In this year’s BBC John Peel lecture, Brian Eno said that one of the failings of modern-day music critics is that they pay too much attention to song lyrics. As part of Roxy Music, Eno played on two of the greatest pop singles of all time – Virginia Plain and Pyjamarama – where the words add to the atmosphere but when considered apart from the music are ,at best, enigmatic, at worst, plain jibberish.
Even when songs do have an obvious meaning or tell a story, they should not be viewed in the same way as poems or works of fiction. This is why the ‘Rock In Translation’ slot of Italy’s Virgin Radio makes for such a torturous listening experience. On this, a woman earnestly reads the translated lyrics to popular tunes as though she were helping to impart some meaningful insight into the human condition. Lines in the vein of “come on baby rock me all night long” are rendered into Italian as though they were some kind of profound comments on the nature of loving relationships. Continue reading →
With the recent rave reviews for Duncan Jones’ new movie, Source Code, I was curious to see his debut feature.
Duncan Jones used to be Zowie Bowie but wisely changed his name. He clearly wanted to show that he could be famous in his own right rather than being forever known as David Bowie’s son .
At the same time, if he really wants to escape the link with his famous dad then making a movie like Moon isn’t necessarily the best strategy.
After all, DB’s big breakthrough single came with the release of Space Oddity in 1969 which coincided with the Apollo 11 launch but also owed much to Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking movie 2001 A Space Odyssey.
This great tune has always sounded like it was made on the cheap largely because of the cheesy stylophone effect.
Duncan’s movie shows that he has inherited dad’s thrifty tendencies as well as a fascination for Kubrick’s magnum opus.
The plot centres almost entirely on lone astronaut Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) who is employed by Lunar Industries. His job is to harvest fuel to supply Earth’s dwindling resources and his only companion , GERTY , is a computer. We meet him near the end of his three year contract looking forward to returning home to his wife and daughter.
This is a spoiler-free post so I won’t spell out what happens next, suffice to say that GERTY has a guilty secret and Sam’s plans are about to go pear-shaped. The circuits aren’t dead but there’s something not quite right on board.
The budget is a bit larger than Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Superthunderstingray but some of the moon models are not what you would call sophisticated. There is no digital animation and most of the film is Sam talking to himself or the machines.
Jones has clearly worked hard to keep within a budget of just $5 million as opposed to the $35 million he was able to spend on Source Code.
GERTY’s emotional range
This doesn’t diminish the effectiveness of his intelligent movie. The clever plot is more important than flashy visuals. GERTY,for example, (voiced in the style of HAL by Kevin Spacey) is little more than a tin can with arms with a screen showing emoticoms – happy, sad or neutral .
One good investment was to employ Clint Mansell to write the score which helps set the claustrophobic mood and create a sense of menace.
This isn’t exactly an action-packed Sci-Fi thriller but, then again, there was also a fair amount of floating in space in Kubrick and Tarkovsky. Jones knows exactly what he’s doing and I look forward to seeing whether he has spent just as wisely on Source Code.
Here’s the trailer for Moon and the classic sketch for Superthunderstingray from Not Only…But Also in 1968.
Virgin Radio in Italy has an occasional feature called rock in translation. They select a ‘classic’ track from yesteryear and render the lyrics into Italian. The words are not sung but spoken so become a narrative prose which may render the gist more intelligible for non-English speakers but, in the process, saps the energy out of the tunes and neutralises tricky innuendos. For some reason it put me in mind of a sketch by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore on ‘Not Only But Also’ which I was pleased to find had been posted on You Tube:
