From the Archives: Clone Wars

Another deep dive into the pre-Talking Movies archives uncovers an infuriating Star Wars movie, plus ca change and all that.

Clone Wars sees George Lucas continue his Terminator like quest to destroy our childhood memories. He trashed Star Wars, gave us an unnecessary Indiana Jones, and now the only worthwhile piece of the Star Wars prequel enterprise is desecrated, presumably for the sake of consistency. And we have two Star Wars shows starting on American TV this autumn to suffer through. He just doesn’t stop…

Clone Wars follows our heroes (I use the term loosely given that neither displays any personality) Anakin and Obi-Wan as they rescue Jabba’s kidnapped son. This film takes all the worst elements of the prequels and magnifies them. Characters without quirks, dialogue that veers between plodding and unbearable, badly shot action completely without tension as we know the futures of the characters, droids and clones that are visually silly and emotionally uninvolving, and of course plots that are so hilariously over-plotted they become tedious twenty minutes in. This film runs for 100 minutes but feels closer to 200 so boring is the story of Anakin taking on an apprentice. Just to interest kids she’s the feisty/plucky/other patronising synonym for feisty girl Ahsoka, who teaches Anakin as much as she learns from him and….yeah. It’s that bad….

What really galls is that Lucas didn’t ask Genndy Tartakovsky to direct this film. Tartakovsky, the creator of Samurai Jack, is something of a mad genius. His hand drawn animation of the Clone Wars TV series was far superior to this insipid CGI and he was far less faithful to Lucas’ boring vision. He made three minute shorts devoted to showing the Jedi Knights being awesome which are at their best the coolest animation you’ll ever see, check out the dialogue free one where Sam Jackson’s character destroys a whole droid army using the Force. When he made longer episodes his storytelling and visual flair came off like an inspired blend of Hitchockian suspense, Spielbergian action choreography, and Sergio Leone’s use of outrageous close-ups to create mythic confrontations.

Was Lucas was appalled to find someone had made something awesome under his name by going so far off the reservation and decided to fix things by making a really faithful Clone Wars feature? That’s what it feels like. This is very bad, wretched beyond belief actually. The only positive to be drawn is encountering some genuine voice actors for once as only Christopher Lee and Samuel L Jackson reprise their live-action roles. All the other characters are voiced by actors talented enough to do more than one voice (Dreamworks Animation take a hint), the standout performance being the sexy/sinister huskiness of Nika Futterman as the Sith villainess Ventress.

This may be acceptable for very undemanding toddlers but it would be infinitely better for their creative development if parents just performed the original trilogy for them as sock puppet theatre.

0/5

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part VIII

As the title suggests here are some short thoughts about the movies which aren’t quite substantial enough for each to merit an individual blog posting.

Did you just ask me who I am?…

Humphrey Who?

Patrick Doyle asked an unnerving question on his Sunday Breakfast show a couple of weeks ago. How many people know who Grace Kelly is anymore? … How could people not know who Grace Kelly is?! Then I started to worry… I am interested in history in general, and this extends into burrowing with curiosity and sympathy into the back catalogue of cinema. But I have to admit that for many people, probably I fear the vast majority, they frankly couldn’t give a damn. (And would only have the faintest idea that that was a reference to the most popular film ever made) A particularly dispiriting display of wilful ignorance of the past came at the Lighthouse Hallowe’en screening of Halloween back in 2016. The very young, very very drunk audience, mostly in party later on fancy dress costume, was hooting in derision from the get-go. At anything and everything, any detail of dialogue or costume or reality (like a 70s car) that revealed the movie as having been made in 1978. I couldn’t understand this attitude of unbridled contempt then, and still struggle with it now. Do they not think people as yet unborn will hoot in self-same derision in 2046 at the films they hold precious now? For heaven’s sake most of these people were sporting the Snowflake hair-do whose sheer omnipresence and ostentation means, as I wrote some months back, that it will be as embarrassing on Jan 1^st 2020 as bell-bottomed jeans were on Jan 1^st 1980.

Censor and be damned!

