EATTISOML #27

"Keep Hope Alive" by The Crystal Method

I have a confession to make. It's something of a guilty secret of which I'm sure none of my friends have even the faintest inkling.

I am a movie nerd.

I know, I know. I can hear your protestations now, Say; "Not you, Euan." Carmen is, as she reads this, thinking "not my beloved Euan" and even Graham is shaking his head sadly saying "I never knew. If only he'd told me".

And one of the things about being a movie nerd is that you can have opinions on strange things. Things like the best use of the word 'fuck' in cinema history (Prisoner Golic in Alien 3) and best throat slitting in an action/horror film (a toss-up between the death of the replacement radio operator in Die Hard 2 and Russel Crowe's effort with a Swiss Army knife in Proof Of Life).

And best cinematic opening sequence.

Say what you want about the rest of the film (and I can say plenty), the opening sequence of Replacement Killers is almost perfect and the use of "Keep Hope Alive" (which some of you might known as the theme for Third Watch) is a large part of the reason why.

Starting with a gentle, airy theme and slowly building into a thumping drumbeat that scoffs at the speedlimit if you play it in the car, the music plays over a slow-mo tracking shot of Chow Yun Fat (King of Cool that he is) walking through a crowded nightclub while the patrons bump and grind around him and it is obvious that they don't know he is there. True, half of them are probably so fucked-up that Godzilla could walk past them and they wouldn't notice, but the movement of the camera (and the way in which he disappears a couple of times when someone walks in front of the camera) is seamless.

I was never, nor will I ever be, the biggest fan of techno music (or dance or whatever the hell you want to call that genre), but even years after seeing the film, this track was one of the first I sought out on Napster and is still a regular on my playlists and driving CDs.