Discovering King of the Hill

NOTE: This is all well and good, but immediately prior to this is a critique of John Williams’s career that I really poured myself into, so if you only read one thing on this blog today, skip back one and check it out. Sorry I posted both on the same day.

Over the course of this class I encountered King of the Hill for the first time. It may not be fair to say the absolute first time, because I’ve come across it before, but I’ve never really paid it much attention. I grew up hating Beavis and Butthead – I’m not sure if that’s because I wasn’t allowed to see it or because I was an elitist fop as an eight-year-old. It’s probably a little of both. At any rate, I hated Beavis and Butthead, and seeing Mike Judge’s name on something else didn’t exactly thrill me. Moreover, the show was set in Texas and while I’ve always appreciated the chance to gently deride the culture in which I grew up, I wasn’t really sure that I could stand being saturated in it that deeply for thirty minutes every week. I guess that the other thing is, there’s a fine line between satire and glorification. (Jeff Foxworthy used to walk that line pretty well.) I never could tell which side of the line King of the Hill fell on, and again, I never really felt any compelling reason to look into it.

Then I started noticing Mike Judge doing things that were cool. I still haven’t seen Idiocracy, but nearly every friend I have who watched it has greatly enjoyed it. He teamed up with Don Hertzfeldt for The Animation Show, garnering my respect not only for giving unknown animators a chance to shine, but for working with Don Hertzfeldt, whom I adore. I was starting to warm up to the guy just a little.

Then in class, when we were asked to bring clips from a TV show that we thought was funny, a classmate brought a clip from King of the Hill where Bobby, the son, chooses to study martial arts by taking women’s self-defense classes. There, he learns to scream things like “That’s my purse! I don’t know you!” and kick people in the groin. His diligence in shouting the things he was told to shout in class creates some beautiful non-sequitur moments, and let’s face it – kicking people in the groin is funny. I think that it may have won me over, at least enough for me to give it a closer look. I haven’t yet checked out the King of the Hill DVDs for lack of time, but I fully expect to soon.

John Williams

John Williams is one of the most underrated overrated composers in the history of film music. By which I mean to say, he is widely loved, but very seldom given the credit that he is actually due. Composer of some of the most widely recognized (and easily recognizable) themes of the 1970’s and every decade since, Williams is perhaps best known for his bright, bombastic fanfares, and for his expert use of leitmotif. (Leitmotif is the idea of assigning themes to specific characters or locations, then integrating those themes into the rest of the score as they appear or gain prominence.) With 45 Academy Award nominations to his name, he has certainly been recognized for his skill. However, he possesses many gifts, including great versatility and a subtle tenderness, that frequently go unnoticed.

Williams began composing for television in the 1950’s, eventually writing music for shows such as Lost in Space. He became known as a composer for disaster films, writing music for movies with titles like Earthquake and The Towering Inferno. Williams changed gears completely for the Faulkner adaptation The Reivers, garnering the attention of a young Steven Spielberg, who had him score his feature-film debut, The Sugarland Express. The two developed a close relationship, with Williams scoring all of Spielberg’s films save two.

Williams delivered a one-two punch in the early 1970’s that propelled him to national prominence. In 1971, he adapted the score of Fiddler on the Roof for the motion picture version, picking up an Academy Award along the way. In 1975, a year after The Sugarland Express, Spielberg had him compose the score for the suspense/horror film Jaws. Williams’s use of a building two-note motif to accentuate the building suspense of the film was a brilliant move. His simple theme associated forever with sharks in the minds of billions, securing him a second Academy Award.

Williams’s collaboration with Spielberg has produced one of the most unique and fruitful director/composer teams in Hollywood. Indeed, apart from Tim Burton and Danny Elfman, “director/composer team” is an unheard-of idea, and the extent to which Speilberg’s films benefit from his intimacy with his composer is immeasurable. In addition to some of his most memorable themes, their work together has also led to some unique moments in film score history. For instance, for the chase sequence at the end of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Williams could not get the kicks in the score to align with E.T.’s running. (It is a common practice to score fights or chases in films with “kicks,” sharp, short, syncopated notes that accentuate the action in the scene.) When Spielberg became aware of the problem, he told Williams to conduct the score as he saw fit, that Spielberg would re-work the scene around Williams’s composition. That a director should cater to a composer is unprecedented. A prior collaboration, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, saw the musical ideas for the film being fleshed out in conjunction with the script, the two creative drives shaping each other as each took form. Again, this is an incredibly uncommon arrangement in Hollywood. Altogether, John Williams and Steven Spielberg have been partners on some two dozen films.

Williams’s work is a laundry list of memorable themes: six Star Wars movies and all their attendant glory, the Indiana Jones films, the aforementioned Jaws, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the first three Harry Potter films, Jurassic Park…blockbusters all, with BIG scores. What is seldom recognized is the fact that Williams commands a far greater variety than what this list of films calls to mind.

