Tag: Movies

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STAR TREK and Me: An Annual Repost

Today is the 60th anniversary of Star Trek‘s first appearance on teevee. On this date in 1966, an episode called “The Man Trap” of a new science-fiction show aired, and I guess that at the time this seemed like just another airing of some new show. New shows arrive every year, most of which are completely forgotten eventually…but somehow that particular new show made enough of an impact that it lives on as a huge franchise, over half a century later. Most of the people involved with making that very first episode are gone now…but their memory endures through the legacy of this great show. This is a post that I wrote on my old blog for the occasion of Star Trek‘s fiftieth anniversary, and it seems that I am now posting it on a yearly basis. Happy birthday, Star Trek!

And you people, you’re all astronauts on…some kind of star trek? –Zefram Cochrane, Star Trek First Contact


Wow. Star Trek made its official US debut fifty years ago today. That’s…amazing. (The show aired for the first time anywhere on September 6, 1966, in Canada.)

Star Trek came and went and was already in syndication when I was born, but my sister loved it, so I quite literally do not remember a time when Star Trek wasn’t a thing. One of my earliest teevee memories is, in fact, the brief bit at the end of the episode “Friday’s Child”, when Dr. McCoy is saying “Oochie woochie coochie coo” to a newborn baby, to Spock’s great confusion.


It’s often taken as an article of faith in the geek universe that one is either a Star Wars fan or a Star Trek fan, and I can kind of see why. It’s a Yankees-Red Sox kind of thing, I suppose. Or Bears-Packers. But for me, it’s complicated. I have to be honest: push me to answer, hold a gun to my head, and I will almost certainly choose Star Wars. But the margin of victory is not large, and in truth, there’s no way I’m the writer I am now without both of them.

“Let me help.” A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He’ll recommend those three words even over “I love you.” –James T. Kirk, “The City on the Edge of Forever”


Star Trek shaped my view, in a lot of ways, of what the future can and should be. It should be a time when humans are not afraid to explore the universe and, in fact, do so with enthusiasm. It should be a time when the diversity of humanity should be celebrated and not resisted. It should be a time when beautiful ships fly the stars, instead of rusting dingy hulks. It should be a time of wonderful cities, not dystopic nightmares. It should not be a time of universal peace without conflict, because that’s almost certainly impossible, but it should be a time when we approach conflict from a much more mature standpoint than we do now.


Of course, when I was a kid, Star Trek was none of that. It was just a show about nifty adventures in space, a way for me to scratch that particular itch in the years between releases of Star Wars movies. It didn’t ever occur to me back then that I was supposed to like one over the other; they were different things, and I liked ‘em both. If Star Wars hit me like a bolt from the blue, Star Trek was the thing that was there, day in and day out. Star Trek was what was on during the afternoon hours after school. I’d get home and watch it and thrill to the adventures of Captain Kirk and crew on the black-and-white teevee set I had in my room. This was before the Internet, obviously, and I didn’t have any access to an episode guide, so the only way to learn the episodes was to watch and watch and rewatch them as they came. I got pretty good at recognizing the episodes by sight, usually within seconds. (Often I had to wait until the first shot after the obligatory opening shot of the Enterprise.)

I don’t know if the station had some kind of plan for airing the episodes in any particular order, but I recall that you could go upwards of a year without seeing “Mirror, Mirror” or “The Trouble with Tribbles”, but other episodes – “The Return of the Archons”, “Errand of Mercy” – would show up more frequently. A certain “This one again?!” factor crept in at times, especially with some of the crappier episodes. (I can live the rest of my life to a rich old age and never watch “The Alternative Factor” again.) But the great episodes? Those live on forever. I still laugh at “The Trouble with Tribbles”, and I live for a moment when someone near me uses the phrase “storage compartments”, so I can respond as Kirk does: “STORAGE compartments? STORAGE compartments?!” And I still feel that sense of doom slowly unfolding as “The City on the Edge of Forever” spins its tale, toward the awful moment when, in order to fix history after it has been changed, James Kirk must stand and watch as a 20th century woman with whom he has fallen in love is killed.

MCCOY: You deliberately stopped me, Jim! I could have saved her. Do you know what you just did? SPOCK: He knows, Doctor. He knows. –”The City on the Edge of Forever”

As a kid, I attended two Star Trek conventions with my older sister – or at least, one Trek convention and one general sci-fi convention. At the latter, “The Trouble with Tribbles” was aired, followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those were fun. George Takei was the guest of honor at the first one, in 1977 or 1978. I was in first grade at the time. I remember Takei wearing a gleaming white suit. (Peter Mayhew was guest at the next one.)

I eventually lost track of daily Star Trek reruns by the mid-1980s, but also by this point, the movies were a thing. I remember being terribly excited for The Motion Picture, and even though I didn’t quite understand all of the plot, I have never – not once – disliked that often-maligned film. I recall being mildly disappointed that the Enterprise never fires its phasers once in that film, and in fact it only dispatches a single photon torpedo, and that’s at an errant asteroid that’s about to collide with the Great Bird. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think The Motion Picture is the first real science fiction story I saw on the big screen that wasn’t about a galactic war or some other action-based adventure. I wasn’t thinking in those terms, but yes, the movie primed that particular pump.


I liked all of the movies that came, and I saw every one in the theater over the next decade. This was an odd time for Trek, when a movie every couple of years was all there was. Sure, every once in a while there would be a tidbit in Starlog (the late, great SF fandom magazine) about how somebody somewhere wanted to make a new Trek teevee series, but it never amounted to much until we learned that we were finally getting The Next Generation. This was for several reasons, not the least of which was that Paramount wanted to keep making money off Trek but the original cast was starting to show its age.

