Typically, I find Joe Dante's least successful movie to be his best.  Matinée is a nostalgic, warm-hearted look back at a more innocent age, as a movie producer comes to a small town to promote his latest daft technology in the cinema, all set against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  It's all delightful stuff, and Mant, the movie-within-a-movie about someone who's "half-man, half-ant" is utterly hilarious.  The central performances from John Goodman and Robert Picardo are winning and Dante's fond fun-poking at the cinema of the past is as affectionate as it is amusing.

Composer Jerry Goldsmith took up his traditional duties for Dante in what was their eighth collaboration.  In many ways it's his most low-key score for the director and is rather different from all the rest.  There's none of the usual electronics or somewhat daft sequences of music, it's all just a glowing portrait of a more innocent time and place, similar in a way (though considerably less deep) to Elmer Bernstein's Far From Heaven.  The main theme, heard fully in the opening "Coming Attraction", is as warm and inviting as they come, an incredibly simple but very satisfying piece.  There are actually several other themes, one slightly bluesy one for piano that is probably meant to be a slight parody of Max Steiner's theme from A Summer Place, a really seedy but evocative jazzy theme for Goodman's character ("The Scam") and a warm-hearted little action theme ("This Is It").  All of them are reprised in full in the eight-minute end credit sequence "The Next Attraction".

Notable - though hardly surprising - by their absence are the pieces used to score Mant, though they weren't composed by Goldsmith anyway, being taken from Henry Mancini scores for various old B-movie horrors.  Goldsmith's score is really quite slight and it's maybe the most simplistic he's ever done (well, aside from Rudy) but it's so charming that it gets me every time.

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