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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Friday, September 6, 2002
15:02 - Aahhrtsy Pretensions To-nite
http://www.kino.com/metropolis/index.html

(top) link
I'm going to be seeing the all-new digitally restored version of Metropolis tonight-- the 1927 Fritz Lang one, not the Tezuka anime. I'll be at the Landmark Aquarius in Palo Alto, right down the street from Stanford, on of those good old two-screen movie temples with unique themed decor (this one's all in an underwater/Atlantis style) that's all but gone today, and lives on only in the theaters that have made themselves famous as little niche art-film houses in towns like Palo Alto and Santa Cruz that can fill them with a steady stream of youthful patrons who will be more than happy to eschew a date comprising Men In Black II in favor of a spiced-latté evening with the goth boyz centered on a showing of Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter.

(Not that that describes me, or anything.)

Metropolis is making the nationwide rounds right now, and over the next few months; I missed seeing it when it was in The Castro a couple of weeks ago. (That would have been fun.) I'd seen it as part of a sci-fi film class at Caltech, which I have to say was probably one of the few times when I honestly enjoyed myself academically there. I guess that says a little something about why I'm not working as a theoretical physicist right now, and instead spend my time blogging about obscure movies.

The version I saw in that class, I think, was a fairly esoteric variant on the usual cuts that have appeared over the years (the 80s "Moroder" version being the current favorite); the one I saw had a shockingly cool jazz soundtrack, sounding like Raymond Scott amplified through the yet unborn shade of Basil Pouledoris. A heavy, insistent, driving heartbeat of a bass drum line ran through the entire introduction, and the saxophones and trumpets over the top of it developed a coherent, concise stress atmosphere that never got away from itself the way later action scores always tended to (like Goldsmith's unlistenable early outing in Planet of the Apes). The semi-mechanized workers in the power plant, frantically wrestling with the valves and the electric clock-face relays were thrown all the more into stark Borg-like surreality by this music, and it's haunted me ever since.

The new release of the film is supposed to restore the very original orchestral score, and I'm very curious to see what kind of music was originally imagined to go with those hellish scenes. If it's better than the score I saw it with, it'll be something to behold indeed.

...There. I'm done being an art-queen for now. Back to the regularly scheduled Mac-flag-waving monotony...

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© Brian Tiemann