For example, consider Indiana Jones. The one piece most people associate with this entire series of films is “Raiders March,” the trumpet solo used as Harrison Ford’s theme. However, even within the first film’s score, which Williams himself considers to be the weakest of the three, there is a multitude of solidly crafted music present. “The Basket Game,” heard in the scene where Indy is looking for Marion in the streets of Cairo is a pizzicato piece which manages to sound jaunty and urgent at the same time. Marion’s theme, frequently played on the flute or oboe, puts the broad intervals which typify Williams’s music to disarmingly tender use. And the Ark theme itself, dark and moody, is exemplified in “The Map Room: Dawn,” in a chilling performance by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

That’s just the overlooked content of one of Mr. Williams’s scores. One of his most famous ones, at that.

E.T. makes extensive use of the Lydian mode to create a sonic atmosphere that is eerily alien, but at the same time melodically inviting. The Lydian mode is one of seven musical modes; the term “mode” refers to a specific type of scale. You know how music can be major or minor? What “major” and “minor” really refer to are two commonly used modes of the seven (The scale most commonly called “the major scale” is the Ionian mode, and it begins on the first note of the scale. If you’re in the key of C, your scale stars on C, and what you get is a very traditional-sounding Western scale. The most commonly-recognized “minor scale” is the Aeolian, which begins on the sixth note of the scale you’re in. If you’re in the key of C, then, you base your piece around the A scale. This basically creates tension between the two, because the intervals – the sharps and flats, whole steps and half steps – aren’t where they sound like they should be. The Lydian mode begins on the fourth note of the scale and is very, very seldom used at all, but it has nevertheless been associated with positive feelings since the days of Plato. This combination of warmth with the unfamiliar found in the Lydian mode is a perfect parallel to the overall themes of the film itself, and JW uses it perfectly. Perhaps left over from his days as a jazz musician, his expert use of such an unusual technique illustrates a versatility seldom credited to him.

In addition to the hidden gems on his widely-known scores, there are the lesser-known scores that reveal a great deal about him, as well. Scores for films such as Hook and Home Alone reveal his more carefree and playful sides, while works such as Sugarland Express, The Reivers, and Stepmom show a gentler Williams.

He is also quite skilled at slowly building works over time. As mentioned above, the score for Raiders of the Lost Ark, while still musically rich, is the simplest of the Indiana Jones scores. As the series progressed, Williams introduced more and more themes into the musical lexicon of the films, so that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade doesn’t rely on the “action button,” as Williams puts it, of the “Raiders March.” Rather, Last Crusade features a texturally rich tapestry of leitmotifs and mood music that change rapidly, the main theme used subtly and sparingly as appropriate. He did the same thing for the Harry Potter films. The score for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is perhaps one of the simplest of his career, leaning on a small handful of leitmotifs. However, by the third film, the level of complexity was building. (It’s a shame that he didn’t stick around to score the entire series. This misfortune is mitigated by the fact that other composers have very capably continued in the direction that Williams was going, and the fact that he may well return to score the final film in the series.) He can build musical grandeur, not just over the course of a movie, but over an entire film franchise. The discipline involved in that sort of musical growth is astounding.

Between my adulation and the music theory I’ve tried to include to make the text more understandable, I left word count behind awhile ago. I’ll just finish by saying that as future generations discover William’s music, he will garner acclaim not just for his “greatest hits,” but for his entire body of work. Not only does he make a strong case for the legitimacy of what is often derogatorily called “pop classical,” he has given the world over fifty years of powerful music that is as broad in its emotional scope as it is beautiful.

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg

I will never forget the first time that I saw Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. I was in my French IV class, and our professor had decided that showing us actual French cinema would ultimately be more culturally rewarding than showing us Dumb and Dumber with the French voice track on, which was also part of the lesson plan that year.

Parapluies is a French jazz opera from 1964. Set against the Algeria’s war for independence from France in the 1950’s, the film follows two lovers, Guy and Geneviéve. When Guy is drafted into the war with Algeria, Geneviéve discovers that she is with child, and her mother begins pushing her towards marrying a diamond merchant who passes through town. The story is an important, beautiful, powerful part of the film, and I wouldn’t dare ruin that for anyone else, so I won’t go into it into too much depth here.

