Recent Viewing Part IV

I'll certainly check it out. UTOPIA was superb!

Sorry, but the score for Humans is frakking brilliant.

And in case you're in doubt of Cristobal's composing talents beside "sound design", give his score to Jamaica Inn a try...

Apology accepted.

I stand by the third post down on this page.

Enemy Mine (1985)

On TV some days ago. I had forgotten how good a film this is. Dennis Quaid deliverers a great performance. Petersen added a serious tone to the space opera craze of these years. Maurice Jarre's score works perfectly in the film.

I agree.

I agree.

I object.

Guilty!

Guilty!

Currently on TV: Turtle: The Incredible Journey (2010)

Nice score by Henning Lohner.

Guess it greatly depends on the inherent quality of the show. Watching The Avengers is still a thrill, watching Space:1999 is, aside from the excellent designs, a bit of a chore, watching Blakes 7 quickly develops into a drinking game (one swig when that infernal rock quarry is used as another alien planet).

Perhaps one of the joys of being so interested in older film and TV themes/scores is that you can re-live the shows now in your mind when listening to the music - perhaps with the eyes of a child? - without having to actually watch the program!

I guess some shows or film memories should remain just that, memories. Of course, our curiosity for nostalgia defeats that and you have to see what it was that captivated you all those years ago.

Martijn, I DO like the idea of a drinking game based on the appearances of the stand-in for multi-worlds quarry in Blake's 7

Blackhat

I haven't seen The Keep, but this has to be the worst Michael Mann film I have seen.

While the premise is fantastic and Mann's attention to detail is plain fantastic (this is the only hacking movie I've seen that doesn't start with a big screen yelling ACCESS DENIED leading to thumping randomly on a keyboard and suddenly LOGIN SUCCESSFUL), the film falls very short of its expectations. It's like a lackluster script led him to desperately try to make it his own stylistically even if all the hand-held camera work wasn't really, really called for.

I don't know much about the process, but I would like Mann to take the guts and make a massive rewrite of it (fully credited in film, too), making it his own in terms of certain stylistic traits that would be very useful in the film. The villain is a weak one and somewhat cliche, has about 20-25 minutes of screen time, mostly in the final act, which doesn't allow him to make an impact, even if the actor is good in the part. His previous on-screen presence (with face hidden!) is basically him smoking and the camera downright fixated on him pressing Enter.

The irony is in the fact that Mann could make it really relevant if he stuck to his storytelling guts and certain thematic elements that made Collateral, Heat and Thief so successful. If you look at his best, Heat, where is the parallel lives element? Look at the premise of Blackhat. After hacking attacks lead to a nuclear disaster in china and market collapse, Chinese and American cyberwarfare specialists have to collaborate and enlist the help of a convicted hacker to bring the blackhat (a hacker working maliciously for his own gain) down.

Let's not get into the fact whether Chris Hemsworth is too pretty to play a seasoned hacker or not. What we have is basically solely the investigation seen purely from the protagonists' point of view. That's not Michael Mann. We have a new dangerous hacker and an old dangerous hacker working for law enforcement. Usually this director tends to blur the lines between being good and being a villain (a point which informed even The Dark Knight, which was outwardly modelled on Heat, with Nolan even being very happy to admit it). If it's about the relevance of cyber warfare in the modern world, showing them in parallel terms would be really beneficial to the theme of the film. What is the difference between Hathaway and the Blackhat? Having the blackhat rework something the guy has done is just not enough in terms of the comparison. Where's the message "to bring one down you have to be like the other?". A massive, massive waste of opportunity. He could have rewatched his own Manhunter for inspiration!

The film starts promisingly enough. Going from the planet to the nuclear plant is a great hook, but then the whole hacking has to be presented with a CGI showing of the inner workings of a computer whcih takes about 2 minutes too long not to be tedious and eventually meaningless. The villain is wasted. Hemsworth tries to do all he can with an underdeveloped character. Tang Wei steals the show, but makes me wish to see a film where she doesn't have a sex scene. A single great, albeit short shootout. The finale is a total waste of everyone's talent, including Mann's. I watched the final act thinking, "is that it?!". Even the music isn't as great as Mann tends to do even when he mauls the composer's work.

All-in-all... it's not the worst film on the planet, it even has some of Mann's poetic sense of urban landscape, but a huge, huge disappointment.