The Screengrab : red dragon

OST: "Beetlejuice"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:45:00 GMT

Danny Elfman's reputation as a film composer, to put it politely, is mixed. To put it not so politely, there are a lot of people who think he sucks. Though Elfman himself -- a multiple Oscar nominee, a millionaire many times over, and Mr. Bridget Fonda -- probably doesn't pay his detractors any mind, there is a growing consensus that the man who started out as the most unlikely person to achieve success as a composer of scores for blockbuster Hollywood films has turned into a contemptible hack whose name in the opening credits is a sure sign of sonic disappointment ahead. Of course, for everyone who feels that way, there's also those who fiercely defend his scores as memorable, inventive, and distinct; how many other film composers can you name who have gold records for collections of their motion picture scores? Elfman has two of them, and a legion of devoted fans. This kind of vehement disagreement is, in fact, familiar to Danny Elfman: during the 1980s heyday of his band Oingo Boingo, opinion was roughly split between those who found him an obnoxious noisemaker whose danceable, horn-laden compositions were an embarrasment to the punk circles in which he traveled, and those who found his music creative, infectious, and a welcome change of pace from the business-as-usual of L.A. hardcore.

But as Elfman's career as a film composer enters its third decade, those who defend him are growing fewer, and those who attack him are growing more. The time at which his name in the credits alone was enough to make fans line up at the box office for a ticket are long behind him, and it seems the more he embraced his fame as a Hollywood name worthy of dropping, the more he moved from his ludic, sonically inventive early work to a sense of darkness and bombast that never quite suited him to what can only be described as hackwork in films like A Civil Action, Proof of Life and Red Dragon. The sad thing is, it was not always thus: Elfman got his start composing music for the films of his friend, fan and frequent collaborator, the director Tim Burton -- and the early work they produced together really was special. Back then, Elfman geniunely sounded like someone who might seriously change the game when it came to film scores: his utterly postmodern approach of mixing the high and the low, and his keen sense of comic and dramatic timing, which he used to blow the doors off scenes with a judicious application of musical cues, seemed to be indicators of someone who was there to do more than just collect a paycheck.

The best of Danny Elfman's early collaborations with Tim Burton was the fantastic score to Pee Wee's Big Adventure. A more perfect marriage of score and film is hard to imaging, and the opening sequence of the beloved comedy -- with Pee Wee's activities growing more and more absurd as the main theme becomes louder and louder, finally hammering away at a perfect comic crescendo -- is unforgettable. Unfortunately, the commercial release is marred by many omissions, and by being paired on a double release with Elfman's passable but unspectacular soundtrack to the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School. So, for Elfman aficianados who want to show off what the man was capable of before he started sleepwalking through his career, Beetlejuice is the default pick. Not that it's much of a step down from Pee Wee's Big Adventure; they're both showcases for his blend of acumen and absurdity, his sure comic timing, his ability to use odd percussive patterns and polyrhythms to such a listener into the scene, and his deft mixing of cartoonish exaggeration with clever and appropriate instrumentation. The ghostly conjurations of the score proved that Elfman, despite later evidence to the contrary, was capable of sounding sinister without taking himself too seriously, and its magical mixture of catchy melodic elements and almost avant-garde experimental sounds makes it a collection of music worth listening to even outside of the context of the movie -- the true test of any great score. Beetlejuice is the pinnacle of Elfman's work with Tim Burton, for good and for ill: it never got any better, and it would all be downhill from there.

BEST TRACKS: The famous opening theme to Beetlejuice is a perfect example of what Danny Elfman is capable of when he's not just out to make a buck. Its clever folding of Harry Belafonte's "The Banana Boat Song" into what becomes a whirling, sinister piece of music is funny and unexpected, and the rest of the piece plays out with excellent and energetic stings over a rapid-fire death train of increasing tempos. "Travel Music", with its conjuration of 1950s-style on-the-road dynamics and its simple innocence twisted by its underlying nastiness, works very well, as does the hilarious muzak-from-beyond-the-grave of "The Flier/Lydia's Pep Talk". The eerie "Incantation", with its high-strung percussion that blasts out into an explosion of creepy vocal cues, haunted-house organ and propulsive horns, nicely rounds out the score.

Related Posts:

OST: Enter the Dragon

OST: Conan the Barbarian

The Albert Popwell Collection

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The release this week of all five "Dirty Harry" movies starring Clint Eastwood on DVD and Blu-ray gives fans the chance to settle in for a long weekend spent admiring the charismatic intensity and skillful range of a familiar but sometimes underappreciated American actor--Albert Popwell. Popwell, who died in 1999, goes way back in the Dirty Harry franchise: he has a small role as a hippie in the movie that many see as a precursor to the Harry Callahan character (as it was molded by Eastwood and director Don Siegel in the 1971 Dirty Harry) and TV's McCloud to boot: the 1968 Coogan's Bluff. In that film, the first collaboration between Siegel and Eastwood--they'd later team up for The Beguiled, Two Mules for Sister Sara, and Escape from Acatraz--Eastwood plays a shitkicker cop from Arizona who hits New York City at the height of the counterculture era to track down an escaped hood and inspires everyone's reluctant admiration for the effectiveness of his uncivilized approach enforcement. Popwell would go on to appear in a small but key role in Dirty Harry and return, in a different role each time, in the first three of its four sequels. Grady Hendrix recently noted that Popwell "twice the actor Mr. Eastwood is in the series;" his repeat appearances also serve as a handy guide to what possibilities were open--and closed--to talented African-American character actors in movies of the period. (I don't necessarily mean to imply that things have changed a whole hell of a lot.)

In Dirty Harry, Popwell has perhaps the movie's most memorable scene, albeit one that he has to spend lying on the sidewalk with a gun in his face. He plays the survivor of a bank robbery that interrupts Harry's lunch. A crackerjack action set piece peerlessly directed by Siegel in his knuckle-cracking prime, it establishes Harry's unearthly cool and mastery of the violent approach to crime-solving; he figures out what's going from one look at the getaway car and proceeds to foil the robbers by shooting their car. He then proceeds to fake out Popwell, who's lying within reach of his gun, by taunting him with the famous speech about just what Harry's gun could do to him if he had any bullets left, which he may or may not--"Do you feel lucky?" After backing down, Popwell calls out to the departing Harry in raspy-voiced desperation--"I gots to know" he says, with as much dignity as imaginable under the circumstances--and Harry points the gun in his face, pulls the trigger--click!--then walks away chuckling. The audience is meant to cheer Harry for not only defeating the fallen criminal but messing with his head and rubbing his face in it, and most of them do cheer, but Siegel's inclusion of a small grace note--a close-up of Popwell muttering, "Son of a bitch" as Harry walks away--can perhaps be taken as the director's covert acknowledgment that, for all his bitching and moaning about the things he's forced to do to compensate for the ineffectual lily-livered politicians and other liberals who would shackle the lawgiver, there's a big part of Harry that enjoys his job way too much.

There are no such grace notes in Popwell's flashy, repulsive scene in 1973's Magnum Force; he plays a pimp who brutally murders a hooker. But by then, grace notes in the "Dirty Harry" franchise were already getting to be few and far between. (Magnum Force is itself conceived as a raised middle finger to those who criticized the first film as a reactionary endorsement of vigilante police power. It pits craggy old Harry against a secret police death squad consisting of fresh-faced young up-and-comers--Robert Urich, Tim Matheson, David Soul--and their fearless leader, Hal Holbrook.) In 1976's The Enforcer, made in the wake of the SLA kidnapping of Patricia Hearst and other manifestions of the last insane, dying ripples of "revolutionary" counterculture politics, Popwell turns up as "Mustapha", a troubled-looking black militant who slips Harry some information that will help him bring down the "People's Revolutionary Strike Force", a bunch of pimps and hookers posing as a terrorist cell. (Like the Mothers of Invention, they're only in it for the money.) However we're meant to view his character, he does again manage to suggest a much deeper and more complicated range of thought and emotion than Harry. Popwell made the full jump to good guy in 1983's Sudden Impact, the only film in the series directed by Eastwood himself. By now, the tensions of the sixties are fully submerged and the movie is in total action-cartoon mode. There isn't much Popwell can do to leaven it, but he does get more screen time than ever before. He plays Harry's partner, which is the series equivalent to being the drummer in Spinal Tap. It is a role traditionally assigned to representatives of "minority groups", such as the Hispanic rookie detective played by Reni Santoni in Dirty Harry and the woman cop played by Tyne Daly in The Enforcer, so that Harry can show that for all his angry-white-male bluster, he can respect and work with the unwhite and the unmale when they prove to him that they have the right stuff. Paradoxically, they invariably prove it by getting taken out of the action by getting injured or killed, so that Harry can also show that only he is tough enough to single-handedly prevail in the end. Popwell's role does not break the cycle.

