One Direction: This is Us

Posted on August 29, 2013 at 6:00 pm

“They don’t know me, but they love me,” says one dewy-eyed One Direction fan, and that says it all.

This 3D documentary and concert film gives us a peek at the moment in time when One Direction, a group of five British teenagers, reigned as the number one musical act in the world. As inevitable a part of early adolescence as cliques and braces is the transitional object known as the teen idol. Almost a hundred years ago, it was Rudolph Valentino. Then there was Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, the Monkees, Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy, the Backstreet Boys. The girls move on, but those ties are strong. Take a look at last Sunday’s Twitter feed when Justin Timberlake’s Video Vanguard performance included a reunion with N’Sync. While there have been notable individual teen idols, the boy band has the advantage of giving fans a range of options. All of them are always safely, well, let’s just say they don’t have to shave very often. There’s usually a cute one and a smart one and a (comparatively) rebellious one. So whole slumber parties can debate the merits of individual members but unite in their shared passion, and each girl can feel that she is expressing her sense of independence and still-evolving personal taste in her selection of a favorite. (I’m a Paul girl, myself.) Teen idols are a mostly harmless transition object for young girls as they rehearse some of their experience of attachment with someone who is safely far away.

After an “aw”-inducing introduction with some home movie footage of the five members of One Direction, as they tell us in voice overs about their early childhood (we’re talking seven to ten years ago in most cases) dreams of stardom. And then we see the Cinderella story of how they got started. They never met before they were contestants on the British talent competition show, “The X Factor.” They all lost competing as individuals. (Does anyone remember who beat them?) But then star-maker Simon Cowell saw something in the long line of runners-up. He pointed: you, you, you, you, you. He told them to get together and come back as a group. They laugh in recollecting that their first conversation was not about the music or the performance but about what they should wear.

What they had, in addition to nice, tuneful voices, was good attitudes and great chemistry. Over and over, they tell us how much fun they have with each other and how what keeps them going through all the work and pressure of the tour is that they’re in it with their best mates. They insist that they’re not like other boy bands because they’re “cooler.” Also, they are not good dancers and they don’t dress alike.

Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me,” “Pom Presents the Greatest Movie Ever Sold”) directed, so you might expect some exploration of the merchandising behind this “pre-fab five,” who seem like nice, talented kids, but who are the avatars of a marketing machine. When a fan says, “They say what we want to hear and no one says to us,” those of us outside of the fangirl demographic would like to know something about the genius who thought One Direction should sing about how it is not knowing she is beautiful is what makes a girl beautiful. We’d like to know more about how the age of social media make these boys stars before they had put out a single record. But this is not that movie. And it is certainly not Alun Owen’s/Richard Lester’s “Hard Day’s Night,” a masterpiece completely separate from the charm and hooky tunes of the Beatles in its innovative structure and documentary-like intimacy. This is just a love letter to the fans from five boys who know how lucky they are and like to show off for the camera.

Parents should know that the movie includes some strong language, some underwear shots, and brief potty humor, but is about as squeaky clean as any documentary about teenaged boys could be.

Family discussion: Which one do you like best and why? What makes them get along so well?

If you like this, try: “Bye Bye Birdie,” an affectionate satire of the teen idol phenomenon

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What Was Really Wrong With Miley Cyrus on the VMAs

Posted on August 26, 2013 at 3:06 pm

Another VMA broadcast on MTV, another morning-after round of horrified reactions. This time, most of the criticism is focused on former Disney tween star Miley Cyrus, whose dance with Robin Thicke included the usual VMA trifecta for female performers: skimpy costumes (one ripped off to reveal an even skimpier one), lewd gestures, and raunchy gyrations.

A lot of people are fulminating about it today. Some are shocked, presumably those unfamiliar with either the VMAs or the trajectory of female tween stars who like to show everyone that they’ve grown up. It’s too bad that they so often think that means posing for what used to be called cheesecake photos and other signifiers of sexuality. Past generations gave children poor guidance by not giving them frank and honest information about sexuality and the result was guilt and repression. I am not sure the information we give the younger generation now is any more accurate. Now they feel guilty for not living up to some impossible icon of “sexiness.”

Some try to make it fit a bigger cultural picture. And there’s a predictable backlash to the backlash. That’s nonsense. She was not expressing herself. She was trying to fit into a distorted notion of what she was supposed to be based on the expectations of people who had no interest in her being herself. Just as with this summer’s “The To-Do List,” people are confusing empowerment with the acting out of externally imposed “norms” that are just as strict in their own way as 19th century strictures against any sexual contact.

For me, it was just sad. I find it hard to imagine that anyone found it sexy or entertaining. It felt calculated and desperate. There was no sense of playfulness or sensuality or pleasure.

