Just don't talk to me about Colin Firth and stammering royalty.
In my humble opinion, the best film of last year was The Social Network. It was an incisive examination of how the most significant cultural phenomenon so far of the 21st century came about. Brilliantly written by Aaron Sorkin and shrewedly directed by David Fincher, it was a massive critical and commercial hit, with a Best Picture Academy Award surely just a matter of time and vote-counting.
Alas, it was not to be. A late-runner in the Oscar stakes, The King's Speech snuck up on the inside and bagged four Oscars, including the coveted one for Best Picture. The Social Network managed a respectable three (Adapted Screenplay, Editing & Score) but there were no golden statuettes coming Fincher's way this time.
The King's Speech is actually a decent enough movie - I just never saw it as being the best film of 2010. Still, that was six months ago. Time to breathe out and let go.
Forget it, Phil, it's Chinatown.
Anyway, this column is about trailers and the advance marketing of The Social Network provided one of the very best. In fact, it's my personal all-time favourite and stands up as a work of art in itself:
What hits you straight off the bat are the striking choice of music and images - Scala & Kolacny Brothers performing a choral version of Radiohead's Creep, over a variety of rapidly changing Facebook pages. It's a whole minute before any footage from the film appears...then it's a selection of key scenes and dialogue, grabbing the audience's attention but not acting as spoilers.
The cherry on the top is the perfect strapline to both trailer and poster:
From the start, The Black Hole was designed to be a game-changer for Disney. The ripples from the splash Star Wars had made at the box-office reached the boardroom in Sleeping Beauty's castle and the Disney executives were determined to get in on the action. With actors Maximilian Schell, Anthony Perkins and Robert Forster onboard, The Black Hole had a far from traditional Disneyesque cast. Disney had such faith in the film's potential that it put it in direct competition with the highly-anticipated Star Trek -The Motion Picture, which was opening at the same time - Christmas 1979.
For the music, they turned to a seasoned professional. John Barry had already gone into space that year with his score for Moonraker; the music he composed for The Black Hole is even better. It begins with the anthemic "Overture", played before the opening credits, like the old roadshow presentations. We then go into the sweeping, circling "Main Title", with Barry's trademark strings in full effect:
This tone is kept through the score - there are no "cute" themes for the robots, none of the chirpy melodies that would have usually been expected in a Disney release. It's powerful, stirring music, often raising the film from the numerous stumbling blocks of its plot and script.
Full disclosure: The Black Hole was the first film soundtrack I ever owned. By the time I was given the album as a Christmas present, I had already seen the film a couple of times. Thanks to continuous performances and the unallocated cinema seating of those days, I was able to duck down and sit through an additional performance, seeing in twice in one afternoon. From these viewings,I soon realised its faults - those stupid Mickey Mouse-eyed robots, the often risible dialogue and a climax that wanted to be Kubrickian in scope and meaning but failing completely. I also knew what was good about it - the production design, the special effects, Maximilian the robot... and the music.
The soundtrack I was given back in '79 had only ten tracks on it and was deleted a few months later.. An appearance on CD has been one of the most hoped-for releases amongst soundtrack afficienados and Walt Disney Records/Intrada have pulled out all the stops. As well as the ten cues from the original album, there are now an additional 14 tracks. Jeff Bond provides extensive liner notes on the making of the film and the various music cues. There's also some rare photographs of the recording sessions and Barry conducting the orchestra. Finally, producer Randy Thornton supplies a fascinating description on how the music was remastered for CD. The Black Hole boasted the first digitally recorded soundtrack in film history and, although the master tapes still existed in the Disney vault, finding the right equipment to play them on proved surprisingly difficult. The hard work has paid off - The Black Hole sounds terrific, immaculately produced and an essential purchase for any fan of Barry's or film music in general.
With the sad passing of John Barry earlier this year, releasing one of his most-requested film works is only fitting. It's particularly welcome that his score for The Black Hole has been given such a respectful and thorough presentation.
The Black Hole soundtrack is a Walt Disney Records/Intrada release and can be ordered from the US here.
It's unusual for a movie to have a custom-filmed trailer made for it; it's even rarer for it to get the honour of having two. Then again, 1941 is no ordinary film.
Back in the late '70s, director Steven Spielberg was hot property, having just directed two successive blockbusters in Jaws and Close Encounters. The cast boasted several rising comedy stars, such as Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and John Candy. And in another unusual move, two studios - Universal and Columbia - joined forces to make the multi-million dollar action comedy.
The first of 1941's custom trailers came out well in advance of its release - a year before, during the Christmas of 1978. It's so premature, they even had time to change the name of Belushi's character to what he says it is in the trailer (it's Capt Wild Bill Kelso in the finished film):
As well as brief footage from the movie and some of Williams' score, the second teaser also made use of the production's model shop skills, with the film's title tearing up through a miniature Los Angeles cityscape:
This image of a camera dolly towards a nighttime California city is something of a Spielberg trademark, with similar shots appearing in both Close Encounters and, particularly, E.T.
Whilst it's fair to say the resulting movie isn't exactly a career highlight for Spielberg , it's not a complete dud either. The miniature work is spectacular, there's a beautifully choreographed jitterbug setpiece and John Williams contributes a rousing score. It's also wrong, as many critics have, to call 1941 a financial flop - whilst the film didn't rack up huge box-office numbers as expected, it did end up turning a small profit for the studios.
I'd recommend searching out the film on DVD, if only for the extensive and surprisingly candid "making of" documentary.
The 1980 film version of Clive Cussler's best-selling novel Raise The Titanic fails for many reasons - the weak script, the lacklustre direction, the lifeless acting. Despite its failings, I've always had a fascination with the huge model liner they built for the climactic sequence where the Titanic breaks through the surface of the ocean like a rocket.
Water (along with fire) has always been the perennial enemy of miniature special effects. It refuses to reduce in scale with the model, so no matter how finely detailed the miniature is, the realism of the sequence is undermined by the water. One way to address the problem is to build as big a miniature as you can afford - this was the route taken by the special effects team on Raise The Atlantic, which had a suitably blockbuster budget. They created a massive 55 foot replica of the original liner, with a slavish attention to detail that pushed the cost of construction to more than $3m over the price of the original (and full-sized) ship. It was then installed in a specially built 350 ft wide by 35 ft deep water tank in Malta, at a cost of an additional $2m.
The shots of it emerging from the north Atlantic in the finished film are very impressive, although the "scale of water" problem still wasn't successfully defeated. The film itself had a disasterous showing at the global box-office, making far less than the budget spent on making it. The model was subsequently used in a couple of other productions but now lies derelict at the studio facility in Malta, rusted and broken beyond repair. The water tank itself has proved far more durable and is frequently used as a location and for special effects work by films, TV shows and commercials.
If you happen to be a fan of Raise The Titanic, you could do worse than visit this YouTube channel, which has a wealth of videos about nearly every aspect of the making of the film.
