The Power of THE FURY

Gosh almighty but Twilight Time's THE FURY Blu-ray ($29.95, available here) is one delicious disc. The only other time I've seen this movie, I didn't care for it, but this time it had me absolutely in the palm of its hand, with only one climactic stumble. It's so sensuously filmed, so state of the art in its sinuous, layered technique... and then you notice that everyone is using landline phones and typewriters. There is one video game scene that shows a couple of girls playing Pong. That's how state of the art technology was at the time. Pong. How the world has changed since 1978, but movies have not learned conspicuously more than Brian DePalma was putting into practice 35 years ago.

Likewise, I've never been a John Williams fan -- he's just too cloying for me -- but the disc's isolated music track is a crash course in why he is great. This is what I learned tonight: Williams doesn't just score the action; he scores the performance that goes into a hand gesture, he scores the way light rubs up against the actors, the way the images shock our senses; he has the foresight to time a cymbal clash to the exact second when light flashes off the open eyes of Cassavetes' somersaulting severed head. The man is a freaking painter.