Today John Williams turns 93. His music stands as one of the undisputed bright spots and creative forces behind my own life; to recall a time in my life when I was not keenly aware of his music I have to dig back to memories that are mostly hazy and almost sepia-tinged. I don’t remember when exactly my sister took me to see Star Wars–it wasn’t in May of that year, it was later, probably sometime in the summer, when it came out we were still living out our one year in Wisconsin and then we moved to Oregon, which is where we saw it–but I’m pretty sure it was well before my late-September birthday, so I was still 5 years old when I first got my serious exposure to John Williams. And he’s been there ever since. It sometimes feels like I’ve kind of let him down as a fan, since I haven’t heard a lot of his post-2000 work beyond snippets here and there, but then I stop and re-cast that as seeing it as a gift to myself: I have many hours of new John Williams music to hear.
Below is the text of the post I wrote on this date a year ago, when Williams’s birthday coincided with Thursday so I was able to use it as the genesis of my weekly Something For Thursday music post. I’m reposting it now, because Williams is great on ANY day of the week!
Here is a wonderful tribute by the author of a forthcoming biography of Maestro Williams, and here below is my post from a year ago.
John Williams turns 93 today…and he’s still working.
In his honor, let’s listen to some of his work!
Williams won a Grammy just the other night for this: “Helena’s Theme” from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. It’s a typically gorgeous theme that manages to evoke Marion’s Theme from all the way back in Raiders of the Lost Ark without echoing it or quoting it.
Here’s something that vexed film music fans for years: the unavailability of the End Credits music that actually was heard in the film of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The suite that appeared on the album was nice enough, but the film version is longer, quoting several of the movie’s themes as the last scene in the Indian village plays out. And when we finally go to credits and the Raiders March fires up, it actually fades out in the repeat (at the 3:32 mark) so that we can here a brief quote of Short Round’s Theme. Williams’s ability to put seemingly disparate themes together into an actually cohesive whole is always amazing.
Going back even farther, here’s one of Williams’s earliest contributions to film music: his score to the law-school drama The Paper Chase. Yes, it sounds a bit dated, but you can absolutely hear the fingerprints of the Williams-to-come in this cue, the End Credits suite from that movie:
It’s the lot of most film composers to have to turn in really good work for movies that…aren’t. Hook is, for me, one of the few misfires in Steven Spielberg’s output; it fell in that weird late 80s-early 90s era when Spielberg hadn’t really transitioned into the finer drama work that was to come, but you could tell that his heart wasn’t entirely in the magic-and-fantasy flicks he was still doing. But along comes Williams with this amazing score, and this almost perfect tone-poem-in-miniature:
When Williams’s score to 2002’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones arrived, a lot of people were a bit befuddled by that score’s mix of darkness and lyrical love music. One person quipped on some message board or someplace, “It sounds like Nixon on a date.” That was pretty funny, but it seemed to highlight the fact that Williams’s score to Oliver Stone’s Nixon has never been particularly beloved. And that interests me, because I have always found it one of his most fascinating scores. He brings just the right blend of paranoid darkness and throwback Americana to Stone’s film (which I consider a masterpiece). Nixon has some of Williams’s most powerful and most overlooked music.
I do have to make an admission: I’m not always a big fan of Williams when he is scoring comedies or really light movies. For whatever reason, I always feel better when there’s a tinge of darkness in Williams’s music. (I can live quite happily without hearing Home Alone again, to be honest.) But in this wonderful march for Spielberg’s early big-budget misfire 1941, you can tell that John Williams has his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. This is absolutely delightful.
I’ve never seen Seven Years in Tibet. I couldn’t even tell you right now what it’s about without Googling it, other than…a guy is in Tibet for seven years. But I love this theme:
Finally–and I’m only ending this here because let’s be honest, I could go on a lot longer about John Williams and how much he’s meant to me and to my creative life throughout my years, but I actually have to eat dinner tonight–here’s a suite of another of what seems to me an underrated score, which is all the more surprising to me because every time I listen to it, I’m dazzled anew by how new this sounds, even for a throwback score. It’s Catch Me If You Can.