Channel 4 has got my goat recently by showing films too early for its own purposes. Dante’s Peak saw a trio of deaths removed, presumably for fear of upsetting younger viewers. But then why show it in early afternoon?! Instead we got the build-up to the trio of grisly deaths, and the emotional fall-outs of the other characters reacting to the grisly deaths, and but no actual deaths so people seemed to be reacting to nothing. It’s all too reminiscent of the time that RTE decided to cut Raiders of the Lost Ark, and left out Indy getting shot, but kept in Indy in great pain attempting to bandage the bloody wound that he’d acquired mysteriously while driving without incident. Channel 4 also decided to censor Romancing the Stone. They snipped the full bloody detail of the animatronic alligator pulling off the villain’s hand, but then kept in his sustained agonised screams and fumbled frantic one-handed bandaging of the bloody stump where his left hand used to be. I don’t know whether it could be said to be more disturbing to show consequences after eliding the actions, but it is frustrating. Channel 4 should take a page from the book of the censor in Malaysia; who banned a film altogether after he’d had to make so many cuts it was left an incoherent mess that did nobody any favours. Show these films later in the day or just don’t show them!

Rub and … Scrub

So Scarlett Johansson, having better things to do than fight Twitter mobs, has pulled out of playing a transsexual in Rub and Tug. Some of the self-same people who mercilessly bullied her online now (incredibly) hope she’ll continue producing the movie. But… clearly she’d been producing, guiding the screenplay, hiring a director she’d worked with before, in order to win an Oscar; following in the footsteps of Jared Leto in 2014, as she noted in her initial response which the usual cyber-bullies dubbed ‘toxic’. Why actively produce this movie now its purpose for her has been gutted? Why would the financing stay in place when an Avenger is to be replaced by a transsexual player like… And there we hit the customary avoidance of specifics in such campaigns. Who? Daniela Vega? Candis Cayne? Films like this don’t make money without star-power and prestige traction. Dallas Buyers Club made 55 million, Moonlight made 65 million, Mysterious Skin made 2 million, Love is Strange made 2 million. Scarlett Johansson starring probably makes it likely you have a just slightly better than 50/50 shot at hitting the Dallas rather than the Skin end of that spectrum. Scarlett Johansson not starring reduces yours odds of hitting pay-dirt so substantially the only reason not to pull financing would be the same masochism expected of her to produce a film to benefit the people who bullied her.

He Got Melody or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Just Love John Williams Again

It was while I was watching this John Williams BBC Prom at the end of last summer that I realised I had done him wrong.

John Williams gets stick in austere musicological circles for his tendency to write theme after theme with the same rhythm. And it’s certainly true that Star Wars, Superman, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park and E.T. all pomp along on more or less similar rhythmic lines. Well, so what? Danny Elfman writes interesting, varied, and energetic rhythms, and has barely written one melody in his entire career. What is his Spider-Man theme? Can you hum his Batman theme beyond the first five notes where the rhythmic variations kick in? You can’t really hum a rhythm without a melody, but, be the rhythms e’er so simple, everybody can hum any number of different Williams melodies. It was happenstance that I watched the John Williams Proms shortly after watching Neil Brand’s BBC documentary on the evolution of film music. As he got to the present day, let’s call it the Age of Zimmer, the all-pervading influence of modern synthesiser and digital programming and recording revealed the paucity of actual music written for actual instruments, as opposed to programming in a swathe of sound; a trick that works well for strings, brass, and percussion, hence the now trademark Hans Zimmer sound, but works less well when applied to woodwind instruments. Either you write a melody for the clarinets or you don’t, but you surely don’t need to throw 40 clarinets at a purely rhythmic ostinato developed from Zimmer at keyboard. And noticeable from early on in the John Williams Proms was woodwind instrument solos, everywhere.

I mentioned austere musicological circles, and I had in mind a particular academic faculty; but also a broader critical tendency. Discovering the Minimalists Glass, Reich, and Adams on BBC Radio 3 in the last five and a half years has been a joy, but has also left me retrospectively incredulous that my music theory education ignored them. I was taught that melody was debunked, Cage and Stockhausen were the heirs to Schoenberg, any other approach was Canute in staves, and that was that. Well, not quite, as it turns out. That tendency, to regard melody as an affront to modernity, is particularised in distaste for Williams’ scores. Jerry Goldsmith gets more love in such circles because he subscribed to their agenda of atonal experimental serialist dissonance. To a point, that is. And the point is interesting. Goldsmith wrote the immensely hummable themes for The Man from UNCLE and Star Trek: The Next Generation (first used for 1979’s The Motion Picture). He wrote a sinuous oboe for Basic Instinct, overpowering choral harmonies for The Omen, and a rambunctious march for Gremlins. But it is because he so often chose to write mood music not hummable melodies; prioritising dissonance over harmony, atmosphere over leitmotifs, and prepared percussion over woodwind solos; that he is esteemed a better composer. One might nearly say a more virtuous composer, because the valorisation is almost more ideological than it is aesthetic. And the result can be seen in a quick, easy, and telling contrast with John Williams.