It is painful to imagine the kind of pressure Miley Cyrus must be under as she transitions to another stage in her career. In a pre-show interview, she brought up the notorious Britney Spears/Madonna kiss and it was clear she was hoping to create that level of transgressive buzz. Instead, she must be embarrassed.

Miley’s fellow Disney alums Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato were also at the VMAs and both won awards. They were gracious and lovely. It is possible for a tween pop star to mature into a successful adult performer and still be cool.

Miley would be better off trying to follow their example than to try to be Lady Gaga, whose opening number last night should have alerted Miley to the risks of a brand based on “oh no, she didn’t!” Gaga’s 2010 meat dress was as hard an act to follow as Hannah Montana.

Interview: “The World’s End” Composer Steven Price

Posted on August 21, 2013 at 5:12 pm

The fifth and best end of the world movie of the summer is called “The World’s End,” and it is the last in what is now being called the Cornetto Trilogy from Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and co-writer and director Edgar Wright. “Shaun of the Dead” was a zom-rom-com (zombie romantic comedy) that featured red Cornetto ice cream. “Hot Fuzz,” a send-up of over-the-top action films, featured blue. Stay through the credits of this one to find out what flavor, or, I guess I should say, flavour since it is British, appears in this one.

I spoke to Steven Price, who composed the score.

You were writing for the wonderful Pegg/Frost/Wright trio and the movie has robot aliens! Was this the most fun movie project ever?

It’s certainly up there! It was an amazing gift for someone who does music to play with because you’ve got the big action sequences and the sci-fi mystery stuff and relationship scenes. So it’s everything you might want to do as a composer and the team involved were pretty good as well.

How did you get involved?

I met Edgar quite a while ago now. The first film I worked on was “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.” It is wonderful to work with him because everything is so well-planned so choreographed, but he is very, very open to different ways of doing things, so as a collaborator he is great fun. Edgar exec produced “Attack the Block,” which was my first feature film, so when this one came up, and he explained what he had in mind, it was an exciting time, really. The characters were all friends and getting out of school. Now they’ve all moved on with their lives, with wives and kids, except for Gary King, who was one of the most popular ones in school and never got over that night. Everything seems to have gone wrong for him so he persuades them to do this pub crawl but none of them really want to. You can’t go back, really. That’s the main theme.

This is a comedy action sci-fi film. How do you set the mood for that musically?

One of the first things that Edgar and I talked about was that everything musically we would do would be serious because for the characters none of it is a joke for them. Whenever we did err on the side of doing anything at all funny you realize very soon that it doesn’t help at all. We took it incredibly seriously and the action music was meant to drive along what was happening. The performances in the fight sequences are so amazing and convincing and the actors genuinely did it themselves. It’s not like there are a lot of cutaway for stunt people. It’s all very choreographed and well put together that it was great of fun to do. It’s not like when you have to cover up a lot of cuts. You could play along with the action and progress the whole tension of the scene as it went. It was fun to do those fight scenes and get the energy right up there. There was so much on scene you find yourself just playing along and enjoying it, really.

At what stage did you get involved?

Edgar’s great because he involves you early on. I saw the script a while before they shot and we talked about what he was doing. There’s a lot of great pop tracks in the film, really evocative songs from the years when these characters were growing up that Simon and Edgar put into the script. We talked a lot about that and Edgar wanted to make sure that it was not like, here’s a song and here’s the score but the whole thing weaved around it so that the music should feel connected to that. That was something we were very keen to do, incorporate some of those sounds into the score itself so you feel like the whole thing’s a body of work, this rhythm going through and connected to the characters. Simon plays a character named Gary King. Quite often you’ll hear a kind of slide guitar thing for his character. The connotation is the Western and getting the gang back together and all of that kind of thing. That came out of me listening to “Loaded” , which is a huge song in the film. In my mind, he lives that era, and the slide guitar became a kind of character thing for Gary. So all along I was playing it, and I always intended to replace it with some great player because my slide guitar playing is a little bit shaky. But toward the end I realized it was was absolutely the thing to do to leave it as it was. This version is in Gary’s mind. There are a lot of things wrong in Gary’s life and it’s not a bad thing to have the guitar a little shaky.

And what about the female lead, played by Rosamund Pike?

We’ve all looked back on things in our youth, so that was a great one to do. We played it very pure. We didn’t steer away from being emotive. We didn’t try to make it arch or a bit knowing. Steven, played by Paddy Considine, always genuinely wondered how it would have worked out. So we played it very purely. That is, until it is interrupted by aliens!

The characters were in high school in the 90’s? Was that your era?

Yes, we hark back to the early 90’s, like ’91.

