Academy Award Nominations 2011
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) have announced the nominations for the 84th Academy Awards, honoring the best in film in 2011.
In the Best Original Score category, the nominees are:
- LUDOVIC BOURCE for The Artist
- ALBERTO IGLESIAS for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
- HOWARD SHORE for Hugo
- JOHN WILLIAMS for The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
- JOHN WILLIAMS for War Horse
This is the first Oscar nomination Ludovic Bource, who won the Golden Globe for his score for The Artist earlier in the season. This is the 3rd Oscar nomination for Iglesias, the 4th nomination for Shore, who previously won for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 and for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2003, and the 46th and 47th Oscar nomination for Williams, who previously won in 1971 for Fiddler on the Roof, 1975 for Jaws, 1977 for Star Wars, 1982 for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and 1993 for Schindler’s List..
In the Best Original Song category, the nominees are:
- BRET McKENZIE for “Man or Muppet” from The Muppets
- SÉRGIO MENDES, CARLINHOS BROWN and SIEDAH GARRETT for “Real in Rio” from Rio
The winners of the 84th Academy Awards will be announced on February 26, 2012.
THE IRON LADY – Thomas Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Even though, technically, I was born when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, I grew up in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. All of my earliest memories of major socio-political stories – the Falklands War with Argentina in 1982, the Brighton hotel bombing of 1984, the miner’s strike and general industrial unrest of 1984 and 1985, the Poll Tax riots of 1990, and various international issues involving the IRA and the former Soviet Union – all occurred during her tenure. Whether you love her or loathe her (and many people do genuinely loathe her and what she did to the country), there is no escaping the fact that she was a massively influential and important person: the first woman ever to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the seventh-longest serving Prime Minister in history, and the longest serving since Queen Victoria was on the throne. Read more…
BAFTA Nominations 2011
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) has announced the nominations for the 65th British Academy Film Awards, honoring the best in film in 2011.
In the Best Original Music category, which is named in memory of the film director Anthony Asquith, the nominees are:
- LUDOVIC BOURCE for The Artist
- ALBERTO IGLESIAS for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
- TRENT REZNOR and ATTICUS ROSS for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
- HOWARD SHORE for Hugo
- JOHN WILLIAMS for War Horse
These are the first BAFTA nominations for Bource, Reznor and Ross. It is the 3rd BAFTA nomination for Iglesias, the 6th BAFTA nomination for Shore, and the 13th nomination for Williams, who has won on seven previous occasions: for Jaws in 1975, Star Wars in 1977, The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial in 1983, Empire of the Sun in 1987, Schindler’s List in 1993, and Memoirs of a Geisha in 2006.
The winners of the 65th BAFTA Awards will be announced on February 12, 2012.
Golden Globe Winners 2011
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) have announced the winners of the 69th Golden Globe Awards, honoring the best in film and American television of 2011.
In the Best Original Score category French composer Ludovic Bource won the award for his score for critically acclaimed silent film The Artist. In his acceptance speech, Bource said:
“I’m sorry, I’m French! Too much emotion for me tonight. Thank you to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for this incredible honor. I’m better with music than words. Right now, if I were to write a song it would be a tap dance number. So, the power of the music is universal. The gift of the silent film, The Artist, is also universal. So, thank you Michel [Hazanavicius] for the greatest opportunity and partnership a composer could wish for. Thank you to Bérénice [Bejo], Jean [Dujardin], and the incredible ensemble cast and crew on The Artist, thank you so much. I would also like to thank Thomas Langmann, Bob and Harvey [Weinstein], my family who is watching at home in Paris, and my agent Amos [Newman]. Thamk you! ”
The other nominees were Abel Korzeniowski for W.E., Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Howard Shore for Hugo, and John Williams for War Horse.
In the Best Original Song category, the winners were Madonna, Julie Frost and Jimmy Harry for “Masterpiece” from W.E., the film about Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson that Madonna directed.
The other nominees were Brian Byrne and Glenn Close for “Lay Your Head Down” from Albert Nobbs; Chris Cornell for “The Keeper” from Machine Gun Preacher; Elton John and Bernie Taupin for “Hello Hello” from Gnomeo and Juliet; and Thomas Newman, Mary J. Blige, Harvey Mason Jr., and Damon Thomas for “The Living Proof” from The Help.
