The Young Ones (1961 film)

Fifty years ago, the world used to be a very different place.

Apparently, teenagers liked musicals. Said musicals were cheerful, uplifting, and didn't depend upon being mean about anyone. Some of them even contained that nice Cliff Richard, shock horror.

Well, he wasn't marketed as that 'nice' Cliff Richard back then (apparently he was somehow considered 'rebellious'), but on the evidence of this film, 1961 looks and sounds like it was a very nice place.

In some ways it's hard not to enjoy this in an ironic post-modern sort of way. In Technicolor, the 1960s fashions, actors and style of filmmaking look so stereotypical that this could almost be a parody. With all the bright London traffic and post boxes, I kept expecting Austin Powers to drive through the background in that ubiquitous red double decker bus.

And why not, for this is a film all about style. The raising-money-by-putting-on-a-show-to-save-their-building-from-a-property-developer plot is not going to stand up to much scrutiny when early on the lead character exploits special effects to leap, conjure, teleport, impersonate and observe events far away. If the secretly wealthy Cliffy can do those things, then he sure doesn't need to put on a show to raise £1500. Yes that's right, fifteen-hundred pounds!!! (zoom-in on bald Dr Cliff Evil raising his little finger to his mouth and drooling)

So much of this is dubbed that I found it reminiscent of watching the Australian TV series K9, which combined with Cliff's accent to make him reminiscent of Starkey, although Cliff is definitely the better one at singing.

The movie's title number struck me as odd though. When Cliff croons "The young ones, darlin' we're the young ones...", he is obviously having words put in his mouth by someone much older. Now that's square, daddy-o.

While Cliff, Melvyn Hayes, Richard O'Sullivan and Hankie do indeed look so young, the whole show is really stolen by the perpetually watchable 53-year-old Robert Morley.

"Unfortunately, I am a brute."

Still, while the film may have aged (alright so more accurately the world has), its appeal may not have done. In the mid 1980s, I remember catching the end of this twenty-year-old classic when I was a teenager. I assumed it was not something that my peers at school would have been interested in. A month later however I had borrowed an audio cassette of something or other off of Spencer at school, and elsewhere on the same tape I found that he had been recording this off the telly. I later challenged him about it. He admitted it, and very quickly changed the subject.

I wonder how many others, then or today, are closet fans of that nice Sir Cliff?

(available here)

The Effects Machine - Paddy Kingsland

In recent years, the word 'geek' has become very useful.

I'm talking about the way in which people now use it to justify why they are doing a thing that they fear most of the rest of the world will consider to be a waste of time. Scrutinising pop-culture. Following science fiction. Using out-of-date technology. Describing oneself with the label 'geek' is a handy time-saving way of informing someone that you're quite interested in the subject, but not one of those people who is too interested in it, because that would just be weird. I'm unique, but don't worry, I'm not that different.

Well, I do all three of the above. Always have done, ever since I was kid. In fact, my geekiness list is rather long. As a teenager, when I understand you're supposed to be spending your money on music, clothes and the opposite sex, among other things I was saving up to buy sound effects records, which I would duly sit down and listen to, all the way through, several times over. Sometimes I'd copy some of them onto cassettes. I built up quite a collection library of them. I still have it. Shame our record player doesn't work any more. What's that? Ebay? Ooh no, I could never sell them...

For my 42nd birthday this year (2013), one of the things I asked for was an LP of sound effects and synthesised music by my favourite composer Paddy Kingsland. Though he's scored countless TV series, from children's shows to comedies, he's probably best remembered for his science fiction work, specifically on the radio and TV incarnations of the BBC's Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

Despite this, he's never released very much of his work domestically. If you collect Paddy Kingsland, as I do, then you're committed to collecting album after album of compilations, often containing just the one isolated track by him.

This makes The Effects Machine something of a rarity. Among his other freelance engagements, Paddy would also work on production music - stuff that didn't have a specific purpose yet. There are a few such albums of his out there, if only you can find them.

So tonight I found myself sitting down to discover a few more of his isolated pieces from that era of the 1980s.

Track #3 Micropower blew me away! Why is science fiction music all so orchestral and old-fashioned these days? Hire this guy again - he makes music that sounds like nothing on Earth!

Conversely, some of the other tracks sounded rather familiar...

Tracks #18 and #19 (different mixes of Communiqué) had me humming along, and it took me a while to recognise this as the sound bed from underneath LBC Radio's old Nightline Newsquiz... because I also retain it underneath some talking on one of my old home-made compilation tapes!

Tracks #38 and #39 Hyperspace evoke a mix of the aforementioned Hitchhiker episodes, and his contemporary work on Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead in 1983. It's all sounds so wonderfully optimistic for the future, and a dawning technological age full of promise and wondrous possibilities. Sigh, his music made distant years like 2013 sound like they were going to be so much better than they actually do sound. Oh, wait, tonight 2013 actually does sound that way. Oh, well, that's all the more to his credit then!