Let us take some sci-fi classics. Goldsmith scored Planet of the Apes and Alien. Williams scored Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Having heard Williams’ Close Encounters of the Third Kind suite in the National Concert Hall I can attest it is largely dissonant mood music that isn’t particularly rewarding detached from the accompanying Spielbergian imagery. It is therefore probably the closest Williams in large scale came to the more critically valued Goldsmith model. And yet it contains a five note melody that is hummable seconds after you first hear it. If I show you a still of Francois Truffaut at Table Mountain regarding the gargantuan UFO mothership and ask what music you associate with it, you should instantly, without thinking, hum those five notes. If I show you a still of Mark Hamill regarding the twin sunsets of Tatooine and ask what music you associate with it, you should instantly, without thinking, start humming a swelling string melody. But if I show you a still of Charlton Heston regarding the Statue of Liberty on a beach and ask what music you associate with it, you should hum and haw, and mutter there was some business with horns and drums earlier in the chase sequence. If I show you a still of John Hurt regarding his Chinese dinner with unusual indigestion and ask what music you associate with it, you should be stumped, and mutter there was something slow, eerie, and atonal in space at the beginning.

Goldsmith’s opening titles for Alien are strongly influenced by a piece of music by, I think, Bartok or Shostakovich (I have aggravatingly misplaced my scribbled note). But the ur-text for Williams, especially for Spielbergian japery, is, I would argue, the 4^th movement of Prokofiev’s 5^th Symphony. And that is crucial. As a child Shostakovich was forbidding and austere to me, whereas Prokofiev was the beloved creator of Peter and the Wolf. (Shostakovich indeed has only truly come to life for me in the last five years.) And while Bartok and Shostakovich have the spiky rhythms and dissonant harmonies that make one modern, Prokofiev, like Gershwin, was held in less regard because of his continued devotion to melody; a mere melodist, not a serious composer. But that is why Peter and the Wolf works, because Prokofiev is effortlessly able to create memorable, instantly hummable melodies for each of the characters in his story. Leitmotifs – much like Williams’ old-fashioned approach to scoring character in action. When you hear Prokofiev’s music you can see in your mind’s eye the action the narrator interjects. And those melodies take on a life of their own beyond the production, in the same way that Williams’ melodies take on a life of their own beyond the cinema screen; appearing as ringtones, programming in classical concert halls, and literally hummed by people to one another at appropriate moments – much as people do their best screeching Psycho strings whenever a situation parodically calls for Bernard Herrmann’s equally screen-transcending moment.

As Neil Brand’s sweeping outline of the evolution of film music had it, everything begins with Korngold; bringing to Hollywood the leitmotifs of Wagnerian opera with an extra lush string-laded Romanticism. Bernard Herrmann introduced serialism, dissonance, and experimentation, but could equally effortlessly pen the frenetic and melodic North by Northwest title music. Jazz and atonal dissonance broadened the spectrum of sonic colours available; together in the case of David Shire’s music for The Taking of Pelham 123 in which the inimitable great rolling funk bass and percussion provided the mother of all propulsive and hummable hooks over which jazz trumpets blared in serialist sequence. And then the synthesiser began to take hold and film music became technological and thoroughly modern. … Until the biggest film of the decade, Star Wars, abjured all this for a return to Korngold. John Williams, then, was a titan, who forcefully and singlehandedly redirected film music back to the melodic orchestral track. A brief side-note: having previously thrown around the word ideological in the placing of Goldsmith over Williams it is meet to note here that Stockhausen himself was a man of self-regarding dogmatism, to the extent that a Hungarian composer stormed out of one of his fabled workshops volubly cursing that Stockhausen’s insistence that any return to melody and harmony was … counter-revolutionary … sounded all too unpleasantly familiar to someone who had lately run from Soviet tanks. But Williams’ counter-revolution would never have succeeded had he not had so many damn good melodies.

