Sounds & Fury

Something To Be Thankful For

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 4:20 PM Eastern on 26 Nov to make more specific a few vaguely worded generalities.]

This Thanksgiving we felt it meet and very American to view two classic movies from classic Hollywood's golden age; that period in the 1930s just before the beginning of the two-decade forced dismantling of the studio system that had ruled Hollywood almost since its very beginnings: the big-budget swashbuckler, The Adventures Of Robin Hood (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1938); and the humongous-budget epic, Gone With The Wind (Selznick International, 1939), and what a startling comparison the two made.

The much celebrated GWTW was almost painful to watch so hokey and hammy was it throughout — from the vulgarly employed three-strip dye transfer Technicolor photography, to the maudlin script (by Sidney Howard), to the overwrought Hollywood music (by Max Steiner), and to the performances of the actors the stellar and iconic performances of Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara) and Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) notwithstanding.

Watching TAORH, on the other hand, was an unalloyed joy on all fronts: from the beautiful and beautifully executed three-strip dye transfer Technicolor photography; to the sparkling and literate script (by Norman Reilly Raine and Seton I. Miller); to the lushly Romantic music (by Erich Wolfgang Korngold); and to the performances of all the actors from bit players to stars including a bravura and iconic performance by Errol Flynn who, even to this day and like Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara in GWTW after him, seems the very incarnation of the essence of the movie's central protagonist. This was Hollywood mythmaking at its finest, an exemplar of classic Hollywood moviemaking, and we all ought to be thankful this Thanksgiving season for the miracle of cinema which, unlike, say, theater or opera, preserves intact a dynamic artwork and permits us to see the work at firsthand and in perpetuity as it was intended to be seen, and exactly as it was seen by its very first audiences.

A small thing to be thankful for in the larger worldview, perhaps, but eminently gratifying nevertheless.

For Halloween

While we're a great admirer of aesthetic economy and especially so in matters musical, when it comes to the sort of economy on display in music written by those composers who adhere to the principles of the so-called "Minimalist" movement (or school), not so much. As with most things, however, there are exceptions. One such exception is music written for Halloween — John Carpenter's made-on-a-shoestring ($325,000), 1978 movie Halloween, that is. The music was written by Carpenter himself (who also co-wrote, directed, and co-produced the movie) and is responsible in no small part for the movie's seminally (and today iconic) creepy effect that defined (and spawned) a new genre of slasher horror flick where the visceral horror of gore and blood plays second banana to horror of the psychological sort.

And so, without further ado, we give you for Halloween the title theme from «shudder» Halloween.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Halloween Theme Song

To Bernard Herrmann — Belatedly

Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of perhaps the greatest of all composers for film, Bernard Herrmann. In our estimation no composer has ever matched his astonishing ability to capture, reinforce, and enrich the emotional essence of whatever scene was playing out on-screen without the music ever calling attention to itself while doing so yet at the same time so impressing itself on one's consciousness that a mere replaying of that music is enough to recall vividly to the mind's eye the images to which it was so intimately wed. Herrmann's brilliant score for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is, of course, the most famous example of this. Here's another. Less famous, perhaps, but hardly less an example.

In Memoriam — Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011

The Importance Of Rosebud

In the film Citizen Kane, fairly early on in reporter Thompson's search for the meaning of Charles Foster Kane's dying utterance, "Rosebud," we are witness in flashback to an exchange between the young Kane and his wealthy banker-guardian, Thatcher, that takes place in Kane's ratty office in his newly acquired first newspaper property, The Inquirer, in which newspaper Thatcher has just read the outrageously alarmist (and false) headline, "ENEMY ARMADA OFF JERSEY COAST":

THATCHER (gesturing to the headline): "Is that really your idea of how to run a newspaper?"

KANE: "I don't know how to run a newspaper, Mr. Thatcher. I just try everything I can think of."

That was precisely Orson Welles's position vis-à-vis filmmaking when in 1939, at age twenty-four, he arrived in Hollywood as a filmmaker for the first time knowing virtually nothing about filmmaking, lured there by RKO's new studio head George J. Schaefer who in order to secure Welles's services had signed Welles to a contract to make one film a year; a contract that gave Welles unheard of control over the finished product including the film's final cut. And what was Welles's very first film shot a mere one year later? Why, Citizen Kane, of course, as today just about every moviegoer worldwide knows.