Through the 1980s, as Star Wars seemed to fade away, Trek was still there, churning out a movie every couple of years and then a new teevee show. That’s what Trek always was for me. It didn’t fuel my imagination in quite the same way that Star Wars has always moved me at a very basic level of storytelling taste, but Trek has always been around. Always, always there. In fact, it was always there to such an extent that in the late 1990s, I started letting Trek go…but I’m getting ahead. During this time I read a number of Trek novels, and there was a fanzine called Trek that would annually publish a paperback book filled with its best articles. These I read with zeal, and I’ve lately started regathering them all via eBay. Maybe this winter I’ll spend some time reliving some fine old fan writing.


I loved The Next Generation, and watching it religiously formed a tradition in college among my mates and I. TNG aired reruns every weeknight, and the new episodes ran every Sunday night after the 10:00 news. That station even went so far, as TNG’s popularity grew, of including a very brief astronomy segment in its 10:00 Sunday newscast – “Tonight you can see Mars in the eastern sky!”, that sort of thing – complete with an Enterprise fly-by animation. And then, in our senior year, the next show, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, arrived. That premiere was an event, and I still think that premiere was an amazing episode.

Never trust ale from a god-fearing people, or a Starfleet Commander that has one of your relatives in jail. –Quark, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

It took a little while for TNG to really get going, but once the writers had the chemistry down, the show was more than ready to carry on the Trek tradition, with many a fine and thought-provoking story, about love and loss and what it means to be human even as we take to the stars.

If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid. –Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation

And still the movies came. The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, which I saw with school friends. The Voyage Home, with its goofy and infectious joy. Even the much-maligned (and mostly deservedly so) The Final Frontier had its charms for me. That poor movie may have failed, but I really give it credit for trying to be about something.

The Undiscovered Country came along in 1991, when TNG had hit its stride. We saw it in the theater the night it opened, which happened to be the same night as our annual Christmas concert performance at a big church in Cedar Falls, IA. We did the concert, quickly changed clothes, and bolted down the street to catch the show. I loved that movie, and in fact, to this day Star Trek VI is my favorite Trek film. I remember a lump in my throat at the closing scene, which boiled down to just the classic crew onscreen (minus Sulu, who finally got his promotion to Captain and got to fly away on his own ship, the Excelsior), followed by the animated signatures of the original cast. Their time was done. (Although, in classic Trek and science fiction fashion, not quite.)

CHEKOV: Course heading, Captain? KIRK: (smiles) Second star to the right…and straight on ‘til morning. —Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

College ended and the real world began, and there was still Star Trek, even as Star Wars started making rumblings again. The TNG crew graduated to movies, and DS9 soared in quality. Another series began, Voyager…which is when I started to lose a bit of energy with respect to Trek. For one thing, I had a lot of other interests by this time, but for another, it was pretty clear as Voyager got going that the creative folks behind Trek were starting to lose steam. I stopped watching Voyager about the fourth season, and the next series? Well, to this day, I have never watched a single episode of Enterprise.


But now Trek is coming back. Three new movies, with varying degrees of success. A new series on the way, reimagined to seasons of thirteen episodes each. The Trek continues. (I haven’t seen Star Trek Beyond yet. It came and went from the theaters too quickly this summer, and it came out during our busiest time of the summer as well, so I simply was never able to squeeze it in. Beyond and Nemesis are, to date, the only Trek films I did not see in the theaters.) Will Trek eventually reach similar heights again? Are there more stories in the offing to match tales like “The Devil in the Dark,” “The Doomsday Machine,” “A Piece of the Action,” “The Best of Both Worlds,” “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” “Tapestry,” “The Visitor”? Who knows…but I look forward to finding out.


Star Trek is, was, and has been many things. It will continue to be many things, too. I don’t know that I’ll ever have the same old investment in it that I did in the late 70s and through the 80s. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel that same enthusiasm for Star Wars either, so the two tentpoles of my science fiction life have that much in common, don’t they? But I’ll always owe a debt to Star Trek. It shone a bright light on a future that doesn’t have to be awful, and it showed beautiful space ships. It put a new light on the idea of space adventure, and it showed a military organization that was devoted truly to peace. Star Trek did time travel better than just about anybody else. Star Trek gave us amazing characters, and it let those characters do amazing things.

They used to say if man could fly, he’d have wings, but he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn’t reached the moon, or that we hadn’t gone on to Mars and then to the nearest star? That’s like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great grandfather used to. I’m in command. I could order this, but I’m not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this, but I must point out that the possibilities – the potential for knowledge and advancement – is equally great. Risk! Risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her. –James T. Kirk, “Return to Tomorrow”

Star Trek is fifty. Amazing. Long live Star Trek.

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange, new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.

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Sunday Stealing (FAB!)

This one’s easy, and it also falls into the FAB category, which I haven’t utilized in a while. FAB stands for Film, Audio, Book…as in, what have you been watching, listening to, and reading of late. To Sunday Stealing we go!

1) What’s something you want to do before summer slips away?

Sigh. You know what, folks? This summer wasn’t great, in a lot of ways. The weather wasn’t awful…but it still sucked. There are degrees of this, after all…but while we never really had that long stretch of low-90s, high humidity that usually stops summer dead in its tracks, it was never comfortable, either. We had very few days this summer where we could turn the AC off and open the windows overnight; often times it wasn’t miserable but just uncomfortable enough, until late in the day, to make being outside just unpleasant. It seemed to get humid in late June and it has stayed at that exact level of humidity until, well, two nights ago. Ugh! We’ve had no sit-by-the-fire nights, we’ve barely used our clothesline to dry clothes, we’ve eaten on the deck very few times.

So, as summer slowly yields to Fall, we’re hoping to do the enjoyable things we haven’t done in summer yet. Our favorite part of summer usually starts in early August; this year it’s arriving in early September. El Nino, maybe?

2) What book are you currently reading?

I’m digging through a lot of photo books of late: books featuring work of Annie Leibovitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Walker Evans, for example. I just finished a wonderful little book called The World According to Henri Matisse, featuring reproductions of his paintings alongside quotes from his writings. I’ll probably put up a post of quotes from this book before it goes back to the library.

