Tag: Movies

I knew nothing about Far From Heaven when I checked it out from the library other than it boasted a highly-regarded score by Elmer Bernstein which was nominated for the Academy Award the year it came out. (That score was favored to win by most film music aficionados, but it didn’t. It was also the last nomination, and last score, of Bernstein’s career; he died less than a year later.) I knew that the movie was highly regarded, but I knew nothing more than that. So I decided to see what it was all about.

The film takes the form of a 1950s melodrama, but with a much more modern sensibility attached to it. Julianne Moore plays Cathy Whitaker, a housewife in Hartford, CT, where she maintains a perfect home and an equally perfect social life for her husband and their two children. She fancies herself quite the modern woman, sensitive to liberal concerns while also living the staid and conservative life of the fifties housewife who meets her husband at the door after work with drink in hand and who is constantly thinking of what the other ladies think of her and her family life.

One night she has to go downtown and bail her husband out of jail, for some kind of embarrassing thing that’s happened; like any good 50s housewife, she doesn’t inquire too deeply into the incident, trusting her husband’s word that it’s all a misunderstanding that will come to nothing. But a little later, we follow him on a night when he’s working late. He leaves his office and ends up going to a secret bar, one of those down-an-alley and through three doors kinds of bars; if we’re wondering what kind of bar needs to be secret in 1950s America, we quickly learn soon enough: a gay bar. Frank Whitaker is gay.

Soon enough she discovers this, and they embark on a series of psychological treatments designed to “cure” him of his homosexuality (remember, this is the 1950s); and meanwhile, Mrs. Whitaker begins to form a close friendship with the family’s gardener, Raymond Deagan, who is a tall, strapping, handsome black man (played by Dennis Haysbert). So the movie gives us not one character but two who become involved in impossible (for their time) romances. Sadly, while Mr. Whitaker’s homosexuality is allowed to remain secret, Mrs. Whitaker’s friendship for the gardener becomes common knowledge. And there’s no real escape for them, either; when the gardener takes Mrs. Whitaker to a local “black restaurant”, her reception there is about as friendly as his would be at a local “white” restaurant. Later, he bitterly comments that their relationship is the only thing and whites and blacks apparently have between them in total agreement.

Yes, this is a sad movie; there’s no way to sugarcoat that, and in many ways the film ends with no real note of resolution at all. But it’s a pretty noble movie, well-written and beautifully acted; there are moments where emotion is conveyed simply by the non-speaking actors in the way they look at one another. The film’s look is also excellent; designed to look like a fifties melodrama, the film’s color schemes are bold and bright, and even the opening credits are done in that style, with the titles displayed in very large letters that take up the entire screen and which fade into one another while the music swells. The film is awash in color, with many shots that linger; the gay bar, with its muted green lighting that makes it seem just a little otherworldly, for instance, or in the way Raymond Deagan’s clothes tend to match the color scheme of the Whitaker household, suggesting that he belongs where he really doesn’t. And that Elmer Bernstein score is truly beautiful, elegiac and tender.

Far From Heaven is an outstanding film.

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So. Love Actually. This is one of my favorite movies, so I’m going to wax poetic about it for a while (with spoilers, by the way). Some people watch A Christmas Story and It’s a Wonderful Life at Christmastime; for me it’s My Fair Lady (which I haven’t watched yet this season) and Love Actually (which I have). The other day Mrs. M-Mv posted her own appreciation of the movie:

I know that many folks dislike this film — too long, too sentimental, too… something. Everyone has a suggestion for a storyline that needs to go or a character that could be deleted. Even Roger Ebert: “I once had ballpoints printed up with the message, No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough. ‘Love Actually’ is too long. But don’t let that stop you.” [Emphasis added.]

I, on the other hand, think the pace, the narrative, and the characters are practically perfect in every way. Moreover, I think the film wears well: I’ve seen it at least six times since it was first released — more, if you count all of the partial viewings — and it’s funny, sweet, and effective each time.

