Why don't you two just do it already?

Those Scott boys love their muses.

For Ridley, it's Russell Crowe, as discussed (quite controversially) here. For his younger brother Tony, it's Denzel Washington. Denzel may make movies without Tony, but Tony never makes a movie without Denzel.

In fact, Unstoppable, releasing today, is the third straight Tony Scott movie in which Denzel Washington has appeared, fourth in the last five, and fifth overall.

So that's why Washington's career seems to have lost a bit of its luster recently.

Look, I actually think Unstoppable looks decent. It doesn't seem to go as heavy on the hypersaturated film stock that Scott has made his trademark, and it reminds me a little bit of Speed, which is always a good thing. Plus, Chris Pine is a genuine movie star in the making. Team him up with one of our greatest movie stars, and you've got the potential for a really fun movie.

It's just that a fun movie would be a real change of pace for Tony Scott.

Scott has become a big punching bag of mine in recent years, and it's really only because of two movies, only one of which stars Washington. In fact, of the five collaborations between Washington and Scott, including Unstoppable, I've seen only three, two of which I liked: Crimson Tide (big fan) and Deja Vu (surprisingly fun). I haven't seen The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 -- I admit that I just assumed that it sucked and moved on -- so that just leaves one more movie I could be talking about:

Man on Fire.

Oh how I hate Man on Fire.

It was like Tony Scott wanted to find one script on which he could dump all his tendencies toward directorial excess, without regard for tastefulness or likability. Man on Fire is a nihilistic, hateful revenge movie full of sadistic characters, many of whom are killed even more sadistically.

But everyone likes a good Charles Bronson movie now and then. So it's the nausea-inducing filmmaking techniques that really drove Man on Fire over the edge into a morass of shit. Jittery camerawork, film stocks and color filters changing every three minutes, frenetic editing, doubling and tripling of movements, distortion of images, slow motion, whip pans, excessive sound effects ... every piece of garish showmanship you can think of to make a film look "hip" and "cutting edge" is in this movie. It just made me feel queasy.

But there's a film that commits these sins to an even greater extent, and it's also directed by Tony Scott, but does not feature Denzel:

Domino.

Oh how I hate Domino.

Take all the visual bombast I described above and then double it, and you've got Domino. To add to the "hipness" quotient of this film, there are even choice bits of dialogue typed out on the screen and looped in the soundtrack, so they have the maximum opportunity to be extracted for quotation and entered into the cinematic lexicon, I suppose. Didn't happen. Domino is noisy and stupid, and it fetishizes violence as much as the worst offenders in that category.

So what does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Or with Unstoppable?

I guess not much. But any opportunity to diss Man on Fire and Domino is a good opportunity. It's my blog, so if I want to use the release of Unstoppable as a chance to bag on its director, I will.

Tony Scott has made some truly enduring films, such as Top Gun and True Romance. But today he is no better than a hack who occasionally scores a likable movie. Denzel Washington, one of the most popular stars in Hollywood, does not need to tarnish his reputation by continuing to appear in Scott's movies.

Er, unless they're like Crimson Tide and Deja Vu, in which case, never mind.

Absolute viewpoints ... they'll get you in the end.

Warning! This soundtrack listing contains spoilers!

And so does this post, so don't read any further if you don't want to know the ending of Man on Fire.

With every new Tony Scott film I see, the director's relentlessly jittery filmmaking style makes me more and more convinced he's a hack. Man on Fire was no different, and perhaps epitomized his approach as much as any film he's made other than the execrable Domino.

But I was never in it for the filmmaking with Man on Fire. I was in it for the soundtrack.

Specifically, I was geeked to see the movie -- well, geeked enough to see it six years later -- because of the Nine Inch Nails song that played in the trailer: "The Mark Has Been Made," from The Fragile. I already devoted a post to the use of my favorite band in the movies -- you can read it here. I neglected to mention Man on Fire in that post, probably because the rest of the movie did not look good enough to compel an actual screening. But I knew I would eventually see it. This must be the weekend for that, as I said the same thing about Running With Scissors yesterday.

I soon found out that there were at least snippets from a couple other Nine Inch Nails songs in the movie, but it was a different song that compelled me to go to IMDB to check out the soundtrack listing. Namely, there was an ethereal choral song in the first act that sounded to me like it was sung by Lisa Gerrard, an Australian singer whose songs sound kind of like the forlorn hymns I might associate with Ireland. I became aware of Gerrard's talents through another film, Henry Poole Is Here, where she sung a song that moved me so much, I bought it on itunes shortly afterward.

Now, most people would probably wait until the movie was over. But we film buffs are notorious for needing our curiosity to be satisfied immediately. Especially if I'm watching a movie by myself, and movie-watching etiquette doesn't enter into it, I'll pause to look up what other movies a certain character was in, etc. And just so I didn't forget to do it later on, I thought I'd check immediately to see if that was, in fact, Lisa Gerrard's voice.

I did find her name in the soundtrack listing. The name of the song she sings in the movie? "Creasy Dies."

I should probably tell you at this point that John W. Creasy is the character Denzel Washington plays in the movie.

So there I was, about 30 minutes into an interminable 146-minute running time, and I already knew the ending.

Not that this was some great surprise. Everything about the movie was setting it up to be a redemption tale of Creasy's character, for the "sins God would never forgive him for," which he mentions in the beginning (but are never elaborated on in the script). In movies like this, where a Charles Bronson type systematically kills every scumbug who had anything to do with some motivating atrocity, he's going to die smiling in the third act, having achieved some measure of vengeance or accomplished some heroic goal.

But did I really need the soundtrack listing to ruin it for me?

I never would have thought I needed to exercise the same type of caution with soundtrack listings as I do with DVD chapters. If I want to find where I was in the movie, I don't like to use the chapter menu, because often times, the very chapter names they choose will reveal some key plot element. If I'm watching The Crying Game for the first time, and am returning to it after a brief interruption, I really don't want to stumble across a chapter called "Dil's Penis," now do I?

What really gets me about naming that Lisa Gerrard song "Creasy Dies" is that the same song plays like four times in the movie, and only during the last time does the life actually snuff out of Washington's character. So not only is the song title an inexcusable spoiler, but it's too specific for the way the song is actually used in the film.

So yeah, that was the one reason I didn't like Man on Fire. (Please note my sarcasm.)

Before we leave the oh-so-interesting topic of Man on Fire's soundtrack behind, I thought I'd mention a couple other interesting things about it. IMDB lists no fewer than six Nine Inch Nails songs, when in fact I could only identify two. ("The Mark Has Been Made," like "Creasy Dies," was played about four different times.)

Then there was the fact that there seem to have been uncredited thefts from the soundtracks of other movies. IMDB mentions three uncredited songs from Changing Lanes, four uncredited songs from Abandon, and one from Against All Odds, oddly enough.