Jeffrey Wells

John Williams‘ War Horse soundtrack is about calculated symphonic dictation. It’s one of those scores that goads you, like an overbearing, baton-waving music teacher, into feeling this or that emotion on cue. Williams + Spielberg have been pushing the same buttons and working the same levers since Jaws. I once listened to an orchestra perform a summation of Williams’ best known movie themes at the Hollywood Bowl (with Williams conducting, of course). Well plowed and well trod, to put it mildly.

Mychael Danna‘s Moneyball score is more of a subtle, half-spooky weaver of spells. It’s hardly lacking in the activation of feeling or the use of compositional complexity, but it goes much easier and always seems to be slipping into your inner reservoir, creating spot-on ripples and currents but never trying to overwhelm or wash over. Danna, clearly, is trying to augment what you’re already feeling. As Jonah Hill put it in a recent HE interview, Danna’s score “watches the movie with you.”

Indiewire‘s Amy Dawes attended last night’s Dark Knight Rises prologue IMAX press screening, and has this to say about the big-screen debut of Tom Hardy‘s Bane character: “You’d have to know in advance [that] the villain was Hardy, given that he’s muscled up and puffed up, has a shaved head, and wears a disturbing-looking gas mask that hides all his features save his eyes – kind of a Hannibal Lecter hockey mask-look on steroids.”

On top of which Hardy’s “voice behind the mask is metallic and muffled — another cause for concern.”

The effect, says Dawes, “is more likely to appeal to S&M fetishists than to anyone who hopes to gaze upon the physically blessed actor, who also appeared in Nolan’s most recent movie, Inception.”

Hollywood Elsewhere will not be among the elite press people (including a fair number of fanboy types) who will be attending an IMAX screening this evening of Chris Nolan‘s seven or eight-minute Dark Knight Rises prologue. Reps for Deadline, Indiewire and other mainstream entertainment press will be at the Universal IMAX Citywalk event at 7:30 pm (with a reception to follow), and Nolan is hosting an earlier screening at the same venue at 5:45 pm for filmmaker friends.

I guess Warner Bros. publicists feel I’m not fanboy enough, but where is the logic in that? This wll be tonight’s biggest Twitter conversation and tomorrow’s biggest topic by far on entertainment sites, and how does it benefit their interests to keep someone with a recognized voice out of the conversation? I’ve been an admirer of Nolan’s stuff all along from Memento to Insomnia to Batman Begins to The Dark Knight to Inception. Am I on Nolan’s shitlist because of this June 2010 posting? All I did was summarize the reportings of others.

I know of another guy who’s been told “no-go” on this thing so I’m not the only one. But it’s silly and petty all the same.

The Dark Knight Rises prologue will be shown to the public at several IMAX theatres just before Mission: Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol, which opens on 12.21. But only, apparently, at IMAX theatres.

Here’s a summary provided by Screenrant:

“There are undoubtedly a lot of people who will be paying to see Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol in IMAX solely for the purpose of glimpsing the six-minute preview for The Dark Knight Rises.

“Chris Nolan revealed in a recent interview that the footage screened in the preview will cover “basically the first six, seven minutes of the film. It’s the introduction to Bane and a taste of the rest of the film.

“Today we have word from a poster named ‘Rocketman’ over on the SuperHero Hype forums, who claims to have a description of the TDKR prologue footage. Read his version of said footage below (be sure to take a salt grain beforehand) and see how it jibes (or does not) with what Nolan alluded to,” and blah, blah, blah.

In the Gurus of Gold view, the top ten Best Picture contenders are, in this order, these: 1. The Artist; 2. War Horse; 3. The Descendants; 4. Hugo; 5. Midnight in Paris; 6. The Help; 7. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close; 8. Moneyball; 9. The Tree of Life; 10. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

The Gurus and the Gold Derby gang are continually estimating and revising their predictions, and I must confess I’m starting to weaken as far as the Artist onslaught in concerned. Or at least, I’m feeling weaker today.