For Welles to have created Citizen Kane right out of the box, so to speak, is fully the equivalent of, say, a Richard Wagner creating Tristan und Isolde the very first time he ever put pen to manuscript paper. Quite impossible, of course, but create Citizen Kane is exactly what Welles managed to do, and without so much as breaking a sweat creatively (there were other matters connected with the project that caused Welles to sweat copiously, but those matters are outside our concerns here).

Over the past almost three-quarters of a century since its premiere, so much has been written about Citizen Kane (and about Welles himself, for that matter) that there really seems little one can say that hasn't already been said. We do, however, want to say a word or ten concerning several ancient but only recently read critical pieces on Citizen Kane by critics now deceased whose writings we respected in the past (although rarely agreed with), among them The New Yorker's Pauline Kael and The New York Times's Bosley Crowther, which critical pieces viewed Citizen Kane's Rosebud with some contempt calling it a gimmick and a rather hokey one at that. Some twenty years after the fact of the film, Welles himself, although for reasons that must be held somewhat suspect, declared Rosebud a bit embarrassing and confessed it to indeed be merely a hokey gimmick; "dollar-book Freud," as Welles wryly put it.

Well, Rosebud most certainly and most clearly is Freudian. But "dollar-book Freud" and merely a hokey gimmick?

We think not.

In 1941, the year of the film's release, the great Jorge Luis Borges had a few unkind words to say about Citizen Kane famously calling it, among other not so good things, "a labyrinth without a center." Clearly, Borges didn't much care for Rosebud either and so dismissed it entirely from consideration. How do we know that even though we've never read Borges's piece in full? Because "a labyrinth without a center" is exactly what Citizen Kane would be absent Rosebud, for Rosebud is precisely the center of the labyrinth that is Citizen Kane. The film (and the final draft of the screenplay) was structured that way from Day One.

There's nothing the least gimmicky or "dollar-book Freud" about Rosebud as it's handled in Citizen Kane (although in less skilled hands it could very easily have become both). One has only to consider the film's great coda to appreciate the fact. That coda is dramatically, logically, emotionally, and psychologically quite perfect and no mere O. Henry twist; an exemplar of Welles's idea that,

You could write all the ideas of all the movies, mine included, on the head of a pin. It’s not a form in which ideas are very fecund. It’s a form that may grip you or take you into a world or involve you emotionally — but ideas are not the subject of films. [...] That is why, I think, my films are theatrical, and strongly stated, because I can’t believe that anybody won’t fall asleep unless they are. [...] For myself, unless a film is hallucinatory, unless it becomes that kind of an experience, it doesn’t come alive.

If one ever doubted that Welles as a filmmaker was Wagnerian to the very core the above should convince him otherwise.

Not only is Rosebud the center of the labyrinth that is Citizen Kane, it provides as well the proper final and central piece of the enigmatic jigsaw puzzle that is Charles Foster Kane himself whose life and actions as revealed in Citizen Kane are perfectly consistent, psychoanalytically speaking, with a man who as a young child was abandoned by a beloved mother (abandoned being how a young child interprets the separation no matter the actual reason), feels himself to blame for the loss of her love (which is how abandonment is interpreted by a young child no matter the actual reason), represses (in the strict Freudian sense) the psychic trauma, and is then driven unconsciously the rest of his life to attempt to wash away his imagined but undefined sin and win back his mother's love while at the same time never allowing himself to become deeply attached to a woman for fear of again being abandoned although he has no conscious inkling whatsoever of any of this or of what's driving it.

More like leather-bound, gold-edged-leaf Freud we'd say and no gimmick, hokey or otherwise. Of course, if one is inclined to dismiss all things Freudian just on general principles and is looking instead for social or political or spiritual or existential relevance, or social or political or spiritual or existential moral point or the like, then one will surely find Rosebud to be a hokey gimmick and "dollar-book Freud," and Citizen Kane to be something less than the consummate work of art others such as ourself consider it to be. For instance, the great filmmaker Ingmar Bergman — as a filmmaker, as Mozartian to the core as Welles was Wagnerian — was no fan of Citizen Kane or of Orson Welles.

For me [Orson Welles] is just a hoax. [Citizen Kane is] empty. [Citizen Kane is] not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of, is the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie has is absolutely unbelievable! [...] In my eyes [Orson Welles is] an infinitely overrated filmmaker.

