Sunday, December 17, 2006 Covington: Movie moments By Gary Covington Looking In
THIS is annoying. A couple of weeks ago I wrote of a wonderful movie moment - the Planet of the Apes and Charlton Heston confronted with a wrecked Statue of Liberty washed up on the beach like so much junk. Here, thought I, was a topic to scribble about in the future.
I was going to start by telling of a magic moment, which occurred in a 1970s caper movie - no, not The Italian Job - but then, and here's the annoying bit, I couldn't remember the name of the film's leading lady. I can picture the girl. A typical 70s blonde; bubbly and curvy. A Doris Day with come hither eyes and, at the time, girlfriend to a famous guy.
Susan George? I have to be careful here. The brain's memory banks work in the same way as Google advertising, by word association. Susan was the name of my very first schoolyard crush. Or was it Penelope? And George. Have to be careful there too. George is the name of any number of famous bods - George Michael, George Martin, George Best...
I couldn't ask my laptop. For the second time in as many weeks it's at the shop, all its wheels off, with a service engineer wrist-deep in its vitals. Not a virus this time but a refusal to get up and go.
Press the On button and all went well until that flourish of music, which announces the wallpaper. Then up popped a window declaring that a bit of the startup program was missing. How can a PC lose a lump of program? I boggled.
Not so the PC which, after gloating for a few seconds, dashed off into an all singing, all dancing routine of its own. The icons flashed on and off. The wallpaper - a tasteful photo of Mt. Apo snapped from Bacaca Road - vanished, reappeared, vanished again. A tiny drawer I hadn't noticed before slid open. What went in there? Too late. It slid shut. I tried to click an icon, tried to click start in order to close. Nothing doing - out with the plug.
And it was Sunday. The local cyber-cafe was supposed to be open but its proprietor spends his day in bed and his employees, knowing this, do so as well. There are other cafes - horrible other cafes - darkened rooms populated by pasty-faced and evil-smelling juveniles cyber-slaughtering anything which shows up on their screens. No thank you.
Screens. There is another magic moment in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: a space odyssey. Kubrick, rather than commission an original score for the movie, married classical compositions to the action. One scene in particular stands out - our first sight of the revolving wheel-like spaceport, bone-white against the blackness of space, accompanied, crazily but marvelously, by the Blue Danube waltz of composer Johann Strauss.
Why the Blue Danube? Familiarity? Hardly. Much of the movie's other music is by Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti and - before 2001 - who had heard of him or listened to his strange and haunting creations?
Never mind. Charlton Heston and the ruined Statue of Liberty. Kubrick's spaceport turning to a Strauss waltz. Susan George in a convertible... Susan George? This is really annoying.