John Williams is 85, and still scoring the occasional movie for Spielberg or Lucas (sic). It is important that we treasure him while we can.

Getting Back to Back to the Future

Watching the Back to the Future trilogy yesterday for ‘Back to the Future Day’ made me think again about the Films You’d Love Your Kids To See season in the Lighthouse cinema this past summer.

Back to the Future of course featured in that season. Time travel has never, ever been as much fun as 1980s teenager Marty McFly’s jaunt back to 1950s Hill Valley where he must ensure his teenage parents meet and fall in love to ensure his own future existence. Watching all three films you realised anew what a great double-act Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd were as Marty and Doc Brown, how stirring Alan Silvestri’s score was, the incredible 1980s-ness of everything, and just how sharp a script Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale wrote. Watching the waves of nostalgia washing over ITV 2 yesterday you also wondered if the 1980s really was a golden age for kid’s films or if it’s just the generation that grew up with them wallowing in nostalgia for their own childhood rather than the films.

Back in the summer I wrote about the paradox of the Lighthouse encouraging adults to take their children to see films they had enjoyed as children. Your children cannot have the same childhood you had because films are part of a cultural matrix. You can’t separate them from the culture surrounding them. Observe Huey Lewis, Ronald Reagan, Michael Jackson, Clint Eastwood, Star Wars, Star Trek and Japanese corporations in the Back to the Future trilogy. These are films of the 1980s, with all that means for politics, music, fashion, television, and on and on and on… To remember originally experiencing Back to the Future involves comics and annuals that accompanied it, which tied it together with a whole complex of movies; Ghostbusters, Short Circuit, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Star Trek, The Goonies, E.T., The Karate Kid, Roger Moore’s Bonds; and television; Doctor Who, The Real Ghostbusters, Thundercats, Transformers, Mask, ALF, Family Ties, MacGyver, The A-Team, Knightrider. That’s some fearsome nostalgia.

But in a smartphone age there is something retro not just about making children experience movies with hundreds of people who have all ditched their phones to unite as an audience and groan as one at Indy being served monkey brains but also in showing them movies shot in such an old-fashioned way as Back to the Future. Robert Zemeckis recently said vis a vis The Walk that spectacle doesn’t just mean CGI. A close-up is cinematic spectacle, because close-ups don’t happen in reality. Look at all the moments in Back to the Future when Silvestri’s score tells you how to read a scene while Zemeckis moves the camera as outrageously as Hitchcock to draw your attention to something, convey importance, or just dazzle you. When Zemeckis unleashes the train pushing a DeLorean finale of Back to the Future: Part III it shames today’s blockbusters. This summer saw many action sequences that were neither choreographed nor legible, but simply CGI edited in a frenzy to create an impression of thrilling action. Zemeckis’ train finale by contrast, is so perfectly constructed, shot by shot, that a 1910s audience would comprehend it and thrill to it as Guido Silvestri hammered his piano.

Twitter went crazy because Back to the Future: Part II’s future day had arrived, but watching that 2015 sequence yesterday it was striking just how much of its vista of hoverboards and flying cars was realised practically. To say nothing of how the earliest cinema pioneers would have smiled approvingly at the lo-fi trick Zemeckis employed in the sequels to have multiple versions of Fox and Lloyd interacting with each other onscreen. And watching Zemeckis’ inspired writing partner Bob Gale effortlessly handle the parallel timelines chaos of Back to the Future: Part II’s time-travel antics you couldn’t help but sigh, remembering just how insultingly nonsensical Terminator: Genisys was. Zemeckis and Gale are no doubt appreciative of how beloved their work is, but Zemeckis probably wishes people would go see the movie he released last month instead of hyping one he made thirty years ago. Perhaps the takeaway from ‘Back to the Future Day’ is we get the movies we deserve.

Zemeckis & Gale had a horrible time getting their script greenlighted in the 1980s. But the idea that anybody would touch it with a bargepole now is fantasy. It’s not a sequel, it’s not based on a comic book, or a toy, or a TV show, or a YA novel, it is simply an original idea that happens to be cinematic lightning in a bottle. If we want films now that will be as beloved in 2045 as Back to the Future is now then we need to put our foot down: we want sharp scripts and properly choreographed action.

