We just watched JAWS last weekend, which is always a delight, so this sequence–the attack at the beach that makes everyone aware that a shark has taken up residence in the waters off Amity Island–is fresh on my mind. I’ve always loved the almost impressionistic nature of the shot of Alex Kintner’s actual demise, as someone on the shore might have seen it–just a glimpse of something big, caught from the corner of the eye in half a second. Apparently the sequence was originally intended to be more than that, though. This YouTuber went down the rabbit hole:
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Completing my small survey of music from the films of James Cameron, we have a short suite from the score to Avatar, written by James Horner. I like this score a lot, for its suggestion of an alien world that is still deeply beautiful, and the tie the people of that world feel to their surroundings. The film often gets ripped for being “derivative”, but I don’t know…I tend to think most films are “derivative”, and what they bring to the table in terms of creativity is how they blend all of their influences into something new and interesting. That’s how I see it, anyway.
Well, an apology of sorts is needed here: I had a new-to-me piece cued up and ready to go, but I wanted to give it a few more listens before I actually posted it, and then I lost track of that during a pretty hectic bunch of days recently. So…if you’ve been around a while, you know what that means. Here’s Franz von Suppe, with his Boccaccio Overture! This actually is one of his overtures that I know quite less well than some of the others, but it’s typical von Suppe, sparkling and delightful.
A few weeks ago I spent a morning at a particular spot in Chestnut Ridge Park, about as far into the park as one can get without getting out and walking. It’s a spot most people at the Ridge don’t go to, because it’s so far into the park’s interior, but it’s hardly deserted; it’s just far from the entrance. At this spot, one of the park’s streams–I believe this one is actually the one that goes over the Eternal Flame Falls, farther upstream–drops something like, oh, I don’t know, maybe 20 or 30 feet, over a few hundred feet of stream bed. So there are a lot of short drops, sloped spots, and deep plunge pools.
On this particular day there wasn’t much water–there usually isn’t, in August and September–so there wasn’t much to photograph by way of flowing water. So while I did get in some nice practice with shutter speed and working with the light, I didn’t get a ton of images from the session that I really liked…but I did like this one. It’s almost an abstract, almost impressionist in what it suggests without being able to depict it without enough water to do so.
Also that day, I photographed this wonderful old well house. Chestnut Ridge has a lot of these, and I’m saddened to think that they’re probably going to all have crumbled away within another decade or two. This one, by its surroundings and the way it always seems to be sitting in half-light, makes me think that I’ve entered a Hayao Miyazaki movie every time I see it.
Continuing our little series here of music from the films of James Cameron, who earlier this year turned 70, we have the big one.
Titanic.
Wow, this movie is nearing 30 years old. I remember when it was dominating popular culture, totally and utterly. In 1997 Titanic was just huge. It’s hard to overstate just how big a phenomenon it was. Musically, it was carried by a stunning ballad sung by Celine Dion, one of the biggest hits of my entire life; but there was also its score, which sold a huge number of records all by itself. This was one of the few times a movie was so big that its composer actually entered the zeitgeist–in fact, when had the last one of those been? Probably Star Wars, twenty years earlier, with John Williams. Anyway, Titanic made James Horner a huge name.
Horner had already been a big name in film music for years prior to that. The man paid his dues, first with scoring low-budget Roger Corman flicks before he started getting bigger assignments; his first big break was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, for which he turned in a classic score. My own relationship with Horner’s music was always complicated, but credit where due: A number of my personal desert-island filmscores that I love dearly are by James Horner.
For Titanic he turned in a surprisingly folk-tinged score, eschewing obvious approaches like a nautical sound or some kind of Edwardian-Elgarian sound. While I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Titanic score, I do think it’s very, very good, and concert performances of suites from this score abound. Here is one that I found quite good:
And while I’m discussing Titanic, one cue that is utterly magical in the film and was inexplicably left off the OST album (perhaps intentionally, as an extra enticement for the later Back to Titanic album) was the delicate solo-piano rendition of “My Heart Will Go On”, titled “The Portrait” on the record, which accompanies the scene where Jack draws Rose. If James Horner’s entire musical output had been limited to just this cue, I think his name would still be known, at least a bit.
I don’t remember when the YouTube algorithm started serving these up to me, but over the last year I’ve started seeing “Survival” videos, in which an intrepid creator will purposely venture out into a difficult situation to see if they can survive. They’ll have titles like “30 below in a snowstorm with NO SLEEPING BAG and NO TENT!!!”…but when you watch a few, a lot of them turn out to be surprisingly watchable as relaxing nature videos. And you learn a few things along the way.
Here’s one of my favorites, by a channel called “Outdoor Boys”, which is apparently one of the biggest and most prolific producers of this sort of thing. This kind of survival is fascinating to watch, and I like this particular video because a lot of what our hero does here is not what I’d expected. He does not find a nice large fallen tree against which he makes a lean-to out of branches, and while he does make a fire, it’s not just a little campfire which he uses for warmth and for cooking food. He uses the fire as a tool, and how he does it is really fascinating. Have you watched any survival videos? Do you find them as interesting as I do?
I’m having a busy week at work, so here’s a piece that might come in emotionally handy by Friday: it’s basically a collection of drinking songs! Here is one of my absolute favorites, the Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 by Georges Enescu, Cristian Macelaru conducting the WDR Symphony Orchestra.
WHOA, hold on!
OK, the above is a great performance, so give it a listen. But also watch this, because this turns it into something really nifty:
