Earlier today we featured an interview with “Sherlock Holmes” composer Hans Zimmer, the first of a two-part piece on the nominated composers of 2009. This music video just crossed my bow, I found it novel enough — thought I’d share:
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TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: Composer symposium, part one
When you’re a film music composer as prolific as Hans Zimmer, unique soundtrack flavors can be a bit elusive. But with Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes,” Zimmer found them, pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable with action film scores in the process.But the work isn’t without its inspirations. There seem to be bits of Danny Elfman married with Ennio Morricone, but Zimmer was actually reaching back much further.
“Let me just be German about it,” Zimmer says with a laugh. “It was actually the Kurt Weill vibe I was after. But it’s sort of all in the family, I suppose. It’s fun for me if I can actually go and embrace some of that European stuff again.”
The score is a delightful, jaunty construction that relishes in its own peculiarity. The good thing about director Ritchie, Zimmer says, is that he’s a bold director who welcomed these slightly “quirky” and “crazy” intrusions.
“There was an enormous amount of thinking about how to do this differently,” Zimmer recalls. “It became apparent quickly that Guy and I had similar tastes in music and, in a funny way, what hadn’t been done in a movie of this scale. It’s all soloists. It’s not really orchestral. Every note you hear has a real performance attached to it. You can’t really hide it. Everything is very opinionated and bold. It’s not the sort of homogeneous sound you get from an orchestra.”
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There is no plot to thicken
This…No matter what happens in the short term, you can bet this will be a hot topic of discussion when the entire board of governors holds its annual postmortem on the show and the process. The academy does not take attempts to interfere with its voting process or to contact its members lightly, no matter how big a mea culpa the offender is offering.
…is, I’m sorry, the biggest chunk of bullshit I’ve ever read in an Oscar season, and you get a lot of it this time of year.
I suppose publicists “polling” members by telephone and insinuating this or that in favor of their films isn’t taken “lightly?”
I suppose holding swanky, expensive events for films throughout the season and inviting members to show up and be glad-handed by talent isn’t taken “lightly?”
Give me a f***ing break already.
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Stunning fluid master
I was reading through this Awards Daily post concerning the foreign language film race (wherein Sasha Stone is quite flattering) and a link in one of the comments caught my attention.
I love fluid master shots. “Touch of Evil,” “The Player,” “Boogie Nights,” I love them. Sometimes they’re thematically relevant, other times they’re just a nice way to get through a lot of information quickly, but I’ve always had a geeky film school soft spot for them. And this became one of the all-time greats for me (even if it is obviously enhanced by digital trickery in the first portion):
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OSCAR GUIDE: Best Documentary Short
Much like the live action and animated short fields, in order for voters to cast their ballots for the documentary short category, they have to attend screenings of all the nominees. This tends to make these categories a bit tougher to predict, because they are frequently immune to noise in the media. You screen, you vote.However, if you’re aware of what the committee likes, you can eventually find the pulse. In all these fields, these committees tend to appreciate doing a lot within the time frame constrictions of a short film, which is why animated shorts that resonate, live action shorts with high production value and documentary shorts that succinctly tackle a subject always come out on top.
The nominees are:
“China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province” (Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neil)
“The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardener” (Daniel Junge and Henry Ansbacher)
“The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant” (Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert)
“Music by Prudence” (Roger Ross Williams and Elinor Burkett)
“Rabbit à la Berlin” (Bartek Konopka and Anna Wydra) -
2/25 Oscarweb Round-up
• Jamey Duvall catches up with Jeremy Renner and “Food, Inc.” director Robert Kenner. [Movie Geeks United!]• Louie Psihoyos asks what you would do with 45 seconds in the global spotlight. [Huffington Post]
• Dave Karger and Missy Schwartz on four underdogs they love. [Entertainment Weekly]
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A whole lotta Oscar talk
One of my favorite annual Oscar-blog institutions kicked off last night: Nathaniel Rogers’s three-day Oscar Symposium, in which six awards “experts” (remove quote marks as applicable) gather to discuss, debate, dismantle and generally disrespect this year’s Oscar race.I’m on the panel this year, but don’t let that put you off — Sasha Stone, Karina Longworth, Tim Robey, Peter Knegt and, of course, Nathaniel himself are all on hand with abundant wit and insight. Join the fun here. As a taster, meanwhile, here’s Sasha’s frightening trip into the mind of a harried voter:
Avatar – no, that one made me nauseous and dizzy. The Hurt Locker. What’s the Hurt Locker? What IS a Hurt Locker? Who’s in it? Who? Oh. Who’s he? It won all of those awards, that’s right. I remember seeing an ad about it last night. Huh. Up in the Air, I did see that. It has George Clooney in it. It wasn’t bad. Kind of depressing. The Blind Side – that was a really good movie. And Sandra is so beautiful. She was going to star in that film I almost made. Anyway, It was so nice to see someone do something positive. I think I’m going to vote for that one.
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Shankman and Mechanic on teamwork
In last Friday’s edition of Oscar Talk, Anne Thompson alluded to something of an elephant in the room regarding the upcoming Oscar ceremony: that curiously matched co-producers Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic are “not getting along.”As whispers to this effect continue to circulate around the industry, the pair have clearly aimed to dispel that notion in this interview with USA Today’s Anthony Breznican. Still, while they play up the “odd couple” angle with good humor — Shankman the highly-strung showman balancing out the more pragmatic (and aptly named) Mechanic — they don’t make you read between the lines to see the strain:
“It’s a meritocracy,” Mechanic says. “Whoever has the best idea wins. We haven’t had a blow-up. But we’ve definitely had disagreements, and definitely gotten heated a few times. He got me going one day, probably by mistake …”
“With an e-mail,” Shankman says. “As it always is these days.”
“At 5:45 in the morning, and I probably didn’t read it the way he intended it,” Mechanic says. “And I got (angry) and uppity.”
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Well…
…it sure took long enough for the “Hurt Locker” smear campaign to get here, and boy is it robust. More in tomorrow’s round-up (since relegating all of his silliness to a round-up is all it really deserves).
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“It will put you in the hurt locker.”
I don’t really know why Melena Ryzik is indicating over at The Carpetbagger that the title for “The Hurt Locker” hasn’t been explained. I feel like that was in the water way back around release and even during the Venice and Toronto screenings of 2008, but nevertheless, if you weren’t aware, she got Mark Boal’s answer at a recent NYC event for the film:It’s a quasi-military term that also shows up around football fields and locker rooms — bro slang, essentially, that’s never mentioned in the film. Mr. Boal first heard it in Baghdad. “I was trying to interview a soldier about a bomb that was there, and I was trying to figure out how much explosive charge the bomb carried, how many pounds and how much damage it could do, and he just sort of said, ‘Put it this way; if it goes off, it will put you in the hurt locker,’ ” Mr. Boal told the Bagger. “And I’d never heard that before, and it really sunk in,” partly because Mr. Boal was close enough to be put in the hurt locker himself. Mr. Boal and Ms. Bigelow meant to tell the story in the movie’s marketing but never quite got around to it, possibly because the movie didn’t get much marketing until it began racking up awards.
As a title, “it appealed to me because it gets to a central theme of the film, which is the cost of war and the brutalizing effects of combat,” Mr. Boal said. “And so more or less, to be really reductive about it, if you’re in Iraq, you’re in the hurt locker.”
Read the rest, including how Boal’s college major informed Jeremy Renner’s character’s name, at The Carpetbagger.
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OSCAR GUIDE: Best Actress
This year’s Best Actress race is easily the most debated of the major categories. Though one can’t help but wonder why that is, as the writing has seemingly been on the wall for a number of weeks now, stretching back to before the nominations were announced.It was also one of the easiest fields to call, pre-nominations, as both lead acting categories had actually coagulated somewhat. The SAG slate was mirrored by the acting branch of the Academy, offering a nice mixture of young starlets and veteran standbys. The winner in the field, however, might be somewhere in the middle of that cross-section.
The nominees are:
Sandra Bullock, “The Blind Side”
Helen Mirren, “The Last Station”
Carey Mulligan, “An Education”
Gabourey Sidibe, “Precious”
Meryl Streep, “Julie & Julia” -
2/24 Oscarweb Round-up
• Elysa Gardner catches up with Ryan Bingham in New York. [USA Today]• John Ratzenberger talks Pixar across the pond. [The Independent]
• Steve Pond chats with “An Education” star Carey Mulligan, who seems to be hitting the pavement a bit late in the game. [The Odds]
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Best Picture race, illustrated
This is a terrific idea that the Academy really ought to steal, particularly in light of this year’s dismal official Oscar poster. BAFTA commissioned Dutch Uncle Agency illustrator Tavis Coburn to create designs for each of their five Best Film nominees, for use on this year’s official BAFTA programme covers. The retro-inspired results are quite gorgeous. My two favorites below; the rest here.
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French trailer for ‘White Material’
Regular readers will know that Claire Denis’s “White Material” topped my list of last year’s best films, and would have placed high in my end-of-decade list were it not officially a 2010 release. If you’ve been wondering what I’m on about, there’s finally a trailer I can show you — subtitle-free, I’m afraid, but you’ll get the idea. It opens in France next month; the rest of the world could take a while.
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‘Serious’ wheels
How much do you love “A Serious Man?” Alternatively, how much do you love vintage American automobiles? If the answer to either or both of those questions is “a lot” — and if you have some cash to spare — you might want to take part in Focus Features’ charity auction of the rather awesome 1966 Dodge driven by Michael Stuhlbarg in the Coens’ latest.
Bidding is currently under way on eBay, and all proceeds from the eventual sale go to Variety: The Children’s Charity of Southern California.
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INTERVIEW: Armando Iannucci
He may currently be basking in the glow of a surprise Oscar nomination, but when I call him up at his London home, “In the Loop” writer-director Armando Iannucci is boasting about another achievement entirely.“Our family dog just gave birth to three puppies this afternoon,” he audibly beams, our opening pleasantries barely cooled. “They’re cavoodles, a poodle-spaniel hybrid. You know the Hairy Maclary books?” As a matter of fact, I do, though he’s too excited to wait for a response. “They look just like Hairy Maclary. They’re lovely.”
As I extend my congratulations to the proud mother – on top of those to Iannucci himself – it occurs to me that the topic of hybrid puppies is as appropriate a place as any to start a conversation with this nimble giant of British TV comedy, a man whose writing trades in everyday absurdities and non-sequiturs, whether in the dead-end Norwich media scene (“I’m Alan Partridge”) or the considerably more high-powered world of Downing Street politics (“The Thick of It”).
It is, of course, the latter – a scabrous satire of the alternately petty and ruthless antics of British government spin doctors – that provides the jumping-off point for Iannucci’s first feature film, “In the Loop.” Linked to the TV series by the presence of Peter Capaldi’s perma-scowling, cyanide-tongued political advisor Malcolm Tucker, the film broadens the canvas by taking on Washington as well as Westminster.