Super

I rented Iron Man (2008, Jon Favreau) on Blu-ray this week. Now, there is no way that I'm in the target audience for a film like this. I suffer from an extreme case of superhero fatigue - tales of men with secret identities who dress in gadget laden outfits to fight crime and take vengeance don't interest me at all. Sometimes an individual film in the genre will take my fancy, but as a whole, superheroes just don't do it for me. I think Spiderman 2 (2004, Sam Raimi) is the contemporary high water mark for the form, much as Richard Donner's 1978 Superman was at the time.

Iron Man is a much loved and hugely successful film. Of course, so are Christopher Nolan's Batman films - Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008) -  and they both left me cold. So let's just say superhero films generally face an uphill battle when it comes to me liking them. It's a battle Iron Man struggled with for the first forty or so minutes, before I grudgingly came around to admitting that I was finding it quite enjoyable.

One of the things that was so great about Iron Man, I was breathlessly assured in blogs and conversations with aficionados of the genre, was how the main character, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is an arrogant prick who discovers compassion along the way. All very well and good, and the choice of Downey - a man who has been to hell and back with his own demons and never been boring onscreen - was promising. However, the film is not brave enough to challenge the audience to like the man - yes, he's never far from a whiskey on the rocks, even when being driven through a war zone in the Middle East, he treats his staff like dirt, and ignores the affections of the ever loyal Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), but he's really a likeable rogue, the kind of lovable bad boy that the film really just wants us to adore from the outset. He'd take a private jet to get milk and seduce the stewardess on the way, and every teenage male in the audience wants to be him.

I know, of all the things to complain about, I choose to complain about a character being likeable. For me, watching Iron Man was akin to sitting down to what is expected to be a spicy dish and instead being served vanilla ice-cream. The terrific cast acquit themselves well, and Jon Favreau proves himself a competent and workman-like director, certainly no visionary, but not a hack, either. The film improves as it goes along, with composer Ramin Djawadi dropping the annoying "hey kids, isn't this bit cool?" guitars when the film has to settle down to dramatic business in the climax - the score improves to the point of not being noticeable. How's that for damning with faint praise?

The film schizophrenically creates a character arc around Tony Stark's realisation that weapons manufacture may not be the best use for his talents, while celebrating and fetishising his increasingly sophisticated suit and fire power. A particularly troubling moment has Stark jetting into a Middle Eastern hotbed of terrorism and kicking butt, until he's faced with a multiple hostage situation - the hostages being a group of women and children (of course). He pauses for a moment, and we wonder how the situation will be resolved. Cut to the interior heads up display in Stark's helmet, a bunch of CGI target trackers isolating the bad guys, who are then all taken out by an array of weapons which appear from the shoulders of the suit, leaving the bewildered hostages standing while their aggressors drop dead around them. Within the space of one minute, the film has raised the notion of how complicated these real world situations can be and then solved it with a piece of simplistic wish fulfillment. Am I reading too much into this? I thought we might have left this stuff behind when James Cameron combined Islamic terrorism and comedy relief in his 1994 film True Lies, but apparently not.

Finally, I was pretty surprised by the number of gags the film lifts wholesale from older films, especially RoboCop (1987, Paul Verhoeven) and Rocketeer (1991, Joe Johnston). At least Favreau shows good taste in the films he steals from.

No way to kick-start a franchise - 'Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan'

This one's for Vance...

Popping Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982, Nicholas Meyer) into the PS3 the other day was an enjoyable reminder of what a truly terrific film this is. The phenomenon that is Star Trek has an interesting history - the original television series ran for three seasons before being cancelled due to poor ratings, despite a hardcore fanbase. It promptly rose from the dead as a huge hit in syndicated re-runs around the globe, leading to the production of an animated television series (with most of the cast from the live action show returning) which ran for a couple of seasons in the early 70s. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was involved in an attempt to launch a second television series in the late 70s. The project - called Star Trek: Phase II - was abandoned after the huge success of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), with Paramount (the studio who own the property) deciding the time was right for a big screen version.

Many elements that were devised for the television project ended up being adapted for the first feature film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979, Robert Wise). At the time the most expensive motion picture ever produced, the film - which is ponderous, humourless, and dull - became one of the notable box office disasters of its time. Despite the poor reception of the film, Paramount were willing to give the franchise another shot. The makers of The Wrath of Khan were fully aware that they were being given one final spin of the wheel, and were determined to go out with a bang.

The bang was big enough to re-ignite the franchise, which is actually kind of unfortunate: Khan is a great space opera/revenge story, but also a wistful meditation on growing old and facing mortality. Which didn't really leave the story much place to go over further films: the age of the main cast, having already been used for maximum emotional impact, is reduced to increasingly cheap gags in the following sequels.

Khan also boldly left the world of Star Trek in disarray - Kirk (William Shatner) is re-united with an old flame, Carol Marcus (Bibi Besch), as well as meeting for the first time her son by him, David (Merritt Butrick), now a grown man who despises everything Kirk stands for. Not to mention having his closest friend Spock (Leonard Nimoy) sacrificing himself to save the USS Enterprise and her crew.

