unofficial and Unauthorised
Guide to Sapphire And Steel
by Richard Callaghan
Telos Publishing ISBN: 978-1-84583-869-0

I always feel a bit torn when I read an account of something which is labelled up as either unofficial or unauthorised or, as in this case, both. There’s usually a lack of occlusion implied by one or more of the creative forces behind a project and also there’s usually not an abundance of illustrative material to be found in these kinds of volumes... such is the case here, with the only picture content being that on the front cover. However, this is sometimes offset by the fact that uncomfortable or awkward issues about a production could be discussed which, more often than not, wouldn’t see the light of day in an authorised edition. And while there’s not a huge amount of controversy on show here, you do get the feeling that, in the few instances of people being consulted for the book, they are being completely truthful about the show which is the focus of this volume and so, yeah, this book is a fun and sometimes informative read.

Assigned! The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Sapphire And Steel is obviously a labour of love for Richard Callaghan who, like many of us of a certain age, remembers being fairly unsettled by this ‘family’ show as a kid. Sapphire And Steel was, if you don’t remember this remarkable series, probably the most terrifying programme on TV... perhaps more so because it was intended for family viewing and was broadcast at times which reflected that, rather than at times reserved for other shows of a scary nature, such as The Omega Factor or Hammer House Of Horror (reviewed here). It ran for three, very sporadic series (and got really screwed up and had to be partially repeated due to a big television strike during the run of one of the 'two story long' seasons). There were six serialised TV ‘assignments’ all told, two per series of varying episode counts and shown as two half hour episodes (with ads) of each assignment per week, sometime between 7 and 8pm on, I think, Tuesday and Thursday nights. And of course, each episode except the last one of each story would end on a cliffhanger (as did the last episode of the last assignment, in a way). I remember it was always the one show that the kids in the playground would talk about the next day.

Why? Because it could be truly terrifying and it was utterly inscrutable in terms of just what the show was really about and who, how and what the two lead characters, Sapphire And Steel, actually were. I mean, you got kind of an idea that they were some kind of ‘elements’, Sapphire played by ex-Avengers girl Joanna Lumley and Steel played by ex-Man From U.N.C.L.E agent, David McCallum... but the writing played with the mysteries of the characters without revealing too much and the enigmatic way in which the two lead stars played these roles ensured that... although we knew the enemy of the week was always ‘time’ in some kind of evil manifestation, breaking through into our world in a supernatural manner to try and do as much damage as possible... we really often didn’t have a flying fig of an idea just what the heck was going on from one episode to the next, other than the ending of each episode was more or less life threatening to at least one character.

The two ‘agents’ spoke to each other using telekinesis most of the time and usually only used their ‘outside voices’ when they wanted one of the human characters to hear what they were saying. They were mostly here to save the humans but, as the second story set on a disused railway station invaded by the spirits of those who died alone in world wars made brutally clear, they were not above sacrificing the odd person to stop time from breaking through and destroying everything. They also had other incredible powers... such as being able to inhabit pictures or, in Sapphire’s case, being able to take time back for a period for their own ends but, the scope, range and details of their particular talents, and the abilities of other elements who would sometimes enter a story to give them a hand, such as Lead or Silver, were often quite flexible and played close to the chest of the writers.

It always felt like there was an overall plan to the thing though so it comes as something of a surprise when revealed in this tome that creator P. J. Hammond, who wrote all but the fifth of the six serials, was kinda making it up as he went along and would like to be surprised as to what the characters would be getting up to next, without doing any planning out. Indeed, from the sound of it, episodes would start being filmed while later episodes were still being written and would often be rewritten on the set, often with he assistance of McCallum who was, like his co-star, very committed to the project.

The book is set up with an introduction followed by a big chapter dedicated to each assignment. Each chapter is split into smaller sections starting off with a very brief plot summary of the story before going into details about various cast members and production crew for that particular shooting block and picking out various bits of, often very interesting trivia, before finishing on a full blown critical look at the story in question. Which is as good a way as any to do it and it certainly is very informative here. In these sections the writer might, for example, explore how ahead of it’s time, say, the fourth story is (the one with the man with no face coming out of photographs), where it’s implied that the main supporting protagonist (that is, other than the title characters), is actually a sex worker and strong, independent woman. Not a combination of qualities shown in a positive light that you would normally expect to see at the height of 1970s family TV viewing.

As a bonus to the six original stories that writer Richard Callaghan puts under the microscope here, he also goes a bit further with some additional sections for a quick, critical look and summation of all the other media which the title characters have appeared in... which, for this show, is a very short list. So, yeah, he also looks at the original paperback novelisation of the first story (also written by P. J. Hammond), the Sapphire And Steel Annual (for readers in other countries, an Annual is a British tradition consisting of a thin hardbound book of themed strips, stories and other activities which would be released for different licensed TV and comic properties every Christmas), the comic strip stories that appeared in Look In magazine and the three series of Big Finish CD audio plays starring David Warner as Steel and Susannah Harker as Sapphire. These are also invaluable chapters and serve to whet the appetite somewhat, although it’s a shame that stuff like the Look In strips haven’t been collected together and reprinted in the intervening decades.

All in all, though, a very welcome visit to the facts and figures that made up what was one of the most enthralling and spooky shows on British TV. There will be a lot of people of a certain age who will remember some of the somewhat uncompromising stories of Sapphire And Steel with a lot of affection and they, especially, are the people who I would recommend this book to. It’s not as long or as meaty as an authorised, fully illustrated, coffee table book look back at the show might have been but, in case that never happens, then this is definitely one people familiar with some of the material here covered will want to check out. Thanks to my friend Dr. Rob for grabbing this one for me for my birthday.