Also, I’m starting Star Soldiers by Andre Norton. I haven’t read any old-school sci-fi in a while. Norton is one of those sci-fi authors from the mid-to-late 20th century who isn’t much mentioned anymore.

3) What have you been listening to?

I’m working my way through Sara Bareilles’s new album Good Grief, which so far is hitting me between the eyes. This one will merit much more comment once I’m all the way through it.

4) What shows or movies have you been watching?

Shows: Rizzoli and Isles has been a comfort watch for us of late, though we’re on the second-to-last season right now, so we’ll need something else soon. We recently watched the first season of R.J. Decker, a new-last-year show about an ex-con in Florida who becomes a private eye when he gets out. It’s a fun show, though I must admit I am getting tired of every show having to have a constant ongoing narrative unfolding along with the stories in the individual episodes. This season of Master-Chef is winding down, and honestly? Thank God. This season has been an annoying slog. Because FOX had the World Cup, this season of MC had fewer episodes going in, but they went into the competition phase with just as many chefs as always, so this season has had a ton of double eliminations, which sucks. My favorite new thing right now might be Bad Medicine, a fish-out-of-water story in which a weirdly uptight city doctor moves to small-town New England to practice medicine, for various reasons. I always dig this genre. This one feels like a quirkier, funnier version of Virgin River. Think House mashed up with Newhart.

Movies: I had high hopes that Super Troopers would have a lot of laughs. It had a few, and that’s it. Disappointing. Also, Triangle of Sadness is a very weird movie about a bunch of rich people getting what’s coming to them, in very weird ways. It’s probably half an hour longer than it needs to be. Tonight we’ll probably watch JAWS, because a summer without JAWS is just weird.

How about you all?

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“Every garden grows one” (Random thoughts on SONG SUNG BLUE)

SONG SUNG BLUE movie poster. Via: https://www.dolby.com/experience/song-sung-blue/

We watched  Song Sung Blue last night. I honestly didn’t know much about it at all. When I first saw ads for it last year, I truly thought it was a biopic about Neil Diamond, with Hugh Jackman in the starring role. Later I learned it was not about Mr. Diamond at all but about a Neil Diamond tribute band, so I figured it was a rom-com with Mr. Diamond’s music forming the main “hook”. Even though there is a lot of humor in the film, it’s not a rom-com. It’s a somewhat fictionalized (though as far as I’ve read, relatively accurate) biopic of a real-life Neil Diamond tribute band called Lightning and Thunder.

In the late 80s, a guy named Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman) is a barely-scraping-by blue-collar dude who has dreams of being a rock singer, but is relegated to the “Impersonator” circuit to play county fairs and bingo halls and that sort of thing. In the opening scene he has an argument with a friend, a guy whose schtick is impersonating Buddy Holly (even though his hair is full gray and he makes no effort to color it), because he wants to do his own music as an act he calls “Lightning”, instead of doing his Don Ho act that he had agreed on. Before storming out he meets Claire Stengl (Kate Hudson), who is about to take the stage as Patsy Cline. Long story short, these two meet again and form a Neil Diamond tribute duo, called “Lightning and Thunder” (“Wait…I’m ‘Thunder’?” Claire asks before planting a long, hard kiss on Mike), and off we are into the lives of these talented people in a world that doesn’t really reward talent all that much, who are constantly behind on the mortgage, and whose health isn’t the greatest (boy, isn’t it).

Here are some random thoughts about the movie:

::  I think that your enjoyment of Song Sung Blue almost certainly hinges on your degree of appreciation for the songs of Neil Diamond. I love me some Neil Diamond, so I loved the movie. If you’re one who runs for the hills at the opening chords of “Sweet Caroline”, this isn’t for you.

::  That said, I love how this movie keeps having Mike fight against doing “Sweet Caroline” all the time. He keeps insisting, and rightly so, that there’s so much more to Neil Diamond than “Sweet Caroline”.

::  But yes, you get a full-on rendition of “Sweet Caroline” in this movie. I’ll say this: the movie earns it.

::  The Buddy Holly guy looked familiar to me. I kept thinking “Wow, he looks like an older version of Christopher from The Sopranos.” That’s because it is Christopher from The Sopranos. I keep forgetting that show is more than 20 years in the rear-view-mirror now. Michael Imperioli is a really good actor, by the way.

::  No spoilers, but if you want a movie about good people struggling through some real shit, this is the movie for you. Doubly so if you want a movie that shows how we’re all just one awful moment away from disaster.

::  Mike is an alcoholic and has been going to AA for years; as the movie opens he’s celebrating twenty years of being sober. I really really really like how the movie never does the supremely obvious thing of having him fall off the wagon. There are a couple of conversations of the “You haven’t been to a meeting in a long time” variety, but they’re more of the “You need support right now” thing than him spiraling back into addiction. At one point he’s working in his garage and he finds, buried in the bottom drawer of a tool chest, a bottle he’d stashed away at some point, because alcoholics stash away bottles. I thought, “Crap, he’s gonna drink now, isn’t he?” He didn’t. The next scene has him pouring it down the drain.

::  When Mike and Claire meet and come together, they each have kids from previous relationships. The movie avoids the usual “Our kids hate each other” stuff, which is nice.

::  The level of “meta” in a movie like this is impressive: Hugh Jackman is playing a guy who played at being Neil Diamond. Jackman does a pretty amazing job of doing what the best “tribute acts” do of sounding enough like the original thing to feel like it, without ever trying to sell anyone on the idea that he is the original thing. There’s a fine line between good and honorable tribute acts and impersonator kitsch, after all.

::  Hugh Jackman is incredibly good in this movie.

::  Kate Hudson is also incredibly good in this movie. It’s interesting to me that my two favorite Kate Hudson movies are music centric: this one, and Almost Famous.