A lot of things about that movie struck me, even as a youth, and it was only as time went on that I began to unravel them. The first and most obviously moving aspect of the film is its score. Parapluies is a jazz opera in which every line of dialogue, however trivial, is sung. Michel Legrand, one of France’s foremost jazz composers, scored the film, and its haunting melodies (which were often translated and reworked into more traditional pop songs in the United States) stand up nearly half a decade later. Besides, there’s something memorable about seeing Guy bounding down the stairs, cheerfully belting out “Merde!” (roughly translated, “Shit!”) to a chorus of energetic, syncopated trumpet riffs. At once playful and tender, Legrand creates an emotionally rich musical environment for the film to play out, and if it is at first a bit disconcerting to hear small talk being quietly sung, it only serves to lead into the beautiful musical tapestry that the film becomes. The score has very few arias in the traditional sense, leaving them behind in favor of a wandering musical undercurrent that flirts briefly with pieces of melodies before moving on to other ideas, leaving you aching the entire time to hear each melody played out in full.

Another aspect of the film that captured my attention early on was Catherine Deneuve, perhaps the closest that arthouse cinema has ever come to producing a stone cold fox. This was a breakthrough role for Deneuve, who went on to acquire enough Palm d’Ors to fill a small house and who may be the only person to retain their critical credibility after playing a lesbian vampire in a motion picture.

But as I got older, I realized that I was watching a really well-put-together film. The cinematography displays great attention to detail, with unique shots of the French coastline and the streets and back alleys of Cherbourg. The other thing that jumps out is the sense of color. The opening sequence shows strikingly vibrant umbrellas being carried through the town, and the clothing worn throughout the film, as well as the décor of the interiors is prominent enough to almost be a character in the movie. The colors used in this film are so impressive that this actually marks one of the first times that I ever paid attention to the visual elements of the film as an art form rather than focusing on the story itself. (I learned recently that the director, Jacques Demy, knew that the film would fade and so made three black-and-white negatives in three different color bands, similar to the old Technicolor process, so that the color would be preserved and that later, the three bands could be brought together to re-create the saturated color of the film. Demy’s widow saw this process to completion for the DVD release of the film. I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought that the color was important.)

Demy’s film also goes beyond the black-and-white moral treatment that seems so common in any form of mainstream storytelling. There are no clear villains – even Cassard, the diamond merchant who tries to woo Geneviéve while Guy is in Algeria, is not an antagonist in any way, even less so if you see Demy’s previous film, Lola, which is actually about Cassard’s life and troubles before his appearance in Parapluies. One of the fundamental messages of the film is that you don’t have to have the fairytale ending,at least not the one you expect, to be happy. It’s not about the overarching triumph of love, or about the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of adversity, or anything like that, but three important things happen:

1. Things don’t turn out the way anyone plans them.

2. That’s okay.

3. I guess this is a bit of a cheat, because it is sort of a film trope, but love comes for people when they absolutely least expect it.

Beyond the novelty of the operetta format, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is a unique spectacle. Magnificently scored, impeccably acted, beautifully shot, the film stands out as a treasure even in the midst of a renaissance for French film. It’s definitely one to seek out.

Blade Runner

People watch movies for many different reasons. Some people want to be immersed in a story, while some want to be immersed in a mood, a blend of light and shadow and music that transports you convincingly to another world. Some want to watch their favorite actors perform, and some pay attention to the technical details – the cinematography, the sets, the lighting, and all of the other things that make a movie work. It is rare that everyone has something to look for, but every now and then, a film comes along wherein all of the elements fall together in glorious unison, a sparkling cinematic gem so clearly superior to most movies that it belongs to a category of film all its own. Ridley Scott’s magnum opus Blade Runner is such a film. Twenty-five years after being underappreciated and having the rights bandied about by studios that hated it, the film has blossomed from a failure to a cult classic to a masterpiece that is finally getting its due praise.

Scott’s movie shines today as beautifully as it did when it was released. Aesthetically, it’s an incredibly appealing film. Long shots of police cars hovering over the streets of a dystopian Los Angeles, for all of their bleakness, have a profound, muted beauty accented perfectly by Vangelis’s moving score. Futurist Syd Mead provided a vision of the future for the film that refuses to look dated, coming from an era in which even the most classic films bear the marks of their era, and the film’s cinematography brings that vision to life perfectly.

The narrative itself is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. On its surface,, it is a detective story, ableit one with sci-fi trappings. A group of genetically engineered humanoids called “Replicants” have escaped the off-world colonies where they were working and returned to Earth, where there presence is illegal. A detective named Deckard (Harrison Ford) who specializes in hunting down replicants is pulled out of retirement to track them down and destroy them. Deckard discovers that some of the replicants have been implanted with memories, in order to help them develop faster emotionally. As he finds himself falling in love with an unwitting Replicant, he begins to wonder what exactly it means to be human and if he is, in fact, human himself.

Actors such as Harrison Ford, M. Emmet Walsh, Edward James Olmos, and Rutger Hauer all give outstanding performances in a film that uses noir trappings to advance disturbing philosophical issues and the art of filmmaking itself, all at the same time.