The Transporter Refuelled

Luc Besson reboots his Transporter franchise with a younger version of Frank Martin, but without the State in the lead, things just aren’t the same…

Ed Skrein replaces Jason Statham as Frank Martin, and, in a transparent attempt to give proceedings a Last Crusade vibe, Ray Stevenson is his retired spy father Frank Sr. But the film’s all about Anna (Loan Chabanol), a traumatised hooker on the French Riviera who comes up with an audacious plan for revenge on her pimps, which begins with the dispatching of Bond henchman Anatole Taubman’s Stanislas. She plans to get out from the under the thumb of the Russian mob, and take her sisters in prostitution with her, by turning junior bosses Yuri (Yuri Kolokolnikov) and Leo (Lenn Kudrjawizki) against their more successful colleague Arkady (Radivoje Bukvic). But if Anna and her comrades in arms Gina (Gabriella Wright), Maria (Tatiana Pajkovic) and Qiao (Wenxia Yu) are to pull this off then they will need the help of both Franks.

It seems silly complaining about the 19 year age gap between Stevenson and Skrein given only 12 years separated Connery and Ford, but Stevenson is the same age as Keanu Reeves; it almost feels like he’s there as back-up in case Skrein couldn’t carry the film (and indeed he displays little of his Game of Thrones’ swagger). This is a double redundancy as Anna controls the film, to the point where, following Mad Max: Fury Road, it must be said this peculiar bait-and-switch manoeuvre is as unacceptable as any other. Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers features prominently, copies even being left lying about lairs, but another key 1840s text seems more apposite given that the logline for this movie could be ‘Hookers of all countries unite, you have nothing to lose but your pimps, you have a world to gain’.

There is a nice fight involving some business with filing cabinets, but too often Frank is a supporting player, while Frank Sr gets kidnapped twice to aid plot mechanics; as a spy he’s more Kim Bauer than Jack. And then there’s the action directing of Camille Delamere, who edited Transporter 3 and Taken 2 before helming Brick Mansions. Some of what should be the film’s best moments (car landing in an airplane tunnel, Frank jumping off a jet-ski into a jeep) become conceptual stunts, where there’s a nice physical set-up, only for a digital pay-off to leave you feeling cheated. The under-used Inspector Becatoui (Samir Guesmi) leaves you pining for the absurdist comedy of previous Transporters, and wondering why Besson decided that Bill Collage and Adam Cooper, writers of Tower Heist and Exodus: Gods and Kings, fitted this knowing franchise

The Transporter Refuelled has some fun fights, but if the Transporter becomes a backseat driver in his movie what exactly is the point of rebooting the franchise at all?

2.75/5

Kids’ Films at the Lighthouse

Films You’d Love Your Kids To See, a season of classic 1980s movies back on the big screen, kicks off in the Lighthouse cinema tonight.

During July and August you can relive the golden age of kids’ films of the 1980s, with a brace of detours to the 1970s. The Lighthouse promises films which drew audiences into worlds filled with magic, adventure, thrills, and frights, courtesy of goblins, spaceships, pirates, muppets, friendly aliens, flying dragons, cars that could go back in time, and imbued with a sense of awe and optimism that can now be relived and enjoyed once more by new and older generations. If the last clause about awe and optimism causes bad flashbacks to Tomorrowland fear not. Film-goers are invited to experience the original spectacular sci-fi of Spielberg’s E.T. and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, as well as the fantasies of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, and The NeverEnding Story, and the tongue-in-cheek derring-do of Indiana Jones and The Goonies.

Special events include Lighthouse Book Club screenings of Willy Wonka and Stand By Me (both of which will have special Kids’ Book Club screenings), as well as a Jim Henson Double Bill, and an  Indiana Jones Marathon. There will be late-night screenings for adults and matinees for families to enjoy. So whether you want to re-live one of your old favourites on the big screen or introduce a whole new generation to these wonderful films, the Lighthouse invites you to escape into these magical worlds this summer on the scale they were originally intended – for a big screen with hundreds of people groaning at Indy being served monkey brains. It must be noted that the split-focus of the season, between 1980s kids who now have families, and 1980s kids who just want to relive their childhood is kind of interesting…

Your children cannot have the same childhood you had; the world has moved on, unless of course we’re talking about the seemingly indestructible world of Transformers. But even Transformers proves the point, my memories of those toys are inextricably bound up with an accompanying British comic and its staggeringly Shakespearean storylines, not a series of Michael Bay films whose screenwriters probably never heard of that comic. But the desire to introduce children to the 1980s classics Lucas & Spielberg et al suggests something more than nostalgia, it says something about the current state of cinema – and it’s more or less a white flag. Omnipresent CGI that can render anything you can imagine just so long as you imagine looking it like CGI will never capture the imagination the way that the last stand of practical effects did in the 1980s.

