Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break is a must see classic especially if you have a penchant for surfing, guns and early ’90s tight t-shirts, dude. Within the first 5 minutes a masked criminal holding up a bank looks at his watch to proclaim “little hand says, it’s time to rock and roll”, this is old-school action cinema at it’s best.
You're sayin' the FBI's gonna pay me to learn to surf?
Keanu Reeves plays Johnny Utah in his first action hero outing. His mission, to bust The Ex-Presidents, a gang of thrill seeking bank robbers by going undercover and infiltrating their clique. The leader of said gang is Patrick Swayze’s Bhodi who brings an idealistic innocence to the film whilst avoiding the pitfall of falling into self parody of the beach-philosopher character. Special mention must go to Gary Busey who plays the gravelly cynical partner to Johnny Utah, a stereotype as old as Hollywood itself. The role of Angelo Pappas is played with off-the-wall aplomb by Busey, who adds many fine insulting lines to temper Reeves’ and Swayze’s testosterone fuelled antics, “Listen you snot-nose little shit, I was takin’ shrapnel in Khe Sanh when you were crappin’ in your hands and rubbin’ it on your face.” For example.
What's the matter with you guys? This was never about the money, this was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit.
The film begins with the rise of brooding synths and strings from accomplished composer Mark Isham. This is combined with a visually effective series of edits of crashing waves to give a hint to the spiritual tone of the film from the get-go. However, like the film itself any indication of spirituality quickly gives way to a maximum velocity, crashing spectacle. The film’s tagline “100% adrenaline” although cliched is probably only a few percent from the truth. Isham has crafted a score that not only complements it’s parent film, but elevates it beyond the egregious silliness which pertains to most ’90s Hollywood action cinema.
When they run they dump the vehicle and they vanish... like a virgin on prom night. I mean they vanish, swishh...
If the film needs a saving grace, it must be the skydiving scene. It is not hyperbole to say this is both a cinematic tour de force and an orchestral masterpiece. Check it out in high quality, here. This is the scene in which the confusion of trust and betrayal between the bank robber and his FBI pursuer comes to a head while plummeting to earth after jumping from a “perfectly good airplane”. Although Isham’s musical signature is present throughout the film, this is where it truly comes to the fore (see track 16 – Skydive). The film has inherent and self-evident weaknesses (mainly the failure to have the audience believe in an enlightenment through extreme sports). However, there are some sublimely crafted action sequences which become almost abstract at times, the exceptional score goes some way to help lead the viewer down this vein.
Vaya con Dios, Brah.
Although made in 1991, the film score did not find a release until 2008 when La-La Land (a company specialising in score releases) took it upon themselves to allow this fine piece to be heard. This edition was limited to 2,000 units and features 65 minutes of score with liner notes by Dan Goldwasser incorporating comments from both Bigelow and Isham. It is now out of print.
It’s not dog-eat-dog around here…it’s dog-gang-rapes-dog-then-tortures-him-for-five-days-before-burying-him-alive-and-taking-out-every-motherfucker-the-dog-has-ever-known. Meet Steven Stelfox. – Kill Your Friends
Not for the faint of heart
There’s definitely an emotional release from learning about an angry cynical anti-hero. (Malcom Tucker answering the door for example: “Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off.”) Steven Stelfox is the protagonist in Kill Your Friends and works in the esoteric world of A&R and takes his ill-natured stance as a genuine hater of all mankind. He does not discriminate and hates everyone equally, the most bigoted and obscene first person narrator since Patrick Bateman.
The novel is set at the arse-end of Brit-pop, ‘cool britannia’ and all the things it came to represent, ravaging expense accounts, buy to let mortgages, politics replaced by PR speak and copious amounts of cocaine. It’s a tribute to the writer that Stelfox’s drug, sex and food binging can be laced with humour and pathos, where often reading about drug fuelled sessions can sound baseless and misguided. The narrator’s description of hangovers and comedowns and all the guilt and self-loathing they ensue are very close to the bone.
In short, it can’t be recommended enough. It’s dark and cruel, and essentially a string of vindictive character assassinations from start to finish. As Hunter S Thompson said: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
We’ll manufacture your records and put them in the fucking shops. We’ll try not to spend a red cent unless we’re sure we’ll get it back with interest. We’ll second-guess you and interfere at every conceivable stage of the artistic process. We’ll edit and remix tracks without your permission. We’ll force you to appear on appalling, degrading kiddies’ TV programmes where you’ll shake hands with Dobbin The Donkey and have to explain yourself to a teenage VJ with the attention span of a Ritalin-fuelled infant. We’ll work you until you can’t stand up. In collusion with your publishers we’ll try and license your music to TV adverts for everything from banks to multinational petrochemical companies. (We’d license it to whaling fleets and arms dealers too if only they advertised on TV.) We’ll under-account to you and charge you for every recoupable expense from the staples used to knock your horrendous contract together to the Coke you had from the fridge in my office. And if it doesn’t all work out, you’ll be dropped faster than a Plymouth hooker’s knickers when there’s a big ship in town. – Kill Your Friends
Based upon J.G. Ballard’s novel of the same name David Cronenberg’s film explores extreme human behaviour – the fascination with death and eroticisation of danger. After being involved in a head-on collision the homonymous lead character James Ballard (James Spader) and his wife Catherine Ballard (Deborah Karak Unger) find themselves increasingly involved with a cult of car crash fetishists, an underground sub-culture of omnisexual car-crash victims who use car crashes to fuel their sex lives. The movie essentially consists of a series of car crashes juxtaposed with sex scenes, providing a cautionary tale of a mechanised industrial society’s tendency to dull the human senses.
