Question: It’s the future, and you are on a spaceship. A fire has broken out in one part of it, and threatens to spread to the rest of the ship. Do you…

A) Get the computer to open up an airlock, immediately suffocating the blaze?

or

B) Flood the compartment with oxygen – precious, scarce oxygen that you kind of need in order to complete your mission without dying – in order to help the fire “burn-out” quicker?

If you answered B, then you would probably be qualified to join the cew of the Icarus II on their mission to restart our dying star in Sunshine. The Earth is doomed and their mission must succeed in order to save mankind. Sadly, whoever had the responsibility of selecting the handful of men and women who would embark on this voyage apparently just chose some names out of a hat and came up with a group of dull ciphers with dubious problem solving skills. We join them sixteen months into their mission. Some bad things happen and some of the characters die. Then some more bad things happen, resulting in more deaths. And then they either succeed or fail in their mission, but you probably won’t care by then. None of the characters are remotely interesting or have inspired any sympathy, and any sense of the impending threat to mankind is limited by having us follow the ship of exposition-spouting dullards for the entire film, never once enlightening us to the actual situation back on Earth other than to briefly mention that it’s getting a bit chilly back home, until the very final scene.

Seeing a bad movie is frustrating, but not as frustrating as seeing one made by such writer/director team with such a strong pedigree. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland took on the zombie movie in 28 Days Later and made it seem fresh and genuinely frightening again. Why, then, when tackling the sci-fi epic did they fail to resist an overdesigned vision of the future, and a mish-mash of half-digested cliches?

Sunshine is a movie that frustrates not because it is bad, but because it should have been so much better. There’s the kernal of a good movie in there, and the occasional effective moment that promises more than is delivered. When the crew find the “lost” spaceship that went before them, for example, and start to board it, we are treated with some genuinely unnerving single-frame images that hint at a much darker horror than the rather bland one that they encounter. Perhaps it would only have taken one more draft of the script – tightening the dialogue, creating a sense of genuine urgency, and given the characters some, well, character, to thaw out Sunshine, but we’ll never know.

In 2004 my partner of three years had to move back home to Australia. The night before I had to move her belongings and her in my shitty car to the airport, we sat and drank wine in our front room and listened to music. One of the things we listened to was Angelo Badalamenti’s score for David Lynch’s The Straight Story. The film itself is a masterpiece of agonising sentimentality and the soundtrack is no different. I fully expect Lynch and Badalamenti to have researched the most heartbreaking chords and notes available and then made sure they utilised them to their full effect. It is something else, it really is. It’s almost cruel.

I remember we fell asleep on the sofa listening to ‘Lauren’s Walking’ and woke up when it was light. We spent our last night together on a sofa. A fucking sofa. What idiots. Since that point I haven’t heard the soundtrack or seen the film again. I have gone out of my way to experience neither and I am absolutely sure I will never see the film or hear the soundtrack again. It is that good.

Buy The Straight Story in diskant’s Amazon.co.uk store

Paris, Texas is one of my favourite ever films, and it must be said that Ry Cooder’s soundtrack album is also one of my favourite ever records. And that’s just in its own right. The album barely more than half an hour long, and the majority of it is solely Cooder’s wonderful, slide-driven acoustic guitar with some barely audible sympathetic percussion. As a piece of Wender’s film, it’s a beautiful, transformative catalyst that charges the rolling landscape and directionless characters with ravaging, stark emotion and depth. The simple, lilting theme performed by Cooder at the start of the film, as arid cliffs and rock formations surround the mute man in a red cap called Travis, is one of the finest moments of cinema-making I have ever experienced.

There’s not just Cooder’s guitar on the album though. Harry Dean Stanton, who stars as Travis, pops up to sing a traditional song in Spanish, startling you out of any stoned reverie you might have drifted into. Stanton sings beautifully, by the way. And scattered amongst the delicate filigrees of guitar exploration, the penultimate track “I Knew These People” is the record’s most curious moment; an eight minute monologue by Stanton, with subtle, sympathetic guitar by Cooder creeping in to colour in textures and emotions. It provides the film’s beautiful denouement, and as such, is something to treasure on record… and also a horrendous spoiler if you haven’t seen the film first. Finally, the album ends with a cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night”, revealing the source of Cooder’s inspiration for such weary, broken-down but elegaic blues as these. It’s absolutely stunning.

Buy Paris, Texas in diskant’s Amazon.co.uk store

Soundtrack albums, for the most part, exist just one step above the novelty record. Bought on a whim, spurred on by little more than the warm association with a flick you may have enjoyed, they often don’t survive more than one spin before being reconciled to the dustier regions of the record collection, itself only an intermediate step towards the charity shop. It’s surprising, therefore, that one of my favourite albums to be released in 2003 (and my most-played record throughout 2004) was the soundtrack to Sophia Coppola’s movie Lost In Translation.

Say what you like about the film. I’m a sappy bastard for whom Bill Murray is a cinematic icon thanks to an early trip to the flicks to see Ghostbusters. This, in addition to the standard geek’s fascination with Japan (not to mention husky-voiced girls in pink pants), makes it one of my favourites, but I’m not blind to its faults and wouldn’t try to defend it against a concerted critical attack on most fronts. Except that of Coppola’s choice of accompanying tunage, of course. Lost In Translation works as a soundtrack because its woozy, gently melancholy sounds echo the jet-lagged ennui of its characters. Lost In Translation works as an album because that thematic link keeps it from feeling like a random collection of tunes. That, and it contains Kevin Shield’s most substantial body of published work in years, while Squarepusher rubs shoulders with the Jesus And Mary Chain like a hipster’s wet dream.

Buy Lost In Translation in diskant’s Amazon.co.uk store

The Birds

The most famous Hitchcock / Herrmann collaboration may be Psycho, but The Birds is much more interesting. No nervy violin stabs, no music at all. The Birds is all about silence.

When the birds gather, they cackle and chatter. They sound like birds but somehow wrong, unnatural and that’s because you aren’t listening to birds, but to tape spooling.

When the birds attack, the tape spooling becomes an enveloping, wheeling riot.

But at the most chilling points in the film, there is silence. And all you can do is listen for the birds to return.

Buy The Birds in diskant’s Amazon.co.uk store

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be regularly posting some short pieces here about people’s favourite movie soundtracks, and why they mean something to the writer in question.

The first will be online soon, but I’d love it if you got in touch to tell me your favourite soundtrack, and why, so you can get involved. Send your suggestions to me at simonminter@diskant.net.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

My housemate Gareth and myself are now experts in the genre of the ‘modern rap video’. Matt Gringo keeps suggesting to Gringo recording artistes that we venture into the world of the music video for the sake of market share and sales forecasts but until someone can do one of those videos where the camera is on the floor going backwards down a hallway with loads of diamonds on the walls and ceiling and it’s kind of looking up at members of Bilge Pump/Lords/Souvaris/Sailors surrounded by professional dancers and then Emlyn from Bilge throws a massive wad of ‘fiddies’ at the camera, then it’s just not going to happen.
Strangely, Kanye West has made a video that looks nothing like this and is funny as fuck.

 

Thank the heavens right now for You Tube and don’t turn it off before these loonies hit the guitar solo.
MONK TIME.

I’m always babbling on here about the new crafting revolution and its links to the indie DIY zine making community and I just found out someone is making a documentary about it all. Focusing on the USA craft community, Handmade Nation features a whole range of crafters including old hands like Nikki McClure and the Austin Craft Mafia and covers all the craft fairs, studios, art galleries, shops and other people involved in making it all happen. There’s a sneak preview up now on YouTube that shows the breadth of the topic and all the amazing things people are making. If we’d had the technology back then there would totally have been a film like this about zinemaking. Also so inspiring to see so many girls doing stuff! Sorry, I get so excited about all this – zines and DIY are what got me and diskant started and it’s all exploded in so many new ways over the last 15 years. Watch it!

Directed by David Fincher, of Fight Club and Se7en fame, Zodiac documents the infamous unsolved crimes of the serial killer who plagued California in the late sixties and early seventies. With these credentials and the heavyweight casting it was obvious this film was going to be an interesting prospect.

Following a spate of brutal murders of couples in the Bay area, the attention-seeking culprit teases police and reporters with cryptic codes about his identity. Four men find the case of the Zodiac taking over their life: Robert Craysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a geeky cartoonist on The San Francisco Chronicle who, although not assigned to the investigation, becomes sidekick to Robert Downey Jr’s beleaguered crime reporter Paul Avery, to whom the killer sends his code. At the same time homicide detectives David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) are investigating the apparently unrelated murder of a taxi driver in San Francisco, when it becomes apparent that the murders are connected.

It’s an engaging performance by Gyllenhaal, in the role of the young man becoming steadily more obsessed with his quest for the truth. Ruffalo performs the part of a world-weary cop frustrated by the obstacles that get in his way to perfection. Downey Jr plays to type as the compelling drug-fuelled hack, whose life is threatened then heads on a downward spiral. The years go by, and although they all have their superstitions, the disparate characters get no further in their search for the elusive killer. No-one was ever charged with the murders, but Fincher makes his own conclusions. There is a scene where Craysmith finally manages to look the man he believes to be the killer in the eye.

The cinematography is excellent, whether it be the panoramic shots of San Francisco and the surrounding area or the brief but harrowing scenes of slaughter. It’s also a great period piece, bringing the frustration of the lack of technology scuppering the police investigation to life. It accurately evokes the terror that the community must have felt at the time. At two and three quarter hours, this meticulously-researched crime story could do with a bit of trimming. However, like a jigsaw Fincher painstakingly assembles the pieces of investigative journalism, composing a cryptic puzzle of a film that both grips and entertains.