E.T.

WED 8TH JULY, 3PM & 8.30PM | SAT 11TH JULY, 3PM & 10.30PM

Science fiction when visualised by Spielberg and scored by Williams is an emotional wonder to experience on the big screen. E.T. asks the question ‘are we alone in the universe?’ and allows the audience to believe that if we’re not, then there’s a universe of adventures to be had and friends to be made. A film that can make grown men cry, Spielberg’s early masterpiece has an innate sense of wonder that is unequalled.

 

LABYRINTH

TUE 14TH JULY, 3PM & 8.30PM | SUN 19TH JULY, 4PM

Part Muppets, part Monty Python, this dark fairytale was directed by Jim Henson and written by Terry Jones. Starring a very young Jennifer Connolly and a very wicked David Bowie, Labyrinth is a rock’n’roll fantasy whose dark heart is cheered up by a colourful cast of Muppets who aid Sarah in her attempt to free her baby brother from the clutches of the Goblin King.

 

THE DARK CRYSTAL

WED 15TH JULY, 3PM & 8.30PM | SUN 19TH JULY, 2PM

In a world divided between the malevolent Skeksis and the benevolent Mystics, two ‘gelflings’ must quest to find the shard of the Dark Crystal to ensure the world doesn’t fall to darkness. Muppets mastermind Jim Henson and Frank Oz (Yoda himself!) co-directed this striking and beautifully crafted, yet sometimes rather dark fantasy.

 

THE DARK CRYSTAL & LABYRINTH

FRI 17TH JULY, 8.30PM

Are you a Gelfling or a Goblin? Celebrate the genius of Jim Henson by going back to the fantastical worlds and characters he created in The Dark Crystal and getting your Chilly Down (doing the Magic Dance) with David Bowie’s Goblin King. That’s right, it’s an 80s cult double bill in the shape of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

 

THE NEVERENDING STORY

TUE 21ST JULY, 3PM & 8.30PM | SAT 25TH JULY, 3PM & 10.30PM

Upon discovering a mysterious book, Bastian enters a magical world of Fantastica and is called on to help the Child Empress and young warrior Atreyu to save the world from terrifying non-entity ‘The Nothing’. But for every wish he makes, Bastian loses a memory from his real life. Fairy-tale action of the highest order – who hasn’t dreamt of flying on their own luck-dragon!?

 

WILLY WONKA

MON 27TH JULY, 6.30PM | SUN 2ND AUG, 1PM (FOR KIDS)

Keeping up the annual Roald Dahl summer book club, this year Lighthouse book club invites you to join them for a screening of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory starring Gene Wilder, Roy Kinnear, and a host of Oompa-Loompas. For the first time ever, there’ll be both an adult book club in the usual slot and an extra Sunday afternoon children’s edition.

 

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?

WED 29TH JULY, 3PM & 8.30PM | SAT 1ST AUG, 3PM & 10.30PM

It’s difficult to say if Robert Zemeckis’ film was intended specifically for children or not. With its film-noir stylings, the ludicrously sultry Jessica Rabbit, and its knowing winks at the ego and corruption at work in Hollywood, there’s as much to love in this live-action-animation hybrid for adults as there is for children as Bob Hoskins and Christopher Lloyd clash.

 

BACK TO THE FUTURE

TUE 4TH AUG, 3PM & 8.30PM | FRI 7TH AUG, 10.30PM | SUN 9TH AUG, 3PM

Time travel has never, ever been this much fun. Michael J Fox is 1980s teenager Marty McFly who, stuck in a time-travel jaunt back to the 1950s – courtesy of his mad-scientist friend Doc Brown – must ensure that his parents end up falling in love so his existence is ensured. Mind-bending in the greatest way and full of spectacle and adventure, as all great family films should be.