::  In one scene, Kate Hudson is wearing overalls! But…be warned, when you get to that point in the movie, things are about to take a very serious turn.

::  Movies like this have a fine line to walk, in terms of how they look. They need to make the time period convincing without looking like they’re making fun of it, especially when the people populating this world pretty much stopped advancing in terms of fashion sometime at least a decade before this movie even starts. Song Sung Blue never once looks fake or false or like an artifice. I never once felt like I was looking at a set.

::  I don’t want to spoil one of the movie’s best jokes, but I have to admire it because it’s exactly the kind of quasi-morbid humor inside-joke that every family has, based solely on that family’s lore. It’s really a “You had to be there” kind of thing. But it works so, so well, and it really made me happy that the movie went there.

::  To reiterate, if and when you watch Song Sung Blue, have at the ready whatever your particular tear-management device of choice happens to be. Kleenex? Handkerchief? Paper towels? You’ll need it, and you’ll need it several times throughout the movie.

::  The movie sounds great, too. It just does. You’ll be humming nothing but Neil Diamond songs to yourself afterwards. I assume this phase will last for days.

::  I’m glad the movie resisted the…opportunity, maybe?…to have a special appearance by Neil Diamond himself. Maybe that wouldn’t have been feasible at Mr. Diamond’s age, but lesser movies would make that exact kind of indulgence. Song Sung Blue is an immersive film; an actual appearance by Mr. Diamond would have broken the illusion.

::  To recap: Song Sung Blue is really good and I’m glad they made it.

 

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Bob and Bruce (a repost)

(Reposting this because JAWS. Do I need a better reason than that? JAWS! I wasn’t allowed to watch JAWS until I was a teenager, which is both probably a wise move on my parents’ part and also really lame. I mean, come on! JAWS! But hey, it instantly became one of my favorite movies ever when I finally did get to watch it all the way through, instead of seeing little bits and pieces through sneaky glimpses at this or that telecast. Anyway, here’s a bit of silliness….)

I’ve seen a few of these photos surfacing online the last few months, and they make me really happy because there’s a kind of absurdity going on. These are behind-the-scenes snapshots from JAWS, featuring actor Robert Shaw and “Bruce” the Shark, in between takes. Bruce, if you didn’t know, was the name lovingly bestowed upon the mechanical shark they made for the movie, which ended up not working half the time, forcing director Steven Spielberg to rely on implied-shots, shadows, oblique techniques and other ways of creating the sense that the shark was there without actually showing that the shark was there. It’s generally accepted that the difficulties with the model are a big reason why the movie ended up as good as it is. I love these shots because they have a kind of absurdity to them, as if Bruce was really a living part of the cast, waiting for his next take like everyone else. They just scream out to be captioned, so:

“Come on, Bob, sing it with me! ‘Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies….” “Shut UP, Bruce.”
“I mean, it was a great fight scene and all, but you gotta admit, Bob, the way your character in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE lets James Bond get one up on him is kinda lame.” “I didn’t write it, Bruce.”

 

“Haha, in your big speech you’re supposed to say ‘We delivered the bomb’ but you make it sound like ‘We delivered the bum’! Hahaha…ouch, please get your hand off my eye! It’s not REALLY like a doll’s eye!” “Too bad, Bruce.”

As John Oliver always says, “Moving on….”  

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“You only have one life to live. So make it chicken shit, or chicken salad!”

(This is a repost from a number of years ago. I recently saw the movie Cousins for free on YouTube, so watched it over several breaks and lunches at work, as I hadn’t seen it in quite a few years. It actually holds up pretty well, and when I looked up my earlier post, I realized that I honestly wouldn’t change much of it at all, except to maybe accentuate more the point that the movie really is a fantasy of sorts, and if a situation like this movie’s came to pass in real life the participants would all need extensive therapy. Still…I love the damned movie. Here’s the post!)

(Oh, and I’m adding a new “Romance” tag, because I’m watching and reading more romance of late, so I may well find myself talking about those things in the future….)

I’m not sure if I’ve ever held forth on the movie Cousins before in this space, but I recently watched it again and wanted to flesh out my thoughts on it a bit.

Cousins is a remake of a French movie that I’ve never seen. It came out in 1988 or 1989, somewhere in there, so by this time it’s full of the kinds of fashions we like to laugh at nowadays. (Mullets and big hair, chiefly. I actually like the big hair, but the mullets, not so much.) It’s directed, very well, by Joel Schumacher, a guy who isn’t on anybody’s list of great directors but whom I think tend to produce well-made films (from a technical standpoint).

In the movie, Ted Danson plays Larry, a dance teacher who is married to Tish (Sean Young, who never looked more beautiful). Isabella Rossellini plays Maria, who is married to Tom (William Petersen, ten years before he started following the evidence). In the opening scene, Larry’s Uncle Phil marries Maria’s mother, so Larry and Maria become cousins of some sort. They also meet in the reception hall after the reception has ended, because neither is sure where their respective spouses have disappeared to. Well, it turns out Tom and Tish have been doing the dirty (Tom turns out to be quite the philanderer), and after Larry and Maria realize this, they decide to pretend to be having their own affair in order to get back at them. It’s a little joke…except they end up becoming close friends and then falling in love with one another. Hilarity ensues.

Of course, this is a remake of a French movie, so it all gets more complicated than that. Uncle Phil dies of a heart attack after being married for a couple of weeks, and then Larry’s father Vince (Lloyd Bridges, who has most of the film’s best lines) shows up and starts to woo Maria’s mother. More hilarity ensues.