That’s true, isn’t it? I have yet to read a critique of this film that fails to mention the “fact” that it is just too long of a movie. Heck, even the movie’s director, Richard Curtis, seems to feel that it’s too long; in his filmed introductions to the deleted scenes on the DVD, he says something along the lines of “Well, the original cut was three-and-a-half hours long, so if you think the two-and-a-quarter-hour version is too long, it could have been worse.” But I heard that and thought, paraphrasing the movie’s Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, “Who do I have to screw around here to get to see the original cut?” I’ve never found Love Actually too long; in fact, it’s one of the rare films that leaves me wishing I could spend more time with these characters, in their world.

I want to know if Harry and Karen repair the damage to their marriage that Harry caused with his near-miss of an affair.

I want to know if Sarah ever gets another chance with Karl, or if she ever manages to find love in a way that still allows her to care for her brother.

I want to know how the PM’s relationship with a staffer turns out.

I want to know if Mark ever finds love after his impossible crush on Juliet plays out.

I want to know how Sam and Joanna fare as kid loves, and how Daniel and Carol make out as a potential couple.

I want to know if Colin ever matures beyond his need for impressive sex with American girls.

And I’d love to see a biopic of aged, battered old rocker Billy Mack, who late in the movie admits that his life, though lonely, has been a wonderful life.

Few movies seem as full of real people, to me, as Love Actually. That’s a testament, really, not just to the writing, but the entire production, because the movie by its nature has to rely on its actors and editors to make the whole thing really come to life. Since each story in the movie is basically told in miniature, each cast member is put in the position of having to knock each scene out of the park. Luckily for the movie, they accomplish this.

So no, I don’t think Love Actually is too long; not even close. And I think that beneath its exterior, which makes it look like the schmaltziest, mushiest romantic comedy ever made, the film is surprisingly insightful about how some relationships work when they’re based on love.

The film’s masterstroke is this: not everybody gets a happy ending. And, thinking about it, you realize that the movie is aware of an even deeper truth: that nobody gets an ending at all, save one, and that’s the big ending, the one that really ends everything.

When we first meet Daniel (Liam Neeson) and Sam (Thomas Sangster), they are at the funeral for Sam’s mother (and Daniel’s wife). [Daniel is actually Sam’s step-father, which raises other questions about Sam’s life: has he already lost one parent, or were his parents divorced with his mother then marrying Daniel? We never learn, and for the purposes of the story in Love Actually, it really doesn’t much matter.] Daniel is devastated, as is Sam, but it soon turns out that Sam’s got another problem of his own: he’s in love, probably for the first time in his life, with an American girl in his school who doesn’t know he exists. When Daniel finally gets this out of Sam, shortly after the funeral, it’s in a scene where the two are sitting on a bench, and Daniel finally appeals for Sam to tell him what the problem is, even if he can’t help the boy. We’re as surprised as Daniel is when Sam bluntly states, “Well, the truth is, I’m in love.” Daniel and Sam spend much of the rest of the film, when they’re onscreen, working out the details of how Sam can win Joanna’s heart. It’s a beginning that only comes out of a horrible moment of ending.

Harry (Alan Rickman) and Karen (Emma Thompson) are middle-aged married folks. Harry is the boss of what appears to be a non-profit or something like that; Karen is the housewife who basically keeps everything at home going, doing the cooking and cleaning and making the lobster costume for their daughter who has just been cast as First Lobster in the school’s Nativity play. (“There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?”) Their marriage seems staid and dull, but not unfeeling; even so, Harry finds himself responding to the advances of his new administrative assistant, a comely young woman named Mia. They never have a physical affair, but Harry indulges the attraction to the point of buying Mia a gold necklace for Christmas, which Karen finds out about. When the film reaches its last scene, Harry and Karen greet each other somewhat warmly but cautiously, and nothing really is said of what is going on with them: are they divorcing? Was Harry away on business, or were they separated? Are they working on it, or is it ending? We don’t know.