The following two films (which, with Khan, comprise a loose trilogy) are stuck attempting to create drama whilst restoring the status quo. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984, Leonard Nimoy) takes everything back, with Spock resurrected via plot devices which had been planted in Khan (you know, just in case), Carol Marcus inexplicably vanishing between films, and David killed off by the Klingons - his death would be promptly forgotten until it resurfaces in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991, Nicholas Meyer) to motivate Kirk's deeply felt hatred of the Klingons, here manifesting as resistance to the failing Klingon Empire's attempts to make peace with the Federation.

Search for Spock does destroy the starship Enterprise - surely the most fetishised spaceship in all science fiction cinema. The ship is regularly showcased in indulgent effects sequences, the camera lovingly gliding across its lines and curves as it leaves spacedock. Composers Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner even create passable orchestral renditions of the sound of the ship zooming off at warp speed. The destruction of the ship in Search for Spock promisingly turns her crew into a group of vagabonds cruising the galaxy in a stolen Klingon warship, but again, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986, Leonard Nimoy) demonstrates that no-one's playing for keeps.

The final scene of The Voyage Home has the crew (with Kirk demoted from Admiral to Captain, another step towards ensuring the status quo) presented with a brand new, identical Enterprise, this one with the letter A appended to the registration number. Similarly, potential romantic interest Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks) - who travels with Kirk and co to the 23rd century from her native 1986 at the end of The Voyage Home - did not appear in any further films. Which is probably a good thing - my recent re-viewing of The Voyage Home revealed her to be a remarkably unhinged character, valuing her captive humpback whales over human relationships, offering Kirk and Spock a ride when all the evidence she's seen of them so far points to them being a pair of possibly dangerous lunatics, and finally abandoning her entire life to travel three centuries into the future at the drop of a hat.

The Voyage Home was the one true box-office smash out of the films featuring the original cast, but it seemed nothing could make Paramount executives forget the amount of money they had lost on the first film, as they kept applying pressure to keep costs on the films down - Khan reuses several visual effects sequences from the first film, and The Voyage Home keeps the Klingon warship cloaked (and hence cheaply invisible) for most of the running time.

The confident teaser poster for The Final Frontier had

people talking. Of course, no-one had yet seen the film.

Or perhaps their tight fist on the budget of the 1989 Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was down to a lack of faith in debutante film director William Shatner. The completed film - an unmitigated disaster - is not helped by substandard visual effects work, the result of an unwise decision to look at more cost effective alternatives than Industrial Light & Magic, who had provided visual effects for the previous three films. In terms of narrative, The Final Frontier is the most negligible of the films - the series had jumped through hoops to essentially hit a huge RESET button on the story, and Shatner's film never even vaguely threatens to end in any manner other than the whole crew back together and sailing off in the Enterprise. More than any of the other films, it resembles a poor episode of the original show - it remains the only film which never even has aspirations to do anything grander for the big screen. Which in a strange way is kind of charming: the film may be shite, but it's affectionately made shite. With one blow the franchise had lost all the goodwill generated by The Voyage Home, which remained the only one of the films to appeal to an audience broader than the Star Trek fanbase.

By this time, the franchise had returned more successfully to television in the form of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), which would be followed by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999), Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) and finally (so far) Enterprise (2001-2005). The cinematic franchise, however, resembled a pull start motor that just wouldn't ignite - Khan was a reboot of sorts, throwing out most new elements that had been introduced in The Motion Picture, and the sixth film, The Undiscovered Country, was devised to give the cast a decent send-off and wash out the after-taste of The Final Frontier.

Khan director Nicholas Meyer returned for this film. Again, the studio applied downward pressure on the budget, forcing set pieces to be scaled back and mandating the use of existing sets from the then in production television shows. The character of Saavik - a Vulcan cadet introduced in Khan and played in that film by Kirstie Alley (Robin Curtis played the role in the following two films when Paramount was unwilling to meet Alley's asking price, and the character was left behind on Vulcan at the beginning of The Voyage Home) - was originally included in the script in an attempt to lure Alley back to the role. Alley was unwilling to return to the role, and the character was re-written as Valeris (Kim Cattrall), which made it pretty obvious that she was a member of a conspiracy to prevent the Federation and the Klingons making peace - anyone who appears on the bridge of the Enterprise and is not part of the main cast ultimately exists to die, or be a bad guy, or both. Had the character been Saavik, her betrayal would have perhaps carried more emotional weight - in any case, Nimoy and Cattrall make the most of the situation. Cattrall - who was a livewire presence in many films in the 80s (many of them silly comedies) before belatedly coming to superstardom as Samantha Jones in Sex and the City - certainly demonstrates a greater commitment to the idea of playing a Vulcan than Kirstie Alley ever did. Where Alley was unwilling to sacrifice glamour and feminine allure, retaining her own Brooke Shields eyebrows and long flowing hair, Cattrall presents with shaved temples, angled Vulcan eyebrows and a dark bob.