Oh dear. Well, what can one say. It may be Bergman's entirely honest assessment or, in part at least, payback for Welles once declaring (a declaration with which we are not in the least in sympathy) that,

I don’t condemn that very northern, very Protestant world of artists like Bergman; it’s just not where I live. The Sweden I like to visit is a lot of fun. But Bergman’s Sweden always reminds me of something Henry James said about Ibsen’s Norway — that it was full of "the odor of spiritual paraffin." How I sympathize with that! I share neither Bergman’s interests nor his obsessions. He’s far more foreign to me than the Japanese. [...] There’s an awful lot of Bergman ... that I’d rather be dead than sit through.

Again, what can one say?

But all that's quite beside the point, the point being that Rosebud is as essential to Citizen Kane as was the gas in the Inquirer's gas lamps the day Kane first drafted his "Declaration of Principles" after which time Citizen Kane was everywhere recognized as the masterwork it so clearly is and subsequently elevated to its rightful place among cinema's greatest and most enduring achievements.

Providential Unfairness

If ever proof positive of Providential unfairness were needed, one has but to glance at this photograph...

and then read this article.

So, all are equal in God's eyes, are they?

In a pig's eye they are.

There Just Has To Be A Better Way

When the Met's plan for simulcast HD movie-house showings of live Met productions was first announced we thought it a swell idea. When the Los Angeles Philharmonic's plan for simulcast HD movie-house showings of live LAP concerts was first announced we thought it not so swell an idea. Is this just us going all elitist on everyone again with our snob engine operating full-out on all twelve cylinders? We think not (although we take unashamed pride in our elitist view of things). Consider, please...

One idea behind these HD movie-house showings is to reach and engage new (and younger) audiences for these artforms and to encourage these new audiences to attend live performances where they can experience the real thing. In the Met's case this makes perfect sense as opera is fundamentally a stage art even though music is at its very core and so simulcast HD movie-house showings of live Met productions for the purpose above noted is the right way to go. Not so in the case of the LAP.

Fundamentally, a classical music concert is not at all a stage art, the stage being little more than a convenient place to set the musicians where they can be heard to best advantage in a concert hall. A classical music concert is not about being a staged performance although that's an unavoidable if collateral consequence of setting the musicians on a stage in the first place. Fundamentally, a classical music concert is about one thing and one thing only: the music. Period. Full stop. The instant the stage itself is centered upon conspicuously as it can't help but be in a HD movie-house showing of a live concert the focus of the audience is shifted to exactly where it should NOT be: musicians performing onstage as part of a staged performance, the consequence — the unavoidable consequence — being that the music itself becomes a soundtrack; part of the show rather than the thing of principal interest the entire enterprise consequently devolving into just another entertainment in a culture oversaturated with mere entertainments.

This is not a good thing, not a good thing at all; is, in clear fact, perverse in the extreme. And we won't even speak of the matter of the reproduced sound, even at its best, being but a mere simulacrum of the real thing as heard live in a concert hall no matter how good the movie-house sound system.

What to do? There just has to be a better way.

We're working on it.

Not So Good News

Why does this news make us cringe.

Opera houses, ballet companies, even the National Theater in London, are competing to lure audiences to live high-definition broadcasts in movie theaters, many of which are then shown again. It is the HD-ification of the arts, and it is already affecting programming decisions along with costume and set design, lighting choices and even ticket prices.

Now orchestras are jumping on the HD bandwagon, hoping that big screens can entice new fans to watch black-clad men and women playing musical instruments. The Los Angeles Philharmonic announced on Monday that it would start beaming live orchestra performances under the baton of its charismatic music director, Gustavo Dudamel, to 450 theaters in North America.

RTWT here.

Urban Intellectual Fodder

There is a certain kind of art made here in America for a lofty but banal purpose: to enliven the contemporary educated mind.

You know: the mind of you and me, dear 3QD reader -- the NPR listener, the New Yorker reader, the English major, the filmgoer who laps up subtitles, the gallery-goer who can tell a Koons from a Hirst.

This art is superior to the cascading pile of blockbuster kitsch-dreck-crap that passes for pop culture, but only superior by a few pips.

This art sure ain't Picasso, or Joyce, or Rossellini, or the Beatles, or even Sondheim. It's more Woody Allen than Ingmar Bergman, more Joyce Carol Oates than James Joyce, more Jeff Koons than Duchamp, more Arcade Fire than the Beatles.

It does not expand the borders of art or wreck the tyranny of the possible or enlarge our hungry little minds.

It is art of the day to inform the conversation of the day by the people of the day who need to be reassured that their taste is a little more elevated than that of the woman on the subway reading Nora Roberts.

For want of a better label, here's a suggested honorific for this kind of art:

Urban Intellectual Fodder.

RTW Spot-On T here.

Say What? Crocodile Dundee Hounded For Unpaid Australian Taxes?!

The Australian Taxation Office is after Crocodile Dundee for millions in unpaid taxes, and has forbidden him to leave the country until the debt is settled in full.

Say what? Dundee is singlehandedly responsible for bringing tens-of-millions, perhaps even hundreds-of-millions, into the coffers of the Australian national treasury, and for, no matter how implausible, making Australia and Australians look attractive to the rest of the world via his three Crocodile Dundee films and his many commercials on behalf of Australia and Australian-produced products. The bloody Australian government ought to be nothing but grateful to the man and declare him a national hero. Instead, they persecute (and might even prosecute) him.

Harrumph! Gross Impertinence! as Nigel Bruce's Dr. Watson would say.

The RSC Hamlet

Today, the assertion, "Shakespeare is the greatest playwright who ever lived," comes easily to the lips as does, say, the assertion, "Babe Ruth is the greatest baseball player of all time"; even to the lips of those who've not read so much as a single line written by Shakespeare much less seen his plays performed onstage, or to the lips of those who've never so much as watched a baseball game. They're commonplace givens today; even axiomatic. And while one may get a dissenting argument from experts regarding the latter, no such arguments can be lodged in earnest against the former. One has but to be confronted by a superbly played and mounted production of a play such as Hamlet to quell all argument on the point. Just the sheer beauty of Shakespeare's language, and the dramatically resonant depth and profundity of his trenchant, psychologically spot-on dialogue are, by themselves, enough to bring one to the verge of tears.

Such a production is the superbly played and mounted TV film production of Hamlet directed by Gregory Doran produced for the BBC by England's Royal Shakespeare Company, a film aired here for the first time this past week on PBS with David Tennant as Hamlet, Sir Patrick Stewart as both Claudius and The Ghost, Penny Downie as Gertrude, and Oliver Ford Davies as Polonius. We just finished watching our tape of the film (the first time since its airing we've had a quiet three consecutive hours to devote to it), and were simply riveted by it. Questions of interpretation aside, and with the single exception of a cringe-inducing and embarrassing couple of minutes when David Tennant as Hamlet, in his, "O that this too too solid flesh would melt" soliloquy, forgot or disregarded Hamlet's instructions to the Players to play their roles and speak their lines without "tear[ing] a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings," the performances by everyone, principals and bit-players alike, were just sterling, and the production, lushly but tastefully set.

If you missed seeing this film first time round, you owe it to yourself to make good the deficit. For that purpose, the film can be seen in full here.

What's that I hear you saying? What's the deal with that modern-dress, 21st-century setting?

Say what? Modern-dress, 21st-century setting?

Oh.

So it is.

Divertissement

A brilliant and iconic speech, from a brilliant and iconic film, brilliantly and iconically delivered — cum graphics.

(Our thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for the link.)

2009's Last S&F Post

Like most in the blogosphere, we considered doing a Top-Ten list of somethingorother as is typical for end-of-year blog posts, but decided instead on a typically brief, typically S&F-acid movie review, typically a few years after the fact of the movie's release, for no better reason other than we just saw the movie for the first time, and it really pissed us off.

We're speaking here of the twenty-first entry in the James Bond movie franchise: 2006's Casino Royale — a movie that received almost universal critical praise as did Daniel Craig in his first outing as Bond — and find ourself in the position of the lunatic who thinks the whole world mad except himself. But as Manohla Dargis put it in her review of the movie for The New York Times, "Every generation gets the Bond it deserves if not necessarily desires," and we guess that says it all in a nutshell.

Mr. Craig's Bond is a Sylvester-Stallone-style lout with a British accent, and Casino Royale, little more than an unmitigated, straight-up action flick with a mindless, humorless plot whose primary purpose is to act as a narrative thread on which to string the largely brutal and bloody action sequences.

Not a pretty picture, not a pretty picture at all. That notwithstanding, Mr. Craig's Bond was seen by critics as a "wonderfully fresh portrait of Bond," as one critic put it, while another, expressing an opinion shared by most of his brethren, declared Casino Royale "gritty and thrilling."

