Ad Mat Memories

 

The film's deceptive simplicity is captured in this wonderful poster art .

After That Sinking Feeling, Gregory's Girl, and Comfort and Joy, Bill Forsyth was on an incredible roll, each new film a stronger tasting concentrate of his unique elixir.

With a dazzling score by Mark Knopfler and superb performances from Lancaster, Riegert, and Jenny Seagrove as the enigmatic 'Marina', Local Hero perfectly captured a period in our history when it seemed the beauty of our world wouldn't be annihilated by corporations intent on profit at any cost.

It was a naive view that overestimated the role of government in protecting the environment.   

 

Always thought this was a strange and powerful "family movie" from the cinematographer of The House By The Lake, Eric Saarinen.

It has a great John Barry score and spectacular location work on the Aleutian Islands and Alaska.

Dramatically, it's a little forced at times, and the emotional resolution (father and son saved by a seal!) tests our tolerance for cheese, but the tone is serious and engaging.

A flawless alternative to a film with similar intentions is Carroll Ballard's Fly Away Home, a masterpiece; his Never Cry Wolf ain't too shabby, either.

 

One of many AMC Century City screenings I attended as sole patron.

There was something about certain Handmade Films that just didn't draw audiences.

Nobody went to see their How To Get Ahead in Advertising, either, or Track 29, or Powwow Highway, or the amazing The Wrong Guy.

Starring Jeff Daniels (now ultra-visible in HBO's The Newsroom), it's a caustic and hilarious piece about a hypochondriac on a mission to find a missing punchline, amongst other things.

It was written by Joe Eszterhas (!) and directed by David Leland. Two years earlier, Leland had directed the superb and subtly sensual Wish You Were Here.

 

Looks like they're trying to sell this Richard Gere production as American Gigolo all over again. Bad move.

UK title is The Honorary Consul, taken from Graham Greene's novel of the same name. The generic Beyond The Limit is plain awful.

Certainly an interesting watch (I caught it at the Gratiot Drive-in), but Gere defaults to robo mode here, perhaps imitating his American Gigolo character. 

The film is MIA on US dvd, but available in England.

I didn't like Gere too much until he appeared in Mike Figgis's Internal Affairs. When he plays evil, he comes across as terribly dangerous. When he plays good, he comes across too often as smug.

In Praise of The Fox and the Child

If you're prepared to put Kate Winslet's redundant narration aside, you will enjoy Luc Jacquet's The Fox and the Child as much as I did.

In every other sense, this is a superb, beautifully produced movie about man's relationship with nature -- in this case, man is a young French girl, and nature is a female fox (a vixen).

Clearly, the intended audience for this film is children, so I'm not oblivious to why Kate Winslet is constantly articulating what we know our heroine is thinking. It's not that Kate doesn't do a good job; it's just that the adult inside me is less tolerant of pointless cinematic devices than the child.

Of course, in the French cut of the film, the little girl (voiced as an adult byAmbra Angiolini) now a mother, is relating the story to her son (Thomas Laliberte), who never appears in the English language version. Thus, the primary story is a narrated flashback of her childhood.

Set in a meadow not unlike the meadow of another French celebration of nature, Microcosmos, we are introduced to a young girl on school holidays who encounters an intense looking fox one day. Although the meeting is short, the fox, a very handsome creature, makes quite an impression on the lass. Before you can say transition, months go by, school holidays arrive, and the the young girl has become determined to forge a friendship with her clever, furry friend.

The beauty of The Fox and the Child is its simplicity and exquisite craft. Director Jacquet previously helmed March of the Penguins, an award winning documentary. In this follow-up outing, he has opted for a soft narrative feature, one designed to showcase the beauty of nature, but also the beauty of patience and tolerance. There is a message about love and possession that is deftly handled, and the film's climactic sequence is sure to ruffle most emotional feathers.

The technical credits (photography and music) are somewhat astonishing, as is the rich and vibrant sound mix. The meadow setting, through which we view the four seasons, feels like a world within a world. Actress Bertille Noel-Bruneau, a freck-faced redhead, makes for a feisty, stubborn little heroine, and is not hampered by overt cuteness.

