While channel-surfing I happened on that Seventy-Five Years of NBC special, only tuning in long enough to hear a comedy bit by Mr. T, of all people. And to my amazement, it was hilarious. He presented a list of “Fools I’ve Pitied”, in keeping with his trademark line “I pity the fool”. He mentioned how he pitied the guy who cancelled Baywatch; he mentioned Jennifer Aniston who — like Mr. T — had her talent overlooked in favor of her haircut; and he pitied Screech from Saved By The Bell, because “We all pitied Screech”. The line that got the biggest laugh from me, though, was “I pity the East Wing. I mean, does anybody know what they do in the East Wing?”
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I’ve been watching The X-Files the last few weeks out of some sense of obligation. I’ve loved the show since I got hooked, midway through the third season, but this year has been one dull and boring episode after another. The feeling that the show was definitely moving toward some specific plot resolution, that The Truth really was Out There, seemed to dissipate entirely after the birth of Scully’s child and Mulder’s exit. The mytharc just seemed to grind on in lifeless fashion, and the Monster-Of-The-Week episodes were dull primarily because of the show’s new dynamic. The X-Files didn’t necessarily fall apart merely because David Duchovny left, but the resulting lack of chemistry between Agents Doggett and Reyes coupled with the lack of a clearly defined new role for Scully only made the dificiencies in the increasingly-lukewarm scripts all the more glaring. Had the show been announced for a tenth season, I likely would have abandoned ship entirely. But since the series is ending, I’m watching all of the remaining episodes (two left, as of this writing). And even still, with the clear knowledge that the show will soon be over, the recent episodes have not been very good. There was a wrap-up episode to the cancelled Lone Gunmen spinoff, which contrived an amazingly unbelievable scenario in which the paranoid trio give their lives for the world, or some such thing. Then there was an episode revolving around Scully’s baby and its supernatural powers which ended with the child’s powers being neutralized forever — but then Scully, realizing that her child will always be a target, gives the child up for adoption. This was so stunningly out of character for Scully that when it was over I stared at the end credits in disbelief, made doubly strong by the fact that the episode was written by Chris Carter, the one person who should know Scully better than this. My expectations for the show have fallen incredibly low, so imagine my surprise when tonight’s episode proved to be one of the best the series has done in the last few years.
The episode involved the nine-year-old murder of Agent Doggett’s son, a crime which has (until now) gone unsolved. A young FBI cadet who apparently has some kind of ability to see things in case files (and autopsies) that are missed provides Doggett with some uncannily accurate information on another case, the success of which prompts Doggett to show his case information on his son’s murder to the seemingly clairvoyant cadet. But the cadet already knows of the Doggett case — he wallpapers his apartment with photographs of unsolved crimes, Doggett’s son being one of the ones on the wall — and in a fairly spooky moment he tells Doggett that the two cases are not unrelated.
This episode was remarkably well crafted, with nicely building suspense and a final resolution that is moving and sad. The story kept me guessing — is the cadet what he claims to be? is there more to the mobster who keeps avoiding prosecution? is the Assistant Director on the take? — and the story’s supernatural element is very muted, much more so than usual for an X-Files episode. The unbelievable plot developments that have been the mainstay of X-Files scripts for this entire season were nowhere in evidence. It’s nice to see that the folks at Ten Thirteen have not completely forgotten how to construct a story.
The episode is carried, though, on the strength of Robert Patrick’s acting. John Doggett’s cynicism, the way he can’t allow himself to believe in anything, is well established by Patrick, so as the episode progresses and Doggett goes more and more out on that limb we can strongly sense his strong emotions and his powerful desire to keep them in check. Patrick gets a lot in this episode to really sink his teeth into, and he does so beautifully. I wonder if it was frustrating for Patrick to get this script, read it, and realize that only now that there are a handful of episodes left before he’s back on the Hollywood unemployment line does he get some material that he can really use to delve into his character. I never disliked the John Doggett character; he was sufficiently different from Mulder and the chemistry was sufficiently different between him and Scully that I was always fine with him. But there was still a sense that Doggett wasn’t entirely thought out, as if he were thrown together by Chris Carter and the Ten Thirteen writers after it became clear that Duchovny was really leaving the show. This episode dispelled all that, and as such it should have been done last year.
So, as The X-Files prepares to end at last, a little hope is renewed. Maybe, just maybe, The Truth really is Out There. We’ll know for sure in two weeks.