The Zeligs have apparently decided where the safe havens are, and the resulting mentality is relentless and appalling.

Another interesting barometer comes from the Broadcast Film Critics Association website, which is the home of the Critics Choice Awards. They’re a fairly good indicator of where mainstream sentiment is, and right now, it appears, they’re thinking a bit differently than the Gurus. Presumably based on votes from the BFCA membership, they’ve assigned numerical ratings to the top contenders, and here, in descending order, is how it reads as of 3:30 pm Pacific:

1. The Descendants — 92 out of 100.

Tied for second place: The Artist, 91 out of 100, and Moneyball, 91 out of 100.

3. The Help — 89 out of 100.

Tied for fourth place: Hugo, 87 out of 100, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 87 out of 100.

5. Midnight in Paris — 85 out of 100.

6. War Horse — 80 out of 100.

7. The Tree of Life — 78 out of 100.

One For The Money (1.27) is obviously another broad, lightweight, formulaic Kathryn Heigel romcom — a perfect late-January release aimed at none-too-bright women. The standout thing, of course, is the casting of a relatively low-profile TV guy, Jason O’Mara, in the Gerard Butler role.

Brian Lowry‘s Variety review of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows says that the upcoming Warner Bros. release “has the significant advantage of featuring Holmes’ preeminent adversary, Professor Moriarty, as played with reptilian charm by Jared Harris. So while director Guy Ritchie‘s excesses and modern concessions — among them a lot of explosions — remain intact, the parts of this second Sherlock Holmes are considerably more rewarding

“For purists, of course, there’s almost certainly too much gunplay and noise (including Hans Zimmer‘s bombastic score), but this is a Holmes designed to appeal as much to the Transformers generation as those steeped in his literary or even past cinematic exploits.”

The more you predict that Academy members will cast their Best Picture vote for a lightweight bauble or whorey manipulative schmaltz, the more likely it is that the Academy Zeligs will be inclined to vote for same. I can repeat this over and over into mid-January. Write it 100 times on the blackboard: “Oscar predictions tend to perpetuate easy-emotional-default mediocrities.”

The Stooge babies and the nun gag is unfunny, awful, forget it. You’d have to be an idiot to laugh at it. But the rest of the trailer…I don’t know. Partly, yeah, kinda. It feels too shiny and overproduced; shoulda have been shot in 1.33 monochrome. And who are Chris Diamantopoulos, Sean Hayes and Will Sassol? I would have preferred Russell Crowe or Benicio del Toro as Moe, Sean Penn as Larry and Jim Carrey as Curly.

Indiewire‘s Todd Gilchrist had judged Mission: Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol to be “a fun but mostly empty adventure story that operates with the rote predictability of a middling ’90s James Bond movie rather than a benchmark-setting actioner or even seasonal ‘event movie.'”

The film “is constructed as a series of sequences in which Cruise reads a description of something they all have to do together, observes how freaking impossible it’s going to be, and then tells everyone to get to business. Afterward, they recap their successes and failures, engage in a bit of emotional banter, and then repeat until a sufficient volume of stuff has been beaten up, damaged or otherwise destroyed that the filmmakers can call it a complete story.

“That said, director Brad Bird does a wonderful job of executing these action scenarios in ways that communicate energy and drama but never succumb to undue self-seriousness. The opening scene, for example, where Hunt breaks out of prison, is marvel of storytelling economy, as Bird uses almost no dialogue to communicate what’s happening and why, but the audience is never at a loss not just for what’s happening, but how they’re meant to feel about it. And later – and certainly augmented by Cruise’s own commitment/ fearlessness — his photography of Hunt scaling the outside glass of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa some hundred or more stories in the air is truly a breathtaking, palm-sweating spectacle to behold.

And yet “ultimately, with so much talent behind and in front of the camera, and the continuing promise of a series authored by filmmakers with distinctive voices, Ghost Protocol fails to provide thrills unique enough to truly celebrate, even if it still offers a Mission: Impossible that’s worthwhile for audiences to accept.”