Movie Magic

March 7, 2023March 8, 2023 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

When we talk about the powerhouses of music, we think of The Beatles or Michael Jackson or Reba MacIntyre or Beyonce, among others. People who have multiple-decade careers, whose very touch seems to turn to gold, who sell records just walking down the street. Everyone knows their name.

So if I said, Guess which musician has won four Oscars, four Golden Globes, seven BAFTAs (the British equivalent of the Oscar), 25 Grammys, was Knighted by Queen Elizabeth even though he was born in Queens, and has had 52 Oscar nominations – second only to Walt Disney, who would you pick? Someone with a net worth of between $300 million and $50 billion, depending on how many assets you count?

Would you believe it’s composer John Williams?

Williams, who is 91 and still going strong, has a Master’s touch when it comes to composing music, and he’s written more film and television music than you realize. An alumni of the prestigious Juilliard School, Williams’ career has spanned more than six decades, and he’s written the scores for everything from the pilot of Gilligan’s Island and Lost in Space to Schindler’s List (his fifth Oscar for score). Although he didn’t write the music or win the Oscars, Williams played piano for the score for Bernstein’s West Side Story. His scoring of Jerry Bock’s music for the film adaption of Fiddler on the Roof won him his first Oscar. That iconic Jaws DA-dunt, DA-dunt that scared everyone from the water, won him his second. Spielberg then recommended him to his buddy George Lucas, who needed a composer for the movie he was working on. Star Wars became Williams’s third Oscar, a soundtrack among the most widely recognized music in history, and remains the highest grossing non-popular music of all time (interactive fun fact: you can dance the Macarena perfectly to Darth Vader’s theme music. Go ahead. Try it.). Williams went back to Spielberg for his fourth Oscar – the soundtrack to E.T. Harry Potter? Yep, Williams wrote that. Superman? Home Alone? Jurassic Park? The Post? Sometimes, it seems as if a movie is destined for greatness if Williams writes the score.

March is Oscar month, and this year John Williams is the oldest Oscar nominee for the score to Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. So cheer for Williams on March 12, and in the meantime, check out one of his dozens of utterly amazing scores on the following films:

The BFG / Star Wars / Raiders of the Lost Ark / Schindler’s List / ET / Jaws / Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone /

Superman / Jurassic Park / Saving Private Ryan / Towering Inferno / Close Encounters / Hook / JFK /

Memoirs of a Geisha / Minority Report

Solar Punk/Lunar Punk

October 18, 2022October 12, 2022 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

Blame Cyberpunk.

The novel Neuromancer is credited as kicking off the Cyberpunk genre. You may not have heard the term, but you probably know it – a dark blend of high-tech in a crumbling dystopian world where the poor get poorer and the rich have all the technology – think Bladerunner, Ready Player One, Alita: Battle Angel, Real Steel , Elysium, Guardians of the Galaxy, even Hunger Games and Divergent (you could make a serious argument for Star Wars, as well). They’re gritty, dark, and sometimes disturbing, and paint a not-so-nice view of the future, with emphasis on classism, violence, famine, and a disturbing police state.

Steampunk is also a well-established fantasy genre, carrying on as if the gasoline engine never materialized and the world was stuck in 1890 and using steam power and copper pipes for everything. They’re wildly imaginative and adventurous – check out Chris Wooding, Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, or Richard Preston Jr., or movies such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or The Golden Compass, among others.

Since then, just like music has a thousand nitpicky subgenres (Simpsonwave, anyone?), fiction has also fractured into microgenres. Most are so nitpicky they’re pretty much covered under larger categories, but two more are becoming increasingly prominent: Solar Punk and Lunar Punk (Punk seems to be a word thrown in because someone is going against the establishment). Never heard of them? Neither have most people, but the genre is growing and defining itself.

Solar Punk is a backlash against all that dreary doomsday cyberpunk. Solar Punk is full of hope and ecology. Everything is green spaces, clean power, civil rights, encompassing communities, anti-establishment, and personal choice. Renewable energy, harmony with nature, and spirituality are key themes. Solar punk is a view of the future where everything finally does work out, a world where everyone benefits from the progress of mankind, because they’re all in it together. If steampunk is Victorian, Solar Punk is art nouveau. Think Star Trek, The Disposessed by Ursula LeGuin, Ectopia, by Ernest Callenbach, Dune by Frank Herbert, Disney’s Tomorrowland, and Black Panther (is anything more Utopian than Wakanda?).

If Solar Punk is all bright lights and butterflies, Lunar Punk is Solar Punk when the sun goes down. It’s moths and the twinkling of fireflies. It’s night-blooming lilies instead of sunflowers. It may be dark but it’s not dreary, like your backyard party at night, with fairy lights everywhere. Lunar Punk often deals more in mysticism, spirituality, magic, and the occult. Their flowers are mushrooms, their light is moonlight, their colors are the blues and purples and silvers of twilight. They have no solar, so they use bioluminescence. Individuals are more important than the communities they live in. The movie Avatar – the world of the Na’vi – exemplifies Lunarpunk. Still utopian, still upbeat ecological fantasy, but out of the bright sunlight. Andy Weir’s Artemis can fall into this category. Many Anime series can fall into these categories.

Solar Punk and Lunar Punk are often categorized together, both supporting the same type of ecologically based, optimistic utopian fantasies, a genre that is growing to match our current promises of renewable energy and inclusive societies. Many of the new teen novels have been exploring the genre. They are the generation who has grown up with recycling, solar chargers, zero-emission footprints and Bald Eagles back in the wild. For them, Solar Punk could very well be the future. Check out some of it today!

Unsung Heroes: The Soundtracks of Your World

August 1, 2016June 28, 2016 / Susan O. / 2 Comments

Think of your favorite movie or television program. Now think about watching it with the sound turned off. It’s just not the same, is it?

Every film, starting with the advent of the movie theater, has some sort of background music that adds to the drama of the moment. You know many of these tunes without even thinking, like Chopin’s Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor. Say what? You might know it better as the iconic Funeral March, parodied in umpteen cartoons and shows. Even if you’ve never seen the films, you can probably recognize the theme from Rocky, or Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Purple Rain. Remember the hits Ghost Busters, Saturday Night Fever, or 9 to 5? Those all began as movie songs. Think of na-na’ing with Batman or to Jaws, Hawaii Five-O, or Bad Boys, the theme from the white-T-shirt-promoting TV show Cops. Soundtrack songs stick in your head, sometimes without you wanting them there.

Sometimes a soundtrack can introduce you to music you wouldn’t normally listen to. My chances of cranking Mozart in my car are close to zero, but I’ll watch the film Amadeus over and over, reveling in “Salieri’s” moving descriptions of Mozart’s music, and I’ll feel every note of its beauty. I’m not too much into old-timey twangy folk, but the soundtrack to the 30’s-era epic Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? adds an earthy realism to the film. Stand By Me is chock full of pop hits from the early ’60’s. Ditto for Forrest Gump, whose soundtrack is pretty much a history of modern American music. Sometimes the music seems to have nothing to do with the movie but we love it anyway, such as Simon and Garfunkel’s top hits from The Graduate. The folky acapella track of Katniss singing “Hanging Tree” in Mockingjay hit number one on the charts in England. Philadelphia has a nice variety of music, from Oscar-winning pop hits to opera. The old British comedy series Young Ones used to spotlight different songs, and got me hooked on the group Madness.

There are times, however, that the orchestral music in the background of a film or TV series is so beautiful it can distract you from the film itself. The soundtrack to Thor did that to me; the movie was engaging, but the music drew your ear away. Pirates of the Caribbean is another – what is Jack Sparrow without his sneaky tiptoe music? Like Star Wars, the music themes give away what’s coming next. The soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings is majestic, speckled with sung tracks by Bjork, Annie Lennox, and the vastly underrated voice of Billy Boyd – Pippin himself. If you want to find a good one fast, John Williams is probably the undisputed King of Soundtrack music, but also look for Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman, Howard Shore, and the late James Horner. Every one of them makes soundtrack music look effortless. You may not like “classical” music, but these orchestral arrangements – “modern classical” – can put a different voice to the genre.

Soundtrack music can make or break a film or TV show. I’ve never seen 1981’s Chariots of Fire, but that darned theme is still stuck in my head. Whether or not you liked the shows, the title themes from The Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island, The Addams Family, and The Mickey Mouse Club remain cultural icons, still widely recognized decades later. It was a song in the middle of the movie version of M*A*S*H* that later became the opening theme for the television series. Forty years later we still know the theme song to Scooby Doo, a show that originally ended in 1976, or The Flintstones (ended in 1966), but no one remembers the theme from Holmes and Yoyo, Dharma and Greg, Eureka, or even Monk. Half of Malcolm in the Middle’s charm was the catchy theme by There Might Be Giants.

Having a “soundtrack” album isn’t just for Hollywood musicals – those are a class by themselves – but for every film or TV series, and most of them, good or bad, have released one, though some may be hard to find (took me years to find the soundtrack to Ladyhawke, a poorly filmed but underrated movie). Check out the film, then check out the soundtrack. You may be delightfully surprised.

What movie or TV music rocks your world?

In Memorium, Ann C. Crispin 1950-2013

September 11, 2013September 9, 2013 / Susan O. / Leave a comment

Just barely a month ago, I was sitting on a panel next to writer Ann Crispin hashing out issues with the film, Star Trek: Into Darkness. I’d known she’d been battling cancer for some time, but I was surprised how well she seemed. I guess she was very good at hiding it, for she passed away on September 6, 2013, just 3 days after posting to her fans that she was not doing well after all. She was 63 years old.

Ann was a gifted science fiction and fantasy writer. She wrote Star Wars novels, V novels, the StarBridge series, and created novels and backstory for Pirates of the Caribbean, but her Star Trek novels, Yesterday’s Son, and later, Sarek, are often regarded as among the best Star Trek novels ever written; they are certainly in my top ten, and I’ve read hundreds. Ann knew and truly loved her material, and it showed in her clever and conscientious works. Earlier this year, she was named the 2013 Grandmaster by the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers.

A native of Connecticut, Ann served as Regional Director and later Vice-President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She cofounded Writer Beware, a subgroup of the SFWA, to help writers avoid the myriad con artists and scams aimed at them, and prosecute the people running them. At her workshops she would drill into her students, “Money flows to the writer, never away. If someone is asking you for money up front to publish your work, run. It is a scam.”

Ann was a frequent guest at science-fiction conventions, often running workshops for writers, one of which I attended perhaps 15 years ago. Ann was a tough teacher and a tough editor, which was not unreasonable. Like Hollywood, the writing industry is a tough business, and it’s best to get the stars out of your eyes at the start. While I felt gifted for not getting her “You need to go back and take a class in basic grammar and sentence structure” speech, my hands shook for the next year with every word I put to paper. She helped greatly, but at the time it felt like getting pushed off a cliff.

Ann’s books will survive, but they are a shadow to such a brilliant and talented writer.