Popwell's career was hardly limited to his association with Clint Eastwood. He was a very active presence in TV, appeared in Siegel's Charley Varrick, and left a fond impression among fans of family-blacksploitation films with his role as Matthew Johnson, who, with his brother Melvin (Caro Kenyatta), lent their martial-arts skills to the efforts to keep heroin out of the neighborhood in two films starring the late Tamara Dobson as the amazon avenger Cleopatra Jones. But he deserves to be remembered for being to Dirty Harry what Frankie Faisan has been to Hannibal Lector. Faison, it will be remembered, appeared in all the movies featuring everyone's favorite cannibal psychiatrist--Manhunter, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Red Dragon--up until the more recent and less successful Hannibal Rising. It would be nice to surmise that Popwell's absence from the last Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool, was closely connected to that film's disappointing returns, but it did have, mmmmmmmmmmm, other problems. Eastwood himself was 58 at the time, and the appearance of this box set, twenty years later, can probably be taken as a declaration, should anyone have been in doubt about it before now, that we have indeed seen the last of Harry Callahan and his big phallic killing device. Eastwood may not be the master filmmaker and great actor that a number of critics have insisted on taking him for in his dotage, but, give him a little credit: he's less shameless than Sylvester Stallone.

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Cinema, a form that makes it possible for the artist to actually devise and stage his own dreams and record them for posterity, has always had a fascination with psychiatrists, explorers of the mind who endeavor to delve into their patients' subconscious for clues as to how to better understand and regulate their conscious behavior. The new HBO series In Treatment is remarkable for how accurately it captures the droning frustration of a session with a typical modern shrink, whose concern that he not appear judgemental or nonobjective leaves him with little to do but sit there grunting noncommittally while the person who's paying for his time sits there tearing his hair out. But it wasn't always that way. As depicted in movies, psychiatry was once a dashing profession, inhabited by risk takers who jumped into their patients' lives with both feet and made a real effort to make a difference. More often than not, the differences they made were scary, destructive, and hair-raising. Still, it must have been nice for their patients to know that they were sharing their problems with someone who cared. Such as these worthies:

1. DR. CALIGARI (WERNER KRAUSE) in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919)

Dr. Caligari (Werner Krause) runs the laughing academy in the picturesque German mountain village of Holstenwall. As the film's narrator tells it, Caligari has been using hypnotism to control his charge Cesare (Conrad Veidt), and has also been trying to help the patient to find a place for himself in society by exhibiting him at the local geek show. When Caligari invites members of the crowd to test Cesare's omniscient powers by asking him an unanswerable question, the narrator's friend, being German, asks him not when Chinese Democracy is going to be finished but when he, the friend, will die. Cesare tells him that he will die the next dawn, and because the doctor has taught him that words must be backed up by action, makes sure that the prophecy comes true by tracking the fellow down and throttling him to meet the deadline. At the end of the movie, all this is revealed to a delusional fantasy of the narrator's, who is in fact an inmate in the asylum where Caligari really is chief of staff. The film ends with Caligari's happy announcement that, now that the narrator has gone to the trouble of envisioning a landmark work in the history of silent German Expressionist cinema, Caligari now has the key to his treatment. Maybe if a few more of the people in analysis had cared a little more about breaking new ground cinematically, the success rate among those in therapy would skyrocket.

2. DR. YEN LO (KHIGH DHIEGH) in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

At first glance, Dr. Yen Lo seems to be the ideal psychiatrist. He has a wife he dotes on, an easy bedside manner, an encyclopedic knowledge of the latest medical and behavioral techniques, and a quick wit. “Always with humor!”, he tells a colleague, with a beaming smile on his Chinese face. It’s only when you realize that the joke he’s just told his nervous compatriot involves using him as the test dummy on which to unleash his newly reprogrammed assassin, and that his gregarious, friendly bedside manner only comes after he has completely rewired your brain and turned you into a remorseless killer that the bloom starts to come off the rose. And sooner or later, you’re going to realize that he may have gotten you to lose weight and play a mean game of solitaire, but he’s also gotten you hooked on yak dung cigarettes. To sum up, Dr. Yen Lo isn’t the kind of doctor who is going to get a lot of referrals through the HMO. But he is, as played by omnipresent character actor Khigh Dhiegh in the immortal 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, the man who made an unstoppable, relentless killer out of war hero Raymond Shaw, and one of the most sinister psychiatrists in cinematic history. (Dhiegh specialized in portraying menacing Chinese – he was also Wo Fat on Hawaii Five-0 – but he was actually not east Asian at all, but of North African Arab origin.) It’s his jolly, disarming manner that makes his aptitude at destroying innocent men’s minds so particularly monstrous; and worst of all, he gets off scot-free in a movie soaked with bloody murder: the last time we see him, he’s tottering off to Macy’s to tick some items off of Madame Lo’s shopping list.

3. DR. LOUIS JUDD (TOM CONWAY) in CAT PEOPLE (1942)

When you think about how many overpaid chin-scratchers are using their psychiatry degrees as a license to tap into the bank accounts of people who have abandonment issues or wished that daddy had hugged them more, you have to feel a certain admiration for Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), who bravely agreed to take on the more difficult case of a deeply troubled young woman (Simone Simon) who was reluctant to consummate her marriage because she was convinced that if she did, she would turn into a sharp-clawed, fang-toothed jungle cat, with dire effects for any naked man who happened to be embracing her at the time. Dr. Judd's breakthrough method of treatment for her condition--i.e., putting the moves on her--remains controversial; some feel that he violated the boundaries of the doctor-patient relationship, while others, pointing out that it was the patient's husband who retained him, argue that anyone who puts his confused, hot young wife in the hands of a guy with a pencil line mustache and a family resemblance to George Sanders is begging for whatever happens. In the end, Dr. Judd surprised himself, if no one else, by establishing that if anyone hit on his patient hard enough she really would turn into a murderous jungle cat, and in his last moments on Earth he wrapped up the case by shooting his client, thus making himself a hero figure to therapists everywhere.

4. COL. VINCENT KANE (STACY KEACH) in THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

“I’m telling you, Billy, Kane is Gregory Peck in Spellbound,” says Lt. Frank Reno (who is adapting Shakespeare’s plays for dogs) to the depressed astronaut Captain Billy Cutshaw. “It’s just like that movie. He comes to take over the nuthouse and he’s nuts himself.” Cutshaw responds to this news by requesting that Reno drop out of a tree like an overripe mango, but the lieutenant is right: Col. Vincent Kane, the Marine Corps psychiatrist sent to take charge of an insane asylum staffed by disturbed Vietnam veterans, is in fact the craziest man in the joint. The actual extent of his insanity is slowly teased out over the course of this gripping, underrated movie written and directed by The Exorcist’s William Peter Blatty; it begins as a surreal, endlessly quotable comedy, and, as Kane’s madness is revealed, becomes a dark, deep philosophical drama. Colonel Kane is played by Stacy Keach in what can only be described as the role of a lifetime, and he meets it with gusto. At first, he’s full of quiet compassion and boundless sympathy, but with the right provocations and the slightest circumstance, he’s fully transformed into the raging, lethal “Killer” Kane. One of his most memorable scenes comes when his subordinate, Major Groper, cavils at having to play dress-up as part of the inmates’ role-playing therapy; demanding love and compassion from Groper, Kane morphs, werewolf-like, from an impossibly kindly shrink to a seething, hissing, screaming maniac of a Marine drill instructor who’d just as soon see someone dead as insubordinate. Groper, by the way, gets one of the movie’s funniest lines earlier in the movie: warning the men – who he considers to be goldbricking fakers – that the asylum will soon be taken over by the formidable Kane, he hollers: “Too bad, boys! Tough shit! Because guess who’s coming? A PSYCHIATRIST! The best! The best in uniform! The greatest fucking psychiatrist since Jung!” Naturally, he pronounces it with a hard J.

5. DR. HANNIBAL LECTER (BRIAN COX) in MANHUNTER (1986) and ANTHONY HOPKINS in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), HANNIBAL (2001), and RED DRAGON (2002)

In many ways, this is an atypical entry for this list, as in the four films set during Dr. Hannibal Lecter's adult life, we almost never actually see him working with patients. Yet I doubt anyone would contest his inclusion here. Formidably intelligent, impossibly cultured, and certifiably wacko, Lecter's appetites take him all over the world and into many realms of human experience. Yet even more than his taste for human flesh, what makes him truly scary is the way he uses that great big brain of his to toy with those he perceives as being beneath him. As a character explains in Hannibal, Lecter preys on what he calls "the rude," and his most severe mind games are reserved for those who offend his cultivated sensibilities. Think of the way he talks Multiple Miggs into swallowing his own tongue after Miggs insults Clarice. Or the way he drugs Mason Verger and convinces him to carve up his own face. But even when he's dealing with people he respects more, he can't help himself — consider his conversations with Clarice, in which he drops hints about the case she's working on, but in the form of riddles rather than as straightforward clues. One almost feels sorry for him after a while — after all, what else does he have left to enjoy in life but his mind?

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.