I’m a little younger than them but music-wise that was when I was first old enough to have my own money to buy records and some of the tracks we used were real blasts for me like Suede’s “So Young.” Scary that it was 20 years ago! It evokes that whole time so well and it was nice to reflect that in the score. There’s music of the era like the Stone Roses. I remember vividly getting Stone Roses records, comparing the vinyl and it was almost like a currency at the time, which records you had. The Blur track — I remember being obsessed with that in the day and trying to learn the guitar part.

It’s not a traditional Hollywood film score. It’s embedded in the British sounds from what we would watch in science fiction programs and the Radiophonic Workshop stuff. They we a BBC unit who did the 80’s-era “Dr. Who” — a lot of those early synth sounds came in very useful. They evoked a peculiarly British thing. We also have an orchestra. The film does get very big. But it’s combined with a lot of the electronic stuff and interesting noises and experiments, things that felt very rooted in this small town where it takes place.

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Interview: Atli Örvarsson, Composer of “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones”

Posted on August 21, 2013 at 8:08 am

The Icelandic composer Atli Örvarsson was attending the premiere of Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. Director Harald Zwart was so impressed with the score that he offered Örvarsson the job of creating the score for his new project, a film based on the first of Cassandra Clare’s best-selling fantasy series, “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.” One problem for Zward — he had to tell the Oscar-winning composer he had already hired that the job was going to someone else. One problem for Örvarsson — he only had three weeks to score an entire movie. Based on the fantasy world of Shadowhunters, Örvarsson created several themes for the film. Incorporating bells and dulcimers to exemplify the presence of new and old, Örvarsson’s theme for Clary is inspired by New Age music with gypsy undertones. He talked to me about writing for a female heroine and why having less choice in what to watch on television can be a good education.

How do you prepare a score that sets the mood for fantasy?

I don’t think about it too much. For me, in a funny way the key to thinking about this movie was Johann Sebastian Bach. The reason being, he’s written into the script in a clever, funny way. He is supposedly a part of the Shadow Hunters, the group of people this story is about, half angel, half human, who fight the dark elements. I thought, that makes life easier. If you’re going to steal you might as well steal from the best and he is arguably the best Western composer of all time, so that was a good place to start. My job is to lend the characters and the story emotion and also importance. That’s the trick, isn’t it? For you to suspend belief, you have to invest in the story and the characters. I felt that the most important thing I could do was to make all these events that are outlandish seem important and personal. That’s what I was going for?

How do you work on such a tight time frame?

It’s like when you’re in school and you have two months to write a paper and you end up writing it in two days regardless of how much time you have. In some ways, time is relative in the sense that if you have a good relationship and an understanding about the aesthetics that clicks with the director, having a limited amount of time can be a blessing because you don’t have time to second-guess every decision. I had to just jump in and start writing. I’ve learned that to write good cues for movies you have to have strong music in the first place, proper melodies, strong musical ideas. It was a bit scary because I knew the clock was ticking, but I also knew I had to have strong material or it would just be wallpaper. It was finding that balance and then jump in and hope for the best.

Did you have a full orchestra or create the score on a computer?

I composed on the computer and then I went to London and recorded at Abbey Road with an orchestra and choir and solo pianist and choir boy soloist and all sorts of interesting things, about seven days of recording. Lily Collins, who stars in the movie, came to the recording.

There’s a scene early in the film at a modern-day club. How do you work with the club music that is already matched to that scene?

I take over that scene toward the end of it when a killing happens and the music goes from a club track to morph into the score piece. But I ended up writing strings for a sweetening for a couple of the songs to co-exist or merge with the score.

What kind of exposure did you have to American films, growing up in Iceland?

There wasn’t much exposure to Icelandic films because at the time they would make them every five years or so. What we saw was mostly about 50 percent American and 50 percent European. The funny thing about it was that there was one television station in Iceland when I was growing up and it broadcast only in the evenings, except on Thursday which was when the staff had the day off so there was no broadcast and the month of July when they had summer break. It’s ironic that I write music for television and film which I am clearly not qualified to do because I wasn’t exposed to it enough as a child. But all joking aside, one night there would be a depressing Czech drama on and the next night would be something like “Dallas.” It’s good to be exposed to such a wide range. There’s a place for both. My next film could not be more different from this one. It is a Holocaust love story. Having limited choices meant a broader exposure to stories and genres and that was a good education.

Is it different to write an action film score for a female lead?

Absolutely! There’s a feminine element that wouldn’t be present if it was a guy. In “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters,” there’s a guy and a girl. The presence of a female character made that dynamic different. “Mortal Instruments” even more so because the hero is a girl. I’m not going to write the same thing for a girl hero as a guy. Men and women just function differently. There’s a different core there. As much as I’m all about equality of the sexes but we have to celebrate the differences.

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Smile of the Week: On the Day You Were Born

Posted on August 18, 2013 at 3:59 pm

For more, check out Frances England’s new Blink of an Eye CD.

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