I’ve just watched a wonderful documentary about the world of rare and antiquarian booksellers, and you can watch it, too! It’s quite a wonderful film that sheds light on the mindset of people who collect rare books, people who sell them, and why they do all this. There is also some skepticism about the reading future, in this time of electronic devices and bad attention spans, but…well, if books are going away, I hope they wait until I’m gone to do it.
The title of this post comes from this poem, which is recited at the end of the film.
…because surely we can add more, if we want. Seems to me it’s kind of the point.
Here’s a tribute film Disney made for its definitive songwriting duo, the Sherman Brothers. I don’t think I was aware that Richard M. Sherman died earlier this year; I knew that brother Robert had previously died in 2012.
I’m not going to wait until my “Movies from the second half of 2024” post for this one:
This is the kind of movie you’d think was entirely contrived from a deeply silly notion until you learn that it’s essentially a true story. (Yes, yes, some of it is fudged from what happened in reality, so what, it’s a movie, people. Schindler’s List wasn’t 100 percent accurate, either.) The bones of it are as follows: a serial killer who ingratiates himself to women by pretending to be a photographer before getting them alone and killing them goes on The Dating Game as one of the bachelors, and our heroine, played by Anna Kendrick–who also directed the film in her debut–is the contestant on the show picking between the three bachelors.
Guess who she ends up picking.
This is not a light-hearted comedy, so be aware if or when you watch it; it’s more disturbing than that. It is a deeply affecting movie on a very basic level, and I think part of that is because of how Kendrick has somehow managed to walk a tightrope here. The movie feels like it’s supposed to be a light-hearted comedy, even if of the “black comedy” variety, and yet, the more you watch the more you realize it isn’t. The “almost comic” feel lulls us into a feeling of calm acceptance…much as a skilled serial murderer does.
Woman of the Hour also depicts several of our killer’s actual efforts, and in each case Kendrick shows us a moment when the woman starts to feel a bit of discomfort, but by then it’s too late. There are moments, too, when glances are shared between characters, and it’s the women who are able to pick up on a bad situation developing while the men just nod and move on because hey, “nuttin’ to see here”. I’ll put it this way: If you, as a man, were offended at all by the recent “choose the bear” discourse that unfolded on social media, then maybe watching Woman of the Hour would be a good idea, because what happens to the women in this movie is far more a reality than we like to admit.
I suppose that Woman of the Hour is actually a horror movie, but it’s one where the monster is utterly and almost boringly human. Recommended…but beware, this one might linger.
Actress and singer Mitzi Gaynor has died. She was 93, and she was one of the very last remaining stars with ties to the great era of the Hollywood movie musical. Her biggest role was likely South Pacific, the Rodgers-and-Hammerstein classic (which I may have never actually seen all the way through, it’s not lodged in my memory all that well at all), which is set in–of course!–the islands of the South Pacific during World War II.
This particular song is the one from that show which I know best, though I am abashed to admit that it’s not because of the song but because a teevee commercial for a hair care product used the theme as the basis for its jingle: “I’m gonna wash that gray right out of my hair!” It was some years before I learned the truth.
Here is Mitzi Gaynor singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair” from South Pacific.
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:
Continuing music selections from the films of James Cameron, who just turned 70 last month, we have a brief suite from True Lies. This movie answers the thought experiment of “What if James Cameron directed a James Bond movie?” Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an American spy who maintains a boring family life by day (his wife and kid don’t even know he’s a spy) but does dangerous spy-shit by night (well, kind-of, he has a boring job where the “travels a lot”). But as he enters his most dangerous mission ever, his wife and kid suddenly become a part of the story. It’s a fun movie in its first and third acts, but act two is really hard to watch because there’s a weird subplot that has Arnold becoming convinced that his wife is having an affair or something so he sets up a bizarre sting operation to make her think she’s a spy and…it’s all very weird and honestly, not very comfortable to watch, to the point that when the movie’s main villain shows back up after having disappeared for 40 minutes, it’s almost a relief.
The score is by Brad Fiedel, who did the music for the Terminator movies. He’s not my favorite composer ever, but for a certain type of 90s action movie–say, the type directed by James Cameron–he’s fine. Here’s a short suite from True Lies.
