And this week's Friday night movie has been... Local Hero!
Sometimes you know a movie by - and only by - it's theme tune. And this is one such movie.
Growing up in the eighties I became very familiar with the tune Going Home. It was only much later when I found out it was written by Mark Knopfler (of Dire Straits fame) and was part of a soundtrack to a movie called Local Hero.
The latter, of course, is interesting to me. I just knew the song but knew next to nothing about the movie it was from. And that can hardly be called a positive sign: if the theme song is more important than the source material then that inspires a level of expectation that is near impossible to reach.
So what i got from this movie was the sense that this is a British comedy where a town is visited by an outsider and the outsider finds the people in the town are quite eccentric. Thing is, this formula has been replicated many times since to a point that going back to the movie which started it (or at least made it work) it seems rather flat in comparison. Yes this was a comedy and yes there were some funny moments but somehow coming to this movie at this point in time, I come away with the sense it doesn't have the impact it should've had. It would be easy to say this movie was dull but in doing so I can't help but admit I have missed something.
Still the soundtrack was great. And it's it fun to see a young Peter Capaldi.
