Earlier today, I found out that one of my very favorite film composers, James Horner, probably best known for having composed the music and theme song for James Cameron's Titanic, died in a plane crash. Of all the celebrity deaths I've ever heard of, this is perhaps the saddest for me, along with Robin Williams' suicide.
I grew up with James Horner's music. When I was eleven I watched Amblin Entertainment's An American Tail on Betamax. As utterly ridiculous as this sounds, I was convinced I was in love with the main character's sister after hearing her (and the main character), sing the song "Somewhere Out There" in the course of the film. I was, of course, captivated by the song (though oddly enough, not the pop version by Linda Ronstadt) and in particular by James Horner's contribution to that melody. He wrote the score, which permeated the film and, as performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, was simply haunting. It left a heck of an impression.
About four years later, Horner blew me away, perhaps a bit more this time, with the soaring choral music of the Civil War epic Glory, a story of African-American soldiers fighting for equality during the War between the States. That was when he became one of my favorite composers of all time.
My love for his music continued into the 1990s, thanks to an aunt who brought me extremely hard to find CDs from the United States. His first foray into the superhero genre, The Rocketeer, was as magnificent as the film itself was ill-fated at the box office, but I was also a fan of his less bombastic stuff, like the jazz-flavored music of Phil Alden Robinson's Sneakers. I also liked his work on Edward Zwick's Legends of the Fall, the film that arguably launched Brad Pitt's career but which I remember better for its sweeping, if slightly overbearing musical score, which featured seventy-five glorious minutes of Horner music being played by the London Symphony Orchestra.
Then he came up with, for me, some of the very best work of his career: the one-two punch of Apollo 13 and Braveheart, the latter of which got him the job that would seal his status as a pop-culture icon: Titanic. People tell me they still cry when they watch that movie, even 18 years after it first came out, and I'm willing to bet Horner's music plays a huge part in that.
Of course, while everyone else went back to their pop music after that, Horner geeks like me continued to follow his work; in particular I loved his music score for Martin Campbell's The Mask of Zorro, yet another foray into the action-adventure genre, the very next year.
Then, the 2000s came, and with it the superhero renaissance courtesy of the X-Men and Spider-Man, and while these films dominated the box-office landscape for the better part of a decade, Horner kind of fell under the radar for me, although he continued to work. He even snagged a couple of Oscar nominations in 2002 and 2004 for A Beautiful Mind and House of Sand and Fog, respectively.
When James Cameron's Avatar started breaking box-office records in 2009, of course I bought and thoroughly enjoyed James Horner's high-flying soundtrack, but if I may be honest, after over twenty years of enjoying this man's music I found myself recognizing a little too often the hooks, motifs and cues from his other work, which kind of affected my appreciation just the slightest bit, especially that four-note "enemy" motif that has featured in a lot of his film scores, and I started wondering if he'd run out of tricks. He had always been guilty of a bit of recycling (which, arguably can also be said of the likes of Hans Zimmer and even the heralded John Williams), but it struck me a little that he was doing it quite a lot in this music.
Horner then wrote the music for the remake of the 1984 film The Karate Kid, and while it was serviceable, it felt even more like a regurgitation of his previous work than Avatar did. He seemed to be in a bit of a creative slump.
Then Horner did something I had not expected him to do: he joined the Marvel Age, and wrote music for Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man. I had always associated the comic book movie genre with the likes of Danny Elfman, Alan Silvestri and Zimmer. Heck, even John Williams only composed music for the first Superman movie (though the theme still endures thirty-seven years later, even after Zimmer's rather clumsy attempt to create a new one); I hadn't figured Horner would be a fit for this, even though he arguably had some superhero work under his belt with the little-seen Rocketeer. Suddenly, a childhood dream I didn't even know I had was being fulfilled.
Better still, Horner's work on the movie truly surprised me. Yes, there were cues borrowed from his other work, but the Shakuhachi (Japanese wood flute) and four-note motif were nowhere to be found, and with the full-bodied brass that played Spider-Man's theme when he swung across a bridge after foiling a carjacker, Horner convinced me that not even John Williams himself could have done a better job of scoring this movie. Not just that; but more than just about all of the superhero scores, including the work of the aforementioned Elfman, Zimmer and Silvestri I had heard over the last ten years prior to this, Horner's music had an extraordinary emotional range. I loved the Peter/Gwen theme every bit as much as I enjoyed the superhero-ey stuff.
What really took me by surprise was the fact Horner poured so much character into what could have easily been treated as another paycheck. I mean, Webb wasn't one of his frequent collaborators like Ron Howard, James Cameron or Mel Gibson, so he could have rejiggered another of his lesser known scores from the 1990s and passed it off as something new. After all, The Karate Kid had been nothing but a patchwork of all his former score. It wasn't the case here, and quite frankly I found myself falling in love with Horner's music all over again, and not just because Spider-Man happens to be my favorite comic book character.
Immediately thereafter, however, he went into a long period of silence. The Amazing Spider Man came out in 2012, and for two years thereafter nothing came out with his name on it. Sure, there were rumblings of a series of sequels to Avatar, but considering that James Cameron is not in the habit of making a movie more often than every six years at best, assuming Horner would even work on the movies, they were a long way into the future.
Finally, this year, Horner was slated to work on not just one but three movies, including a rather promising drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal entitled Southpaw.
And now he's gone.
It saddens me greatly that someone whose music I grew up with has passed on, and arguably well ahead of his time considering that he was a sprightly 61 (for purposes of comparison, consider that John Williams is now 83 and still composing music), but what pains me more was that he went at a time when I was starting to rediscover him. I take some consolation that I can look forward to at least three more movies with the music of my favorite composer of all, the wonderful James Horner.
Thank you for the music and the memories, Mr. Horner.
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Friday, June 12, 2015
A Very Pleasant Trip Down Memory Lane: A Review of Jurassic World
directed by Colin Trevorrow
written by Derek Conolly, Colin Trevorrow, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver
I was not having a very good year in 1993 when I walked into Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, but when I walked out after having seen the film I was significantly happier. It really was a fantastic film, the kind that gets me excited about watching movies in the first place. The sequel four years later was simply awful by comparison, and by the time the third movie in the series rolled around, this one no longer based on a novel by the series creator, the late Michael Crichton, I had lost interest and caught it on cable television instead of in the theaters.
I'm not entirely sure why I was particularly impressed by the trailer of Jurassic World, the latest installment in the Jurassic series, which I can confirm is a sequel and not at all a reboot (and even features one of the cast members of the very first movie) but suffice it to say, I went to see it, my expectations having been tempered by my disappointment with the second and third movies and several years' worth of cynicism and blockbuster fatigue. Maybe I just liked the feeling that star Chris Pratt was kind of channeling his Star Lord character from last year's Guardians of the Galaxy. Whatever the reason, I'm happy to say that for the first time since 1993, I enjoyed a movie with the word "Jurassic" in the title.
The story picks up some 22 years from the time the first movie left off (and as odd as this may sound, actually seems to disregard the previous two sequels) and things are quite different now; Jurassic World is a fully-functioning theme park, the kind that Richard Attenborough's John Hammond set out to build in the first movie, and has been for several years now. As often happens with any long-running business concern, costs are escalating, and the woman running it, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) has been looking for ways to incease the "wow" factor, and as a result she and her higher-ups, including the theme park's owner, magnate Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan) have given the scientists, headed by Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) from the first film free rein to create the most badass new dinosaur they could imagine. Meanwhile, another new approach Masrani is taking is having ex-sailor Owen Grady (Pratt) actually train the deadly velociraptors that menaced the humans during the first three films, and to his credit, Grady seems to have done a pretty good job, much to the interest of the park's head of security, Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio), who has his own sinister plans for the raptors. Claire is so preoccupied with improving the park's attendance that she completely neglects her two nephews Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray (Ty Simpkins) who are touring the place while their parents (Andy Buckley and Judy Greer) lock horns over their divorce proceedings thousands of kilometers away. She leaves them in the hands of her equally indifferent assistant Zara (Katie McGrath). Unfortunately for just about every one of the 20,000 + human beings on the park, the Indominus Rex, the dinosaur that Dr. Wu and his cohorts have cooked up is bigger, meaner, and smarter than any other dinosaur, and in true Jurassic Park fashion, figures out a way to get out of its enclosure and cause all hell to break loose.
While I often bewail Hollywood's lack of originality given the proliferation of remakes, reboots, sequels and adaptations of existing material, Trevorrow makes this film work by paying effective homage to the original film, and a brace of other 80s and 90s science-fiction films, including James Cameron's Aliens. There's an overriding sense throughout the whole movie that the filmmakers know they aren't breaking new ground, so they try their very best to show their love for the original film and similar movies of the era, and by gum it works. There's a bit of investment in getting the audience to care what happens to the characters when the dino-poop hits the fan; the kids have to grapple with their parents' impending divorce, and their aunt's almost criminal negligence, Claire has to deal with, well, the greed of Jurassic World's shareholders, and Owen has to deal with the fact that while he seems to finally have achieved some kind of breakthrough in understanding dinosaurs (or at least velociraptors), no one else, save perhaps for Barry, one of the park's other wranglers (Omar Sy) seems to really care.
The humans are always peripheral in movies like this, though; at the end of the day their principal purpose is to serve as stand-ins for the audience so that they can feel they're in the thick of all the dinosaur-induced chaos, and to these humans' credit, they do a pretty good job. The real treat has always been the dinosaurs, and Trevorrow gets all of the important beats right, from concealing the big bad I-Rex (a jab, I imagine, at today's smartphone savvy generation) for most of the first act of the film, to dialing back the constant reliance on computer-generated imagery and giving animatronic dinosaurs some generous screen time, just as Spielberg did in the original. Still, the script calls for a lot of running, fighting and killing dinosaurs here, so heavy use of CGI is kind of a must, but at least Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) is very much at the top of their game here, no matter what the hipsters who love to bitch about CGI might say.
I also appreciated Michael Giacchino's unobtrusive music score, as well as his rather generous and very well-timed references to John Williams' regal theme.
It's worth emphasizing at this point that this film is nowhere near as good as the original, which set a benchmark for science fiction movies that stood for many years, but it's also worth emphasizing that it's not trying to be. Interestingly, like the first film, it also has something to say, though it feels more of a commentary about the greed of Hollywood than on the evil of messing with nature that was quite patent in the first film. There's some irony to that, considering that from one perspective this film may definitely be viewed as a cynical cash grab; a repackaging of a much older product to sell to newer audiences. There's even a loose end that is somewhat shamelessly left dangling so that Universal can pursue a sequel if the box office receipts justify one.
Ultimately, though, what matters is that the film, for all its flaws, is quite an entertaining affair. Trevorrow and his cast and crew have thrown together the best "Jurassic" movie since the original, and whatever success this film may experience when it opens worldwide is, to my mind, well-deserved.
(On a side note: I was somewhat amused by the fact that almost the entirety of the principal cast consists of actors who have starred in one adaptation or another of a Marvel comics property; Pratt, of course, was the lead in the aforementioned Guardians of the Galaxy, Howard had a supporting role in Spider-Man 3, Khan had a role in The Amazing Spider-Man, Simpkins had a pretty pivotal role in Iron Man 3, Sy had a small role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, and D'Onofrio was the arch villain in Daredevil. There were so many Marvel-movie or TV-show veterans around that if the Hulk had shown up at some point and started beating up the dinosaurs, he wouldn't have felt entirely out of place.)
The cast and crew have put together a solid, competent sequel to one of the most beloved Spielberg movies of all time, and while it wasn't exactly 1993 all over again for me, I had a really good time.
7.5/10
written by Derek Conolly, Colin Trevorrow, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver
I was not having a very good year in 1993 when I walked into Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, but when I walked out after having seen the film I was significantly happier. It really was a fantastic film, the kind that gets me excited about watching movies in the first place. The sequel four years later was simply awful by comparison, and by the time the third movie in the series rolled around, this one no longer based on a novel by the series creator, the late Michael Crichton, I had lost interest and caught it on cable television instead of in the theaters.
I'm not entirely sure why I was particularly impressed by the trailer of Jurassic World, the latest installment in the Jurassic series, which I can confirm is a sequel and not at all a reboot (and even features one of the cast members of the very first movie) but suffice it to say, I went to see it, my expectations having been tempered by my disappointment with the second and third movies and several years' worth of cynicism and blockbuster fatigue. Maybe I just liked the feeling that star Chris Pratt was kind of channeling his Star Lord character from last year's Guardians of the Galaxy. Whatever the reason, I'm happy to say that for the first time since 1993, I enjoyed a movie with the word "Jurassic" in the title.
The story picks up some 22 years from the time the first movie left off (and as odd as this may sound, actually seems to disregard the previous two sequels) and things are quite different now; Jurassic World is a fully-functioning theme park, the kind that Richard Attenborough's John Hammond set out to build in the first movie, and has been for several years now. As often happens with any long-running business concern, costs are escalating, and the woman running it, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) has been looking for ways to incease the "wow" factor, and as a result she and her higher-ups, including the theme park's owner, magnate Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan) have given the scientists, headed by Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) from the first film free rein to create the most badass new dinosaur they could imagine. Meanwhile, another new approach Masrani is taking is having ex-sailor Owen Grady (Pratt) actually train the deadly velociraptors that menaced the humans during the first three films, and to his credit, Grady seems to have done a pretty good job, much to the interest of the park's head of security, Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio), who has his own sinister plans for the raptors. Claire is so preoccupied with improving the park's attendance that she completely neglects her two nephews Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray (Ty Simpkins) who are touring the place while their parents (Andy Buckley and Judy Greer) lock horns over their divorce proceedings thousands of kilometers away. She leaves them in the hands of her equally indifferent assistant Zara (Katie McGrath). Unfortunately for just about every one of the 20,000 + human beings on the park, the Indominus Rex, the dinosaur that Dr. Wu and his cohorts have cooked up is bigger, meaner, and smarter than any other dinosaur, and in true Jurassic Park fashion, figures out a way to get out of its enclosure and cause all hell to break loose.
While I often bewail Hollywood's lack of originality given the proliferation of remakes, reboots, sequels and adaptations of existing material, Trevorrow makes this film work by paying effective homage to the original film, and a brace of other 80s and 90s science-fiction films, including James Cameron's Aliens. There's an overriding sense throughout the whole movie that the filmmakers know they aren't breaking new ground, so they try their very best to show their love for the original film and similar movies of the era, and by gum it works. There's a bit of investment in getting the audience to care what happens to the characters when the dino-poop hits the fan; the kids have to grapple with their parents' impending divorce, and their aunt's almost criminal negligence, Claire has to deal with, well, the greed of Jurassic World's shareholders, and Owen has to deal with the fact that while he seems to finally have achieved some kind of breakthrough in understanding dinosaurs (or at least velociraptors), no one else, save perhaps for Barry, one of the park's other wranglers (Omar Sy) seems to really care.
The humans are always peripheral in movies like this, though; at the end of the day their principal purpose is to serve as stand-ins for the audience so that they can feel they're in the thick of all the dinosaur-induced chaos, and to these humans' credit, they do a pretty good job. The real treat has always been the dinosaurs, and Trevorrow gets all of the important beats right, from concealing the big bad I-Rex (a jab, I imagine, at today's smartphone savvy generation) for most of the first act of the film, to dialing back the constant reliance on computer-generated imagery and giving animatronic dinosaurs some generous screen time, just as Spielberg did in the original. Still, the script calls for a lot of running, fighting and killing dinosaurs here, so heavy use of CGI is kind of a must, but at least Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) is very much at the top of their game here, no matter what the hipsters who love to bitch about CGI might say.
I also appreciated Michael Giacchino's unobtrusive music score, as well as his rather generous and very well-timed references to John Williams' regal theme.
It's worth emphasizing at this point that this film is nowhere near as good as the original, which set a benchmark for science fiction movies that stood for many years, but it's also worth emphasizing that it's not trying to be. Interestingly, like the first film, it also has something to say, though it feels more of a commentary about the greed of Hollywood than on the evil of messing with nature that was quite patent in the first film. There's some irony to that, considering that from one perspective this film may definitely be viewed as a cynical cash grab; a repackaging of a much older product to sell to newer audiences. There's even a loose end that is somewhat shamelessly left dangling so that Universal can pursue a sequel if the box office receipts justify one.
Ultimately, though, what matters is that the film, for all its flaws, is quite an entertaining affair. Trevorrow and his cast and crew have thrown together the best "Jurassic" movie since the original, and whatever success this film may experience when it opens worldwide is, to my mind, well-deserved.
(On a side note: I was somewhat amused by the fact that almost the entirety of the principal cast consists of actors who have starred in one adaptation or another of a Marvel comics property; Pratt, of course, was the lead in the aforementioned Guardians of the Galaxy, Howard had a supporting role in Spider-Man 3, Khan had a role in The Amazing Spider-Man, Simpkins had a pretty pivotal role in Iron Man 3, Sy had a small role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, and D'Onofrio was the arch villain in Daredevil. There were so many Marvel-movie or TV-show veterans around that if the Hulk had shown up at some point and started beating up the dinosaurs, he wouldn't have felt entirely out of place.)
The cast and crew have put together a solid, competent sequel to one of the most beloved Spielberg movies of all time, and while it wasn't exactly 1993 all over again for me, I had a really good time.
7.5/10
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