Is that so. Well, we beg to differ. We thought nothing could top for dumb-ass-ness the dumb-ass, special-effects-ridden Bond flicks starring Pierce Brosnan, but this 2006 Casino Royale manages the trick nicely. And as for Craig's Bond, we can't say it better than we did about the various Bonds in this 2008 S&F post dealing with the degeneration of the Bond movies over the years:

As if we Bond movie connoisseurs, other considerations aside, could get past the ultimate absurdity of ... movie actors playing at being James Bond. We all know the genuine article is Sean Connery, and these other clowns merely inadequate, playacting imposters unworthy to deliver Bond's signature response as to who he might be: "Bond. James Bond."

But Ms. Dargis is right. Every generation gets the Bond it deserves, and, sadly, this Bond, both the character and the movie, is indeed a Bond for our time.

Farewell, decade of the naughts.

Sherlock Holmes For Morons

It was only a matter of time. A Hollywood-budget-sized, in-all-earnestness, contemporary-sensibilities-pandering excrescence to the deathless Holmes-Watson saga; an adventure set as a Victorian-era action flick for hormonal adolescents and adults whose IQ barely exceeds their belt size, complete with a myriad of action-flick-requisite chases, fisticuffs, shootouts, and things blowing up, and for good measure, some sex, and a villain who's managed to rise from the dead to do his evil deeds.

Early in Sherlock Holmes — and also again, later on — the famous sleuth demonstrates his ratiocinative powers in a way undreamed of by his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. Observing a thug standing guard over a horrible crime in a dimly lighted church, Holmes calculates just how to surprise the man, disarm him and beat him senseless. The audience follows his thought process though slow-motion pre-enactment, observing how the laws of anatomy and physics will be used to snap bones, gouge organs and turn flesh into pulp. Then, having seen it diagramed once on screen, we see it all again, with more noise, in real time. Elementary!

[...]

It seems that an evil aristocrat ... executed for a series of murders, returns from the dead to mobilize an ancient secret society that he may have time-traveled into a Dan Brown novel to learn about. Doesn’t that sound fascinating? I thought not.

O tempora! O mores!

RTWT here.

Trailer here.

An Exemplar Of Filmed Staged Opera

This filmed excerpt from an Opera Company of Philadelphia production of Bizet's The Pearl Fishers is an exemplar of the way staged opera should be filmed. Notice, please, the absence of closeups which are almost never appropriate in filmed staged opera, and that, throughout, the audience is kept aware of the entire staged "picture" so that the physical dramatic context is never lost.

Director(s) of the Met's HD productions, take note — please.

Classic

What do you get when Bringing Up Baby meets North By Northwest? You get Charade is what you get; one of the most perfectly crafted and executed movies ever made. Directed by the brilliant Stanley Donen with a brilliant screenplay by Peter Stone from an original story ("The Unsuspecting Wife") by Stone and Marc Behm, and with the lead roles played brilliantly by the ever-urbane Gary Grant and the ever-elegant Audrey Hepburn, Charade is quite simply, um, brilliant. With but a single, brief exception (which brief exception we decline pointing out as it was almost certainly missed by just about everyone), the movie is virtually flawless throughout. Every line, every gesture, every clever twist of plot, every scene, every camera shot is all it could be, and precisely what it should be.

We make off-message note of the above for no better reason than that we had occasion to view this 1963 movie this past Saturday, and marveled at its perfection and undiminished charm even after numerous viewings over the years — a very definition of that overused (and much misused) term, classic.

A Reappraisal

We were never able to see what so many others saw in Bob Dylan and his "art". The man can play the guitar only competently; he can't be said to be able to sing any more than Johnny Cash can be said to be able to sing, perhaps even less; his music can, at times, be catchy, even a bit poignant in a Sixties-quasi-folk sort of way, but never more than that; and his "poetry" (i.e., lyrics) is largely Sixties-sophomoric or arrant beat-poet gibberish with aspirations to profundity. Witnesseth:

In short, we think little of Mr. Dylan and his "art" — until now, that is. Now we love both.

Why?

Because of the following from a piece by The Guardian's Jonathan Jones is why:

[I]f [art] really is reducible to an explicit message, is it actually art at all?