A psychopathic hymn
Some of J.G. Ballard’s (the author) favourite films were created by directors who work in tandem with great composers. For example, David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock, who Ballard has written about in a variety of contexts, had long standing relationships with composers Angelo Badalamenti and Bernard Herrmann respectively. Appropriately, the film adaptation of Crash was created by one of the most important director / composer teams of contemporary cinema: the Canadian duo of David Cronenberg and Howard Shore. J.G. Ballard has hailed Cronenberg’s Crash (made in 1996) as “the first film of the 21st century,” and in a review of one of the director’s more recent works, A History of Violence (2005) he wrote “all Cronenberg’s films make us edge back into our seats, gripped by the story unfolding on screen but aware that something unpleasant is going on in the seats around us.” The effect is compounded by the relationship between Cronenberg’s film in the context of a Howard Shore score.
Relentless sexual content
Shore has taken the opportunity to experiment with the music. In the liner notes for the soundtrack he explains that “… 75% of the score was composed while 25% was mutated after the music was recorded.” His approach is to focus on the emotions (or lack thereof) being played out on screen. Using six electric guitars, three harps, three woodwinds and two percussionists to make up most of the score, the ensemble provides a metallic touching on industrial sound, presenting little in the way of recurring themes. It is clear Shore understands that space and silence are important in manipulating the viewer’s perception in a film such as this. He has generated soundscapes under which the on-screen characters play out their increasingly hazardous and destructive lives. Listened to on it’s own, without Cronenberg’s scenarios to guide the audience, Crash is a difficult listen, with electric guitars monotonously moving forward, repetitive yet arousing. The woodwinds are used sparingly and tend to appear in the more intimate moments. When the small string orchestra makes an appearance it appears the characters may actually care for on another.
Metallic and melodic
There is a subtle use of electronic effects which is mirrored by lead character Ballard’s comments about technology in the film; the car is the technology we are most involved in, providing a marriage between human imagination and technology. These words could be used to describe Shore’s own take on his score for this film. The mixture of the electronic manipulation and acoustic instruments is carefully considered by the composer. Antique harps plucked over images of slow-moving heavy traffic provide a connection between old and new technology. The score mirrors the film in it’s linking of technology with the carnal. What is often referred to as a “love affair” with the automobile as resulted in a world-wide and growing addiction to a means of transportation which is unhealthy and destructive. Aside from the pollution and accident rate the addiction has also increased human isolation. Hidden in private shells people only interact when necessary, the interaction rarely becoming intimate until it is violent. Cronenberg, J.G. Ballard and Howard Shore put forward the idea that machines have changed our humanity and Crash says that our sexuality can mingle with the technology we hold so dear. Film director Bernardo Bertolucci apparently told Cronenberg that Crash is a religious masterpiece.
Technology and desire
It is easy to tell as the film progresses and protagonist James Ballard unravels psychologically the music become stranger to represent this. In one scene where Ballard, his wife and fetishist Vaughan are entering a car-wash, Shore creates a sort of music concrete (best described as electronic music created from editing fragments of natural and industrial sounds). The car-wash scene begins with detailed recordings of the convertible car as it reconfigures it’s roof; a window closing electrically to hermetically seal the occupants in the watertight car, giving way to the mixture of thick wads of cloth and leather against metal and streaming water sounds. The pulsing machine noise builds to an intensity measured by the sexual activity inside the car. However, mostly throughout the film, music is rarely louder than the dialogue, engines, and traffic noise dominating the sonic landscape of Crash.
Collision of flesh and metal
Shore says that Cronenberg has always given him considerable freedom in their collaborations. Having scored over a hundred films Shore claims that for him film and music are intertwined, that the film performs his music for him, in a way. The score successfully creates an atmosphere that allows the violence and sexuality to seep out, rather than represent it explicitly as would be the temptation for many composers. The various performers and soloists show discipline in how their respective parts are played, never conveying too much emotion into the score. It is unlike anything Shore has produced before or since. He has gone on to compose full-blown orchestral scores for the likes of Peter Jackson and his Lord of The Rings trilogy, but the budget would not allow for such extravagance in this film, leading to a much more interesting product. The understanding of dynamics and layering are clear here, the limited tonal and thematic range and a reluctance to key changes creates hypnotically repetitive melodic patterns – hypnotising the audience to the ritual significance of automobile trauma. This intelligent balance creates the perfect environment for action, magnifying the images and their meanings. The score juxtaposes the most ancient instruments (such as harp and flute) with the most contemporary (sampling and computer manipulation), reflecting J.G. Ballard’s comparison of basic human needs (sex) with contemporary culture (cars).
As a bit of a diversion, here is a classic Squarepusher track Red-Hot Car cut together with a re-edit of some scenes from the film. Nothing like the soundtrack for the actual film, but fun all the same.
