Film Shapes

So I was driving back from down south and we decided to fiddle with the radio. A generic FM station appeared and my Gen X ears knew most of the tracks, some ok, some dire. But the thing that prompted me to start this post was that a couple of the songs were clearly linked to films from the 1980s. I began thinking that, as much as it doesn't really happen now (or even much after the end of that decade, with some notable exceptions), this 'movie/song tie-in' was a huge pop culture phenomenon back then. As a massive time-wasting technique, I decided to do a bit of research and try to find the film and song pairing that was the most popular of the era. Box Office Mojo helped with the film's takings, but how to discern a song's popularity? I've had a look at the US Billboard charts and the UK top 40, so we'll see if this goes some way to covering it.  Ultimately, the song that YOU heard on the radio all the time, or watched on MTV (often with the film's actor...

I caught this second episode a couple of days after the first one, while the world of Dumas' Musketeers was still fresh in my mind. It picks up very close to the cliffhanger ending of the first, with D'Artagnan (François Civil) in a spot of bother after watching his fancy, Constance (Lyna Khoudri) possibly being abducted, and then taking a club to the head. As with the first episode, this is a fairly dense film, full of 'script' events and a near exhaustive roll call of characters to facilitate. Martin Bourboulon and his writers, Mathieu Delaporte and Alexandre de le Patellière pay their due respects to Dumas by trying to squeeze as much in as possible in a relatively short runtime. And mostly, it works. It's as entertaining as the previous film, albeit with a markedly different tone. The story continues as King Louis XIII (Louis Garrel) has finally declared war on the Protestant terrorists, camped in La Rochelle on the west coast of France. The Musketeers make thei...

Here's another version of the Alexandre Dumas classic, the latest in a long line of adaptations, possibly starting in 1903, but probably most famously directed by Richard Lester in the 70s (or the Douglas Fairbanks film in the 20s, if you want to go back that far). This one, directed by Martin Bourboulon, is given all bells and whistles - it was filmed together with its second part, The Three Musketeers: Milady  and they had a pretty sizeable budget, apparently. I'm guessing a lot of those Euros went on the stellar cast - Vincent Cassel as Athos, Romain Duris as Aramis, Eva Green as Milady, and Vicki Krieps and Loius Garrel as the Queen and King. All on sterling form, though it's François Civil as the lead, D'Artagnan and Lyna Khoudri as Constance who must take the plaudits. The innocence of their burgeoning romance is the heart within the film that all the religious and political arteries feed into.  The story is slightly convoluted but it all spins around the affairs ...

We saw this on May 22 at the 109 cinemas in HAT Kobe. The HAT apparently stands for Happy Active Town, an area east of central Kobe that was rebuilt after the Hanshin earthquake of 1995. Why am I writing all this? Probably because it's a tad more interesting than the film we saw there. I guess this Pirates movie shows that even if you throw actors the calibre of Depp, Rush, McShane and Cruz together, you still can't guarantee goals. It was a fairly flaccid affair (though a little better than numbers 2 and 3) and Depp is required to tent-pole the whole thing but he's not THAT good. It seems the franchise doesn't have the legs. Bombastic and dispiriting. P.S. A few days later I watched a 'small' German film called The Edge of Heaven and it stayed with me a lot longer than this Pirates film did.