WAR HORSE – John Williams
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A variation on the classic Black Beauty tale about of the life of a heroic horse, filtered through the cinematic lens of director John Ford, War Horse is director Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the well-regarded novel by Michael Morpurgo about the adventures of a horse named Joey during World War I. The action moves from rural Devon, where young Joey is raised as a plow horse by Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) to work on his father’s farm, to the battlefields of central Europe after he is sold to the British Army upon the outbreak of war and is adopted by a kindly cavalry officer as his personal mount. Moving from adventure to adventure, Joey makes his way through the mire of The Great War, serving on both sides of the conflict – and all the while young Albert, now himself serving in the trenches, never gives up hope of being reunited with his equine friend. The film co-stars Peter Mullan, Emily Watson, David Thewlis, Niels Arestrup, Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch, and of course has a score by the venerable John Williams, his second score of 2011 after several years away from the podium. Read more…
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO – Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There’s a lot of discussion going on in film music circles these days about the direction the art is taking, and a lot of it stems from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s Oscar win for their score for The Social Network last year. Amongst many mainstream film critics, Reznor and Ross’s ambient drones are seen as ushering a newer, better way of scoring films, one that moves away from the “schmaltzy emotional manipulation” written by the likes of John Williams and James Horner, and instead embraces a cold, clinical musical style that is more akin to sound effects than traditional film music. In his review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Variety film critic Justin Chang said the score “blends dread with driving momentum, establishing a richly unsettling mood with recurring dissonances, eerie wind chimes and pulsating reverb effects”. In his simultaneously-published review of War Horse, he criticized the film for “a cloying strain of bucolic whimsy driven by John Williams’ pushy score”, so you see what we’re up against. Read more…
THE DARKEST HOUR – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
As a general rule, and if I can help it, I don’t engage in hyperbole on Movie Music UK. A recurring cliché is that predominantly web-based reviewers are prone to proclaim every new thing “Best Something Ever” or “Worst Something Ever”, with no real sense of the history of whatever they are reviewing, and it’s a difficult stigma to overcome. Having said that, and with those points in mind, you will understand what it means why I say that Tyler Bates’ score for The Darkest Hour is one of the worst film scores I have ever heard. The last time I wrote something along these lines was when I reviewed Geoff Zanelli’s awful effort for the film Gamer in 2009. In my review of it I posted a picture of a polar bear with a migraine to illustrate how it made me feel; as such, here is a similarly illustrative visual representation of how I felt after listening to The Darkest Hour: Read more…
OVERBOARD – Alan Silvestri
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Director Gary Marshall, who was well known for his comedic success on TV with shows like Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, hired writer Leslie Dixon to write a new romantic comedy, Overboard. This outrageous story concerns a wealthy and pretentious married couple, Joanna Stayton (Goldie Hawn) and Grant Stayton III (Edward Herrmann) and Dean Proffitt (Kurt Russell) a local redneck carpenter. Joanna is a bitch of a woman who, after stiffing Dean for carpentry work, happens to fall overboard. She wakes up with amnesia and so begins a comic and outrageous story. Grant takes the opportunity to deny knowing her and seizes his long desired chance to escape a horrific marriage. Meanwhile Dean falsely claims to be her husband – seeking her household care of his four kids as recompense for his unpaid job. Well, be careful what you ask for! As the plot develops Joanna and Dean begin to fall in love, Joanna’s mother closes in on a search for her daughter, and the return of Joanna’s memory looms. To say the plot was silly and contrived is an understatement! Nevertheless the chemistry between Hawn and Russell worked and it suffices to say that Americans just love a romantic comedy. As such the film went on to become a big commercial success. Read more…
Golden Globe Nominations 2011
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) have announced the nominations for the 69th Golden Globe Awards, honoring the best in film and American television of 2011.
In the Best Original Score category, the nominees are:
- LUDOVIC BOURCE for The Artist
- ABEL KORZENIOWSKI for W.E.
- TRENT REZNOR and ATTICUS ROSS for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
- HOWARD SHORE for Hugo
- JOHN WILLIAMS for War Horse
This is the first major film music award nomination for Ludovic Bource. Korzeniowski was previously nominated for a Globe in 2006 for A Single Man. It is the 2nd nomination for Reznor and Ross, who won the Globe in 2010 for The Social Network, the 6th nomination for Shore, who previously won Globes for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2003 and The Aviator in 2004, and the 22nd nomination for Williams, who previously won Globes in 1975 for Jaws, 1977 for Star Wars, 1982 for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and 2005 for Memoirs of a Geisha..
In the Best Original Song category, the nominees are:
- BRIAN BYRNE and GLENN CLOSE for “Lay Your Head Down” from Albert Nobbs
- CHRIS CORNELL for “The Keeper” from Machine Gun Preacher
- ELTON JOHN and BERNIE TAUPIN for “Hello Hello” from Gnomeo and Juliet
- MADONNA, JULIE FROST and JIMMY HARRY for “Masterpiece” from W.E.
- THOMAS NEWMAN, MARY J. BLIGE, HARVEY MASON, Jr., and DAMON THOMAS for “The Living Proof” from The Help
The winners of the 69th Golden Globe Awards will be announced on January 15, 2012.
TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY – Alberto Iglesias
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A slow burning thriller based on the classic espionage novel by John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a film about corruption at the highest level of the British spy game. Influenced in part by the real-life exploits of the British-Soviet double agent Kim Philby and set in Britain in the mid 1970s, the film stars Gary Oldman as George Smiley, a taciturn, but brilliant secret agent who becomes embroiled in a labyrinthine plot of bluff and double-bluff when he discovers that there is a mole leaking classified information to the Soviets, and that the mole might well be one of the highest ranking agents in MI5, Britain’s elite intelligence agency. This is not the secret world of James Bond however: these spies are thinkers and manipulators rather than men of action, with a strategic mind more akin to chess than swordplay and gunfights, and much of the film develops via hushed conversations in darkened corridors and furtive rifling through filing cabinets. The film features an all star cast including Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, Simon McBurney and Ciaran Hinds, and is directed by Swede Tomas Alfredsson, making his English-language debut following his spectacular success with the original Swedish version of Let The Right One In. Read more…
BREAKING DAWN, PART I – Carter Burwell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The fourth of the projected five Twilight movies, Breaking Dawn Part I is the first of a two-part series concluding the cinematic saga based on Stephanie Meyer’s massively popular horror-romance novels. Teen heartthrobs Robert Pattinson, Kristin Stewart and Taylor Lautner return as Edward, Bella and Jacob, the three protagonists in the never-ending love triangle between a vampire, a werewolf and the human object of their desires. The story revolves around Edward and Bella’s marriage and her subsequent pregnancy with a half-human half-vampire baby; not only does she have to contend with the implications of this hybrid, but Jacob’s werewolf clan – mortal enemies of the Cullen vampires – are planning to kill Bella and her unborn child before it becomes a threat to them. The film is directed by Bill Condon, and features the usual supporting cast – Nikki Reed, Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, Kellen Lutz, Ashley Greene, Jackson Rathbone – as well as Michael Sheen as the leader of the enigmatic vampire clan, the Volturi. Read more…
THE ARTIST – Ludovic Bource
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Each year, around this time, an unexpected art house film emerges as a critical darling with Academy Awards potential. It happened to Life is Beautiful in 1998, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000, Brokeback Mountain in 2005, Juno in 2007, Slumdog Millionaire in 2008, Precious in 2009… the list goes on and on. In 2011, that film could be The Artist, director Michel Hazanavicius’s story about a silent movie matinee idol in 1920s Hollywood whose career is threatened by the advent of sound in motion pictures. The difference here, unlike those other films, is that The Artist is a silent film itself, shot in black and white and in such a way that the style and tone of the piece mirrors the very films in which Hazanavicius’s protagonist appears. The movie stars Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell, Missi Pyle and Penelope Ann Miller, and has already opened to great critical acclaim in the United States. Read more…
55 DAYS AT PEKING – Dimitri Tiomkin
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
55 Days at Peking is an epic film which joined politics and a love story as it explored European imperialism at the dawn of the 20th century. Set in Peking (now Beijing) we see the capital city occupied and under the financial domination of eleven European countries and Japan. They exploit the populace, are immune from Chinese laws and compete for economic control. A populist peasant rebellion called the Boxers rises up with fury and covert support from the Dowager Empress to expel the foreigners and restore Chinese honor and sovereignty. Producer Samuel Bronston assembled a stellar cast that included Charlton Heston as U.S. Major Matt Lewis, Ava Gardner as Russian Baroness, Natalie Ivanoff with whom he falls in love and David Niven as Sir Arthur Robinson, head of the British delegation. Regretfully despite the grandeur of its sets, its splendor and pageantry, the film’s narrative was uninspired, its script weak, and it suffered massive production challenges; implacable hostility between Heston and Gardner (she quit the film and they were forced to kill off her character!), went through four directors and ended up being both a commercial and critical failure. Read more…
IMMORTALS – Trevor Morris
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Considering what a rich and vivid palette they have, and how much potential there is for great storytelling, there haven’t been many great films made about Greek gods. In the past couple of years Hollywood has tried to work its way into that world, with films like Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the remake of Clash of the Titans, but found limited success. Unfortunately, Immortals continues the trend by being a film with a great deal of promise, but which is severely lacking in dramatic content. The film is directed by Tarsem Singh, and stars Henry Cavill as Theseus, a simple mortal man who is chosen by Zeus (Luke Evans), the king of the Gods, to put an end to the reign of Hyperion (Mickey Rourke), a ruthless tyrant who is searching for the mythical Epirus Bow, a weapon of such enormous power that it has the capability to release the Titans – vicious warriors who were enslaved by the Gods centuries ago – and with which he intends to wage war on the Gods themselves. The film, which also stars Stephen Dorff, Frieda Pinto and John Hurt, looks fantastic, as is always the case with Tarsem’s films, but suffers from terrible pacing, especially in the film’s first half, confusing interchangeable characters which make empathy difficult, and a curious lack of connection with the audience, which left me unexpectedly uninvolved and – at times – rather bored. Style over substance, it seems. Read more…
THE RUM DIARY – Christopher Young
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Rum Diary doesn’t quite know what kind of film it wants to be. On the one hand it’s another wry look at life through the alcohol-soaked and frequently hilarious lens of the late Gonzo author Hunter S. Thompson, on whose novel this film is based, and on whom the lead character Paul Kemp is clearly modeled. On the other hand, it’s a comparatively serious examination of the American suppression of native culture of Puerto Rico in the 1950s, specifically the way in which rich industrialists manipulate the system and steal from the local landowners in order to line their pockets. Then again, it’s a romance, in which the Kemp character falls in lust with the beautiful young wife of a shady entrepreneur. But, most of all, it’s a love letter to Puerto Rico itself – the unspoiled beaches, the sunny climes, the generous people, and the seemingly unlimited supply of alcohol that keep the wheels of the island greased. Read more…
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