The farmer and the cowman should be friends...and other movie musings
Some might see a pointed liberal convergence in the results of this year's Golden Globe awards - a movie about gay cowboys, a movie about a gay writer, and a made-for-tv drama about a transsexual - but I tend to think it's just coincidence. (And as these pages have asked before, where's Ed Wood when you need him?)
I have no plans to see Brokeback Mountain, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it a good film. Films with gay plots are like any other - there are good ones like Dog Day Afternoon or Magnolia or My Own Private Idaho, and there are dreadful ones like the screechily self-righteous American Beauty.
I suspect the prominence of Brokeback is just another sign that it's been a thin year, in a succession of thin years, for mainstream American movies. I think I first realized this when Finding Neverland got nominated for six Oscars (yeah, okay, TM), including best picture, in 2005. Finding Neverland is a perfectly pleasant little by-the-numbers costumer, (with the usual quotient of glaring anachronisms, both in material detail and social reality). But best picture? (The winner was Clint Eastwood's magnificent Million Dollar Baby).
Historical inaccuracy in movies and books is a favourite topic of mine, and perhaps one for another and longer post, but I can't help noticing that Kate Winslet is in both Neverland and one of the all-time champions of anachronism, Titanic. She's also in the surprisingly good Enigma, by Michael Apted. I have no quarrel with her here. In fact, Enigma not only pays great attention to detail, but manages to evoke, especially in the final scenes, an emotionally convincing sense of the end of the War, and the slow return to peace and civilian normality.
In this last endeavour, it is aided mightily by John Barry's score. I've often wondered what to think about Barry as a film composer, given that he really only has one mode - the soaring romantic, elegiac theme, which he achieves with a surprisingly limited musical vocabulary. But this mode works so immediately and powerfully that it seems philistine to question it. Given that directors almost always commission a composer for the express purpose of recreating his last score, Barry has probably been locked into this mode since his biggest hit, Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985). But it's always been there. One needs only to think of his themes for the Bond movies, especially songs like 'You only live twice' and 'Diamonds are forever', which give them an emotional dimension - a sense of life-lessons earned with pain and the passage of time - that they otherwise would not possess.
I will always be grateful for the revelation I had as a youthful film buff, from Barry's score for Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout (1971), and I find it impossible to imagine a masterpiece like Richard Lester's Robin and Marian (1976) without his music. I still regret that the plans for Barry to score Pixar's The Incredibles never came off. That would have been something.
Some might see a pointed liberal convergence in the results of this year's Golden Globe awards - a movie about gay cowboys, a movie about a gay writer, and a made-for-tv drama about a transsexual - but I tend to think it's just coincidence. (And as these pages have asked before, where's Ed Wood when you need him?)
I have no plans to see Brokeback Mountain, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it a good film. Films with gay plots are like any other - there are good ones like Dog Day Afternoon or Magnolia or My Own Private Idaho, and there are dreadful ones like the screechily self-righteous American Beauty.
I suspect the prominence of Brokeback is just another sign that it's been a thin year, in a succession of thin years, for mainstream American movies. I think I first realized this when Finding Neverland got nominated for six Oscars (yeah, okay, TM), including best picture, in 2005. Finding Neverland is a perfectly pleasant little by-the-numbers costumer, (with the usual quotient of glaring anachronisms, both in material detail and social reality). But best picture? (The winner was Clint Eastwood's magnificent Million Dollar Baby).
Historical inaccuracy in movies and books is a favourite topic of mine, and perhaps one for another and longer post, but I can't help noticing that Kate Winslet is in both Neverland and one of the all-time champions of anachronism, Titanic. She's also in the surprisingly good Enigma, by Michael Apted. I have no quarrel with her here. In fact, Enigma not only pays great attention to detail, but manages to evoke, especially in the final scenes, an emotionally convincing sense of the end of the War, and the slow return to peace and civilian normality.
In this last endeavour, it is aided mightily by John Barry's score. I've often wondered what to think about Barry as a film composer, given that he really only has one mode - the soaring romantic, elegiac theme, which he achieves with a surprisingly limited musical vocabulary. But this mode works so immediately and powerfully that it seems philistine to question it. Given that directors almost always commission a composer for the express purpose of recreating his last score, Barry has probably been locked into this mode since his biggest hit, Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985). But it's always been there. One needs only to think of his themes for the Bond movies, especially songs like 'You only live twice' and 'Diamonds are forever', which give them an emotional dimension - a sense of life-lessons earned with pain and the passage of time - that they otherwise would not possess.
I will always be grateful for the revelation I had as a youthful film buff, from Barry's score for Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout (1971), and I find it impossible to imagine a masterpiece like Richard Lester's Robin and Marian (1976) without his music. I still regret that the plans for Barry to score Pixar's The Incredibles never came off. That would have been something.
posted by cuckoo at
12:20 PM
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