Hardcore - you know the score (has never been officially released?)

Lazy Jack is here just rewriting bits from Performance O/S/T - the bluesy Stonesy ramblin geetar, the whooshy Moog



Like the synth cues though - and a porno / electronics link-up that parallels those marvellous Patrick Cowley gay skin-flick soundtracks.



Strangely though when Jack had to do the OST for Cruising he didn't go electronic, he had a bunch of vaguely punky types like Willy DeVille.  I.e. not your standard gay club sound of the era at all.



Hardcore though - an object lesson in the fact that you can be the greatest scriptwriter but it don't mean you can direct

Despite the promise of the material, and the high calibre talents, virtually every scene is stilted... you sense that George C. Scott knows it ain't sparking and is resignedly going through the motions... Even Peter Boyle can't bring a scene to life.

Really shows you what a director does, by its absence - you could have a superb script, top-drawer thesps, a superior cinematographer, quirky and atmospheric locations, triffic costumes and scenery, neat soundtrack etc - but without the director's touch, there's no reality  ("reality" here nothing to do with realism or naturalism - the action could be fantastical or eerie or absurd or nonsensical, but the scene must convince, ring true). Nothing coheres, nothing flows.

The whole ending bit makes no sense whatsoever - the daughter refusing to be rescued and then suddenly agreeing, the surrogate daughter  being abruptly abandoned back to the fallen sleaze ghetto of porn and prostitution, the consequences-free gunning down of the snuff director-producer (running away, and as far as  i remember, never actually draws a weapon, does he?) with  Peter Boyle the private detective saying to the George C. Scott character (more or less) "leave it Jake, it's just Chinatown"

(Did Paul S ever get better as a director? I know Blue Collar is rated... Patty Hearst didn't spark at all as I recall... never seen Mishima...  Affliction was impressively harrowing I suppose... ooh and there was the DISASTER with Lindsay Lohan... but they do say the new film is terrific)

One of the better scenes in Hardcore - in so far as it gives a sense of the lead character's worldview and also some more sorely-needed insight into the stifling godly world that the daughter has fled - is this one: