The Best Original Score of 2014

by Gabriel Valdez

Like industrial machinery puncturing the dead of night, like the oddity of hearing a baby cry in the house where you have none, like being sure of the rats in the walls, Mica Levi’s score for Under the Skin evokes our most primal reactions. That the film itself seems to trap those reactions under glass only to run tests on them makes the effect all the more disturbing.

Call it industrial, call it art house or avant garde, call it horror, I don’t much care.

I also know that no climax turns on a musical cue quite like that of Under the Skin, throwing the entire meaning of the film for a loop, inverting the roles of victimizer and victim by suddenly assigning the musical theme of our alien sexual predator to another: the more familiar sexual predator of our own world. And when our alien’s true identity is finally revealed, it changes motivations, but does it change any outcomes?

No musical cue on film has sparked so much discussion in my filmgoing life…well, ever.

Yet even without that twist, Levi would win this. Her score is one of the most challenging, surreal, otherworldly, and creepy I’ve ever heard. It marries methodical pulses and bump-in-the-night knocks to teeming infestations of strings and background noise, yet manages to find beautiful soundscapes hidden in these combinations. As a reflection of the film’s hideous, largely unfeeling yet very natural beauty, it does as much for Under the Skin as any design or technical element does for any film this year.

(Read the review)

(Read my interview with author Michel Faber)

Half-Year Awards — Film Design and Technique

The midpoint of the year is a fantastic time to highlight the amazing films we’ve seen so far, many of which have passed hidden underneath the bigger event films of the summer. Let’s get on with the design portion of our Half-Year Awards:

Best Sound Design: Johnnie Burn, Under the Skin
Best Musical Score: Mica Levi, Under the Skin

Eavesdropped conversation on the downtrodden streets of Edinburgh, Scotland. The digestive system of an alien beast. Wind bending the pines. The raging ocean and the cry of a child. Feet racing through falling snow. The back of your jacket rubbing mossy bark off a fallen tree.

And Mica Levi’s score over all of it, spare, atonal, discordant, threatening and yearning, relentless yet lost, pulsing, an organic system all its own, a sound that exists before you walk into the theater and stays with you long after you walk out. She may even hijack the movie’s conclusion through a shift in musical cue, perhaps one of the most important musical moments since Jaws.

How do you portray the remorseless sociopathy of a rapist in music? How do you communicate the aching you feel in your chest on witnessing the beauty of nature, the hard stone in your stomach on spying its unfeeling violence? This is the score you’ve felt in your bones when you look at the dark woods under a bruised sky and feel like all the menacing possibilities of your imagination lurk in those shadows. This is the soundtrack you’ve felt all your life when chills run up your spine. Mica Levi gives our most basic impulses and fears notes to play by.

Best Art Direction: The Raid 2

This could just as easily be The Monuments Men, but The Raid 2‘s production design isn’t quite as piecemeal; it comes together to form a more cogent whole with its other elements. The Indonesian film’s red-walled dining hall is straight out of a Kubrick film, its vibrant night clubs would feel at home in a Nicholas Winding Refn piece, and its snow-draped alleys speak to Zhang Yimou’s influence on martial arts production design. To design a movie at once gangster, drama, spy, war, and martial arts film demands an eclectic mix. To bring it all together into a whole that feels part of a singular world is nothing short of breathtaking.

Best Make-up: Kumalasari Tanara, The Raid 2

With a core cast that becomes progressively more bruised and bloodied over the course of the film, and dozens of extras sliced and diced along the way, The Raid 2 separates itself from other martial arts films by taking its technical elements the extra mile. Director Gareth Evans doesn’t want your basic henchmen, though. He wants each to have their own story, so that one man’s victory is always another’s tragedy. In this way, he crafts an incredibly bloody film that’s simultaneously anti-violence. Evans often tells these smaller stories through Tanara’s make-up design, which allows lengthy fight scenes to develop their own emotional pulse free of the choreography.

Best Stuntwork: Yayan Ruhian, Fight Choreographer;
Iko Uwais, Fight Choreographer;
Bruce Law, Stunts Coordinator, The Raid 2

There are basic rules about fight choreography that are there to keep directors from biting off more than they can chew. Director Gareth Evans breaks most of them. The more difficult the choreography, the more impractical his shot selection. Ruhian and Uwais’s choreography is presented in long, unbroken takes, much like dance choreography is. In one fight, dozens of fighters are filmed in a space so narrow that cameras barely fit. In another, 30 combatants wage war in a muddy prison yard. Choreography in thick mud is already ill-advised – shooting it with overhead crane shots that show every fighter at once is next to impossible.