Continuing a few weeks of featuring music from the films of James Cameron, who just turned 70 last month, we have a selection from a score I don’t like all that much for a movie I don’t all that much care for. It’s Aliens, his mega-hit from 1986 that was a thrill-packed sequel to the Ridley Scott original horror film. I know that my reaction to these movies is deeply contrary to the geek culture in which I grew up, but hey, we all diverge from the norm sometime. For me, the original Alien is effective once, and after that it’s basically like riding Space Mountain with the lights on, when you know the gross-out stuff is coming and you can anticipate the jump-scares. It also didn’t help that I never found myself caring about the characters.
Cameron did get me caring about the people in Aliens, so that’s props to him. This film, though, is for me something else; when you give me all flow and no ebb, I eventually check out. My feelings for this movie turn out to mirror Roger Ebert’s almost perfectly, so I’ll just quote his original review of the film:
It’s here that my nerves started to fail. “Aliens” is absolutely, painfully and unremittingly intense for at least its last hour. Weaver goes into battle to save her colleagues, herself and the little girl, and the aliens drop from the ceiling, pop up out of the floor and crawl out of the ventilation shafts. (In one of the movie’s less plausible moments, one alien even seems to know how to work the elevator buttons.) I have never seen a movie that maintains such a pitch of intensity for so long; it’s like being on some kind of hair-raising carnival ride that never stops.
I don’t know how else to describe this: The movie made me feel bad. It filled me with feelings of unease and disquiet and anxiety. I walked outside and I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was drained. I’m not sure “Aliens” is what we mean by entertainment. Yet I have to be accurate about this movie: It is a superb example of filmmaking craft.
As for James Horner’s score, it’s not marked by memorable themes much at all; there’s some moody stuff that mostly mirrors the Khachaturian ballet music used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then there’s a lot of very intense action music that’s mostly rhythm and not a whole lot of build. The best cue is probably the one titled “Bishop’s Countdown”, so here it is. Sorry for my lack of enthusiasm, but I don’t think any artist has ever hit ’em all out of the park for me; after all, George Lucas did make More American Graffiti.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This post was cued up and ready to go and then the person responsible for clicking “publish” did not execute. Unfortunately that person cannot be sacked, as that person is also the person writing this and the content and everything else here. Requests for full refund will be ignored.
I’ve noticed an uptick in mentions of the movie Contact lately on social media. I’m not entirely sure why it’s come up, as this isn’t a notable anniversary year for the movie, but I suppose it is a pretty popular movie among science fiction fans, so I don’t grudge it being brought up. It’s never been a movie that I love, for reasons outlined below. I was going to write about the movie anew but then I realized I’ve already said what I need to say about the movie, so I’m just reposting. But first, music: the movie’s end credits suite, composed by Alan Silvestri, who may not be the most profound composer out there but who always turns in well-crafted and highly-listenable work.
And now, a post I wrote a few years back, which in turn includes a post I wrote ten years before that. I’m nesting posts! It’s posts within posts within posts!
—
The movie Contact, based on Carl Sagan’s one and only one novel, came out this month in 1997. Almost ten years ago I posted the following piece about the movie, a film that I’ve always liked and admired but not quite crossed over into loving. I’m not sure I totally agree anymore with what I write below, but thinking does shift and evolve, and I appreciate Contact more now than I used to; it remains one of the few major pop culture artifacts that endorses the Saganesque view that science should be our guiding philosophy as humans, and not spirituality. But I still think the movie hedges its bets too much, it drives its points home with too little subtlety (a fault often found in Robert Zemeckis films), and I think it undermines the feminist subplots by surrounding its main character with men without whose help and influence she would not succeed.
And yet…Contact is still a movie that says the right things about science and about the universe. It’s a movie that confirms that the proper response to this universe is curiosity and wonder, and my favorite moment is when Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) is discussing the voyage into the Cosmos that is at the heart of the movie’s narrative and she describes the required quality as “a sense of adventure”.
(Oh, Contact‘s score, by Alan Silvestri, is really good–for all the film’s lack of subtlety, Silvestri brings the goods here. Here’s one cue, called “The Primer”, scoring a scene in which the secret of an alien transmission is revealed. This is really good stuff, excellent suspense music, and it shows why Silvestri ended up being the composer for the recent sequels to the original Cosmos series.)