And then there’s Mark, who serves as his best friend’s best man in a wedding at the beginning of the movie. His problem is that he is himself desperately in love with Juliet, the bride who is marrying his best friend. This is hard for him to cope with, so his way of compensating is to treat Juliet very coldly, to the point where she thinks he hates her – until she visits him one day, hoping to find some good footage in the videotapes he’d made of the wedding, and realizes that all he taped that day was her. Late in the movie this plays out in a fairly charming scene that could give pause, as Mark admits to Juliet his love for her. Was this the right thing to do? It’s tempting, I suppose, to say that he should never tell the wife of his best friend that he loves her, but I don’t see it that way. Mark knows that he owes Juliet an explanation, and he knows that he has to find a way to be around her and not act like an arse, and he further knows that there’s no danger that he’s going to be coming between his friend and his friend’s wife by doing so, because he knows them. Mark knows that Juliet is not going to love her husband one bit less, so he knows that what he’s doing is not a potential act of abetting adultery. His is an act of reconciliation, and as he walks away, he says to himself: “Enough. Enough now.” He’s put himself in a position to move on, and it’s a totally right thing for him to do, even though if someone else were to try the same type of thing, it might well be disastrous for all concerned.

The most notable unhappy ending, though, belongs to Sarah (Laura Linney), who works for Harry and has been in love with their office’s graphic designer, Karl, for “two years, seven months, three days, one hour and thirty minutes” (half an hour less than the time she’s actually worked in that office). Harry finally sits her down and tells her to do something about her crush on Karl, since it’s Christmas and apparently everybody in the office knows already. Sarah’s eyes light up briefly with the sense of possibility. The problem, though, comes in the person of Sarah’s brother, who is institutionalized with some unspecified mental illness. Sarah is the only one to take care of him, and she does, out of an intense sense of duty (their parents are apparently long deceased). Her brother calls her on her cell phone constantly, usually to talk about problems that she really can’t help him with, but she takes each call anyway – including two that come the very night she is finally trying to seize her chance with Karl. It’s an awful moment that she faces: the two are in bed, beginning foreplay, when the phone rings; Karl says, “Can you help him right now?”, and when she shakes her head, he says, “Then maybe you don’t answer it.” But she can’t bring herself to do this, and she answers, telling her brother that she’s not busy at all. The moment passes, and as far as this film goes, Sarah and Karl never get together.

Sometimes in our lives, our various loves come into conflict. The love people have for one another can’t be exercised because of the love they have for their children; or, as with poor Sarah, her love and desire for Karl – her desire for a life of her own, even – is pushed back because of her love and duty to her brother. One friend of mine hated the movie, mainly for this particular plot point, but I found it entirely realistic. I’ve known people who have made these kinds of choices in their lives.

Of course, I wouldn’t be so enchanted with Love Actually if the movie wasn’t so wickedly funny. There isn’t a scene with Billy Mack (Bill Nighy), the aging rocker, that doesn’t leave me grinning at the very least. There’s the wonderful moment when the Prime Minister has to literally go door-to-door looking for someone, at one point being exhorted by a trio of little girls who have no idea who he is to sing Christmas carols (the look on Hugh Grant’s face when the PM discovers that his own bodyguard has an amazing singing voice is priceless). There is one hilarious moment after another.

Lastly, Love Actually is a beautiful film. So much of the movie seems to actually sparkle, and the music is, for a typical selection of romantic-comedy music, mostly wonderful stuff, including two gorgeous love themes by composer Craig Armstrong.

As a conclusion, here’s the opening scene to Love Actually, with a brief monologue by Hugh Grant as the PM. Love actually is all around.

I don’t know of a scene that better sets the tone for what’s to come in a movie than this one — so much so that I almost want to turn off the computer and watch the movie again right now.

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So I watched some movies, as you might expect, while I was not blogging. I’ll discuss them in no particular order over a series of posts. First up, Harold and Maude.

I knew absolutely nothing about Harold and Maude until I picked up the DVD from the library. All I knew was that it had been cited on the recent AFI list of great romantic comedies; on that basis I checked it out, since I do love a good romantic comedy. Imagine my surprise, then, when I looked at the DVD cover and discovered that the couple in the film involves a young man in his late teens (Harold) and a woman who is about to turn eighty (Maude). What’s more, Maude is played by Ruth Gordon, an actress whom I’ve always seen as, well, the crusty old lady, which is basically what she is here. I wasn’t sure I’d like the film at all, but I decided to watch it anyway.

Which is a good thing. What a movie.

Upon further reflection, I realized that my impression of Gordon is rather unfair. The only other movies I’d seen her in before this were the two Clint Eastwood comedies Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can, in which Gordon plays Eastwood’s incredibly crusty and foul-mouthed mother. That’s not what Maude is, at all. So my initial expectation of the film was confounded, and rather delightfully so.

Maude is quite a character. She first meets Harold at a funeral, which she attends because she likes attending funerals, and not because she has any connection at all to the person in the coffin. This is also why Harold is there: he has a bizarre fascination with death and suicide that give the film many of its fine moments of black humor, such as the opening shots in which Harold fakes hanging himself in his family’s living room, to have his mother merely walk in and react to this as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened at all.

Over the course of the movie, Harold and Maude form a very unlikely friendship based on mutual notions of what it means to live a life worth the effort. There’s one wonderful moment when they are sitting at the edge of a hillside that is covered with daisies. Harold comments that the daisies all look the same, and Maude objects, saying that a daisy is a beautiful thing, and that it’s tragic that so many people are really “like this” (holding up a daisy) but allow themselves to be “treated as if they’re that” (gesturing to the field of nearly-identical flowers).

Maude’s conversations with Harold are mostly about rediscovering zest for life, and over the course of the film, it’s clear that these conversations have their desired effect as Harold slowly begins to come out of the death-worshiping shell he’s built for himself, even as he stages several outrageous fake suicides for the benefit of the nice girls that his mother keeps trying to fix him up with. Maude seems so completely random in her approach to life, but as the film reaches its conclusion, we discover that she’s not random at all, and everything she’s been doing has been leading up to her final act that somehow surprised me even though it’s pretty strongly telegraphed early on.

One small thing that I greatly appreciated about Harold and Maude is in the way the key fact about Maude’s past – that she is a Holocaust survivor – is conveyed by the simple device of having Harold getting a brief glimpse of the numbers tattooed on the inside of her wrist. What’s so great about this is that this happens, Harold has an expression of recognition on his face that lasts a couple of seconds, and then that’s it: the moment is over and never mentioned again. I have the feeling that if Harold and Maude were made today, Harold’s glimpse of her concentration camp tattoo would eventually lead to a Big Major Scene wherein he gets her to open up about the horrors she saw there, and she’d have the obligatory Big Oscar Clip in which the actress playing Maude would chew the scenery in grand fashion. Not so here: Harold gets a brief glimpse of insight into his new friend’s character, and so do we, but it’s not the only insight we get and the film neither highlights it nor downplays it. How often does this kind of thing happen, after all? How often do we find ourselves learning something new about someone we’ve thought to know so well that the new thing, prosaic as it may be, comes as a complete surprise? And yet, as we get to know these two people, so many of the things they do don’t come as any surprise at all. When Harold gives Maude a trinket he’s had engraved with the words “Harold loves Maude”, she throws it into the nearby water, and then says, “So I always know where it is.” This is the kind of movie that has characters who do things that would strike anyone else as being nonsensical but, given the people they are, make perfect sense when we think about it.

One other aspect of Harold and Maude that warrants mention are the songs, written and performed by Cat Stevens. His voice, an earnest tenor that occupies the same kind of area as Jim Croce, is ideally suited to the kind of story told here – or, more specifically, to the characters whose story we are following. I wasn’t terribly familiar with Cat Stevens before I saw this movie. The most important song in the film, “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out” is, in particular, a very special song.

I loved Harold and Maude.

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No James Bong Blog-a-Thon would be complete without a post somewhere about the music of Bond, would it? Why, no! That’s why I’m here, folks. I fill a need.

Any discussion of the music of James Bond must begin, and probably end, with John Barry. Barry is an English composer who has had a very long and storied career. Apart from his work on the Bond films, Barry has also written notable scores to films like The Lion in Winter, Born Free, Out of Africa, Body Heat, and Dances With Wolves, for which he won an Oscar. Barry is still kicking and still active as a composer, although he doesn’t much write for films anymore, and he hasn’t scored a Bond film since 1987’s The Living Daylights.

Starting with Dr. No, the series had a distinctive musical voice, grounded in the string-and-percussion heavy sound of the 1960s, with a lot of “stinger” notes from the brass punctuating things. Dr. No‘s opening sequence kicks us right into the musical sound-world of James Bond: after the gunbarrel sequence (which is actually “scored” in that film with some odd electronica), the famous James Bond Theme kicks in for the first time ever.

Now, the James Bond Theme has been a subject of controversy for many years. It is always credited in the films as having been written by a man named Monty Norman, but this has been a point of contention for a long time, and it was even the topic of a court case in Great Britain some years ago. I don’t know what was decided in that case, but my general notion is that Norman gets credit for the theme, but Barry’s been arranging it as he sees fit ever since. (Or, at least, that’s what he did on his tenure as the Bond composer-in-residence.)

Dr. No‘s score is dominated by Jamaican rhythms, and to modern ears the score at times seems to be making gestures in pretty silly fashion. The James Bond Theme, for example, plays in its full arrangement early in the film not when Bond is doing serious spy work but when he’s finishing up his game of baccarat and is on his way back to his apartment. Likewise, the score is occasionally dominated by a song called “Under the Mango Tree”, which is…well, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. It’s a silly song. I’ve always found Dr. No‘s score to be much like the rest of the film: I can see where it’s pointing the way the rest of the series will go, but it’s not terribly satisfying on its own.

Barry would return for From Russia With Love, a score that’s more confident of itself. Notable here is that the film’s song is only heard in its vocal arrangement (crooned nicely, if not spectacularly, by Matt Munro) during the end credits, while Barry writes an impressive up-tempo arrangement of it for the opening credits, featuring a series of staccato brass chords as an opening figure that’s highly distinctive. (David Arnold would use those same staccato chords many years later in a few of his own Bond scores, one of many ways he’s paid homage to Barry.) The scoring for the Orient Express sequence is some wonderfully suspenseful “travel montage” music indeed, and the score’s a lot more confident, excepting one “danger” cue that is tracked from the Dr. No score.

With Goldfinger, Barry started to hit his stride. This score is like the song: big, brassy, and without a trace of subtlety to be heard within it. This is many enthusiasts’ favorite Barry Bond score (although not mine), particularly thrilling are the cues underscoring the flight of Pussy Galore’s Flying…whatever they were called. Flying Circus? Flying Uruk-Hai? I don’t remember…but it’s great stuff. And of course, the theme song, belted out by Shirley Bassey, is the model for all Bond songs, even if it’s not my favorite.

Thunderball would bring an even bigger and brassier score, well befitting a film whose main goal was to be just plain bigger than the iconic Goldfinger. Barry’s score for Thunderball is, to my ears, even better then Goldfinger, even if it’s slightly schizophrenic at times. Barry wrote a song for the film called “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and, as was his wont, incorporated that song’s tune into his score all over the place, only to have the producers ask him to write a new song that used the film’s title in its lyrics…hence we hear Tom Jones belting out about a man who “strikes…like thunderball”. (What does that mean? Nobody knows!) Interestingly, if you listen to the song’s original recording, you can almost hear Tom Jones losing consciousness after that last note which he had to hold for something like a day and a half. Thunderball also features the second instance of Barry’s secondary Bond Theme, which he titled “007” (previously used in From Russia With Love in a proto-form).

Next up was You Only Live Twice, in which Barry wrote in faux-Japanese style. This was in no way authentic Japanese music, but what a British composer would write if asked to write something sounding Japanese. It’s an extremely lyrical score, much more melodic and fluid than Thunderball. The song is sung by Nancy Sinatra, and even though it boasts a beautiful melody, it’s not the most memorable of Bond songs.

This brings us to what is, for me, the best Bond score of them all, befitting the best Bond film of them all, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. This score is brilliant from start to finish: it boasts amazing melodies, some of Barry’s best action writing, a pounding main theme (for the instrumental opening credits music), and a gorgeous cue for the helicopter flight through the Alps. Barry gives the film’s song, “We Have All the Time In the World”, a number of different arrangements, one of which is proud and almost arrogant, another of which is terribly sad and lonely, and yet another which is just ravishing. I love this score deeply; it’s one of my favorite film scores ever. “We Have All the Time In the World” is only heard in its vocal arrangement during neither opening nor closing credits, but rather about a third of the way through the film, as scoring for a love montage between Bond and Tracy.

Barry would close out the Connery era with Diamonds are Forever, in which he goes back to some of the Goldfinger sound, all the way to using the same singer for the song, Shirley Bassey. It’s not that great a score, frankly, but it has a lot of nice moments and a nice sound of “glitter” to it, befitting the diamonds of the plot. That’s actually a strength of Barry’s throughout: he’s able to always suggest various things about each individual film, be it the “gold” of Goldfinger, the undersea adventure of Thunderball, the love story of OHMSS, the diamond glitter of Diamonds are Forever.

Roger Moore’s arrival as Bond would also see Barry’s first temporary departure from the series. Live and Let Die was scored not by Barry but by George Martin, a producer for the Beatles. As much as I dislike LaLD (it’s my least favorite Bond film by a long margin), I have to give Martin his due: this is a nicely written score, not totally divorced from the John Barry sound but also bringing some new approaches to the table. Roger Moore plays Bond with more overt swagger, and the score reflects that view of the Bond character pretty well. The title song is performed by Paul McCartney and Wings, and it’s an odd song, although it’s had a longer life on oldies stations and the like. The song is hindered by a very odd middle section that is in a completely different style than the beginning and end.

John Barry would return for The Man with the Golden Gun, which is, like the rest of the movie, mainly OK. It’s not one of the better scores by any stretch, but it’s got some strengths, mostly in the film’s last act. Barry gets to revisit his pseudo-Asian writing, and some of it’s pretty nice. The film’s song is sung by Lulu. I actually have a bit of a soft spot for the song, even if it’s really silly and way too frenetic.

Next up was The Spy Who Loved Me, which boasts a terrific title song (Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better”, which if not for “Goldfinger” would probably be the series’s best known song) and a frankly awful score by Marvin Hamlisch. I hate this score, and it’s my second-least favorite in the series. Its sound is dominated by outlandish 70s funk stuff, sounding downright disco at times. The score does nothing to help the film establish a sense of suspense, and the underwater music just stands out as awful when considered alongside Barry’s underwater music for Thunderball.

Luckily, Barry would return for Moonraker, in which he gives us a score that’s one of the slowest I’ve ever heard. Seriously, in terms of tempo, this score is one slow cue after another. It’s not a bad score, at all, and it’s got some really nice moments, but wow, is it slow. It’s like listening to a symphony where every movement is marked “Andante”. (Not “adagio”; that would be too slow.) Barry also reuses his “007” secondary theme for Bond, not heard since Diamonds are Forever (it’s heard during the Brazil boat chase). This film would also kick off a new habit of Barry’s, that he would use in each of his remaining Bond scores, using the James Bond Theme in the film as an action cue for the respective film’s silliest chase scene (although that point is debatable in A View to a Kill).

Barry would leave again for For Your Eyes Only, so scoring duties would be taken over by Bill Conti. He takes the “Disco Bond” approach again, but this time it works a lot better; first of all, he wisely limits the “Disco” sound to the action cues, using a more traditional sound for the “normal” scenes; second, the action cues work very, very well. This score has some addictively listenable stuff inside it. The main weak point comes at the very end, though; after some wonderfully atmospheric writing for Bond’s ascent of St. Cyril’s, the score mainly becomes plodding suspense stuff after that. But to that point it’s all very good, with some orchestral and techno effects used to create the kind of unique atmosphere that Barry did in his glory years in the 60s. Sheena Easton’s song is a nice 80s ballad, and interestingly, this is the only time that the singer of the song actually appeared in the opening credits sequence.

Barry came back again for 1983’s Octopussy, which would be the first of his final three Bond scores. It’s a good score, although not really one of his best. Barry’s onetime skill at giving each of his Bond scores a distinctive sound of its own, evocative of the film’s character or location, isn’t terribly on display here, aside from a bit of Indian percussion here and there. Still, the action cues are well-crafted, and there’s some very nice tension-filled scoring for the knife-wielding twins as they chase down 009. Rita Coolidge’s song isn’t bad, if you’re into the kind of song you hear on radio stations that tout themselves as presenting “the best soft rock of the 70s and 80s”. The song makes for some nice love music during the score, but as a Bond song, it’s not terribly exciting.

A View to a Kill would be Roger Moore’s final appearance as Bond, and Barry gave him one of his better scores. The action music is raucous and fun, with nice use of electric guitar, and the love music makes impressive use of a title song (by Duran Duran) that wouldn’t at first hearing seem to lend itself to that sort of thing.

Barry would wrap up his James Bond tenure for good with The Living Daylights, the first of Timothy Dalton’s two Bond films, and in my view, he would end his tenure with one of his best scores of the series. It’s a richly melodic score, using not just the title song (by a ha, whom Barry apparently found difficult to work with) as a basis for action cues, but also two songs by The Pretenders: “Where Has Everybody Gone?” and “If There Was a Man”, the latter of which forms the basis of the film’s love music. Highly notable is the wonderfully atmospheric music that accompanies Bond and Kara’s trek across Afghanistan. TLD is a highlight of the series.

For Licence to Kill, the producers turned to Michael Kamen, who was making a name for himself in the late 80s scoring action films like the Lethal Weapon series. (His biggest successes, such as his score to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, were still in the future.) Kamen’s score to Licence is something of a mixed bag. On balance I like its different approach and sound, befitting a film that dared to venture afield from the typical Bond formulae. It’s less melodic, but it’s got its own sound, which I appreciate. The film’s two songs, the title number sung by Gladys Knight and “If You Asked Me To”, are decent if not terribly notable songs.

After a six year absence, Bond would return to the screen with Pierce Brosnan in the role for Goldeneye, a terrific film that only really suffers in a major way in one area of production: its score. The producers went with Eric Serra, who turned in what is, to my ears, the single worst score ever written for a Bond film. It’s full of techno sounds that are awfully distracting, it boasts no notable melodies at all, and it only really works as a score at the very end of the film, during the final fight between Bond and Trevelyan. I don’t like this score at all. Bleecchh. (I’m not a big fan of Tina Turner’s song, either.)

For Tomorrow Never Dies, the Bond producers brought in one of the brighter film music voices to emerge during the 1990s, David Arnold. Arnold’s work seems to pretty sharply divide film music fans; in my experience he’s one of those “love him or hate him” types of composers. I like his work, especially his Bond work. His sound is often evocative of Barry, without aping him too closely. Arnold does tend to use a techno approach quite heavily, especially in his action cues. This can bother some listeners, but I generally find it enjoyable for the most part. TND has two songs: a title number by Sheryl Crow that’s just OK, and a really good song by kd lang that is used on the end credits and actually forms the melodic basis of much of Arnold’s score, which seems to suggest that this song was originally to be the main one before Crow was brought on board.

The World is Not Enough features a song by Garbage that I actually like a lot. TWINE is such an odd film; it’s got some really great stuff going for it but it also has this awful tendency to shoot itself in the foot. Arnold’s score satisfies the film’s needs nicely, though. (There’s actually a second song on the album that wasn’t used in the film; I wonder if it tested poorly in some way.)

Die Another Day has Arnold doing much the same thing as in the previous two films. If there’s a criticism to be made of Arnold’s Bond scores, it’s precisely that: there often isn’t a whole lot that sets them apart, soundwise. The title song by Madonna has been largely derided because it’s a very techno-oriented song. I don’t hate it, but it’s very far from being one of my favorites. In truth, I’ve listened to DAD very few times since I bought the CD when the film came out.