Kirstie Alley as Saavik in The Wrath of Khan

- unwilling to lose her glamour to play a Vulcan.

Kim Cattrall as Valeris in The Undiscovered Country

- showing a bit more commitment.

It was safe to break some things for good by this time - Hikaru Sulu (George Takei) is finally given the command of his own starship, an idea which had been considered as early as the third film but abandoned when William Shatner protested, wanting to remain Captain to the entire crew. It was, after all, intended as the final film to feature the original cast, and anyway the drama of the Klingons wanting to become part of the Federation was preempted by The Next Generation, which is set some 70 years after the original show (but had been running for a few years when The Undiscovered Country was released) and has a Klingon officer serving on the Enterprise D. Nevertheless, rather than acknowledging that the crew of the Enterprise might have at some stage retired, lived the rest of their lives, and died, The Undiscovered Country wraps up with them sailing off into the blinding sunlight in the starship, before the signatures of the main cast are animated on screen (signing their own names rather than that of the characters) to the fanfares of Cliff Eidelmen's score. The suggestion seems to be that they sailed straight into myth.

Three years later, The Next Generation also made the transition to the cinema - Star Trek: Generations (1994, David Carson) was the first of four films which went through a familiar cycle of destroying and promptly replacing the Enterprise, making empty promises to develop character relationships, giving the Captain - this time around, Jean Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) - one-film-only special guest love interests, and giving cast members the chance to direct. The films played to an increasingly disinterested public and disappointed fanbase, with only one box office hit - Star Trek: First Contact (1996, Jonathan Frakes), another time travel story directed by a cast member which matches Jean Luc Picard with the appealing Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard, another potentially good addition to the cast who gets left behind at the end of the film). The advertising material kept promising that each film was bigger, better, and more action packed than the previous one, but the truth is Paramount was always a bit timid with the marketing of a new Trek film, at least until the currently screening J.J. Abrams reboot of the franchise, simply titled Star Trek (2009).

It is easy to imagine Paramount's marketing department breathing a huge sigh of relief that they are no longer saddled with trying to sell a cast mainly aged in their sixties to the much coveted youth demographic. This time around, those form fitting Starfleet uniforms adorn the hot young bodies of the likes of Chris Pine (Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock), and Zoe Saldana (replacing Nichelle Nichols as Uhura). As a reboot, it's a step in a promising direction, although it remains to be seen if the inevitable sequels will attain the sort of storytelling boldness which eluded the previous run of films.

New Blu-rays

JB Hi-Fi (where I usually go shopping for DVDs and BDs) has an ongoing "buy 2 get 1 free" promotion for Blu-ray discs. Which is great if you want to buy The Transporter or Prince Caspian. However, if you're like me and hate the majority of Hollywood films these days, and what really gets you going is the release of 30 year old favourites in High Definition, then you're shit out of luck. That bright yellow sticker signaling a disc is part of the promotion never adorns the likes of The Thing or RoboCop.

And so it goes with my latest Blu-ray purchases, both old favourites that I was delighted to see appear on the format.

The stark one-sheet for Poltergeist.

Poltergeist (1982, Tobe Hooper) was never very well served on DVD, despite being released a couple of times. The first release - which I bought - had a good 16:9 transfer but seemed to have been sourced from inferior elements. It was re-released for its 25th anniversary, with a new transfer but still tellingly lacking any kind of special features which offer any real insight into the notoriously troubled production. The Blu-ray release also lacks any decent special features - the docos on the discs are about real life poltergeist phenomena rather than any behind the scenes looks at the making of the film. The HD transfers, however, are stunning.

The film is a top notch production all-round, never mind the ongoing dispute over who's responsible for directing it: the film clearly bears the strong stamp of co-writer/producer Steven Spielberg, who oversaw post-production (with his regular editor Michael Kahn) without Hooper's involvement. Nevertheless, I feel that Hooper's personality is evident in the film, partly in a couple of the more effective scare moments, but mainly in the heightened hysteria of the performances - Dominique Dunne's screams of 'what's happening? WHAT'S HAPPENING?!?' in the climax could only have been drawn out by the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).

The film is a product of the very best Hollywood at the time had to offer. James H. Spencer's production design looks great in High Definition, as does Matthew F. Leonetti's rich anamorphic cinematography. The innovative visual effects by Industrial Light and Magic (under the supervision of Richard Edlund) are still striking today. And then there's the great sound-mix, put together by a talented team which included Alan Howarth, who was just beginning a fruitful collaboration writing scores with John Carpenter. And the sound on the Blu-ray disc makes the most of Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar nominated score. 1982 was a banner year for film scoring, with extraordinary works from James Horner (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), Basil Poledouris (Conan the Barbarian), and John Williams (E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the Oscar winner that year), but Goldsmith's Poltergeist was a stand out even in this company. This is a score that can do anything - from evoking everyday suburbia to calling up forces from the other side that are wondrous, mystical, and terrifying by turns. It is strong both in melodic writing and jagged shocking rhythms. A truly wonderful score.