Here is my old post:
As much as I love Carl Sagan, I have to admit that I never warmed to his one and only novel, a science-fiction first contact story he called Contact. I tried reading it a couple of times, and each time I only got about a hundred pages in before I stopped. I just don’t think that Sagan was really cut out for novel writing, no matter how great his gifts may have been for science writing. But in 1997, a movie adaptation of the book arrived in theaters, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConnaughey and directed by Robert Zemeckis. The movie was six months too late for Sagan to have seen it, alas.
I’ve had a somewhat uneasy relationship with Contact ever since it came out. On balance I like it a lot…but I don’t love it, and in truth, I never really have. I’ve never been entirely successful in putting my finger on what it is about Contact that vexes me, but after recently watching the film again on NetFlix, I think I have it: the movie is too unfocused. When the film is concentrated on telling its story and attending to that central story, it is a fine, fine piece of work. But too often I get the impression that Robert Zemeckis got distracted, often by something shiny, and there are way too many times in the movie that the story gets lost so we can follow something shiny.
Contact tells the story of Ellie Arroway, an astronomer whom we meet as a young child, operating her HAM radio under the guidance of her father. They have a wall map of the United States, on which she marks her radio contacts with push pins; after talking to someone in Pensacola, Dad comments that it’s her farthest contact yet. Ellie asks if a radio could talk to the Moon, or to Mars…or to her mother, who is apparently dead. Dad responds, “I don’t think they’ll ever make a radio that can reach that far.”
Grown-up Ellie (Jodie Foster) turns out to be an astronomer, as noted, who is using her research time at the Arecibo Radio Telescope to look for, as she says, “little green men”: she is dedicating her career and scientific energies to SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). This leads to her meeting a former priest (Palmer Joss, played by Matthew McConnaughey), who despite being religious and spiritual where she is not, attracts her on a number of levels, and it also leads to run-ins with an older male scientist named David Drumlin (Tom Skeritt) who is snide and condescending to Ellie as he regards her chosen field of specialty as an utter waste of time. After a number of obstacles to her career – mostly owing to funding difficulties, as convincing people to part with money for something like SETI tends to be difficult – Ellie finally has a breakthrough when, while working at the Very Large Array in New Mexico, her radio telescopes detect an unmistakable alien signal. The rest of the film follows the implications of such a discovery.
Or, rather, the rest of the film should do that, and when it does, it’s incredibly effective and thought-provoking and loaded with the grand “sensawunda” of all the best science fiction. The problem with the movie is that it too often wanders into less interesting stuff, or its steps away from subtlety to drive its points home with a jackhammer, or it does things that forcibly eject me from the world of the film.
Taking the less interesting stuff first: Ellie Arroway is too often portrayed in the film as the feminine voice of reason in a crowd of over-bearing, pompous, or downright dim men. Science and engineering are male-dominated fields, and it’s a well-established fact that women in those fields tend to have a tougher going just to overcome gender biases. The problem with Contact‘s approach isn’t so much that it points this out, but that it’s about other things, and thus it can’t really delve too intelligently into those topics which really do deserve higher scrutiny. Thus we have Ellie being treated like an outsider on her own project, or Drumlin stepping up to claim ownership over a project he’s derided consistently up until the moment it proved fruitful. Ellie is constantly on the defensive in the movie, and I think it hurts the narrative because the film can’t just gear up and take us where it wants to go. Instead we have to keep talking about God.
EDITOR’S NOTE, 8/6/24: Re-reading the above now, 13 or so years after I wrote it, I think I’d back off from this a bit. My objection is not to the film pointing out how women are marginalized in science and tech, but rather that the movie doesn’t really do anything other then use that marginalization to craft a few plot points along the way. It’s kind of a reverse of the frankly dishonest complaint that some people make about diversity in movies: “I don’t mind seeing X in a movie, but it has to serve the story!” Here, ALL it does is serve the story. Moving on:
And God is where subtlety just isn’t something that interests Robert Zemeckis. Contact is full of discussions of religion versus science, but the feeling is never that anything is really being debated; what happens is that opposite sides’ viewpoints are stated, and restated, and stated again. Ellie goes to a reception in Washington, where her first order of business upon approaching Palmer Joss is to immediately launch into a discussion on religion, without any preamble or preliminary; more than that, though, the script treats all such conversations – and many that aren’t on the topic of religion at all – as though Ellie has a sizable axe to grind, while everyone else (just about all of whom are male) is calm and collected in their disagreement. Coupling that with the several instances in the film where Ellie is betrayed by men – Drumlin’s taking of the credit, Joss’s posing of a question at the hearings when he knows that the answer is going to doom Ellie’s chances of being the one selected to go in ‘the machine’ – and the film seems to depict Ellie as someone who doesn’t so much achieve a lot but whom is given things, table-scrap like, by the men in her life. It’s an odd kind of feeling.
