Songs that should be in films: Hægt, kemur ljósið

I recently learnt that a Sigur Rós song is prominently featured in the new Danny Boyle film, 127 Hours. This pleases me. It's nice when two things I like come together - melded together like, er, something that's melded. Now, I could mention what Sigur Rós songs would work well in a film, but I'm pretty sure they've all been used. Making the exercise a bit pointless. But I've chosen something equally Icelandic: Hægt, kemur ljósið by Ólafur Arnalds. He's a composer, who Wikipedia reliably informs me is aged 23-24. That's a nice age to be. Adding to the confusion, he writes 'neo-classical' music (thanks Wikipedia) and his song titles contain letters I'm not familiar with. But the music speaks for itself. I imagine this song could come near the end of a film, or the climax of a television series - a montage perhaps. Everyone's sad, a bit downbeat. A lot of bad things have happened. Maybe somebody's been happy for five minutes until Joss Whedon killed everyone they loved. They could perhaps be on a boat. Cut to other characters looking pensive. Wide shots of the scenery. Then, at around fifty seconds, the song picks up and they realise they have a lot to look forward to. And they're happy, but still in a poignant, reflective way. I imagine someone could start running at this point. There are alternative uses, like a bunch of presumed-dead fishermen returning to port, and then looking back out to sea to think about the journey.

For all my sarcastic meanderings, this is obviously a good song. That's the technical term used by music critics: a good song. For more impressive sight and sound, watch this other video. To sum it up in noises, it'll make you go 'ooo'.

The Pillars of the Earth: Slightly different hair but no happier

At the end of it all The Pillars of the Earth seemed to ask: how many bad things can happen to people in their lifetime? The people of Kingsbridge have an extremely bad time. They're trying to build a cathedral, but it doesn't go very well. I wrote before about my expectations for the series, and its relation to the original novel. In watching it I was reminded just what these characters have to overcome. It's all down to a pair of thoroughly evil people: Waleran Bigod and William Hamleigh. They plotted and murdered their way through half a century. One an ambitious bishop and the other just plain bad. This is how to fill fifty years. Look at Jack Jackson, the hero of the story. He wants to marry Aliena, but before he can do that he has to be banished, strangled, banished again, and turned into a monk. Then she marries somebody else. He transforms from mute boy to master mason, despite not looking a year older. It's a sprawling story where people have to wait decades to get what they want. A new episode might jump fourteen years into the future, when everyone has slightly different hair but are no happier. It makes the payoff all the more satisfying. When William is clouted over the head with a rock it comes after weeks of waiting. It makes everything better.

The backdrop to all this strife is the argument over the throne. With so many political deals and earls to slaughter it becomes difficult to follow. And nobody really cares anyway. Sometimes the throne will swap hands between episodes, and the battles just seem to amount to a bunch of people on horses riding around in the same field. Never mind then, all the entertainment is happening elsewhere - with the monks and the wool merchants and the fancy new rib vaulting on the cathedral. It's not as powerful as the book. Sometimes an adaption just can't hope for that. But it does a good job of making you forget.

The Walking Dead: Chewing on zombie-Lost

The third episode of The Walking Dead has a lot of making up to do. Can it regain its credibility (in my eyes) as a tense, dark drama, or become a cluttered show of annoying characters? Here we're introduced to even more people back at camp. Though not all necessarily annoying, I do miss the times of a lonely man and his horse. It's getting more and more like zombie-Lost. One camp full of disparate people, stuck in a mysterious, horrible situation. Stranded. All with stories to tell. Just dying to jump into flashback. There's so many of them that a few can be thrown to the undead every now and then to keep things ticking. Better to have a large group of zombie-food, or a tight family where every loss matters? We'll see, though not before they've got over their arguments. There's now a wife beater to join the racist on the dumb and evil pile. Characterisation comes in big strokes. Like the zombies just want to eat brains, there are people who only do one thing. Early days, obviously, but does anyone ever think about how good Lost was? In The Walking Dead Sawyer would be a racist drunk and nothing else. I hope to be proven wrong, as there's still good stuff going on the middle of it all. Rick finds his family, which holds up the entire episode. It's a nice moment, and you begin to forget how rubbish his wife is. Maybe it is just unremarkable drama with added zombies. The monsters make it interesting, to be honest. Every now and then one might turn up. There's always that threat. There was only one in this episode, chewing on a deer near camp.They are the other thing that's going on, hiding the shadows.