THE KARATE KID

WED 5TH AUG, 3PM & 8.30PM | SAT 8TH AUG, 3PM & 10.30PM

Everyone on your street did at least one karate class as a kid and there was probably some kid with a black belt who seemed like the coolest person in town. That is thanks, to a huge extent, to this film. Probably the greatest pairing of master and student in sports movie history, Daniel and Mr Miyagi throw poses like nobody’s business in this classic coming-of-age sports film.

 

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND

WED 12TH AUG, 3PM & 8.30PM | SUN 16TH AUG, 3PM

Spielberg’s first foray into the world of extra-terrestrials, Close Encounters is not only a wonderful film, but one that has hardly aged at all despite its heavy use of special effects. The trademark Spielberg sense of wonder, channelled through man-child alter-ego Richard Dreyfuss, makes this a marvellous big-screen experience for both young and not-so-young. Although children might not be so enamoured with the idea of dad simply abandoning the family to hang out with ET.

 

INDIANA JONES TRILOGY

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg put their blockbusting heads together and came up with the ultimate family-friendly adventure. A throwback to old 1930s cliff-hanger serials, Harrison Ford is the perfect charismatic, quipping leading man. These films have everything – action, romance, face-melting, whips, running from a giant rolling boulder. Not only does each film get its own daily screenings but there’s also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to watch all three back-to-back in the Indiana Jones Trilogy Marathon. What do you mean there were four films?

 

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

TUE 18TH AUG, 3PM & 8.30PM

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM

WED 19TH AUG, 3PM & 8.30PM

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE

THURS 20TH AUG, 3PM & 8.30PM

INDIANA JONES TRILOGY  MARATHON

SAT 22ND AUG, FROM 2PM

For €21 TRILOGY DISCOUNT PRICE – call 01 8728006 or book in person at Box-Office.

THE GOONIES

THURS 27TH AUG, 3PM & 8.30PM | SAT 29TH AUG, 3PM & 10.30PM

Goonies never say die! Get your treasure maps out and come along to screenings of The Goonies, one of the most beloved of 80s cult classics. The ultimate kids’ adventure tale sees a group of friends trying to save their homes from being demolished and in doing so discover an old treasure map from the legendary One Eyed Willie, but they must battle the weirdest family in America for the hidden treasure. Pirate outfits and truffle shuffles encouraged.

 

STAND BY ME

SUN 30TH AUG, 1PM (FOR OLDER KIDS) | MON 31ST AUG, 6.30PM

Based on the short novella The Body by Stephen King, Stand By Me is a masterful adaptation of a very brilliant book, with Rob Reiner reining in King’s customary tendency to go just a bit too far. Pushing the definition of kids’ films to its limits this coming of age thriller starring the future Wesley Crusher and a fully-formed villainous Kiefer Sutherland is the perfect discussion piece for the YA Lighthouse Book Club.

 

Tickets are now on sale at www.lighthousecinema.ie, with free online booking for members.

…And Harrison Ford

I’m indecently excited at the notion that Harrison Ford has finally stopped clinging on to his leading man career and belatedly embraced just being ‘…And Harrison Ford’.

Ford was 35 when recurring roles in the Lucas-Coppola-complex finally culminated in his star-making supporting turn as Han Solo in Star Wars. He threw himself into leading man roles with gusto honing that roguish quality for comedy, romance and action in Force 10 from Navarone, Hanover Street, and The Frisco Kid, before The Empire Strikes Back codified his blockbuster persona. Its immediate successors, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Blade Runner, showcased both his strengths and his versatility respectively. From that point on Ford balanced his Spielberg and Lucas blockbusters with more intimate films like Witness, Frantic and The Mosquito Coast, and even branched into outright comedy with Working Girl. The 1990s are when everything starts to wobble. He started well with a massive hit despite a terrible haircut in Presumed Innocent but followed it up with Regarding Henry, which, in retrospect, may be the tipping point.