A later sequence involves three fighters in a narrow hallway. Most films would cut back and forth, shooting the fight from behind one side and then shooting it from behind the other. Here, the camera is choreographed with the actors, swinging in between and under them as they fight. The fight choreography itself is already top-notch, but nothing like the intricately choreographed camerawork in The Raid 2 has ever been done before. It’s too impossible a task. Or at least, it used to be.

Best Costume Design: Michael Wilkinson, Noah

Noah wins this by default. There just haven’t been a lot of strong entries so far this year. However you feel about its story, its technical elements are brilliantly executed, and its costuming is very detailed.

Best Visual Effects: Industrial Light and Magic, Noah

Darren Aronofsky uses a number of techniques that are inherently broken or hopelessly dated in modern cinema. The quick montage. Stop-motion. Time lapse. BodyCam. Shooting in silhouette. Yet he translates all of them into his own cinematic language, and for Noah that means implementing visual effects.

It’s not just about the rock giants and the mythical Great Flood Noah depicts, it’s also about how Aronofsky uses visual effects to enhance and emulate his other cinematic techniques, to create a big-budget version of his particular views of religion and philosophy. For me, visual effects aren’t just about fidelity, but also about how they are used, and few films use visual effects so effectively and experimentally as Noah does.

Best 3-D: Edge of Tomorrow

Like it or not, 3-D is here to stay. It’s unlikely it will ever overwhelm 2-D film – people work on a visual level in too many different ways, and until we can take the burden off the human eye and put it on the technology itself (read: a big step forward in holographic tech), 3-D will remain too uncomfortable and unhealthy for too many people.

That said, it can be fun for some. In terms of 3-D, no film takes full advantage of it this year quite like Edge of Tomorrow does. Is it as revolutionary as Gravity? No, and we’re not going to see 3-D used as well as Gravity used it every year. But there were moments when I’d move a hand to wipe incoming debris from my eye only for my brain to check myself and remind me it was only in the film. That’s the measure of 3-D for me – how well can it trigger kneejerk physical responses in ways that 2-D can’t. Edge of Tomorrow wins that comparison handily.

Best Animated Film: How to Train Your Dragon 2

I look for an animated film not just to be beautiful, but to communicate meaningful themes to adults and children alike. How to Train Your Dragon 2 has a lot to say about growing up, trusting oneself, and taking responsibility, but most big-budget computer animated movies do that. What puts it in a class all its own is what it has to say about betrayal and forgiveness, about divorce, about death and loss.

Combine this with its bright color palette and phenomenal mythic imagery that speak to legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins’ consultancy on the film, and – despite being a cameraless film – you have no idea how tempted I was to suggest How to Train Your Dragon 2 for this next award as well.

Best Cinematography: Daniel Landin, Under the Skin

There’s something in the cinematography of Under the Skin that’s like looking at Winslow Homer’s “Wild Geese in Flight.” In the painting, those geese are being cut down by something unseen as they fly in. Countless more are on their way. We don’t know what’s killing them. In Homer, the perpetrator is out-of-frame. In Under the Skin, the perpetrator is largely silent. In both, the artist imitates your perspective well enough to make you believe it’s your own, and so that pile of dead animals becomes a weight on your conscience. Except here, while death of nature is still the subject, it’s not geese being shot – it’s sexual assault, acts of possession and consumption.

This is fused together with an approach that highlights bright figures in dark surroundings during the film’s first half, only to switch to dark figures in frames only edged with light in its second part. In many ways, the visual approach shifts us from a documentarian beginning to a narrative end, while also reflecting the powerful predator’s burgeoning confusion as she begins to identify with her prey and their natural environment.

Best Editing: James Herbert, Edge of Tomorrow

Edge of Tomorrow is nothing particularly new. On paper, it falls into the gimmicky column that thousands of other action movies inhabit. But this is a film that lives or dies in the editing room, and I’ve rarely seen a film edited so tightly. If it were beef, it’d be 99.999% lean, and that sounds fricking delicious. So it is with Edge of Tomorrow. You’ve tasted this movie before in Aliens, Predator, Terminator, (oddly enough) Groundhog Day, and Saving Private Ryan flavors. But Edge of Tomorrow does it all so well that it ceases to matter – it puts its own stamp on things and it does it through editing.

Moreover, it’s a throwback breed of action movie that’s not all that heavy on action – visual effects used to cost tons of money, and that meant you had to have a lot of character. While Edge of Tomorrow isn’t short on visual effects, it harkens back to the days when an action movie’s intensity relied on caring about its characters first and foremost, and the action was secondary. I’m glad I caught this in the theater, and I intend to watch the crap out of this movie once it’s streaming. I highly recommend you do the same.

I’ll publish my choices for Half-Year Awards in acting tomorrow, and for screenplay, director, and film on Thursday.

