Scum / Bad Boys

I think anyone familiar with Alan Clarke's Scum who then watches Rick Rosenthal's Bad Boys will notice some striking similarities between the two films, in narrative, thematic, and visual terms.  To me, there are enough parallels that Rosenthal and Bad Boys screenwriter Richard Di Lello (author of The Longest Cocktail Party) probably should have given some direct acknowledgment to Clarke and writer Roy Minton's film (as well as the earlier Scum teleplay that proved to be too much for the BBC).   

Bad Boys is a pretty rough film, particularly for a mainstream American product intended largely for teen audiences.  Scum, however, makes its American cousin look like a preschool picnic and is a much stronger film for it.  Where Bad Boys injects a love story into its narrative, an inspiring, incessant Bill Conti score, a Rocky-like final fight, and a theme of redemption, Scum doesn't attempt any of these softening, conventional touches.

What the American film hints at or suggests, such as male-on-male rape, Scum pulls no punches with and rubs the viewer's nose in.  There are mostly sympathetic guards and administrators in the juvenile prison where Bad Boys star Sean Penn does time; the men who run the borstal in Scum range from cold and unfeeling to unrepentant sadists.

In Bad Boys, the prison is shown to be flawed, but the film still makes it a force which turns bad boy Penn into a better man.  The borstal in Scum is a brutal, inhumane place and the film offers no hope for those inside or for some kind of reform to the system.  A few years after Scum was released, the borstal system was abandoned in the U.K.  Whether the film influenced this in any way and how truthful the film is to the actual borstal experience, I'm not certain.

I illustrate some of the parallels and contrasts of the two films in this video essay.

EDIT: I just found out about a French-Canadian remake of Scum, entitled Dog Pound, via this most informative Scum Wiki page.

Vintage Video Logo Mashup

Just under a minute of vintage videocassette and videodisc company logos dating from the late '70s to mid-'80s.  All the clips come directly from pre-recorded VHS cassettes and laserdiscs.

Manero / Balboa

It's by no means unusual for a successful film to spawn imitations, along with the inevitable official sequels, prequels, remakes, and re-imaginings...happens all the time.  So it was that the phenomenon that was Rocky inspired music impresario Robert Stigwood to quickly develop and produce his own urban, working class fable, optioning Nik Cohn's New York article "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" and enlisting Serpico scribe Norman Wexler to write the screenplay version of what would eventually be called Saturday Night Fever.  It's fitting that Rocky director John G. Avildsen was the original helmer of Saturday Night Fever before having "creative differences" with Stigwood and star John Travolta, leading to his being replaced by John Badham during pre-production.  I can only assume that the Rocky poster on Tony Manero's wall is a remnant of the production design overseen by Avildsen (additionally, there's a Serpico poster in Manero's bedroom; incidentally, Serpico is another film that Avildsen was attached to at one point).  Prior to their near-collaboration on Serpico, Wexler and Avildsen teamed on Joe, another blue collar cinematic icon of the '70s, which J. Hoberman wrote about here on its 30th anniversary.

Even with that not so unusual production history in mind, it is interesting to see the mythos and cultural impact of a film, right down to the Rocky poster prominently displayed on Tony Manero's wall, so quickly and openly acknowledged and absorbed, in part, by another film; to put this in perspective Saturday Night Fever was being produced while Rocky was still in theatrical release.  It's this relationship between Rocky and Saturday Night Fever, Rocky Balboa and Tony Manero, that I play with a bit in this short video essay:



Continuing this Balboa - Manero strand, Rocky writer and star and Sylvester Stallone would direct Saturday Night Fever's inferior sequel Staying Alive (complete with theme song by Stallone frere Frank). 

 

Completing this circle, over thirty years later, Saturday Night Fever would inspire the fascinating Chilean film Tony Manero, darker and more disturbing than anything on screen in either Rocky or Saturday Night Fever.

'70s and Beyond Studio Logo Mashup #2

Here's a second video tribute to some of those opening logos of yesteryear.  This one is set to the "United Artists Logo Theme" by Joe Harnell that was composed for use with the studio's 1981 logo, music I heard every time I popped in that Rocky III tape into the VCR, which was a lot.  I don't know too much of Harnell's music, but he composed 2 of the most memorable themes of my childhood: the aforementioned UA theme and that of the Incredible Hulk television series.  The Hulk theme is a piano piece also known as "The Lonely Man."

There are several other logos I would have liked to include in one of these videos, but was unable to locate good quality versions (or, I ran out of running time)...

'70s Movie Studio Logo Mashup

As part of my ongoing love affair / obsession with studio / distributor logos of yesteryear, particularly those of the late '60s - early '80s, I've put together a short video mashup of some of the greatest hits of logos from that period.  All the source clips come from movies in my personal DVD collection.  As I've written here before, some of these logos have become quite rare in the DVD and Blu-ray age, replaced by newer studio logos; specifically, the '70s-era Saul Bass-designed WB "worm logo" and Transamerica-era UA logos are very scarce these days.  However, the odd WB and MGM discs have retained these logos, which I've happily used for this video.

I would have included World Northal on this video clip except I recently sold my Quadrophenia DVD, which contained the World Northal logo, in anticipation of the upcoming Criterion release of the film.  I can't locate the logo anywhere else in decent condition.  Strange Behavior, another World Northal title I have access to (via my roommate Clyde), frustratingly does not contain the logo on the Elite Entertainment DVD.

 

The music for this clip comes from electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani's Columbia Pictures theme, which was composed for use with the '76 - '81 Columbia logo, aka "the Sunburst."  The music itself is hard to find these days over that logo; only 1 DVD in my collection (The Hollywood Knights) out of about 10 Columbia titles from that era, retains the Ciani music.  My Midnight Express disc, for instance, does not have the music played over the logo; however, when I saw the same film projected on 35mm, the theme music was included.

Incidentally, Finders Keepers / B-Music label has recently put out another in a long string of most welcome, left field releases...this one a Suzanne Ciani compilation entitled Lixiviation and Dead-Cert has just done a limited LP pressing of Ciani's first album Voices of Packaged Souls.

Sunshine Noir

In an effort to shake things up a bit, I'm trying something new here.  With some help from my flatmate Clyde, I've finally started to learn some Final Cut basics and I've used those new found "skills," to construct a video essay of sorts.

Sunshine noir.  Swelter noir.  Yuppie noir.  Boomer noir.  For a few years, I've been thinking about some of the characteristics shared by several of my favorite neo-noirs of the early to mid-'80s and tried to attach a suitable moniker to this grouping.  I thought about writing an essay or article, but after a couple false starts, I realized constructing a short clip reel or video essay could be more effective and more fun.  The Cinefamily put together a series a couple years back calling some of these films, in addition to a few others, "Neon Noir."  For the record, I had already been thinking of my own "Sunshine Noir" series / article independent of the Cinefamily thing.

There is some crossover in these two strands, of course, but I think of these five films as being distinct from the Neon Noir sub-genre, which, incidentally, encompasses just about all of the cinematic antecedents to Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive.  Cinefamily's series came about a year before Drive and from what I understand, unfortunately, was not very well-attended.  Perhaps if it had coincided with the opening of Drive, it may have fared better.

 

Since I promised this wouldn't be a written essay, let's just go to the videotape and hope that it explicates things as effectively, or more so, than a written essay would.  Music is by Tangerine Dream, by the way.  "Love on a Real Train (Movie Version)" from Risky Business and "Igneous" from Thief.