But what really makes Poltergeist endure is the cast. Everyone is great - from Spielbergian moppets Heather O'Rourke and Oliver Robins to Zelda Rubinstein's medium and Beatrice Straight's warm portrayal of the kindly Dr. Lesh. Holding the film together though are the gorgeous Craig T. Nelson and the beautiful JoBeth Williams, both delivering career best performances as Steve Freeling and his wife Diane. They bring credibility to even the most outlandish sequences with their thoroughly believable characterisations, completely selling every single moment. The (to my mind) unfairly maligned Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986, Brian Gibson) retained some of the spirit of this film by bringing back most of the cast and such key behind the scenes players as Richard Edlund (now heading up his own effects firm, Boss Film) and Jerry Goldsmith.

The one-sheet for Escape From New York - iconic.

Escape From New York (1981, John Carpenter) continued Carpenter's run of commercial hits which started with Halloween in 1978 and would screech to a halt in 1982 when he made The Thing, his first film for a major studio. It's a genuine "high concept" thriller - in the future world of 1997, Manhattan Island has been walled off to create the world's largest prison, and when the United States president (Donald Pleasence) is forced to make an emergency exit from Air Force One due to a hijacking and is trapped in New York, the authorities send in notorious vigilante Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell, in a role that would define his action film persona) in a desperate rescue attempt.

The film starts off strongly and then kind of runs out of steam once Russell (at his hottest in this film) lands in the streets of Manhattan. Here the main menace is provided by a pack of Mad Max cast-offs, the same kind of crazies in leather with punked up hair that would also appear - with a similar lack of effectiveness - in later Carpenter films such as Ghosts of Mars (2001). However, with a cast including Lee Van Cleef (throwing every bit of Kurt Russell's cynicism right back at him) Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, Ernest Borgnine (at his hammiest), and Adrienne Barbeau (Carpenter's then wife, providing a splash of busty B-movie sleaze) and rounded out by Carpenter regulars like Tom Atkins and Charles Cyphers, it never gets boring.

As usual for an early John Carpenter film, the small budget is belied by the technical ingenuity, with ace production designer Joe Alves creating the dystopian world of 1997 New York in the then fire ravaged streets of St. Louis, aided by the typically bold widescreen camerawork of cinematographer Dean Cundey. The electronic score was the first collaboration between John Carpenter and Alan Howarth - a working relationship which would see a significant increase in the musical and technical sophistication of Carpenter's scores - and the inventive low budget visual effects were created by a team which included future uber-director James Cameron.

The towers of the World Trade Center were indeed still standing in 1997, when the film is set, and one can forgive Carpenter for failing to predict - in 1980 - that New York councils would take an increasingly effective zero tolerance policy towards crime. It's tricky stuff, this future speculation business - there are dozens and dozens of science fiction films which have, over the years, been transformed from amazing visions of the future to catalogues of anachronisms and wrong-headed speculations. Of course, the great films remain great films - 2001 wasn't how Stanley Kubrick saw it, and it's looking pretty likely that 2019 won't be how Ridley Scott saw it, but the issues touched upon in their films - Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Scott's Blade Runner (1982) - remain relevant and potent, no matter how many logos of now extinct businesses are featured. Sadly, that cannot really be said of Escape From New York, but it remains an entertaining and effective action film.

Score of the week

The first film score I owned was the cassette of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. Hooked on scores immediately, I quickly moved on to vinyl, and had a pretty decent collection by the mid 80s. At that time, CDs were only bought if I really, really loved the score. Once, I bought a soundtrack on LP - it was Willow by James Horner - and loved it so much that after one listen I took it back to the store and begged them to allow me to return the listened-to-once LP and exchange it for the CD. Of course, eventually I replaced most of my LPs with CDs, but I never got around to getting the CD of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and in my last house move (which came with a very severe cull of possessions) I got rid of all but a couple of my LPs, as I no longer owned a record player. There were some real gems in there, too - including a few scores which have since become rare and much sought after. Who knew that I would one day miss The Serpent and the Rainbow? Whenever I'm in a music store I fondle the CD of Willy Wonka, but always end up putting it back, thinking to myself 'It's a novelty item which would only be in your collection for nostalgic reasons.' Last week I decided to see if it was on iTunes, found it (bizarrely, it's title is censored to W***y Wonka... - I mean, wtf?), and seconds later was listening to it for the first time in years.

This score - which earned the film it's single Oscar nomination -  is a bit too musically straight forward and conventional to be counted amongst the great achievements in the history of film scores. And the film has a strange, scattershot approach to the use of songs - it's not quite a musical. Initially, the songs are connected to Charlie Bucket's story, through songs such as 'Cheer up Charlie' and 'I've Got a Golden Ticket'. Then, once Charlie and the other Golden Ticket holders are inside the factory, the songs are limited to a number by Willy Wonka (the wonderful and slightly unsettling 'Pure Imagination'), Veruca Salt's big tantrum in 'I Want it Now,' and the memorable Oompa-Loompa songs, one for each unfortunate child who ends up leaving the tour, with no big finale musical number and no musical continuation of songs about Charlie. It doesn't seem to matter - the film works whether the characters are singing or not, finding the right blend between being charming and scary, a balance which eluded Tim Burton. The album is only 37 minutes but it's a sheer delight, the music is gorgeous and the album is spiced up by the inclusion of a couple of dialogue snippets and some brief tracks featuring the bizarre and hilarious sound effects from the factory machinery. It's as much fun as watching the film again!

An obsessive phase...

I think I'm having one at the moment. They are periods in my life where I focus my viewing and reading on one particular thing. They vary from a more casual three or four week kind of thing before I move on (which is what the current one is) to a complete obsession that I spend months on. Previous subjects have included spending all my spare time re-reading my favourite Clive Barker novels (which means pretty much all of them), or re-watching my favourite Brian DePalma films one after the other. Yes, I'm a big re-watcher of films - I've seen a lot of my favourites dozens of times. Anyway, currently I'm going through a vampire phase. Sparked of course, by my re-reading of Dracula. Since picking that book up again, I've watched the 1979 film, the 1977 mini-series, and many clips from both 1922 and 1979 versions of Nosferatu as well as Francis Coppola's 1992 film on YouTube. I've also watched bits of Interview With the Vampire.

My reading was sent in a different direction - after Dracula, I've had a hankering for Victorian gothic, which had me re-reading Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and now H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man. Reading these could send me back to the early films of Angela Lansbury, 1930s Universal horror films, or Paul Verhoeven's film Hollow Man. Which will in turn, send my reading in another direction, and the circle of life keeps turning.

Anyway, my vampire phase intersected with my brief interest in James Mason and I inevitably ended up pulling out the DVD of Tobe Hooper's 1979 mini-series adaptation of Stephen King's novel 'Salem's Lot. A theatrical cut down of the film was distributed to international territories in 1979, and I loved the look of it and wanted to go see it. Of course, I was nine years old and it would have scared the crap out of me and scarred me for life, so my mother quite sensibly did not allow me to go see it. I was, however, allowed to read the book. I remember finishing reading it and immediately turning back to page one and starting again. I devoured that book. It was funny, I gave it to mum to read when I was done and then my teacher at school, and no one really said anything about my tender brain being exposed to Stephen King at his very best.

I had two years of recurring vampire nightmares from reading 'Salem's Lot, but I was kind of hooked on the primal thrill of a really good scare by then. When the mini-series in it's complete form aired on Australian television in (I think) 1983, I loved it. It had all the kids at school talking about it - lots of "did you see?" and "what about..." 

It was a big ratings hit in Australia - the network broadcasting it ran a repeat screening the following year, and again the year after that. It was a period of two years where I was pleading with my parents to buy a VCR, as I wanted to start taping stuff. When our first VCR finally arrived (it's funny, I remember that VCR as clearly as if I'd seen it this morning) we were too late to miss the repeats of Salem's Lot. I had to wait until it became available to buy from Warner Home Video on VHS, which was sometime in the 1990s, before I got to see it again. I remember the first time I saw this film as an adult, I found it cheesy and dated. I never really watched it again until the price of the DVD dropped enough for to finally say "oh, alright". I blame the highbrow and dismissive company I was in when I first re-watched it for my former judgement, as this time I found Salem's Lot to be extremely effective. I used to dislike the lack of fidelity to the novel, but now I enjoy the way the screenplay by Paul Monash plays fast and loose with the novel, conflating characters and re-ordering events in a similar fashion to many of the various stage and screen adaptations of Dracula.

I won't go into comparing the mini-series and the novel even though I've done a bit of that sort of thing on this blog. I actually do believe a film should stand apart from any source text, and be judged on it's own merits. That said, this small town of 'Salem's Lot, with petty, grasping characters played by the likes of Kenneth McMillan, Fred Willard, and George Dzundza, is recognisably the world Stephen King created. I fell in love with Bonnie Bedelia, girl-next-door pretty until the final scene, where she is transformed into a vision of Gothic seduction. James Mason's sneering and disdainful Richard K. Straker and Reggie Nalder's growling Nosferatu faced monster leave strong impressions. And the sequences with the boy vampires floating outside the window, scratching at the glass and pleading to be let in, are unforgettable. It's strong stuff - I can't imagine anything being scarier than this for a 1979 television production. Special shoutouts to contact lens specialist Dr. Morton Greenspoon, Harry Sukman for his scary Emmy nominated score, and production designer Mort Rabinowitz for the Marsten house, represented by a Psycho inspired facade on location and a sensational interior set which easily gets my vote as the best ever decrepit old house of evil.