It’s hard to honestly appraise a movie like this, since one must acknowledge that a state of affairs anywhere remotely resembling this one would result in all manner of emotional trauma for all concerned. (The movie does address, in passing, the effects of all this on Maria and Tom’s daughter.) But the movie itself is awfully well-made, with chemistry positively dripping between virtually every couple it shows us, so I end up looking past a lot of that. Of course Danson and Rossellini have great chemistry; the movie wouldn’t work at all if they didn’t. But so do Danson and Young, and so do Rossellini and Petersen, and so do Young and Petersen. Heck, in a couple of scenes, even Danson and Petersen have good chemistry (although as rivals). It’s also to the film’s credit that its characters do bad things without being bad people. Even Petersen’s Tom, the “cheating husband”, is a fairly low-grade jerk who is genuinely hurt when he realizes that he’s losing his wife. “Are you in love with him?” he asks; “If I am I’ll get over it,” she replies. “Yeah,” he says, in return. “We were in love once, and we got over it.” (It is kind of unfair the way the movie’s finale leaves Tom in a limbo state; we get some idea that Tish will be just fine, but Tom’s just tossed aside.)

Of course, this is a romantic comedy, so one must also judge it by if it makes one laugh, and it certainly makes me laugh. The Lloyd Bridges character has zinger after zinger (“At my age, you don’t want to get too close to an open grave”, “I’d rather have a case of the clap than a case of that wine.”), and there’s a hilarious scene set inside a wedding theme park where one of the cherubs is shown smoking behind a bush.

And the score is wonderful. Angelo Badalamenti writes a very French-sounding score (apropos, obviously), bound by two main themes: a love theme in waltz time (heard in a big way when Larry and Maria run away on Larry’s motorcycle), and a simpler, beautiful theme for Maria. In a very nice touch, Maria’s theme turns up throughout the film as diagetic music, played by street musicians as Larry and Maria wander by. The movie is also great looking, filmed in Vancouver, with lots of sweeping shots of that city’s environs. Cousins is wonderful froth, if that’s what you’re looking for.

Here’s the love theme I refer to above. I mean, isn’t this great stuff? This is easily one of my favorite movie melodies ever.

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“Vultures, vultures everywhere!”

Eighty-three years of Casablanca.

This morning I got in the car, turned on the radio, and as I was preparing to switch it over to my phone’s output so I could listen to a podcast, the announcer on WNED indicated that they were about to play a suite of Max Steiner’s wonderful music for Casablanca, because the film opened eighty-three years ago today.

That movie has been a part of my world my entire life. I didn’t watch it myself until sometime during, or immediately after, my freshman year of college, but I was always aware of it, and my parents always spoke very highly of it. I remember when I watched it the first time I thought, “Yeah, that’s pretty damned good, I don’t know if it’s quite as good as everyone makes it out to be, but that’s a damned good movie.”

A while later I watched it again, though…and I discovered something that Roger Ebert would later write about: the fact that Casablanca is, somehow, always better the second time. There’s just something about it that makes it a “pretty good” watch the first time and makes it utterly engrossing the second time around…and each and every time thereafter.

Eighty-three years.

When I was a kid, Casablanca was my benchmark for “an old movie”. Since it was only 29 years old when I was born, I guess I kind of set “twenty-nine years old” as my thought for what constituted an “old movie”. So, using that metric, here in the Year of Our Lord 2025, new “old movies” include Independence Day, Scream, Jerry Maguire, and the first Mission: Impossible movie.

Anyway, here’s the Max Steiner suite I listened to this morning on my ride to work. This is music to put you in the mood to be a big inconvenience to Nazis…which honestly, is saddeningly needed right now, innit?

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A Turnip Cures Elvis (Something for Thursday, Friday edition)

Like I said the other day, there’s a kind of perfect storm of STUFF all coming to a head at once that isn’t leaving me with a ton of time for posting, so posting much, I have not. This is likely to continue for the next week, maybe even two, depending on how things transpire. None of this is bad, by any means: we have a big work event that’s taking up tons of time to prep coming up, and then next weekend is our annual getaway to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes, and right after that, The Wife has a medical procedure that will occupy a lot of mental cycles and energy.

But, I do need to get something up here at least once in a while, don’t I? And I’m still saddened by the passing earlier this week of Robert Redford, so I’ll discuss my personal favorite Redford movie, to which the title of this post alludes. The film is the 1992 caper film Sneakers.

Here’s the text of a post I wrote some years ago about the film, and then I’ll come back and say a few things more about it:

 

 

COSMO: You could have shared this with me.

MARTIN: I know.

COSMO: You could have had the power.

MARTIN: I don’t want it.

COSMO: Don’t you know the places we can go with this?

MARTIN: Yeah, I do. There’s nobody there.

COSMO: Exactly! The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy or money. It’s run by ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It’s all just electrons!

MARTIN: I don’t care.

COSMO: I don’t expect other people to understand this, but I do expect you to understand this! We started this journey together!

MARTIN: It wasn’t a ‘journey’, Coz. It was a prank.

COSMO: There’s a war out there, old friend, a world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information: what we see and hear, how we work, what we think. It’s all about the information!

MARTIN: If I were you, I’d destroy that thing.

I saw Sneakers when it first came out, back in 1992 or thereabouts. It quickly became one of my favorite movies, and I saw it several more times theatrically before it became a fixture in my rotation of movies to rent on occasion, and later, when I had a sizeable collection of movies on VHS. But for one reason or another – mainly because I just never got around to it – Sneakers never got into my DVD collection, so I haven’t seen it in…holy crap. More than ten years. That seems rather wrong to me now, in retrospect, but never fear – I finally watched it recently, with some fear and trepidation that, like many a techno-thriller made more than a decade ago, it wouldn’t hold up very well.

Surprisingly – and satisfyingly – it does hold up, very well. And more than that: it’s striking to me now, twenty years later, just how eerily prescient this movie was.