It also bothers me that the film ends right when it gets most interesting, and it feels to me like it takes the easy way out. To me, the most interesting thing is, What would human society be like once we know that we are not alone in this Universe? We may know next to nothing about who is out there, but surely knowing once and for all, without speculation, that there is someone or something living out there would be a staggering revelation for the human species. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t do much with this notion – in fact, it backs away from it. We get lots of intrigue involving the contents of the message that is received from space, and then the construction of the transport “machine”, and so on. And this is all very compelling and entertaining…but at the end, the film gives us the old “Did it really happen?” gambit, reducing a momentous scientific discovery to something that will appeal to some people and not to others. Not unlike, say, the belief in God.
(Again, I don’t know to what degree the film’s story tracks that of the novel.)
I always find that the film deflates in its last fifteen minutes or so, after Ellie returns from her journey only to learn that, so far as anyone here knows, she never went anywhere. This leads to a Congressional hearing (which really drives home the film’s theme of “one woman versus a whole bunch of mean men”), at the end of which one Representative says, “Are we supposed to take your story…on faith?” And yes, he really pauses and puts big emphasis on those last two words, just in case we missed the irony of a scientist committed to objective observation being forced to admit the necessity of faith. Again, subtle, this is not. The movie does try to have it both ways by showing two government folks discussion the fact that the machine’s video recorder recorded eighteen hours of static (had nothing happened at all, there would have been about two seconds’ worth). But this is to be kept secret, apparently. They might as well seal all this information in a crate and store it in the warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.
EDITOR’S NOTE, 8/6/24: It continues to bother me that the big lessons are really only learned by Dr. Arroway in CONTACT. She’s the one who is basically forced to admit to a degree of faith underpinning her rational approach to the universe. I wish the movie had found a way to show Palmer Joss also learning a similar lesson in reverse, showing a way in which his own faith-based viewpoint is shaken or informed by the scientific discoveries depicted in the movie.
And the movie ends, on this state of affairs. What happens now, though? Does some kind of new religion start to accrete around Ellie and her scientific beliefs? Does Ellie somehow become an evangelist for a new blossoming of a scientific worldview? Does her experience have any effect on the human tension between science and religion? We never get any suggestions or speculations. All we get is the rolling of the credits. Contact tells a good story, but it stops just as its important story is just beginning.
Finally, I just have to note that all the cameos in the movie annoy the crap out of me. This was when Robert Zemeckis had just discovered that he could put people into lots of interesting situations, digitally; remember, he’d had Forrest Gump consorting with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. So here we get loads of real-life CNN personalities, and even President Bill Clinton, with the film taking quotes from actual Clinton newscasts and editing them so that it sounds like he’s discussing the events of the movie. It’s incredibly distracting. Instead of being drawn further into the story, I find myself trying to think of what event Clinton was actually discussing in the speeches that were repurposed for this movie. Things like having Rob Lowe play a Christian conservative leader named “Richard Rank” are incredibly distracting, because of course it makes me think of Ralph Reed. Shoehorning in mention of the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult, which had happened just months before the movie came out, is another example. Zemeckis seems to want his movie to seem ‘real’ and relevant, but all this stuff has the exact opposite effect on me: it forces me to keep the story at arm’s length.
Ultimately, I want to love Contact, because of my love and admiration for Carl Sagan, for the subject matter of the story, and for the view of the Universe as a place of wonder and of science as humanity’s greatest achievement. And there really is a lot to love about Contact. But the movie spends so much time getting in its own way that I inevitably end up just admiring it a lot.