Score of the week

Of course, I think the new Doctor Who has been perfect from the very first episode. The minute Delia Derbyshire's cliffhanger scream played over the time vortex from the opening titles, I was instantly transported back to my childhood. The deal was sealed about twenty minutes into the first episode, when Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) ran toward the TARDIS yelling 'Doctor!'. This was the real deal, Doctor Who was back on telly, and it was fucking brilliant.

A more critical part of my brain, however, notices that the careful balance between barminess and adventure that Doctor Who needs to hit was very much a work in progress for the first two seasons. It might even be argued that the show only hit its stride when unburdened of the loaded relationship between Rose and the Doctor. The latest series in particular, buoyed by Catherine Tate taking the re-invention of the companion further than Billie Piper ever did, went from strength to strength, with perhaps the only duff episode being 'The Doctor's Daughter'.

Of course, the show couldn't have hit such diverse highs as 'The Unicorn and the Wasp', 'Midnight', or 'The Stolen Earth' without the careful build up of the first couple of seasons. The show needed Rose Tyler to lead up to Donna Noble. In a similar fashion, the music of Murray Gold started out pretty strong and developed into some of the best scoring we're currently hearing on the box. Series 1 was scored entirely with synthesizers and samples, which to an extent limited the effectiveness of some of the scoring, although some cues recalled the avant-garde electronica which was a staple of Doctor Who music in the 60s and 70s. As the popularity of the show has solidified, Gold has been given expanding resources to realise his scores, and is now able to utilise the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. His scores, like the show itself, vary wildly in styles and tone, and are never ashamed of big broad strokes.

This is the third soundtrack release for the series, presenting music from Series 4. It kicks off with Murray Gold's third (and best) reworking of the immortal Ron Grainer/Delia Derbyshire theme, with chugging guitar and high energy percussion propelling along Derbyshire's unearthly howls. Then we're treated to highlights from the material Murray Gold wrote for Series 4 - from the jaunty theme for Donna ('A Noble Girl About Town') through to action ('UNIT Rocks', 'The Dark and Endless Dalek Night') heartbreak ('The Rueful Fate of Donna Noble') and triumph ('Song of Freedom'). It's obvious that Murray Gold has been paying attention to Michael Giacchino's brilliant work for Lost, and elsewhere influences as diverse as John Murphy and Ennio Morricone can be heard, although Murray Gold definitely has his own distinct voice.

As with the previous two albums, Gold's music is better served here than in the show itself, where it often re-edited and tracked into different episodes, and frequently too prominent in the mix. This last problem has been rectified in Series 4, but the tracking of older cues remains an issue: the finale from the cue 'The Daleks', which fit the scene it was written for (the cliffhanger of the penultimate episode of Series 2, 'Army of Ghosts') like a glove, was far less suited to use in the Series 3 episode 'Evolution of the Daleks' and suffers even more by being repetitively tracked into several sequences in the Series 4 finale 'Journey's End'. I suspect these problems are more due to the producers of the show rather than decisions made by Gold.

But the album presentation is terrific, even though some of my favourite musical moments are not represented, such as the mime sequence from 'Partners In Crime', the introduction of Agatha Christie in 'The Unicorn and the Wasp', or the cliffhanger from 'The Silence in the Library'. But there was such a wealth of material composed for this series it's no wonder some good stuff had to get left off. The importance of Murray Gold's contribution to the show's success cannot be over-estimated. Doctor Who has always been an ever evolving beast, and the new incarnation has cleared such hurdles as the changing of Doctor and companion. With the show about to go through changes again, it will be interesting to see if Gold stays on - or if not, who would be capable of replacing him.

Score of the week

Prince of Darkness (John Carpenter and Alan Howarth, 1987)

I've made this one score of the week because I received in the mail today the new 2 disc edition of the soundtrack album. The film was the first cab off the rank in John Carpenter's deal with Alive Films, in which he was given small budgets ($3m) and complete creative control. It didn't get a release here until the Valhalla cinema in Westgarth ran a brief season in late 1988, so we got to see it after the second film Carpenter made for Alive Films - They Live (1988) - had come and gone. I must mention that the Valhalla was also responsible for bringing films such as Miracle Mile, Akira, and Koyaanisqatsi to Australian screens, for which I will be forever grateful.

Anyway, I was bitterly disappointed when I finally got to see Prince of Darkness. Of course, I was eighteen years old and took everything so god-damn seriously back then. The film has aged well for me - it's a John Carpenter film through and through, with slick production values belying the small budget. Apart fom the el-cheapo make-up effects, anyway - but anything was going to be a step down from previous (and more costly) vfx collaborators such as Rob Bottin and Richard Edlund.

As always Carpenter's strong visual style is an asset. Shooting in anamorphic panavision as usual but without his regular cinematographer Dean Cundey, Carpenter's penchant for prowling steadicam and frames dominated by blackness is well realised by his new DP Gary B. Kibbe. And Carpenter's collaboration with co-composer Alan Howarth was working well, the two of them expanding upon the minimalist style Carpenter had employed in his pre-Howarth scores.