Sneakers is one of the most entertaining cyberthriller-espionage movies I’ve ever seen. Robert Redford stars as Martin Bishop, the head of a security firm consisting of a group of men whose backgrounds mostly include shady dealings or outright brushes with the law. Their main job is simply to break into places that are supposedly highly secure, in order to demonstrate the lax areas in the security. They seem to be mostly just eking by: when they complete a job for a bank early in the film, a bank officer fills out the payment check, looks at it, and comments that it’s not a very good living. The team gets hired for another job, this time by two men claiming to be NSA agents, who happen to know who Martin Bishop really is (for which he could go to jail). They are to steal a device that decrypts codes which are supposedly unbreakable, which they do, and then give to the NSA guys – only to learn that they’re not NSA guys at all, and that they’ve murdered the mathematician who invented the device.

In a deeply eerie scene, Bishop’s hacker buddies start probing around with the little black box, just to see what it can do – and they discover that it can allow anyone to hack into extremely sensitive computer systems. The power grid of the entire Northeast…the Federal Reserve…air traffic control. They couldn’t have known it, writing this movie ten years before 9-11, but hearing one of the hackers jokingly say, “Anybody want to crash a few passenger jets?” is deeply chilling.

The entire movie is about security in an increasingly digital world, and at the end of the film, the exchange quoted above takes place, between Bishop and his onetime college buddy Cosmo, who has become a villain since doing time in prison for a crime that he committed with Martin at his side (but who eluded capture by the police simply by going out for pizza when they showed up with the guns). The idea of the world become increasingly governed by, and even defined by, the processing of data was a pretty bold one back in 1992. When I saw this movie, I had not yet even heard of the Internet, and the digital infrastructure that Sneakers portrays – with dial-up modems and not a cell phone in sight – seems utterly quaint. And yet, the movie is somehow fresh, despite all that, largely owing to the charm of the cast, the sparkling dialogue, the engaging direction, the brisk pacing, and – in terms of the technology – the nicely non-specific way the technology is depicted.

There are a lot of very clever touches in Sneakers: the reverse ‘race against time’, for example, in which Martin Bishop has to get a job done and yet literally can only do it at a very slow pace, lest the motion detectors notice his presence. Also the way they enlist Martin’s former (and yet still friendly) girlfriend to help with the problem of recording a particular scientist’s voice for use against the voice-print ID gizmo. (If the phrase “My name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me.” is in your geek lexicon, then you are my kind of people.) I also like how vague the movie is about Cosmo’s villainy. We never learn who he works for, or if he is the main ringleader; we never learn what exactly it is that he wants to accomplish with the little black codebreaking box. In fact, it’s entirely possible that Cosmo doesn’t even have a specific plan in mind at all, and that he just wants the codebreaker because it will give him power that he as yet doesn’t really know how he intends to use it. He’s almost purely a theoretical villain, which is what makes him even scarier — as well as the sheer optimism of his villainy, which is what makes the quote above so memorable. It’s not about making threats or committing crimes or any of that dirty stuff. It’s about the possibilities inherent in controlling the world’s data.

And that is really makes this twenty-year-old film stay relevant.

OK, that’s the old post. I notice that I didn’t mention the film’s acting much in my original post, so I’m addressing that now, because Sneakers is one of the best-cast movies ever made, in my opinion. If they handed out Oscars for casting, Sneakers would have won it that year. You have River Phoenix as a young hacker, and Dan Aykroyd as an old hacker who is deeply invested in paranoid conspiracy theories. (This was a considerably more charming and entertaining character trait thirty years ago. Now, not so much.) You have Sidney Poitier as a retired CIA spook who hasn’t given up the game just yet, and David Strathairn as a blind hacker. Leading them all is Mr. Redford, a hacker with a past that has led him to assume a false identity. Joining them is Redford’s old girlfriend, played by Mary McDonnell, and the villain is Ben Kingsley as an old friend of Redford’s who went to jail for their escapades while Redford did not.

It’s really something to watch this movie and note the complete chemistry among the cast. At no point is there any break in the illusion; we really believe that this motley crew of hackers and law-benders has spent years working with one another at the weird intersection of legality and morality and…neither of those things. And they really do seem to enjoy doing it; they’re having fun, up until the moment when they realize that they have somehow become embroiled in something very real and very dangerous. But even then, once they sense that the winds have shifted in their direction again…the sense of fun returns.

Speaking specifically of Mr. Redford’s performance, he is doing more than having fun. There’s a sense right from the start that he’s been at this longer than anyone else, and that he’s starting to get a bit weary of the whole business. Redford shows us a Martin Bishop who is genuinely sorry for what happened to his old friend back in college, and who does want to move past the hackery part of his life. He’s also skeptical of what is to come and what Cosmo seems to be embracing, as shown in the exchange quoted above; Bishop’s hesitance to embrace a world where everything is determined by information and who controls it is notable, and in Redford’s hands, very, very real. Redford does things in this film with simple facial expressions that are just wonderful: a rolling of his eyes when he’s told to hurry up when doing a job where moving as slowly as possible is required, or a sudden snarl when he decides to punch out the thug who has been inconveniencing him all movie long. Or his mischievous smile that lets us know he’s pulled a fast one on somebody.

Most of all, though, Redford captures that Bishop is the brains and the heart of this whole operation. He’s the one who suspects first that this whole business with the code-breaking machine is more than he bargained for and that he and his team are involved in something more deep and sinister than they have ever dealt with before. This is something that Robert Redford was always great at, something that made him one of the best. He was always able to suggest, often without even saying anything, the emotional and intellectual lives his characters were leading.

And he was just so damned cool about it. Who wouldn’t want to be Robert Redford, after all?

Oh, this is a delayed Something for Thursday post as well, so here’s a nice suite culled together from the soundtrack to Sneakers, with music composed by the late, great James Horner. This is one of the great “caper film” scores of all time.

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Remembering James Horner (1953-2015)

(This is a repost of what I wrote when composer James Horner died ten years ago, very prematurely, in a plane crash. Apparently Horner had been an amateur, hobbyist pilot. My relationship with his music through the years was complicated, but I wouldn’t ever say it was complicated to the point of being “love-hate”. Horner was one of the most important and notable film composers from 1980 until his death, after all, and as prolific as he was, I wish he was still around.)