Right Where It Belongs — “Under the Skin”

Imagine a wolf making a documentary about rabbits. The little, scurrying things will seem foreign and strange and uselessly busy. Every once in a while, the wolf gets peckish and nabs one of its film subjects for lunch. This is how Under the Skin introduces itself, as a monumental psychological horror movie that reflects the bleak, harsh landscapes of the Scottish cities and countryside in which it takes place.

The predator we follow, played by Scarlett Johansson, is a human-looking alien preying upon the damaged and homeless in Scotland. We’re told she’s an alien in a very esoteric way, but you’ll probably have it figured out by the time she’s seducing and digesting men.

Species this isn’t, however. There are no sex scenes in these seductions – plenty of equal-opportunity nudity, but no sex scenes. Instead, the seduction takes place in a sort of nothingness. It’s haunting and beautiful and visually very clever. And the digestion? It’s one of the great moments of horror filmmaking.

The visuals here can utterly command your attention. The first half, as Johansson’s predator is on the hunt, is dominated by bright figures centered in dark surroundings. It’s a binary relationship – predator, prey, nothing more. When she’s on the prowl, Under the Skin reflects Scotland’s surging visual art movement – one which recycles liberally from other popular media. Our predator is selective – no one with a family or loved one will suffer, only loners no one will miss. As she trawls the streets of Edinburgh for potential victims, we spy on her conversations as if following Dominic Monaghan or Jeremy Wade seeking out interviews from aboriginal locals, or we watch from the back of her nondescript white van as if we’re the turret camera atop a jeep waiting for some stalking creature to give chase to the herd.

The second half of the film is altogether different, and concerns our predator’s growing empathy and identification with humans. She begins to learn the limits and capacities of her body. Images now brim at their edges with light and color, yet are anchored in the middle by dark, underlit figures. It redirects our focus toward the edges of the frame, toward the possibility of what’s just out of sight, the unknown still obscured. Where we once cut relatively quickly from one shot to the next – while Johansson’s alien was on the prowl – we now linger even after characters leave the shot so we can appreciate the sound of the wind or the complex geometry of crisscrossing branches. The wolf goes native, starts wanting to play with the rabbits.

There’s also a spooky moment of inverting rape culture here. Scarlett Johansson’s nameless alien gets very unnerving theme music early on, whenever she preys upon a man. When it hits, you straighten up, your fingers grip the armrests. The score by Mica Levi is superb – the best of the year so far. As the predator identifies more and more with humans, she adopts our rhythms, our weaknesses. These moments are without music, but that unnerving theme does return once more. It becomes someone else’s theme later on, when roles of predator and prey are reversed. It’s a shocking auditory moment, a double-take for the ears that sends a lump straight to your throat.

It’s vicious, but played as academic and unfeeling as her own earlier predations. It makes you realize you’ve spent ninety minutes trying to inhabit the altogether alien sociopathy of a sexual predator. It gives you a window into a psyche it ought to be utterly impossible to give us access to. In that single achievement, this may be one of the most challenging and important films I’ve seen in my life. It’s terrifying on a whole different scale. I can’t recall having seen a piece of art do what Under the Skin does.

As an adaptation of the Michel Faber novel of the same name, this is…altogether something else. I love the Faber novel, but gone are the corporate politics and alien foodie-isms. This is a sleeker beast with a different cross to bear, yet there’s a consciousness to the rhythm of each sequence, an offhand attitude to narrative, and a lingering in the most evocative moments of its cinematography that feels just like Faber’s guarded and relentless concision of speech.

It’s worth noting I saw Under the Skin with two friends – an actor who enjoys classic cinema and a filmmaker whose bread and butter are action-comedies. Two ends of the spectrum, and neither one enjoyed it much, criticizing its lack of storytelling fundamentals and the molasses-pace of its second half. I was taken aback by how much they didn’t like it, but their criticisms are accurate. As a cogent story, Under the Skin requires a lot of work on the part of the audience. It’s that work on our part, that Pavlovian training we have as viewers to try as hard as we can to identify with our protagonist, that gives the story’s later inversion its power, however.

Under the Skin is not just a weird film or an art horror piece, it’s downright, unabashed experimental filmmaking, and that’s divisive. It’s absolutely not for everyone. For the right someone, though, it’s as brutal a shock to the system as storytelling in any form can achieve.

Wednesday Collective – Bollywood Evolves, Shark Attack, The Lion in Winter, and So Many Jake Gyllenhaals

We’re running 3-5 articles a week here now, so there are some efforts to simplify the blog – browse down the left hand side and you’ll see a new Categories section that breaks articles down by type: Awards, Guest Writers, Movie Reviews, Television, and Wednesday Collective, which I hear is pretty fantastic. There will be some bigger moves toward streamlining, and the eventual transition to a more full-service website down the road.

