In Contention

Tag: The Fountain

  • In praise of the modern movie soundtrack

    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.

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  • ‘Amelie’ tops list of decade’s best cinematography

    The folks at Movieline got their hands on a list of the top 50 films of the decade, from a cinematography standpoint, as laid out by voters at American Cinematographer magazine. Topping the list: Bruno Delbonnel’s work on “Amelie.” Delbonnel is a favorite among DPs. After all, “A Very Long Engagement” won him the ASC honor in 2004 and he received his third Oscar nomination of the decade for last year’s “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” But it’s still a surprising call.

    Another delightfully unexpected pick is Jeff Cronenweth’s lensing of “Fight Club,” but I was personally irritated to find John Toll’s serene, thematically potent work on “The Thin Red Line” go completely unrecognized in the top 10 (he finally shows up at #17).  I’d also say Roger Deakins, though at his usual top notch on “No Country for Old Men,” probably should have seen top 10 representation for “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” instead.  His work on the western just misses at #11.

    I’ve been asked many times to offer up a list of the top 10 shots of the decade as a bonus to my annual top 10 shots of the year columns, but I don’t think I can do it.  For one thing, it’s obviously a ton of work, but with so many shots in so many movies, I just think it would be tough to whittle it down.  Too tough.

    Check out the full list from American Cinematographer after the jump.  (Note they’re picking from 1998 to 2008).

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  • The best films of a decade

    Tom Cruise in Minority ReportThis column has been the elephant in my living room for months.

    Putting together a list of the year’s best films is easy. It’s fresh. It’s in your mind. It’s, in many ways, the expected culmination.

    Putting together a list of the decade’s best films is a different chore altogether. Yearly rankings fly out the window as a proper gauge, because tastes shift and impacts either dwindle or deepen. Revisiting films is called for, but fitting in the works you missed along the way is also imperative. It can be maddening.

    And the truth is, you can’t see everything. All you can do is try to be as honest about how you feel as you can. And even then, no list can be definitive on a personal level, let alone authoritative.

    And so the whittling begins, and in many ways, the process is the reward. The ultimate collective is a mere reminder of the journey through 10 years of film product. But some things stuck out along the way.

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  • An evening with Clint Mansell

    Clint MansellIt has been a very long time since I sat myself down in a wooden pew, but I think it’s safe to say that the last church recital I attended didn’t begin with a speech by a rebel auteur from Brooklyn, didn’t involve any electric guitars, and it certainly wasn’t accompanied by video imagery of Mickey Rourke. But then, the last church recital I attended wasn’t by Clint Mansell.

    A short stroll from my home in quiet North London, the Union Chapel is a converted (but still active) Victorian church that moonlights as an alternative music venue — perhaps the city’s loveliest — and tonight it played home to the extraordinary film composer and his musical cohorts.

    A cosy, candle-lit suburban chapel may seem a slightly odd setting for an evening that was largely devoted to the considerably harsher screen worlds of Darren Aronofsky, whose Mansell-penned film scores formed the bulk of the evening’s program, but it quickly proved a comfortable one.

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  • Clint Mansell on growing up through film music

    Clint MansellIt’s no secret around these parts that I’m a pretty committed disciple of composer Clint Mansell.  I was absolutely beside myself — livid — when his work on Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain,” potentially the best score of the decade, was unceremoniously snubbed by the Academy two years ago.  So it was delightful to read through this Pete Paphides piece in The Times of London, an interview with Mansell charting his course from pop rock star to serious film music collaborator as he prepares to take to the stage at London’s Union Chapel Monday with his Los Angeles string ensemble, Sonus Quartet.  The group will be playing selections from Mansell’s film score catalog.

    Much of the article (which has sporadic, fleeting quotes, a style that drives me mad) details Mansell’s collaboration with Aronofsky.  The two met in New York over a decade ago when Aronofsky was fresh out of film school looking to produce his black-and-white mind-bender “Pi.”  But there is also finally comes around to Mansell’s collaboration with filmmaker Duncan Jones on “Moon,” which eschewed the composers typical stylistic particulars in favor of a more traditional approach (that is no less atmospheric and of a piece with the film’s expert craftsmanship).

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  • Aronofsky at Edinburgh

    Darren AronofskyAs someone who prefers watching movies to listening to others talk about them, I probably haven’t attended as many of the In Person Q&A sessions at this year’s Edinburgh festival as I should have. Sam Mendes lost out in my priority scale to “The Red Shoes,” while the likes of Bill Forsyth and Brenda Blethyn (whose award-caliber work in “London River” I discussed yesterday) passed me by.

    I did, however, catch Darren Aronofsky’s career discussion earlier this week, and a most entertaining couple of hours it was. It wasn’t quite clear why Aronofsky was at the festival, given that he had nothing new to present – perhaps he also simply fancied a chance to kick back and watch a few movies in a picturesque town. (Earlier in the day, I had found myself seated behind him at the “Antichrist” screening – he didn’t look quite as impressed as I was.)

    As with the last time I saw Aronofsky speak, when presenting “The Wrestler” in London, the filmmaker’s interview style is largely too chatty and anecdotal to relate in writing – for the most part, I simply dropped my notepad and enjoyed the patter. The interviewer (whose name, I’m embarrassed to admit, escapes me at this moment, though I can confirm she was both gracious and very well-versed) reasoned that “The Wrestler” was still fairly fresh in the audience’s mind, so the conversation mainly flowed around Aronofsky’s first three features.

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  • Fuck that

    Warner Bros. Pictures' The FountainThis Ben Child item at The Guardian has me steaming.  The quote, following a recounting of “The Fountain”‘s crash and burn at Venice two years ago, that pushed me over the edge:

    How would Aronofsky recover? Despite being heralded as one of Hollywood’s most hotly-tipped young film-makers, he was a little early in his career to be making such a horrendous, narcissistic error of judgement. But recover he has. Could it be that the epic failure of The Fountain was just the kick in the teeth Aronofsky needed to get him back on track? There’s nothing like wasting six years of your life on a project, only to see all the doubters that tried to stop you getting it made proved correct, to persuade you to keep it simple the next time.

    Ass.  There are some of us that actually liked the film, bub.  Enough to consider its ambition worth more than the shitstorm that ensued.  There’s never anything worse than critics that smell blood, but whatever.

  • BEST ACTOR WATCH: Mickey Rourke in ‘The Wrestler’

    Mickey Rourke in The WrestlerFor some time I have been cautiously anticipating Darren Aronofsky’s upcoming film “The Wrestler.” I say cautiously because, as much as I love Aronofsky’s vision of a cinematic world slightly askew, I recognize his potential for going off the rails in blind artistic rage.

    I loved “The Fountain.” I found it to be one of the two best films of 2006, a unique and vigorous demand for new barriers in the cinema. Some people hated, detested it, found it a waste of celluloid, but I saw a filmmaker dissatisfied with the limits of his medium and stretching to make a different kind of film entirely.

    Then again, I hated “Requiem for a Dream,” the film largely agreed upon as a testament to his considerable talents. I found it to be an embarassing display, the sophomore slump from a director clearly going places.

    And of course, in “Pi,” I think many would agree that the seeds of expertise were sewn, the potential glaringly apparent.

    And now we get “The Wrestler,” which will bow at the 65th annual Venice Film Festival later this month. The film stars Mickey Rourke as a professional wrestler “making his way through the independent circuit, trying to get back in the game for one final showdown with his former rival,” according to IMDb. And for some reason, it sounds like a story with a lot of potential, to say nothing of what an actor as gifted as Mickey Rourke could do with a role such as this.

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