Nobody wanted to see Ford in a quiet drama… He responded by belatedly taking on the role of Jack Ryan in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, but neither of those films is well beloved either. Indeed The Fugitive was his last unqualified mega-hit blockbuster. At 52 in Clear and Present Danger Ford was getting a bit old for the all-action shtick, which he last successfully purveyed without in-camera apology in 1997’s Air Force One. Branching out into comedy with Sabrina and Six Days Seven Nights proved disastrous, the controversial turkey The Devil’s Own didn’t help matters, and by 2000 he was clearly struggling. His terrifically ambiguous turn in Zemeckis’ Hitchcock homage What Lies Beneath was meant to resurrect his leading man cachet after the unseen disaster of Random Hearts. Instead it led only to the unseen K-19: The Widowmaker, and the unwatchable Hollywood Homicide and Firewall. These all got cinema releases, but they weren’t must-sees…

The gambit of a 4th Indiana Jones movie seemed liked desperation, and it was. Ford was still good in the role but its welcome success wasn’t enough to get his leading roles in either immigration drama Crossing Borders or medical drama Extraordinary Measures into Irish cinemas. Nearly three years after Indy 4 he finally made into Irish cinemas again with Morning Glory, a reasonably popular film, but one in which he appears in an ‘…And Harrison Ford’ capacity, in a part that functions as a satirical commentary on his long refusal to acknowledge his star had dimmed. I didn’t know Ford was even in Cowboys and Aliens until I saw the trailer before Transformers 3, but it’s great news. It means he’s accepted that he can’t be the lead in blockbusters anymore, but that instead of sulking about it he’s shrugged his shoulders in the best Indy ‘I’m making this up as I go along’ fashion and realised that he still belongs in blockbusters.

He may have to accept Daniel Craig as the lead, but an awful lot of fun can be had as the wise mentor to the action-hero whippersnapper in blockbusters. Ford has finally relented and become the Henry Jones who sits in the side-car, not the one who rides the motorbike, and that’s something to cheer.

Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Talk about your lucky timing! Indiana Jones 4 is released during Anti-Ageism week, thereby precluding anyone with a sense of decency from making catty remarks about Harrison Ford being too old at 65 to play the role again. As I’m not burdened with a sense of decency it’s just lucky for him that it’s really not an issue in this film. The other great doubt that plagued this movie was that George Lucas was going to destroy our fond memories of the original trilogy just like he did with Star Wars by producing a totally unnecessary, badly written sequel. Well, Spielberg hasn’t let him, by bringing in his own favoured scribe David Koepp to polish Lucas’ story. The film zips along at a breathless pace for 2 gleeful hours before falling apart in a misconceived and distinctly underwhelming finale which fails to do justice to what has gone before, especially the great new villain Col Spalko.

The first half-hour is utterly superb, setting up the 1957 setting with wit and imagination while paying its respects to the original trilogy. This heady amalgam of ‘pop’ 1950s history from ‘I Like Ike’ to nuclear tensions, rock and roll, McCarthy witch-hunts, Red scares, Roswell conspiracies and teen gangs is impressive stuff and superbly introduces our replacement for the boo hiss Nazis of the 1980s. Meet some comic-book bad guy Soviets led by Cate Blanchett’s distractingly sexy villain Colonel Dr Irina Spalko, sporting a raven black bob hairdo and wielding a very sharp sword.  While many elements feel comfortably familiar there is an odd lack of the trademark squirm-in-your-seat gory moments, and the use of CGI is just painful in places (CGI gophers?!), especially the finale which it completely destroys as one of the joys of Indy’s derring-do was that it always looked somewhat real.

Indiana is dragged to South America by Mutt Williams to search for the missing Professor Oxley (played by an under-used John Hurt) who has reportedly discovered both the titular crystal skull and a mythical lost city which hides an awesome paranormal power sought by psychic weapons researcher Col Spalko. Shia LaBeouf verily astounds as taciturn tough 1950s ‘greaser’ Mutt, a world removed from his usual neurotic persona, while Karen Allen proves a good foil for Indy as his Raiders of the Lost Ark flame Marion Ravenwood – especially in a hilarious scene that combines slapstick with revelations.

The highlight of the film is a lengthy action sequence in the Amazon which is as well orchestrated as any Spielberg has choreographed and features, among other pleasures, a superb swordfight between duellists in separate cars. Crystal Skull can be very silly indeed (there is an unbelievably ludicrous use of a fridge as well as a cringe-worthy CGI heavy Tarzan homage) but it’s all done with such a wild sense of infectious fun that you forgive it all its flaws, such as the completely inconsistent character Ray Winstone is saddled with, until the last 20 minutes….which reveals Lucas’ beloved Maguffin plot device which is as woeful as was feared. This is fun but it never manages to justify resurrecting the franchise after 19 years. Not the disaster you feared then, but not an Indy story so awesome it just had to be told either…

3/5