Also of note has just got to be the catchily named track #67.16 Computer Graphics (p) Long synth slide - up. It's probably not, but it doesn't half sound like the UK opening to that other 1980s series Fraggle Rock, specifically the effect played over the camera zooming down into the lighthouse's skylight and through the Captain / PK / BJ and Sprocket's quarters...

While many of the other sound effects on this compilation are similarly artificially composed, in a few cases Paddy appears to have simply recorded a thing happening and included it. At one point there's the sound of a radio being tuned in. Well, as explained above, those all fit in with my own personal geekiness too.

There remain several more of these releases out there for me to track down, not to mention of course that today the man himself still continues to work, and compose. Here's hoping that Paddy's realisation of the future continues to sound every bit as optimistic as it always used to.

The real future may well need it to.

Available here.

Citizen Kane

*** Contains spoilers ***

A mortality film about the boredom of success, that is not remotely exciting, but is entirely fascinating.

Charles Foster Kane spends his whole life pursuing his wont, but he is taken away from his mom and dad, his political career is defeated by an opponent who is more sly, and his collecting of artefacts becomes so meaningless that by retirement he has ceased even opening their boxes.

His first marriage is depicted as failing in a numbing montage of ever more uncomfortable disagreements over breakfast.

His determination to make his second marriage work, by giving her everything he possibly can, highlights the ultimate emptiness of material possessions and adulation. These things can help with happiness, but only to a point, as Charles and Susan learn when they discover they have nothing else left to wish for. Eventually Susan develops an OCD for doing jigsaw puzzles, creating a false need that she can spend her enormous amount of spare time filling.

Even reporter Jerry Thompson, who after Charles' death spends the entire film searching for the meaning of the tycoon's enigmatic final word 'rosebud', never succeeds, although he has a significant advantage over Charles in how to deal with this dissatisfaction.

He simply accepts that the conundrum doesn't fit his expectation of having a solution that he can identify, and so, rather brilliantly, he just gets on with something else instead.

Jerry: "Charles Foster Kane was a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get or lost. No, I don't think it explains anything. I don't think any word explains a man's life. No - I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle - a missing piece. We'd better get along. We'll miss the train."

Ahh, the power of finding value in whatever is here rather than there...

Although the non-chronological narrative is confusing, and the acting quite variable, Citizen Kane bears viewing more than once. The camerawork, style and script are all simply first class, and credit the viewer with just the sort of intelligence that we usually have to leave behind when watching a movie.

Mr. Bernstein: "Mr. Thompson. A fellow will remember things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it, there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on, and she was carrying a white parasol, and I only saw her for one second and she didn't see me at all - but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."

That's not a plot-point, it's just the sort of brainy thing these characters are capable of.

Also the make-up here is excellent, with Orson Welles in the title role convincingly appearing to progress through decades. Joseph Cotton as three incarnations of best friend Jedediah Leland looks so different each time that it's a challenge to make the connection that he's the same guy.

Conversely, George Coulouris aims flatly for laughs as Kane's long-suffering guardian Walter Parks Thatcher, and I counted at least three occasions when he dared to mug to camera and break the fourth wall!

The opening sequence featuring a posthumous newsreel of Kane's life is quite laborious, and just goes to show that Hollywood's reliance on a news report for exposition is not purely a modern device after all. It also makes more sense on a second viewing once we actually know which guy in the clips is Kane!

Although we the audience do indeed discover what Charles' final word refers to (fuzzily - that thing it's written on could be anything), it remains up to the individual to choose how to apply it to his life, or indeed to our own. It beggars that haunting question of mortality, what understanding of ourselves might each one of us discover on our deathbed, in failure?

How might a similar film of one's own life substitute the ambitions, defeats and pointlessness?

What will I leave behind?

(available in an unopened box here)

OctoberBaby

Original subject. Brilliant message. Nice film.

Blank characters. Dreary songs. Worst ending in cinema history.

Basically I liked this film in theory, but much less in its realisation.

What's that? You want details? Well so did lead teenager Hannah, and look where those questions got her:

Hannah: "My parents aren't really my parents. And my real parents tried to abort me. And I have a brother, well, I had a brother. He died shortly after the - I'm angry at my parents for not telling me sooner and making me think that I was just like everybody else. I'm angry at my real mom for not wanting me. Why didn't she want me, what's so wrong with me? I found her. And she still doesn't want me. 'N I feel guilty. Part of me feels like he should be alive, and I shouldn't. I wonder if he would've been a better person than me, what he would have been like? I just - ang - I should hate myself for feeling this way."

As you can see, Hannah pretty well has the full set of possible issues when it comes to discovering that someone tried to stop you as a fetus, and in so doing blunderingly caused the opposite by bringing your birthday forward. Well there aren't many films about that journey of self-discovery, so of course the writers of this one are going to cram in as many related developments as they can.

Not listed above are Hannah's lifelong medical problems, including epilepsy, multiple hip surgery and acute asthma, which cause the film to open with her collapsing on stage in the middle of a play she's in.

Her biggest problem though would have to be her hopeless adopted father, who despite his years of life experience appears to have never before come across these things called teenagers.