For now, please enjoy this week’s collection of the best articles on film and storytelling from around the web.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
“The New Wave of Indian Art Cinema”

Janaki Challa at The Aerogram writes about the evolution of Bollywood, the independent film movement in India, and its burgeoning supply of arthouse directors (if not arthouse audiences) seeking to tell more realistic, socially insistent narratives. The article centers around Anand Ghandi’s new film Ship of Theseus, a relatively unknown film in the West that has jumped to the top of my radar.

The Wonders of GoPro

It’s been a very good week for the phone-sized (and sometimes smaller) sports camera. It’s rugged nature and affordable price-tag mean everyone from independent filmmakers to divers can capture unique footage that proves the adage “everything’s been done already” dead wrong.

My favorite, perhaps of all-time, is spear-fisher Jason Dimitri’s recording of his reef preservation work off the Cayman Islands on March 13. While culling invasive lionfish, a 10-foot Caribbean Reef Shark gets curious. The pair engage in an extended battle that is enthralling, terrifying, yet safe for work/family-viewing. I have no qualms saying it’s among the best three minutes ever put to screen. Watch it full-screen, but not if you’re looking forward to the beach this summer. Thanks to Lara Hemingway for making me aware of this.

A cute narrative film comes from Corridor Digital, a studio that specializes in combining short films and visual effects. They combined footage from a drone with CG and ground footage to create a short film entirely from the perspective of Superman. Some clever editing gives the impression this is drawn from one long continuous take.

GoPro curates many of these user videos on YouTube. There’s this clip of a pelican in Tanzania learning to fly and this rescue of deer stuck on ice by two men with hovercraft. If those don’t make you tear up, there’s always “Fireman Saves Kitten,” which I’ve seen turn the burliest of men into balls of weep.

“The Lion in Winter: The Reason I Became a Medievalist”

My favorite experience as a performer was as Philip, the king of France, in The Lion in Winter. It was during my first year of college and it was when I was still oblivious enough to think everything was running smoothly when, in fact, I’m pretty sure the entire crew was either killing or dating each other behind-the-scenes. The experience introduced me to a number of friends and a few mentors when it came to film and theatre.

The blog An Historian Goes to the Movies goes over some of the historical nuances of the Oscar-winning film version starring Katharine Hepburn, Peter O’Toole, Anthony Hopkins, and Timothy Dalton, and explains why it’s enough to make anyone change their planned career path. The articles on The 13th Warrior and 300 are also worth checking out.

“Film as film: What’s the point of movie criticism?”

This brilliant article by Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson at Prospect Magazine asks the question, “In the digital age, what is left for a critic to supply?” His response is very close to my own view: the rote summarize-and-judge template of criticism is obsolete. There are too many audiences and too many resources available for viewers to do this themselves without reading 700 words.

The job of the modern critic is a difficult one – to fuse knowledge of cinematic techniques with emotional response and, through doing so, translate what the experience of the film itself is like. It echoes something I said in last week’s Wednesday Collective, that an ideal review should read two different ways before and after readers see the film: translating the experience beforehand to give the reader a sense of whether the film is for him or her, and drawing technique and meaning from the experience afterward as a further contemplation of what they’ve just seen.

Doppelganging Jake Gyllenhaal

Writer JP Hitesman got a chance to see Enemy, Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up to last year’s Prisoners. It follows a milquetoast college professor played by Jake Gyllenhaal as he tracks down a bit actor played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Suspensefully paranoid hijinx ensue. Villeneuve got something out of Gyllenhaal in Prisoners that’s always been hinted at, but isn’t always realized in his films, so I’m very excited for an even more out-there story from the pair.

Hitesman wrote a reflection on Enemy and on the understated qualities of Canadian theatergoing.

Mica Levi on Under the Skin

Speaking of actors breaking into new territory, Scarlett Johansson’s avant-garde Scottish nymphomaniac alien mindbender Under the Skin opens soon. I’ve heard some of the score by Mica Levi, frontwoman for Micachu and the Shapes, and it is a strange, brave thing all on its own. The Guardian has a brief piece on her influences and experiences while writing and recording the experimental soundtrack.

Mendes. Sam Mendes.

We’ll close with director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Skyfall) and his 25 rules for filmmaking. I have a love-hate relationship with Mendes. His best, most raw film may be Jarhead (starring Jake Gyllenhaal, no less). American Beauty and Revolutionary Road are beautiful, but have some issues of staging, broad stereotyping, and overt showmanship. Skyfall is a discussion all in itself, a film shot so gorgeously it often forgets to give its viewers proper access into its action scenes. It also betrays Mendes’s perspective by replacing the nod-and-a-wink sexism of most James Bond films with an outright and unsettlingly violent misogyny. Nonetheless, that’s three successes and a popular miss, and much of this is good advice, so Vanity Fair‘s article on Mendes’s 25 rules of directing is worth checking out.