{"id":6131,"date":"2013-02-08T14:27:32","date_gmt":"2013-02-08T19:27:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mondomark.com\/wordpress\/?p=3777"},"modified":"2013-02-08T14:27:32","modified_gmt":"2013-02-08T19:27:32","slug":"podcast-with-mama%e2%80%99s-composer-fernando-velazquez-and-nostalgic-shockers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=6131","title":{"rendered":"Podcast with Mama\u2019s composer Fernando Velazquez, and Nostalgic Shockers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Nostalgia comes in many forms, especially when directors are influenced by a whole slew of specific, regional, and voluntary impressions of what constitutes good, or neat, or that which is sublime.<\/p>\n

Take Joe Dante, for example: a filmmaker clearly influenced by fifties B movies (mostly bug-eyed monster films) yet whose sense of humour is rooted in classic Warner Bros. cartoons, and black humour comes from all those sleazy sexploitation films for which he cut trailers at Roger Corman\u2019s New World Pictures.<\/p>\n

Corman is responsible for giving many important American filmmakers their first or major breaks \u2013 Francis Ford Coppola directed Dementia<\/strong> 13<\/strong> (1963) prior to The Godfather <\/strong>(1972), and Martin Scorsese made Boxcar Bertha<\/strong> (1972) before Mean Streets <\/strong>(1973) \u2013 and Dante eventually made his own significant, personal films under Corman\u2019s penny pinching guidance. Not small character studies of small town America, but piranhas eating stupid people (Piranhas<\/strong>), or a sexually repressed woman discovering her self-help group \u2013 many of whom are named after B-movie directors – is really just a mass of werewolves (aka The Howling<\/a><\/strong>).<\/p>\n

Dante\u2019s real entry into mainstream filmmaking came with Gremlins<\/strong> (1984), but as too often happens when the director of a big hit is given carte blanche to make a more personal project, you get a misfire, a dud, or an outright disaster.\u00a0 Joe Dante\u2019s been revisiting specific themes, characters, and odd plot hooks in many of his films, and after an extended time directing TV he managed to make a 3D thriller filled with almost the same vintage humour, horror, and quirks as his eighties and nineties work, and yet when the film was completed\u2026 no one cared.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It\u2019s a phenomena that\u2019s all too familiar when a veteran director spends maybe too much time in TV purgatory and can no longer convince the studio snots now in charge of greenlighting a film to give him a modest budget for what\u2019s a familiar concept film. The Hole was shot in 3D and should\u2019ve been given even a limited release, but apparently there were no indigenous takers in North America, and its sudden debut on home video in late 2012 \u2013 3 years after it was completed \u2013 is a classic sign of what happens when a window of opportunity passes, and whomever owns the rights to the film has no idea how to handle it. Even the indie label who released The Hole <\/a><\/strong>[M<\/a>] as a Blu-ray \/ DVD combo is apparently no longer making that release, leaving fans stuck with either\u00a0 digital downloads from online merchants, or a poorly downconverted PAL-NTSC DVD released in Canada.<\/p>\n

The irony, as stated quite windily in the DVD review, is that while original creators of a now classic style \u2013 the eighties kid shocker \u2013 can\u2019t get money to make a film in North America, their grown-up fans who are now filmmakers themselves, can. With The Hole<\/strong>, the film represents a silly situation specific to a strange distrust by studios towards the progenitors of the films that influenced the humour of new filmmaker-fans.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A variation of nostalgia lies in Devil <\/a><\/strong>[M<\/a>] (2010), the film that was supposed to launch M. Night Shyamalan\u2019s Night Chronicles franchise\u2026. but didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Like a Twilight Zone<\/strong> episode or any twisty-bendy-foldy mystery, if you think too much about the story\u2019s logic, things get silly \u2013 there\u2019s no reason why Satan would waste time on a batch of losers in an elevator when there\u2019s far easier ways to claim souls. The filmmakers’ presumption is the reason a handful of characters are trapped and being driven insane (and possibly to kill) in an elevator is that Satan is just having some fun. Messing around with choreographed rolling balls of doom until everyone\u2019s dead.<\/p>\n

Devil<\/strong> is simple, lean, and surprisingly well written; the story comes from Shyamalan\u2019s head, but the script and dialogue is credited to Brian Nelson \u2013 a better writer who doesn\u2019t drag stories into preposterous, emotionally pretentious fantasy dramas – like Shyamalan’s idiotic The Happening<\/strong> (2008).<\/p>\n

Devil<\/strong>, which was shot across the lot where I used to park my car for Tuesday lunches with a batch of friends, was scored by Fernando Velazquez, a really skilled composer who\u2019s currently enjoying the success of Mama<\/strong> \u2013 good reviews, good audience attendance, and a box office hit.<\/p>\n

The latter factor is flattering to both composer and director Andres Muschietti because it validates their nostalgia for an elegantly constructed, slowly paced shocker that doesn\u2019t fixate on murder montages and sound design \u2013 a cheap style typical of most studio or studio distributed shockers which are too often remakes of or loosely tied to better, older B-films or exploitation nasties.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve uploaded a recent podcast interview<\/a> with Velazquez, and thanks to Quartet Records, there\u2019s a few music samples woven into the discussion about scoring horror, the beauty of an orchestra, the uniqueness of the cello, and Mama<\/strong>\u2019s executive producer Guillermo del Toro.<\/p>\n

Coming next<\/em>: a blog \/ review of the latest edition of Packaged Goods, Artful Animation<\/a>, which screens Wednesday February 20th at 7pm.<\/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":"

Just uploaded is a podcast with Fernando Velazquez, the lauded Spanish composer of the current box office hit Mama. Also new: Editor’s Blog on nostalgic horror, plus reviews of Joe Dante’s underrated and very badly treated The Hole (Alliance \/ EOne), and the underrated Devil (Universal), the latter featuring a terrifying score by Velazquez.<\/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":[1],"tags":[1843,1839,1525,1850,1852,1846,4212],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-1AT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6131"}],"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=6131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}