Composer James Horner died the other day when the airplane he was piloting crashed. He was the sole passenger.

This is, quite simply, the worst news to hit the film music world since Michael Kamen, Jerry Goldsmith, and Elmer Bernstein all died within a year of each other.

For me, though, the hit is more directly personal. Although my relationship with Horner’s music has been rather complicated over the years, he still wrote a fair number of my favorite filmscores of all time, and when a score of his connected, it connected. He had the ability to hone in on the precise moment of a given scene’s emotional high point and construct his music to reach its high at the same moment. All film composers strive for this, but Horner’s gift for this was something else.

Moreover, I saw Horner’s career take flight, as he rose from obscurity to, well, stardom in his small corner of the film world. He started writing for films in the late 1970s, and I first encountered him in his fifth film, the Roger Corman space opera flick Battle Beyond the Stars. This is the first James Horner music I ever heard:


That score is still a fun listen to this day, even with all its minor faults: its heavy debt to Jerry Goldsmith (one of Horner’s strongest early influences), its occasionally awful orchestration (there is a track called “Cowboy and the Jackers” when you can hear the trumpet section slowly die), and occasional transitional missteps. Horner wrote a swashbuckling score that was better than the film it accompanied (although the film really is not all that bad, as long as you don’t ask too much of it).

When next I encountered the music of James Horner, it was for another science fiction film: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Gone was Jerry Goldsmith’s brightly optimistic bombast from The Motion Picture, and in its place was a lyrical score that had an older and more seafaring quality to it.


It wasn’t all lyricism, though; Horner’s action writing was impeccable, and the film’s climax gives a great example of Horner’s skill for matching the music to the exact visual and the emotional beats of the scene. Here is the music, titled “Genesis Countdown”:


And here is a portion of the scene as scored, starting with the Enterprise backing away from Khan’s crippled Reliant:


This entire cue is a clinic in how to spot a film: you hear the desperation as the ship begins to move so painfully slowly, the drive as Spock climbs down through the ship toward Engineering, a snippet of Horner’s theme for Spock himself as he mind-melds with McCoy, the desperate ticking down of the seconds as the bridge crew realizes they’re doomed, Khan’s final expressions of hatred. When Horner was on, this is what he could do.

Horner would return to Star Trek for the next film, The Search for Spock, but he never did any more Trek after that. This always seemed to me a pity. I would have liked to hear, perhaps, a more light-hearted take on his themes from Treks II and III in IV, perhaps, or maybe his take on the adventures of the Next Generation in any of their films. Alas, it didn’t happen. I next encountered Horner via his score to the SF film Brainstorm, which is notable mainly for being Natalie Wood’s last film and, well, for Horner’s score.


And then there was Krull.


It’s amazing to hear the progression in Horner’s sound from Battle to the Treks to Krull and beyond. You can really tell how much he was learning along the way, and his development along these lines culminated in 1988’s Willow.


One can detect a certain amount of the common lot of the film composer: often the scores are, on balance, better than the films. Not everyone can be John Williams, with a partnership with Steven Spielberg.

Horner was also able to do a lot more than genre films. He scored everybody’s favorite gentle baseball film Field of Dreams, in which he flexed his Americana muscles without quite aping the typical Coplandesque sound, and a couple years later he scored the Robert Redford caper flick Sneakers.


In the mid-90s, Horner reached what was almost certainly the height of his powers, and his filmography from about 1993 to 1998 basically includes one fine score after another, with three that were truly wonderful and one other which would become his single most famous work.

For Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, Horner managed to capture both the optimism of the Apollo moon missions and the elegiac sense, looking back, that that was as far as we were willing to go at that time and for quite a long time afterward. Horner infused that entire film with amazing energy, never moreso than during that film’s incredible rocket launch sequence:


Then there was Braveheart. Horner’s score for this film is amazing, one of my favorites of all time, and I consider its first half to be some of the finest film music ever written. It’s really quite something, what Horner did here. Mel Gibson’s film takes a fairly ‘dreamy’ approach to its subject matter, with long, lingering shots and scenes that feel like meditations. Horner accompanies all this amazingly, never better than in the “Secret Wedding” sequence. This love music is more complex than it seems, with a main melody that is subtly varied through a number of different stepwise progressions, and as the scene becomes more and more intimate in the film, so too does Horner’s score, boiling down to the utter simplicity of the rhythm being set by an ostinato harp. The first half of this score amazes me each time I listen to it.


Also in this same period came what I consider to be Horner’s finest score, Legends of the Fall. This melodrama is actually a favorite film of mine, and Horner’s approach to its big emotions is to basically say, “To hell with subtlety”. It’s a choice that works amazingly well, as Horner moves from big moment to big moment. This is a movie that blends World War I tragedy with Native American mysticism and Depression-era bootlegging with the generational drama of a family of strong-willed men and women underneath the Big Montana Sky, and Horner turns in a lush, Romantic score that proves that sometimes less is not more.


And then, in 1997, Titanic arrived.

Oddly, while I love the movie Titanic to this day, I’m not a huge fan of its score. It does, though, have a number of great moments. Horner would win his only Oscar for Best Original Score for Titanic (he also won Best Original Song that year for “My Heart Will Go On”). Titanic seems to be mostly laughed-at these days, which I always find unfortunate, but Horner did play a crucial part in its success, from the wonderful energy of “Southampton” to the way he scored the scene where Jack shows Rose how to “fly”. Note, in the latter scene, how the music seems to swell, only to swell again, with an upward modulation, when Rose lifts her hand to Jack’s neck, making the kiss all the more intimate.

 

One thing that’s always struck me about Horner’s Titanic score is how unobvious it is. He doesn’t go for the type of “seafaring” sound that one might expect from a disaster-at-sea film; nor does he particularly try to capture a “British” feel with proper Elgarian pomposity. Horner’s score, even if it’s not one of my favorites of his, still does manage to somewhat lift the film from its period setting, thus helping make the love story a bit more eternal, if that makes any sense.

