HANS ACROSS AMERICA

Friday night Your Humble Narrator had excellent seats to one of the more peculiar orchestral concerts I've ever attended: The World of Hans Zimmer.

(apologies in advance for my atrocious performance photographs)

My pal Kate kindly offered me a ticket to the Arizona stop of the show's current U.S. tour, at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale. I had never heard of it, but it clearly has a following; though not quite a sell-out, the place was full and the crowd screamed and cheered like they would have for Barry Manilow or Kenny G, at least.

At a glance, the audience members looked roughly like the folks you might see at a film festival. Zimmer, as you may know, is a prolific, Oscar-winning German composer of film scores, usually for big Hollywood blockbusters. He wasn't present at the concert, except in video segments during which his giant mug bantered with the maestro, Matt Dunkley, or chatted onscreen with the likes of Jerry Bruckheimer or Guy Ritchie. The show is a multi-media event, with lighting effects and video screens showing expressionistic patterns...

...or clips from the movies.

But the stars were the onstage performers; according to Dunkley, 60 musicians from 18 countries, from Ukraine to Brazil to Lithuania to Turkey to Israel to Kenya to Lebanon to Northern Ireland to the United States, playing and singing lengthy suites from Driving Miss Daisy, The Rock, Gladiator, Interstellar, Dune, Pearl Harbor, The Prince of Egypt, Wonder Woman and others. They made up, quite simply, the most glamorous-looking orchestra I've ever seen.

Kate got her tickets from the solo cellist, Timothée Berte-Renou, seen here, or rather not visible here, behind a column of otherworldly light...

Again, the photo does him zero justice, but the French native's long flowing hair and romance-novel costumes gave him quite the dramatic stage presence as his mournful strings essentially stood in for the voice of Billie Eilish in the Bond movie No Time to Die. He was one of the stars of the evening, but far from the only one.

The show's apparent strategy was to let top-notch classical musicians behave onstage like rock stars, dancing, mugging, emoting, interacting, working the crowd, goofing around. The audience ate it up. 

The finale was from The Lion King...

...and the encore was a rousing suite from Pirates of the Caribbean. 

Genius though Zimmer unquestionably is, after hearing such a generous helping of his music all at once, I must admit that a large percentage of his work seems a little on the unvaried side. Some of his scores are distinctive, like Driving Miss Daisy with its delightful if ear-wormy clarinet theme. But when it comes to his action and superhero movies, I'm not sure I could confidently identify, without the intros and clips, which solemn, brooding, bombastic score went with The Rock or Interstellar or a Batman flick. On their own merits, however, each of them is potent.   

On balance, The World of Hans Zimmer was one of the nerdier shows I've ever been to, and that is surely saying something. I had a blast.

WHY YOU ALWAYS LION?

Hope everybody had a great Inauguration Day.

On Inauguration Eve, Donald Trump, Jr. posted this comparison between incoming President Joe Biden and Scar, the villain of Disney's The Lion King, on Instagram:

I'd like to set aside the obvious silliness--that Biden "cheated to win"--and ask Junior a different question: Who, in this "analogy," are the hyenas?

Back in 1994, when I reviewed The Lion King for Phoenix New Times, the 32-year-old pedantic ass I was spent interminable paragraphs trying to show off my supposed great Shakespearean acumen by tediously noting all the allusions to the Bard in this and other Disney animated flicks of the period. I didn't get to what should have been the point of the review until the last couple of graphs, and even there I let the movie off too lightly for it.

Specifically, I should have given more emphasis to how hard it is to escape the interpretation of The Lion King as an allegory (probably unintentional) in support of racial--or, at the very least, nationalistic and aristocratic--purity. Much was made at the time that this was the first truly original Disney film; that it wasn't based on some fairy tale or novel or other such source. Yet what they came up with was, as in the Star Wars flicks, one more tired-ass tale of a prince destined to rule as a birthright.

Even back then, though, what I found still more disturbing was the matter of the hyenas.

The usurper Scar invites the hyenas to integrate the lion pride, a sure sign of his wickedness. Two of them have overtly "ethnic" characterizations, voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin. A third, performed by veteran voice actor Jim Cummings, appears to have some sort of disability. It's this diversity that wrecks the integrity of the pride under Scar. The filmmakers seemed to be uncomfortable with this implication themselves, since toward the end there's a heavy-handed shot of the hyenas goose-stepping. This touch now seems like a classic reflexive right-wing projection, a meme tactic, like putting a Hitler mustache on a picture of Obama.

I closed my review back in '94 with the observation that "...if The Lion King weren't so obviously good-hearted...it might have seemed like the jackboots had been placed on the wrong paws." I can remember people I knew back then rolling their eyes at this mild suggestion as being overthought and tiresomely "politically correct" of me. But the 58-year-old pedantic ass I've grown into now wonders if I didn't take this insanely popular movie too little to task.

So, again, I'd like to ask Don Jr., who would have been about 16 years old when The Lion King came out: Who, in your view, are the hyenas?

Also, does this mean you see yourself as Simba, destined to rule after throwing Biden off a cliff?