• He puts a question mark on it but Dave Karger nevertheless calls “The Ides of March” the year’s first slam-dunk Best Picture nominee. [Entertainment Weekly]
• Steve Pond talks to 2011 “it” girl Jessica Chastain. [The Odds]
• S.T. VanAirsdale gets a bunch of us awards blowhards on the record for a little early discussion on what’s in store this season. [Movieline]
I generally try to ignore film opinion pieces I think are fundamentally misguided — à chacun son goût and all that, plus the fact that fighting one mind is generally more trouble than it’s worth — but Ben Walsh’s idle article in The Independent today on the supposed demise of the movie soundtrack does such an absurd disservice to the current landscape of film music that it can’t pass without objection.
Walsh’s standpoint is a dully nostalgic one: movie scores were so much more memorable in the old days, when greats like John Williams, Ennio Morricone and Danny Elfman (who are all dead, apparently) conjured whistle-ready themes by the dozen, while scores today “seem so completely unmemorable” by comparison.
His pool of case studies for this assertion is a shallow one — he speaks mainly of the recent Oscar winners by Best Picture, Original Score and Original Song, oddly conflating the last two categories as if the two disciplines are somehow comparable — and even through that narrow prism, his preferences are hard to justify.
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I believe this weekend “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” passed “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to become the most successful of the Indy films. Granted, counting in inflation, “Raiders” might still be ahead, but probably not for long.
One has to wonder how long it will take greedy ol’ Lucas to come up with a follow up plan. I can’t see Spielberg doing another Indy movie, but I can see everyone else involved wanting to badly. Will we be given a Mutt Ravenwood movie (something I’d probably be more in favor of than another Indy film. Get some exciting up and coming directors and writers with soul-power attached, and they could be great).
At the end of the day, did anybody really want another Indy movie? I get the feeling that when “Crystal Skull” has run it’s course and has around $7-800 worldwide, Lucas won’t let it lie and we’ll get more.
So what’s the best case scenario? Sound off.
Can he do it? After becoming (in his own eyes) a serious filmmaker with “Schindler’s List,” “Amistad,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “A.I.” and “Munich,” is Steven Spielberg able to re-create the magic he almost always brought to his pure entertainment blockbusters?
It takes a look at his journey as an artist to even attempt a reasoned understanding of such a question.
On one hand, I argue that he was always a brilliant director, “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “E.T.” all great examples of his artistry, yet he himself was never satisfied by the reaction to those films by the Academy. It is well documented that Spielberg coveted acceptance in the film community, seeing the Oscar for Best Director as the ultimate acceptance from Hollywood. Snubbed for “Jaws” in 1975, he behaved like a petulant child as live cameras caught it all on film, invited in to see his reaction when he was nominated…but — he wasn’t.