The film, to be sure, is second (maybe even third) rate Carpenter, but I'd watch third rate John Carpenter over first rate Ron Howard any day of the week. And I've come to appreciate it more after seeking out some of the earlier works it is influenced by - particularly the extraordinary 1972 telemovie The Stone Tape. Prince of Darkness is short on character, emotion, or plot (despite being full of terrific ideas), and long on atmosphere.

A lot of this atmosphere comes from the score. It is not musically complex, but that was not the mode Carpenter and Howarth worked in. Instead, they were always using state of the art synths and samplers to create their own unique sound, more often than not consisting of sustained string lines and driving percussion. It was a style that was adapted to the bluesy rhythms of They Live or the Eastern flavour of Big Trouble in Little China but was most effective when used in straighter action (Escape From New York) or horror (Christine) contexts. Prince of Darkness is full of choir samples and howling electric winds, and is effective both in the film and as a listening experience, especially if you have it on whilst reading some Lovecraft by candlelight.

The new 2 disc album contains the complete score followed - as is becoming common with new expanded editions of scores - by a presentation of the original album which was released along with the film. It's a good listen, but only worth the re-purchase if you're a hardcore Carpenter fan. I'm sure you've picked up by now that I'm a pretty hardcore fan. For others, the old album is a fine representation of the score and there's no major thematic material or action set pieces that aren't on there. I do enjoy having the music unfold over a longer running time, though, and those vocal snippets from the film which open both discs are wonderfully creepy.

Tarantino to make a film with an original score

Quentin Tarantino's upcoming war epic, Inglorious Basterds is to be scored by film music legend Ennio Morricone. Exciting news - Tarantino has never had an original score composed for one of his features yet, although he plundered many scores (some of them Morricone's) for Kill Bill. Is Tarantino finally going to allow one of his films to have a unique musical voice, and not rely on the instant nostalgia of golden oldies to create emotions?

Score of the week

Psycho (Bernard Herrmann, 1960)

As a kid, one of the television shows I enjoyed watching after school was 'Simon Townsend's Wonder World'. It was kind of a light infotainment show for younger viewers, and they would often use cues from film scores in their segments. So it was that I first came across the electrifying main title theme from Psycho, used as the background for shots of Angela Catterns running madly around an old house.

I knew about Psycho and its score, of course. I'd never seen the film, but I'd read about it and the music in many film books and magazines, and had read the pulp Robert Bloch novel it was based on. I had to wait until the end credits of 'Wonder World' to find out what the music was (I always scrutinised the end credits to find out what music they used) and was delighted to discover that I'd finally heard Psycho. And it was brilliant!

I finally caught the film a couple of years later on television. This was before the internet, and even before home video. I'm talking about an age where it was possible for a film - many films even - to become myth, possible to remember if you'd seen them at the pictures but otherwise not readily available for perusal. The television schedules were scoured for late night screenings of items like Tarantula and The Green Slime. That thrill of stumbling across a rare screening of a thirty or forty year old film is a thing of the past in our age of video (or anything) on demand.

I didn't need to sneak out of bed at 1:00 am to see Psycho however - it screened one weekday afternoon, and I excitedly sat at the television and watched. Despite the fact that I knew every plot twist (from reading the novel, which the film is quite faithful to in most respects, a notable exception being the characterisation of Norman Bates), the film gripped and terrified me. And the score had me thrilled from start to finish. It was typical of Bernard Herrmann's genius that when given a restricted budget to produce the music, he turned it to an advantage - limiting his musical palette to string instruments only, providing the perfect sonic counterpart for Hitchcock's black and white film.

The score for Psycho keeps springing surprises - immediately after the urgent rush of the main title theme (brilliantly matched by Saul Bass' startling title design), Herrmann abruptly changes tack, providing slow descending notes for the languid montage of Phoenix, Arizona which opens the film. He scores the clandestine romance of Marion Crane and Sam Loomis (Janet Leigh in her signature role paired with the hot but wooden John Gavin) with a 'desolate falling pattern'* which never quite resolves into a melody, allowing dissonance and plucked string tension to creep in as Marion steals $40,000 from her employer, before revisiting the urgency of the main title theme - this time denoting panicky flight - as Marion leaves town, finally pulling over at the Bates Motel. The thematic material making up the score becomes more varied with the introduction of Norman Bates (another major deviation from the source novel is having the narrative discover Norman at the same time as Marion, rather than crossing back and forth between his story and hers), including the unnerving three note motif for madness which would later reappear in a similar context in Herrmann's final score for Taxi Driver, and most memorably the shrieking terror of the infamous shower murder.

This last is the most well known piece from the score, one that is still imitated by kids in the schoolyard - although they're more likely referencing The Simpsons or one of the many other films or shows which have riffed on the famous cue. It stands alongside John Williams' two-note theme for the shark in Jaws as an immortal piece of film music.