I would place this comfortably on the shelf beside Fly Away Home, The Bear, Milo and Otis, The Silver Brumby, and Hachiko - A Dog's Story (a film I will write about at length shortly).

The French title, Le Renard et l'enfant, has a beautiful ring to it.

Fly Away Home

Films of authentic beauty, love and sadness are rare, so finding one is a cause for celebration.

In '86, I found Louis Mandoki's extraordinary Gaby - A True Story, which was released the same year as Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot, and explored similar territory. Unfortunately, the Daniel Day Lewis film got the attention and the Oscar, and Gaby, a far superior piece of humanist cinema, got totally ignored.

It is still being ignored, in fact; there has never been a DVD release.

Gaby is one of my Top 20 films of all time -- I re-watch my VHS constantly.

Sharing equal footing with Gaby on that list is Carroll Ballard's captivating Fly Away Home, a film I cannot hurl enough superlatives at.

On its initial theatrical release in the US, the film did very average business. Although intended as a "family film", its gentle, almost brittle emotional core was at odds with the new breed of family films that were being redefined by companies such as Disney and Pixar. The film wasn't manic or boisterous or filled with gags and jokes. Even its original poster art suggested a melancholy journey rather than a rollicking good time with flocks of wise-cracking geese.

When released on DVD, the marketing shifted its focus in a more definite, family-friendly direction that appealed to children and their love of animals.

I'm sure this didn't harm its desirability.

The DVD cover directly above, which is the first edition, captures the film's spirit best.

What happens in the film's first five minutes is not, in fact, unusual for an old-fashioned children's story. Amy (Anna Paquin) loses her mother in an auto accident in New Zealand, and is then sent to live with her father, Tom (Jeff Daniels) in Canada. Tom is an eccentric inventor who lives on a farm which is the Summer home for migratory geese.

Tom's relationship with his daughter is pretty much non-existent, so he leaves her to grieve as he works on a variety of flying machines.

One morning, in a beautifully photographed sequence, Amy sees her father in the sky above the house, and is further traumatized when he crashes into a field.

The father/daughter relationship begins to develop, however, when Amy becomes Mother Goose to a dozen baby geese who have lost their real mother.

She imprints with them by behaving as they do, and eventually leads them South across the country where they will spend their first Winter.

Director Carroll Ballard, whose previous films have included The Black Stallion ('79), Duma ('05), Wind ('92) and Never Cry Wolf (('83), has an acute sensitivity towards nature and natural process. Exploring our sometimes uneasy relationship with the animal world, he brings enormous emotional depth to Fly Away Home. The result is a piece of cinema that takes the breath away, ignites the mind, and fills the heart with an appreciation for the majesty of the world around us.

Cinematographer Caleb Daschanel, who shot The Black Stallion and The Natural, delivers exquisite, transporting images of beauty and wonder. Composer Mark Isham, who should have won an Oscar for this, creates a score that expands on the script's emotional base.


Paquin is terrific as Amy, further demonstrating the maturity she displayed in her debut film, Jane Campion's The Piano ('93).

Jeff Daniels, who is always solid, delivers a fine turn as Tom.


Because it is so delicately realized, the film never becomes schmaltzy or maudlin.

The flying sequences are nothing short of amazing, seamlessly combining live action shooting and effective green screen processes.

Although it would have been easy to let the cinematography dominate, director Ballard never loses site of the fact that this is a story of a little girl's growth.

The climax of the film, which takes place above a long, winding river as Mary Chapin Carpenter's heart-rending "10,000 Miles" is played, is cinematic perfection.

On video, the film has developed a much-deserved following.

If you haven't seen it, I envy you the experience of seeing it for the first time.

What You Can't See Will Move You

First an admission. I don't have academic music bona fides, so I can't write about musical structure or debate the virtues of a particular key.

I took guitar lessons for several years when I was a teenager and my text book was the volume above (one of three). I learned to read music, and I loved picking at my guitar and attempting to play along with my Mike Oldfield (Tubular Bells, Hergest Ridge, Five Miles Out, Platinum) and The Sweet albums (Sweet Fanny Adams and Desolation Boulevard, two of the greatest rock albums ever; yes, ROCK albums), but I was no musician.

The first soundtrack I ever bought was Star Wars ('77). Hundreds more followed. Now I have a decent collection closing in on one thousand titles, which is close to three weeks of non-stop bliss.

The only response worth a damn (to me) when listening to music is the emotional response.

What does it do for me?

Where does it take me?

Does it move me? -- to tears possibly?

Does it inflate buried emotions?

The following do all these things...

Fly Away Home is one of my favorite films of all time. Directed by Carroll Ballard, who also gave us Never Cry Wolf and The Black Stallion, it is a sublimely beautiful and emotionally transporting work of art.

Mark Isham's brilliant score is in no small part responsible for that achievement.

A track identified as "Dad's Glider", in which Anna Paquin observes her estranged father (Jeff Daniels) soaring through the sky above their farmhouse, is almost unbearably moving.

And Mary Chapin's vocal rendition of "10,000 Miles", heard over the opening montage, and again over the climax as Paquin flies down the river and leads her feathered charges to safety, is both haunting and inspiring in context.

"Father Goose" is delicate but lighthearted, while "Life in the Drawer/The Assembly" has a deep, emotional intensity.

Isham has composed dozens of film scores including a great one for the underrated remake of The Getaway.

His work here feels like it was realized in the purest, most collaborative of environments.

It is perfect.

Unfortunately, Giuseppe Tornatore's The Unknown Woman (La Sconosciuta, 2006) has gotten very spotty global distribution; this is despite winning a sack of European awards and being from the director of the Academy Award winning Cinema Paradiso.

It is a raw, extraordinary thriller about the revenge of a woman sold into sexual slavery.

The score, by Ennio Morricone, is rich, harrowing, brutal, and almost operatic in its unbridled intensity. It is the composer's best effort since the exquisite Lolita.

"La Sconosciuta", the lead track, hints at the darkness to come, and employs a cello that moved me to tears.

"Giochi Infantili" is a beautiful, effervescent piece suggesting the possibility of flight; it refers to the main character's provocative relationship with a young girl.

"Archiu Bianci" is a slow, deep, exploratory piece that resonates with grim inevitability.

A prime example of a brilliant film being the equal of its score.

For mine, Morricone is the greatest living composer.

Carter Burwell's sad, powerful score was a replacement for another composer's work.

Incredibly, it feels like internal dialog converted to music.

Sidney Lumet's film is a mature, groundbreaking piece of work about two brothers (Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman) who commit a crime that destroys their family.

Running only one minute, the title theme fully succinctly establishes the film's emotional landscape. The use of piano is inspired.

In "Andy Doesn't Add Up", we feel lives falling apart and hope crumbling.

"Father's Last Resort" underscores a terrible decision and its shocking consequences. It is beautiful and heart-breaking.

Burwell has gotten more attention recently for his Coen Bros. scores like No Country For Old Men (deservedly so) and Burn After Reading, but this is superior to those.

This riveting vigilante drama from 1983 starred Michael Douglas and failed miserably at the box office.

Michael Small's score is a terrific piece of work with variations on a haunting, subtle motif that creates a rich mood of suspense and inevitability.

Stand-out tracks are "Andujar Trial" and front and end titles.

Small also scored Klute.

There's little I can add to the legend of Jerry Goldmsith.

This is perhaps one of his most unheard scores because the film flopped and was unavailable in any format for many years.

More a drama than a thriller, though you wouldn't know it from looking at the artwork, it is an exceptional film with great performances from Sissy Spacek and Eric Roberts.

The "Main Title", which blends guitar, flute, harmonica and strings, is rich and filled with warmth. It telegraphs tragedy, too, but it does so gently.

"The Kite" captures the magic of childhood and the nostalgia of country fairs.

The Raggedy Man score is one of Goldsmith's richest, most humanistic works, and he should have won an Oscar for it.

Goldsmith, who left an amazing legacy of music including The Omen, Papillon, Extreme Prejudice, Hoosiers, Planet of the Apes, Star Trek - The Motion Picture, Inchon, Basic Instinct, The Mephisto Waltz and Patton, altered the architecture of film music.