I love the scene in DA Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, where the young Bob Dylan is interviewed by a journalist who demands to know what his message is. "Walk tall and always carry a light bulb," he replies.

Of course, Dylan didn't have a message — or so he explains in Martin Scorsese's 2005 film No Direction Home — and the reason he changed his music and lyrics so profoundly in the mid-60s, from the agitprop of his early folk songs to the tumbled words of "Desolation Row", was precisely to escape from people who thought they understood him. It was a self-conscious defence of the idea of art.

We get it now, Bobby. Pretty damn smart. Way t'go!

Brief Comment On Jürgen Flimm's Production Of Strauss's Salome

[Note: This post has been edited extensively as of 1:53 PM Eastern on 12 Jun to add missing detail, and to make more temperate our initial too-extreme expression of contempt in calling the production "imbecile".]

We for the first time saw via PBS the Met's HD film of this Met production, and, Konzept-wise, everything about it was pointless, predictable, and lame. Salome is a work about private and perverse obsessions pervaded by a mystic, brooding miasma of spiritual decadence and evil, but the stage was so cluttered by a pointless, modern-day, detailed set (apparently an outdoor, man-made oasis adjacent to or part of the desert mansion of a decadent, 20th-century super-rich) — a set that seemed designed expressly to cause maiming bodily injury to any singer who made the slightest misstep — and peopled by an equally pointless drinks-in-hand gaggle of decadent, modern-day tuxedoed and gowned supernumeraries milling about seemingly in search of something to do, that the pervasive, brooding, mystic context that informs and conditions the work was all but lost entirely right from the get-go.

Something needs to be done about this sort of ham-fistedly metaphorical Eurotrash. It really, truly does. It needs doing away with — permanently and forever.

(Oh, in case you were wondering, Mattila was superb as always, the pointless Konzept notwithstanding.)

Good News

This is good news.

Roger Friedman, an entertainment columnist for FoxNews.com, discovered over the weekend just what Rupert Murdoch means by “zero tolerance” when it comes to movie piracy.

On Friday, the film studio 20th Century Fox — owned by the News Corporation, the media conglomerate ruled by Mr. Murdoch — became angry after reading Mr. Friedman’s latest column. (Movie bloggers had started opining about it late Thursday, alerting the studio.) The subject was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a big-budget movie that was leaked in unfinished form on the Web last week.

Mr. Friedman posted a minireview, adding, “It took really less than seconds to start playing it all right onto my computer.”

[...]

Over the weekend, the Web site Deadline Hollywood Daily reported that Mr. Friedman had been dismissed. Sure enough, on Sunday came a revised statement from the News Corporation. “When we advised Fox News of the facts,” the statement said, “they promptly terminated Mr. Friedman.”

The question is, Would News Corporation-owned Fox News have done the same thing had the pirated movie not been a property of a News Corporation-owned film studio?

Unhappily, we suspect not.

RTWT here.

And You Wonder Why Classical Music Is In Trouble

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 3:47 PM Eastern on 15 Mar. See below.]

Here is Guardian classical music critic Tom Service extolling the music for the new superhero flick, Watchmen:

The music? Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries". It's an association of image, story, and score nicked straight from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, when Robert "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" Duvall as Colonel Kilgore (geddit?) leads his flight of death-giving helicopters to destroy a Viet Cong village, blaring the Wagner from on-board speakers.

For once — or rather, for twice, now that it's happened again in Watchmen — this is an intelligent and accurate fusion of movie and music. Wagner's Valkyries are angels of death in their original operatic context (the opening of act three of Die Walküre)[!], scouring the world for warriors to kill[!]. What Wagner's music captures so brilliantly is the Valkyrie's [sic] bloodlust and love of killing[!]....

Did we mention that Tom Service is the classical music critic for the Guardian?

Oh. So we did.

Incredible.

---

Update (3:47 PM Eastern on 15 Mar): If anyone was wondering why we didn't respond to the nonsensical defense of Mr. Service and his above linked article posted in the article's comments section by one Andrew Dickson, Mr. Service's editor at the Guardian, it's because Mr. Dickson has seen fit to put us on the Guardian's "moderated" list which means any comments we make must first be approved by the editorial staff before being published. Consequently, we, for reasons which should be obvious, have refused to waste our time commenting further in the comments section of that article under that condition, and have so informed Mr. Dickson in just those words in our last submitted comment to the comments section which comment was, of course, never published.

So much for free and open discussion.