There are several different recordings of either the entire score or suites from it on CD, although the original film recordings have not been made available in commercial form outside of an isolated score track on a 90s laserdisc. 

Herrmann conducted a recording of nearly all of the score in 1975, and although it's at a slightly slower tempo than most of the music in the film, it has precision and clarity.

Conductor and film composer Joel McNeely recorded the complete score in 1997, and it ranks as the best recording of the score available.

In 1998, Danny Elfman and Steve Bartek arranged and recorded the score for use in Gus Van Sant's experimental shot for shot remake of the original film, and produced a terrific and energetic version, surprisingly faithful to the original score - at least on the album. Van Sant and his sound team couldn't help themselves from screwing around with a couple of the cues in the film, especially noticeable ones like the shower murder.

Australian film maker Richard Franklin made a remarkably good sequel to Psycho in 1983. Although Franklin and his Psycho II composer Jerry Goldsmith wisely decided to create their own sound for the sequel, the film kicks off with a replay of the shower scene, for which Goldsmith provided a terrific recording of the cue 'The Murder'.

* with thanks to Steven C. Smith and his terrific biography of Bernard Herrmann, A Heart at Fire's Center

Score of the week

Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (John Williams, 2005)

This, the climax of George Lucas' Star Wars prequel trilogy, was one lame film. A classic case of join-the-dots storytelling. Even as fx house ILM reached greater heights with the types of environments and characters they could create, the script plumbed the lower depths of laziness. And just as Ewan McGregor catches the spirit of the young Kenobi and makes him the man we met in the original films, the other cast are resigning themselves to the fact that they are just parts of a machine. We get the Palpatine that Ian McDiarmid usually saves for Christmas parties, Samuel L. Jackson is clearly not engaged by the material as he was in the second film, and poor Natalie Portman can do nothing but watch her character turn into a series of plot devices, before being forced to act the most poorly conceived cinema death ever. George Lucas must have simply lost the will to write. Or bloody well direct, for that matter.

If only the hints dropped in the original trilogy (like Alec Guiness as Ben Kenobi wistfully recalling Luke's father) weren't so evocative, and hadn't had decades to grow in our imaginations. Many fans of the series could have (and probably did) pen superior third instalments. Lucas' insistence on filling in every possible gap (from the evolution of each type of spacecraft to not being able to resist explaining the Emperor's decrepit look in the original films, as if twenty years of abusing the dark side of the force wasn't enough) made it feel like watching a screenwriter run through a checklist of things he had to do. There was more excitement in the Pavlovian response the trailers generated - the right combination of R2 beep, Wookiee growl, laser zap, and bursts of John Williams and the LSO tweaking geek pressure points in anyone of a certain age. It's sad, because Attack of the Clones seemed to be a step in the right direction. Even The Phantom Menace has aged better than I suspect Sith will.

At least John Williams wasn't phoning it in. His score is full of beauty, action, adventure, and despair, even if it doesn't reach the heights of adrenaline as such cues as 'The Asteroid Field' from The Empire Strikes Back. The John Williams of the last, let's say, sixteen years is a different composer to the man who scored Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Dracula. He's a less excitable composer now - his instincts tend more towards subtlety. But he has not lost the capacity to produce thrilling music. Go on, give it a spin and tell me that 'Anakin vs Obi-Wan' is not a terrific action cue, or that the last two minutes of 'Anakin's Dark Deeds' is not beautiful and heartbreaking. Williams has become less prolific of late but when he does choose to work (because it must surely be always there for the asking for the most legendary living film composer) he always delivers something special.

Region B Blu-ray of 'The Shining' is longer American cut...

I haven't come across much in the way of commentary or reviews of the region B Blu-ray disc of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, although there is definitely something about this disc worth highlighting, especially for region B (Australia, UK) readers.

Stanley Kubrick trimmed one scene from The Shining after the premiere screening - a brief epilogue featuring Wendy and Danny safe (not sure of it's exact nature - it may have been a scene of them fishing, as in the book). When the film was met with befuddled reviews and unspectacular box office, Kubrick and Warner Bros made further trims for the international market, removing some 15 or so minutes of footage (around 30, according to the DVD and Blu-ray packaging but I don't often trust them and can't be arsed putting the discs in to get the exact number). Presumably one of their main goals with the new cut was to shorten the film by 1 reel for international distribution.

It is this shorter version which has been the only version available on home video formats in Australia, including the DVD. Until this new Blu-ray disc, which contains the original domestic (US) theatrical version.

It is not a radical transformation of the film - it remains magnificent, hilarious, and terrifying - but some sequences are imbued by certain moods as a result of information we know about the characters in inserted scenes. But you know this already, don't you? If you've already found this blog, that means you're the kind of person who already has the Blu-ray disc.

If so, I suggest you check out the short documentary on Wendy Carlos and her music for The Shining. A ten minute look into the world of this extraordinary lady.