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I’ve added a permanent link at left to ScoreLand, a film music review site maintained by a man whose thoughts I enjoy greatly. (Just don’t stare for too long at those spinning CDs that are at the bottom of each review. Trust me on this point.)
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Good news for anyone who loves (or is at least interested in) the Golden Age of Science Fiction: the third volume of The SFWA Grand Masters is out in paperback. The SFWA began awarding its Grand Master award in the 1970s as a “lifetime achievement” award for the greatest of SF writers. (Additional stipulations were that the award could be given no more than six times in any decade, and it could only be given to writers who were alive at the time of the award.)
Each of these books collects a representative handful of stories by five of the Grand Masters. Those presented in the new volume are Lester Del Rey, Frederik Pohl (Pohl is also the series editor), Damon Knight (who sadly passed away just last month), A. E. Van Vogt, and Jack Vance. This is a terriffic series of books, well-conceived and lovingly assembled by editor Pohl.
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Evaluating a new John Williams filmscore is always fairly difficult, even for one where there is so much familiarity as there is with his already-extant Star Wars scores. Even with four previous films and filmscores to go on, it’s still somewhat hard to judge Williams’s score to Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. This is not purely due to the film having not been released yet; my strongly held belief (which is only getting stronger as the years go by) is that one should not hesitate to listen to film music even for films one has not seen. Good film music must be good music first, and good music by definition can stand alone.
The difficulty with a Williams score comes in its presentation. Williams has always tended to rearrange his score albums, taking cues apart and pairing them with other cues to form single tracks that (theoretically) are more listenable than the cues as originally written. Williams has continued to do this, even as the trend in filmscore releases in recent years has trended very strongly toward presenting the music purely in film order. Williams even did it with his initial score CD to The Phantom Menace — for example, the track entitled “Qui Gon’s Noble End” starts with the “dark fanfare” when the landing bay doors part, revealing Darth Maul; then the track presents the action music that accompanied the escape from Naboo, about an hour earlier in the film, before finally returning to the music that accompanies, well, Qui Gon’s noble end. Good listening? Yes, but not exactly conducive to really judging Williams’s effort. That CD was then supplanted a year and a half later by the release of a 2-CD set of the same score, which was labeled “The Ultimate Edition” and did present the entire score in film order. (Actually, it presented the score exactly in film order, which caused some consternation amongst filmscore afficionados because George Lucas had re-edited the film’s final act after Williams had completed scoring, resulting in a few odd-sounding edits in the music.) Further, the Phantom Menace album — while a delight — also omitted a number of the score’s best cues, including the entirety of the delicate music from the scene where young Anakin gains his freedom and says goodbye to his mother. Assuming that Attack of the Clones has roughly as much music as The Phantom Menace did (just about every scene in the earlier film was scored), and assuming that reports of the new film’s running time — roughly 130-140 minutes — are accurate, then the new CD has probably omitted at least 45 minutes of score. It will be interesting to see what, exactly, has been left out.
What to make, then, of what we have been presented of Williams’s Attack of the Clones score? I have read a number of reviews of it, some positive and some not. The dividing line seems to be how the reviewer in question responds to the score’s “Love Theme”, since it is by far the most dominant theme on the CD — we hear it, either in part or in whole, on nearly every track. Critics who find the “Love Theme” gorgeous tend to give the score high marks; those who find it lacking (especially in comparison to the great “Love Themes” from the classic Episodes IV, V and VI) tend to rank this score lower. And me? I fall, quite solidly, in the former camp.
The “Love Theme from Attack of the Clones” is, to my ears, absolutely and utterly gorgeous. It is passionate, lyrical, and sad. It is perhaps the darkest Love Theme that Williams has ever created, which is certainly fitting given what we know of how the romance of Anakin and Amidala eventually plays out. The earlier Love Themes in the series — most notably, that from The Empire Strikes Back — are made to sound at times sweet and romantic (Han and Leia’s first kiss, for example) or sweeping and desperate (the carbon-freezing scene, frex). By contrast, the Clones theme is almost unremittingly desperate, even when it is played in fairly innocent fashion. Williams seems to be pointing the way to the story’s inevitable turn toward ever darker events. Particularly notable is how, in the concert version of the Love Theme, Williams incorporates a central section where the theme is interpolated with more rhythmic and darkly martial-sounding music. This treatment seems to note how, even as Anakin pursues his love, he is moving toward becoming what Obi Wan will later call “more machine than man”. I find this treatment fascinating. The Love Theme, as noted earlier, crops up very often throughout this CD, never more remarkably than in the final track, when Williams segues from a full-bore statement of his famous “Imperial March” to the Love Theme before going to the End Credits music. It’s impossible to ignore the dramatic implications of juxtaposing Vader’s Theme (even though Vader doesn’t really exist yet) and Anakin’s Love Theme. And Williams does it once more, at the very end of the End Credits, when as the Love Theme fades away he quotes his theme for Anakin from The Phantom Menace before giving a very haunting last statement of the Imperial March.