Finally, David Arnold was retained for Casino Royale, despite that film’s status as a reboot for the franchise. He took a terrific approach here, often hinting at the James Bond Theme without actually quoting it directly until the very end of the film. Chris Cornell provides a really good song, “You Know My Name”, which he then for some unimaginably stupid reason refused to allow to be presented on the film’s soundtrack album. Why? Who knows? There can’t be a smart reason for that. Arnold’s score is much more emotional in nature, befitting one of the most emotional Bond films.

And that brings us to Quantum of Solace. Stay tuned….

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Ooooh! I’m always finding out about cool Blog-a-thons after they’ve happened, so I’m never able to participate, but this time I can. This will be the first post of two in honor of Lazy Eye Theatre’s James Bond Blog-a-thon!

This first one will be a quickie, but here’s a neat video: every opening “gunbarrel” sequence from every Bond film. How fun to watch this iconic visual make its evolution through the series!

:: The early ones are all really slow, aren’t they? I mean, Bond just walks along as slowly as possible. (Of course, it’s not even Sean Connery until Thunderball; that’s a stuntman or something like that.)

:: Watching all of these, I always wonder about the bad guy with the gun: why doesn’t he just shoot, if he’s always got Bond dead-to-rights for something like six or seven seconds before Bond whips around and shoots him?! Especially in those first couple of gunbarrel sequences, when Bond’s movement into the shooting position is so drawn out that he’s practically shouting “I’m gonna shoot you now, Mr. Assassin Who Thinks He’s Got the Drop On Me!”

:: Connery always drops down a bit, but stays on his feet; George Lazenby actually drops to his right knee for the kill shot. Roger Moore’s shooting stance is to put his feet close together and use his left hand to steady his right arm (his shooting arm). Timothy Dalton returns to a Connery-like stance, whipping his left arm behind him and dropping down a bit. Pierce Brosnan shoots one-handed as well, but doesn’t drop down his stance at all. His is probably the quickest delivery of the shot.

:: Moore’s the first one to not wear a hat.

:: From The Spy Who Loved Me on, Moore is always wearing a tux when he shoots Mr. Gunbarrel.

:: With Thunderball, the sequence started ending with the “shifting white dot” dissolving into a part of the opening scene, and then irising outward to let us into the entire shot. This would remain the practice until For Your Eyes Only, when after the white dot shows us a piece of the opening scene, we just cut all the way right to it without the irising-outward effect.

:: Never Say Never Again was not an “official” Bond film, so no gunbarrel sequence. They did try to do something that suggests the graphical style of Bond films, though. I rather liked it, actually.

:: For most of the films until the Brosnan era, the shifting-white-dot moves down to the lower right corner, dissolves to a bit of the opening scene, and then either irises out from there or moves back to the center of the screen before irising out. The Brosnan films would move the shifting-dot all over the place, each time. For The World Is Not Enough, it actually dissolves to Bond’s face, the first time that Bond is the first thing we see as we emerge from the gunbarrel sequence.

:: Brosnan’s gunbarrel isn’t static-looking either; the gunbarrel itself reflects the shifting light as it tracks Bond’s movement.

:: Die Another Day added a digital bullet ripping right at the viewer. I’ve never been able to decide if I liked this or if it bothered me.

:: Casino Royale‘s teaser sequence actually ends with the introduction of the gunbarrel sequence, which was one of the niftier things about that movie. I always thought it would have been cool if they could have worked in a reverse-gunbarrel sequence of some sort into the film’s ending, just after Bond finally gets to utter the words “The name’s Bond. James Bond.” Our old friend, the shifting dot, would appear in reverse, irising down to just Bond’s face before fading to white and then allowing the credits to roll.

But what fun to see them all, back to back; the Bond gunbarrel is one of the most iconic things in movies. I rank it right up there with the MGM lion and the 20th Century Fox fanfare, to be honest.

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