{"id":3451,"date":"2011-08-23T12:23:34","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T16:23:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mondomark.com\/wordpress\/?p=2333"},"modified":"2011-08-23T12:23:34","modified_gmt":"2011-08-23T16:23:34","slug":"career-intersections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=3451","title":{"rendered":"Career Intersections"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course this shot is in the trailer. It's inflammoniously glorious!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The Specialist<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>] (1994) may not have been a highpoint in the careers of Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, James Woods, Rod Steiger, and Eric Roberts (will you just look at that cast?), but it could be regarded as an important career intersection for the lot, seeing how the production occurred at a time when each person\u2019s career was going through another downshift.<\/p>\n

The marketing team must have loved playing up the alliteration with \u2018Stallone and Stone\u2019 in the ad copy, but both stars were slowly coming to the end of their feature film peaks.<\/p>\n

For Stallone, he must have felt the cluster of nineties action films were becoming stale, and taking a physical toll on his body, whereas Stone realized little by little good roles would be few and far between because of the bias against aging actresses, and few producers would see her beyond a cinema sex symbol, after her breakthrough, peek-a-boo role as the scissor-legged femme fatale in Basic Instinct <\/strong>(1992).<\/p>\n

Woods had already found satisfying work in TV \u2013 he\u2019s great as the corrupt lawyer Roy Cohn in Citizen Kohn <\/strong>(1992) \u2013 whereas Steiger kept working, regardless of the increasingly diminished quality of scripts. He also needed a proper director to reign in his penchant for eating scenes, d\u00e9cor, actors and oxygen in giant mouthfuls, but then part of the fun for viewers was watching the powerful actor overindulge in his craft and get all googly-eyed.<\/p>\n

Roberts had already fallen into that magical realm known as direct-to-video-Hell: he made a lot of films that were either destined for or ended up on cable TV and home video; and he rarely got a chance to shine on the big screen. Either no one knew what to do with him, or there was a certain oddness to his performance style that wasn\u2019t sufficiently overt to build a whole film around, the way John Carpenter shaped Vampires<\/strong> (1998) into a James Woods showcase of blood, action, and verbal vulgarities by the barrel load.<\/p>\n

As mediocre and plot-wonky as The Specialist<\/strong> is, it does possess a certain elegance, of which a good chunk can be attributed to John Barry\u2019s score. It\u2019s a rich orchestral work that quite frankly doesn\u2019t belong in a nineties action film because in 1994 electronics had already made such strong forays into the genre, most composers were compelled to inject a bit of synthetic drum loops hither & thither.<\/p>\n

Like Body Heat <\/strong>(1981), The Specialist <\/strong>is one of Barry\u2019s finest noir scores, and whether it was producer Jerry Weintraub or hack director Luis Llosa who wanted a full-on orchestral score, someone deserves a hug. It\u2019s one of Barry\u2019s best works, and showed he could apply his action style outside of the James Bond realm.<\/p>\n

Fans of Barry already know that the composer\u2019s trick in scoring action was to go against it: lessen busy passages, and go against the grain by emphasizing harmony, melody, and lots of sustained sections that for the most part managed to work.<\/p>\n

In The Specialist<\/strong>, Barry\u2019s score transcends the flat characters and sometimes limply conceived action sequences (again: Llosa = hack), and the original soundtrack album featured a nearly hour-long selection of music, most of it built around a heroic march, and a stunningly gorgeous love theme that morphs into romantic, lounge, and mournful guises. Once in a while a composer writes music for a banal film, and you have to wonder where the inspiration really stemmed.<\/p>\n

Warner Home Video\u2019s Blu-ray offers up a gorgeous transfer with crisp HD sound, and I\u2019ve uploaded a review, noting the film\u2019s obvious failings and some pluses. As a disc, however, the sleek colours look great in a home theatre, and while not the best Stallone film from the nineties, it could\u2019ve been worse: Oscar<\/strong> (1991), or maybe Stop or My Mom Will Shoot<\/strong> (1992).<\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mark R. Hasan<\/strong>, Editor
\nKQEK.com <\/strong>( Main Site<\/a> \/ Mobile Site<\/a> )<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review of Warner Home Video’s sparkling Blu-ray of The Specialist, starring the combustible team of Stallone, Stone, Woods, Steiger, Roberts… and Barry!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[676,675,283,673,656,674,659],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-TF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3451"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3451\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}