I look forward to seeing personalities shift and characters having another side. I don't look forward to a cycling succession of new survivors that come in to replace the chewed ones. Is it still annoying? Not really, it made it past that. But it's changed so much in a few episodes that I don't know which show it's going to turn out to be.

Especially if you're an action hero living in the mountains

Wolverine is guilty of not realising the obvious: your past will always find you. In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, it happens to be the past of his past that finds him (it's probably right to be suspicious of any film with a colon in its title). This backstory can go on forever, right the way back to mysteries about his parents. And it all matters, apparently. Or it can just set up another thread of the franchise. I don't believe Hollywood is interested in making fan pleasing canon-fodder, so there must be some life left in these X-Men. Here we see that Wolverine and his brother used to be part of a military team of mutants, taking orders from the appropriately named Colonel Stryker. This all becomes a bit too shady for Wolverine but his brother seems to like it. Cut to six years later and the good one is living in the picturesque Canadian mountains, working as a humble lumberjack and living with his lovely girlfriend. Like the hundreds of retired heroes who came before him, he asks 'why won't they just leave me alone?' It was all going so well. The men in black cars always arrive to tempt you back into a plot that may or may not be a con. I'm not complaining. Thriller's are built on this idea. The violent past finds the pleasant present and then everyone can do some revenge. It's the standard for two thirds of all action films, even the good ones. In fact, Wolverine begins to make a habit of destroying idyllic things. He runs into two unrealistically kind old people, who let him sleep in their barn and give him the clothes he wears for the rest of the film. Then things start exploding.

Apart from this, a lot of time is spent in military labs and secret island bases. We see how he gets his metal and I'm reminded how invincible he is. There's no need to worry about him getting hurt, but the scale of the action makes up for it. He can slash through tanks with his claws. He's an action prop, but an effective one. This may all be about to change with the Darren Aronofsky sequel. Will he descend into a drug-fuelled haze and reflect on his loneliness? Possibly. And so, to sum up this film in a mildly interested sort of way: it's alright.

The wicked witch of the west was the bad one

I wrote before that I'm easily impressed by found-footage horror, so it's about time I watched The Blair Witch Project. You've probably seen it already. In fact, you probably saw it when it came out ten years ago. But I saw it last night. I like to stay up to date. Three film students go out into the woods to make a documentary about the Blair Witch, a nasty-sounding ghost that haunts the place. They stock up on cereal and battery packs and set off for some camping. For a film of just eighty-six minutes, there's a good chunk of set-up before things start getting spooky. It's a nice walk in the forest until a bit of arguing, and a bit of map losing, makes the situation a lot worse. But how scary is it? Suggestion is a powerful tool but, perhaps unusually, it wasn't really working for me. There's shouting in the night and a lot of arts and crafts in the woods -mostly a bit too subtle, a bit too far away to count as horror. Maybe I didn't have my imagination switched on in the right places, but the piles of rocks weren't spooky. I could have done with a little bit more. A more concrete suggestion of something solid, ugly, and scary. Especially at the end, where something definitely needed to present itself. It is an effective film though, because without all these scares you're left with a drama about people going mad in the woods. The film crew really were harassing them and leaving suggestions for improvisation. Eventually they just start rocking back and forth. Importantly, the camera is a comfort to whoever is holding it. It's a disconnection from reality, 'a filtered reality', and makes them braver. They can only go out into the night if they're seeing it through a lens - it means it's not really happening.

I know that these characters aren't enjoying it, I'm just not feeling the same thing. One says that she's 'too scared to close her eyes and too scared to open them'. I believe her, I just need to be shown why. I'm usually a fan of this sort of horror, but finding scary things isn't the same as experiencing it. A bit more, that's all that's needed, just a little bit. So it may not have been the scary treat I was hoping for, but it's an interesting (and probably by now 'classic') part of the found-footage genre.