I have a problem with these kind of action films, in that I am the only person in the cinema laughing. Why doesn't everyone find it as funny as I do? I think they are meant to be funny. The film is packed with musical jokes and cues. Tom Cruise, 53, leaps from tall buildings, jumps through plate glass windows, rolls the car nine times down steps and emerges without a scratch. Meanwhile, the LSH, 50, seizes up in the cinema seat and thinks he might have broken a tooth on some popcorn. "Can I get a motorbike?" he asks at the end of the film. "Of course," I reply, "As soon as you can jump through a window without getting cut."
While watching the film I was thinking about some things I'd read about music Education earlier in the day. I'm always seeing things that say teaching music is good because it helps with literacy or numeracy but earlier I had read a blog that cautioned against such rationalisation. He pointed out that music is all around us, it's rare to go an hour without hearing music and that is why we should want to know more about it. We shouldn't just want to study music because it helps with other things.
If we heard spoken English every day and just shrugged and thought that there was no point learning how it worked because that was only for a select few that would be bonkers. That's what we do with music, though.
Mission Impossible is a masterpiece of a film musically. It has a very clever musical score, where Mission Impossible themes are interwoven with other music. The LSH recognised several bits of classical music and often barked, "Music?" at me, during the film, to enable him to fill in his missing knowledge.
Benji plays Halo to the Marriage of Figgaro. I thought it should have been another Mozart Opera, the Magic Flute, which could have been a musical reference to the whole point of the film.
The baddie needs money (don't they always?) and he is so desperate for it that he is prepared to kill anyone he needs to and I know why he needs money.
It's all to do with the scene at the Vienna Opera, where we watch some beautiful Turandot in a bit of a random order minus the last scene (because Puccinni died before he could write it). The lady in high heels and a dress that you can see her lady garden in, slides down the back of the set without tripping or getting her heel caught in the hem of her dress and checks her score. We know something is going to happen on the high A of Nessun Dorma, although they do start shooting on the B before it, which is a more natural climax (shoot at the point of tension not the resolution) If you weren't able to read music it is helpfully circled in red and followed by the word 'affrettando', which tells us things are about to kick off and everyone is going to hurry and rush around.
She does all this while Simon Pegg (always makes me laugh), as Benji watches on a flickering monitor. He helpfully arrived at the opera to Beethoven's Eroica, just to let you know that he is a hero, even if he doesn't look like one. He might be an IT expert but I can tell that even his Poxy Server keeps going down. While Benji is watching and thumping things Tom Cruise (I have no idea what his character name is) leaps around not getting a scratch. There are two other shooters and one has a weapon that just made me gasp.
A gun made from a Bass Flute. No wonder the baddie needs money. You are not going to find a Bass Flute covered in cobwebs at the back of someone's loft. If you don't have a spare five grand, you might be able to pick up a second hand one for four and a half. There's not a flautist alive that hasn't fantasised about a dual purpose gun/instrument. For me, the highlight of these imaginings came when a conductor told me that I wasn't allowed to breathe during Schubert's Unfinished. "If you breathe. I'll kill you, so you might as well risk it and not take a breath," he said as I turned my imaginary flute gun round, cocked to reload, placing a bullet square in the middle of his forehead. Not one of us, however, would dream of using it as a strangling weapon (silly Tom Cruise). We would also leave it at home if we were playing Turandot because there is no Bass Flute on the score.
If, like me, you get to the end wondering why the baddie needs money now, even though he has been doing the things he needs money for already then you just have to think about the Bass Flute. And if you were thinking that Tom Cruise might be too old for all this then the composer reminds us, with a small reference to James Bond that spies are old.
Isn't it sad that most people will have missed all these musical because learning the language never seemed important?
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