The best part of this score, though, comes when Horner sends the orchestra home and uses a simple solo piano for the scene when Jack draws the portrait of Rose. It’s the film’s most intimate scene, and the solo piano is an inspired choice. You can hear that track here. (I’m having trouble embedding it because this post was originally written for the old BlogSpot iteration of this site, and the copying-and-pasting of entire blocks of text-and-video doesn’t always play well with WordPress’s “blocks”.)

Listening to all these selections, I’m struck by something I’d never totally noticed before, with regard to Horner’s melodies. He leans toward long melodies that seem at first to meander, before settling into an internal logic that makes a lot of sense.

Since the late 90s, I’ve lost track of Horner a bit. Partly this is because I stopped seeing as many movies, and he wasn’t scoring as many films that I actually wanted to see. Also, it seems that he wasn’t scoring as many films in general. He was active right up to the end, but he wasn’t getting as many of the blockbuster assignments and high-profile films, as tastes in film music have shifted toward the kind of tuneless soundscapes of Hans Zimmer and the like. I think Horner’s style has somewhat fallen out of favor, but he didn’t disappear entirely. The last new score of his that I heard to any significant degree was his music for James Cameron’s Avatar. I didn’t care for it all that much at first, but it has grown on me on repeated listens.


Horner had his detractors, of course, and sometimes they had cause. Over time, it became clear that Horner had little sonic “tricks” that he liked to use repeatedly throughout his scores — a particular motif to indicate that something bad was in the offing, for instance; film music fans would sometimes call this the “Danger Motif”. Another is what I came to call the “James Horner Rolling Chord of Melodic Punctuation”. More than a few times I would see a film with a Horner score and notice these very tricks playing out, and though it wouldn’t much faze the general audience, I knew what was going on.

Horner’s gifts of melody and his skill at spotting a film were always in evidence, however, and I can’t name a single film that he didn’t enhance with his music. After John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner’s music was the most familiar to me growing up. His musical storytelling, in its finest moments, stands with any film composer who has ever put pen to paper.

And his voice will be missed. I may not have heard much of his music of late, but I don’t like knowing that there will be no more to discover. I didn’t like everything he did, but I liked most of it and loved a lot of it. Seeing his name attached to a film was always exciting.

So thank you, James Horner. Your music is part of the soundtrack of my life.


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Bob and Bruce (a repost)

(This is a repost from a couple of years ago. I’m bringing it back in honor of the 50th anniversary of the release of JAWS, which opened June 20, 1975. I didn’t get to watch JAWS until I was a teenager, which is both probably a wise move on my parents’ part and also really lame. I mean, come on! JAWS! But hey, it instantly became one of my favorite movies ever when I finally did get to watch it all the way through, instead of seeing little bits and pieces through sneaky glimpses at this or that telecast. Anyway, here’s a bit of silliness….)

I’ve seen a few of these photos surfacing online the last few months, and they make me really happy because there’s a kind of absurdity going on. These are behind-the-scenes snapshots from JAWS, featuring actor Robert Shaw and “Bruce” the Shark, in between takes. Bruce, if you didn’t know, was the name lovingly bestowed upon the mechanical shark they made for the movie, which ended up not working half the time, forcing director Steven Spielberg to rely on implied-shots, shadows, oblique techniques and other ways of creating the sense that the shark was there without actually showing that the shark was there. It’s generally accepted that the difficulties with the model are a big reason why the movie ended up as good as it is.

I love these shots because they have a kind of absurdity to them, as if Bruce was really a living part of the cast, waiting for his next take like everyone else. They just scream out to be captioned, so:

“Come on, Bob, sing it with me! ‘Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies….” “Shut UP, Bruce.”
“I mean, it was a great fight scene and all, but you gotta admit, Bob, the way your character in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE lets James Bond get one up on him is kinda lame.” “I didn’t write it, Bruce.”

 

“Haha, in your big speech you’re supposed to say ‘We delivered the bomb’ but you make it sound like ‘We delivered the bum’! Hahaha…ouch, please get your hand off my eye! It’s not REALLY like a doll’s eye!” “Too bad, Bruce.”

As John Oliver always says, “Moving on….”

 

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Indy and the BPO

At some point in the last ten-fifteen years, orchestras happened upon a new formula for a cash-cow event: performing the entire score to a movie as the movie itself played on a screen above them. These events have proven very popular, and thus have given orchestras a much needed series of events that draw big crowds.

And yet, as much as I adore film music, I had never attended one of these events…until last week, when The Wife and I went to see Raiders of the Lost Ark at the Buffalo Philharmonic. I bought the tickets several months ago, for The Wife’s birthday in February. We’ve been trying to give events as gifts more over the last few years, and when I started “event shopping”, this was the nearest one that made me go “Oooooh, yeah, that!” So on her birthday on February 25 I got to say, “Happy birthday! I bought tickets to this thing in twelve weeks!”

Luckily, she didn’t mind.

I don’t have much to say about Raiders as a movie, since it’s one of my favorite movies of all time and I know it as well as I like any movie ever made. It did occur to me that this was the first time I’ve seen Raiders on a big screen since it came out in 1981. The movie’s story pulled me in, to the point that at times I actually forgot that the BPO was right there on the stage.

And how did the BPO do? Brilliantly, as a matter of fact. This isn’t surprising, really. The BPO is a terrific orchestra, and they were more than up to the task at hand. Their sound is really suited to the big, lush romantic sounds of John Williams’s score, especially in the showpiece cues like the Map Room sequence and the “basket chase” in Cairo. They really excelled in the extremely technical action music during the airplane fight and the “Desert Chase”, which is one of the most difficult and complex movie action cues ever written. Here the BPO held up amazingly.

The event was an absolute delight, and I’ll be looking for more such concert-filmscore performances to come!

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