After the Love Theme, the music that will likely make or break a person’s opinion of this score is the third track, “Zam the Assassin and the Chase Through Coruscant”. This is a pure action track, eleven minutes long, and it is almost entirely a study in rhythm with just about no melodic material whatsoever. It’s a fascinating sound, especially a central portion that contains nothing but percussion (which sounds like some of the more frenetic percussion stuff one would encounter at a Drum and Bugle Corps competition). It is in this track that Williams employs an electric guitar, which riffs on a very brief motif two or three times for about twenty seconds altogether. This use of guitar — an instrument that almost no one would expect in a Star Wars score — has been the basis of a large amount of the discussion of this score around the Web, but hate it or love it the guitar isn’t very loud (in fact, it’s almost a background instrument) and it’s only heard for a total of twenty seconds or so, out of an eleven-minute cue. What interests me more about “Zam the Assassin” is that it marks a point that Williams has reached that is about as far away from the action writing that he used to do, action writing that — while always incredibly exciting — was always melodically based. My heart still races when I listen to his “Battle of Yavin” track from A New Hope, especially the part toward the end when Luke’s Theme is heard over steadily thumbing timpani and ever rising chords (as Luke is all alone in the Death Star trench, with Vader closing in on him). Williams also wrote melodically-based action cues for The Phantom Menace, so perhaps this is experimental on his part given that the chase in question is in a very urban setting, something which we haven’t seen in a Star Wars film yet. I’m undecided as to whether or not I like “Zam the Assassin and the Chase Through Coruscant”. But I’m certainly getting to know it well as I consider it.
Of course, a Star Wars score should contain a number of the earlier themes from the series, and Attack of the Clones doesn’t disappoint. The “Force Theme” is quite prominent, and we also hear “Yoda’s Theme” (mostly in a beautiful track called “Yoda and the Younglings”). There is also a big quote from “Duel of the Fates” (from The Phantom Menace), and in the final track we hear — as noted above — a big statement of the Imperial March, probably to signal that the Republic has irrevocably turned the corner toward becoming the Empire. The score opens with the Star Wars Main Title, in the same incarnation in which it has been heard in the other four films. Some commentators have complained about this; some think that the instrumentation should be changed to reflect the darker tone of Episode II (and Episode III to come); and some have even suggested that the Main Title be eliminated from the CD entirely to make room for another “new” track or two. Personally, I can’t fathom a Star Wars score CD not starting with that theme, but that’s only my opinion.
So, here we have a score that is in my estimation worthy of the tradition in which it stands. Time will tell if it will become as classic a work as its forebears. But then, that’s the case with everything, isn’t it?
(A couple of extra points: First, the versions of the Attack of the Clones score CD that are being sold at Target stores contain a bonus hidden track, an action cue apparently called “The Conveyor Belt”. Secondly, the documentation annoyingly does not include track times. Finally — and this is a piddling complaint, but it’s my blog — the picture on the CD itself is terrible. It’s a muddy shot of Slave One flying through an asteroid field, firing its blasters. If I hadn’t seen the film’s previews, though, I would have absolutely no idea just what the picture is. I liked the picture of Naboo from the Phantom Menace CD a lot more than this one.)
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Ugh. Due to a posting mishap that I haven’t yet figured out how to correct, my attribution on the Image of the Week was snipped. Anyway, I found the image on the Daily Bleat at lileks.com. Click on the image to read the well-written article.
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The May update at SFSite is up. Check it out. (This is one of the finest general-SF websites in existence.)
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The PBS show American Masters just did a documentary on one of my personal heroes, dancer-actor-director-choreographer Gene Kelly. Any discussion of American dance in the 20th century must include Gene Kelly, whose athletic style formed a perfect counterpoint to the graceful moves of the other giant of his time, Fred Astaire. Kelly was involved in many fine, fine films, and Singin’ In The Rain is generally considered to be the greatest of all American musicals. Gene Kelly is one of the few celebrities whose passing I truly mourned.