I don't really care about this crap because the Oscars are nonsense, but my one real pet category this year was best original score, for John Powell's How To Train Your Dragon score.
you, it was by far the best score this year, and for that matter, probably the best film score since Howard Shore's landmark work on The Lord of the Rings. Yes, The King's Speech score was good, but fairly predictable period piece music, and Inception's score was thunderously awesome in the context of that movie and a perfect tailor-made fit, but lacked subtlety (like the rest of the movie, I guess) and was too bombastic to stand on it's own. It's great when accompanying the movie, but unlike most of the greatest movie scores, it isn't terribly listenable as stand-alone music.
Dragon's score was vast, memorable, compelling, full of great themes and leitmotifs and tons of character that are not only great apart but also interact with and complement each other perfectly to create a totally cohesive whole, beautifully and deeply arranged, and pretty much unlike anything I've ever heard in a score for an animated film. Of course, the first time you see the movie, the score is enchanting and sweeps you off your feet throughout the entire adventure, but if you later go listen to the score album on it's own a few times on some good audio equipment and really pay attention and listen actively and explore, you'll discover a wealth of little beneath-the-surface details that you probably missed while hearing it for the first time mixed with the rest of the movie audio (a quiet choir voice here, a little violin section there, et cetera), that reveal a wealth of undiscovered moods and feelings and emotions and depth and subtlety in the music, and if you then go watch the movie again, with all of those new musical details you've picked up and are listening for now feeding back into the world and feel of the film, it makes that world even more rich and whole and full and mesmerizing that it was before. This score just keeps on giving and giving and giving, in and out of the movie, the more you listen to and explore it.
That's the sign of a truly great film score, when you can discover more of it on it's own, and it then adds back to the movie in new ways the next time you watch it. When you listen to the Inception score on it's own, it's still pretty much the same BRWAAAAAAHM sledgehammer-to-the-ear you hear in the movie itself, and that's just about all you'll ever get out of it. Again, a perfectly fitting score to a very good movie, but it just doesn't compare to Powell's work on Dragon, which I also think was something of a creative breakthrough for him in particular, compared to his past work, bigger, braver, more thoughtful, and more free.
Giving the score award to The Social Network was an absolute joke. For crying out loud, it sounds like Reznor just recycled
Ghosts I-IV or something. Blah. It's fairly obvious to me that the voters were just wanting to pad out The Social Network's trophy count, after giving everything else to King's Speech and The Fighter.
With my score rant out of the way, I'm not even going to start in on HTTYD the movie itself, and how it grows and flourishes the same way the score does the more you explore it. The first time I saw it, I left the theater thinking "well, that was pretty cute and fun," amused but not totally floored or aware of how special it was, but after watching it again, and then again and again and again, really thinking about the movie, it's art and animation, the direction, the world and characters, all the parts put together, it's utter sincerity and lack of sarcasm or irony, the movie grew and grew until I now consider it to be almost certainly the greatest, most innovative, and most fearlessly directed CGI animated film ever made. As far as I'm concerned, How To Train Your Dragon is flawless, and sorry Pixar, but even the mighty Toy Story 3 caved in to cowardly conventions on a couple of occasions, and the fact that the rest of the movie is so mature and so great only ends up making those couple of missteps that much more painful and jarring to watch in comparison. I can absolutely understand if someone thinks that Toy Story 3 is overall better than HTTYD and that it's flaws don't lower it that much, but I insist that it be recognized that it does have a couple painful mistakes, and in my opinion, HTTYD has none. At any rate, one hell of a year for CGI animated films!
[quote name='ITDEFX']I really do not understand why TKS is so highly praised? I fell asleep 4 freaking times!!! It was an okay movie. Sure it didn't have great special effects, action, explosions, Machete (Just kidding
) , score and so on.[/quote]
Uh yeah, I don't think you're really the intended audience of this sort of film award show.
Inception is a movie that requires multiple viewings. An incredible movie worth a sequel.
Yeah, definitely not.
Toy Story 3.....was good...but after waiting 11 years..that's just way too long for a highly anticipated movie. I am glad they adjusted the story forward to a few years instead of keeping it around in the past.
The span of time, and the changes that come with it, are the exact dramatic crux of Toy Story 3, both internally, in the story of the movie, but also externally, in terms of how long it's been since we've seen the characters, and how much we've all grown up since then. Even if it was the exact same movie, frame-for-frame, it wouldn't have had even remotely the same impact as if it had been released in 2002, for instance. Toy Story 3's true triumph was how it took a duology that stood on it's own as a creatively complete work that would have stood the test of time forever, that nobody
thought needed anything else added, and then added a final chapter that as soon as we saw it, we suddenly realize was absolutely necessary and essential to truly complete the work, and to grow the whole thing, including it's predecessors, into something bigger, a whole even greater than the sum of it's parts. The span of time since TS1 and TS2 has only served to increase their reputation and solidify the notion that a sequel
wasn't necessary, which makes TS3's success as not just a sequel, but a great sequel that really adds something that the series could now never do without, all the more impressive.
[quote name='lokizz']whoever thought it was a good idea to have kirk douglas come out probably got fired lol. i respect the guys work and his iconic status but he drug down the pace of the show bigtime and his jokes with the ladies came off creepy.[/QUOTE]
Don't disrespect Spartacus. That was the only tolerable part of the show, hosting-wise.
[quote name='giantqtipz']The kings speech was alright. My bro in law who is the vp of weinstein is probably happy tks won so much, but I personally wanted inception to win. Most of the movies were remakes or just biographies...[/QUOTE]
Which of them (I assume you mean the best picture nominees) were remakes or biographies?