When he thinks his daughter is going to do one thing but then she does another, he's completely taken by surprise. He reads her diary, and then secretly emails it to her doctor, before being dumbfounded at her outraged reaction to this. Has this guy ever met his daughter before? Has he ever met another human being before? For that matter has her doctor? I would describe him as your definitive out-of-touch movie dad, except that he's written as too shallow even for that.

Not that I should be singling him out here. This movie is packed to bursting with bland characters, none of whom offer us any hook whatsoever for being interested in them or their lives. Even the cops turn out to be so nice that they let our heroes off, twice! Thin characterisation can work well in some types of comedy (eg. the 1960s TV series The Monkees), but I can't think of a comparative successful example of drama. There are a couple of comic relief students who occasionally get to say something almost worth smiling at, but after the first half even they get dropped, presumably for threatening to bring a bit of sparkle to all the grey.

Bmac: "This is literally the worst hotel I've ever seen."
Truman "It looked better on the internet."
Bmac: "Where - at normanbateshotel.com?"
Truman "Hotelmonkey.biz."
Bmac: "I'm sleepin' in the car."

The story, though groaning with heavy issues, is a simple one, and that's one of its strengths. Look at the details, and you can't help but notice Hannah's best friend Jason claiming that he doesn't have the money for a second motel room and so he just has to share with her, before in a later scene revealing that he actually had enough spare emergency cash for his own room all along. Aye-aye.

But ignore this movie's shortcomings, because where this film does positively excel is in its moments of drama.

The cast with the serious roles do a sterling job of taking what little their dialogue offers them and transforming it into something compelling. They're helped along enormously by a director and editor who are prepared to really invest the necessary time into these key scenes. The story's simplicity is probably one of the reasons why there is the luxury to invest so much time in telling it. Despite starting out as a road movie, there's no sense at all of this film being in a hurry to get anywhere.

When Jasmine Guy shows up as a nurse who assisted at Hannah's attempted abortion, her performance is solid gold. Thanks to how outstandingly well the film's dialogue has been recorded and mixed (if not the foley), I found I could really sit back and absorb this, without any idea how long the conversation would last, like in a real one.

I'm afraid I can't really say the same about all the dreary Monday morning music that keeps rearing its half-asleep head throughout. Now I admit that when it comes to using a song on a movie's soundtrack, I'm automatically prejudiced against it, because I find it to be a form of narration. However this film tries to get away with squeezing an entire album into the transitions between scenes. The net result is a movie which keeps stopping to explain to you what it's been trying to say in each scene, which is hardly the mark of a film that's succeeding at this.

The worst post-modern moment though is saved for the closing credits. Having spent nearly two hours suspending our disbelief, while the credits roll they gobsmackingly interview some of the cast and crew about how they felt making it. While I respect the content in isolation, the decision to include this within the actual film itself is suicidal. Suddenly these characters aren't real, and neither are any of the events we've just witnessed. Know how many viewers this leaves still connecting with the story? None!

In summary, a film with such a refreshingly life-affirming message ought to itself contain some life too.

(available, throughout the year, here)

Pointless

Just spent eleven years' of Nectar points on half a vacuum cleaner. (it turns out Argos no longer accepts Green Shield Stamps :( )

Jumanji (1995 film)

Children's horror comedy that has no doubt been responsible many a nightmare since 1995.

Instead of being a nice safe board game, Jumanji keeps throwing all manner of malevolent real-life dangers our young players' way - from fierce jungle animals to natural disasters to never seeing your parents again - and it all begins its smashing within the delicate safety of the kids' home.

Worse, when each challenge is escaped, it still never really goes away. The result is a town outside the window that is becoming increasingly ravaged by earthquakes, swarms of poisonous wasps, and fast-growing flesh-eating plant life.

Oh, and a big game hunter called Van Pelt, but he's one of the movie's comic reliefs. The sequence where they all fight back at him using whatever's on sale at the local supermarket is just like watching a Home Alone short. (yes, I'm pulling that face now...)

There is danger almost all the way through this one, ramped up considerably by there being no corporeal intelligence to bargain with at the centre of it all. Had this been an episode of Doctor Who, then you can bet the evil game's box would have presently begun bragging out loud about its plans, and laughing. Long, and heartily.

There are a few moments where a needed explanation appears to have been cut, but these seem to me to be minor. I'm thinking of the (lone) cop who almost runs Alan over but then tries to arrest him (!), the medics who vanish when bugs attack the car, and why on Earth Sarah agrees to play the game again. But hey, maybe that was just the Moviemix channel deciding to drop some lines for time.

Jumanji is a well-made epic ride, and all the more impressive for pulling together so many different genres. For the most part I found it very well thought through, and although many of the effects have not dated terribly well, the conviction of the whole cast ensure that they have lost nothing of their dread-factor.

But really, don't throw the game away, just burn it already.

This afternoon, somewhere beyond the bottom of our garden, I could hear a drum kit beating away.

I've always assumed that sort of thing to merely be a neighbour playing around with an actual drum kit, but now... (shudder)...

(Available here. Don't buy the wrong product.)