space invaders!!!

Elrich and Brian discuss Arrival and some of their favorite space invader flicks on the Pure Cinema Podcast.

dan braun's top 10 films of 2014

Another amazing list from Dan!


1. Boyhood
2. Under the Skin
3. Inherent Vice
4. Leviathan
5. Birdman
6. Whiplash
7. Only Lovers Left Alive
8. American Sniper
9. Gone Girl
10. The Grand Budapest Hotel




Honorable Mention -

The Babadook; Belle; Blue Ruin; Calvary; Citizenfour; Edge of Tomorrow; Elena; Enemy; The Fault in Our Stars; Force Majeure; Foxcatcher; Get on Up; A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night; Goodbye to Language; Ida; The Homesman; The Imitation Game; The Immigrant; Interstellar; Jodorowsky's Dune; John Wick; Land Ho!; Last Days in Vietnam; The LEGO Movie; Life Itself; Like Father, Like Son; Listen Up Philip; Los Angeles Plays Itself (remastered version); Love is Strange; The Lunchbox; A Most Violent Year; A Most Wanted Man; Mr. Turner; Muppets Most Wanted; National Gallery; Nightcrawler; Noah; Obvious Child; Olive Kitteridge; The One I Love; Selma; The Skeleton Twins; Snowpiercer; Top Five; The Trip to Italy; Two Days, One Night; Venus in Fur; We Are the Best!; Le Week-End; Wild; Winter Sleep


Flashback!
Here are his 2013 choices & 2012!

film score friday!

2014 was a rich year for song-driven soundtracks (particularly thinking of Wild, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and Boyhood) but there have also been some gems in original scores.

Here are some of my favorites.

Birdman - Antonio Sanchez

This was one of the more riskier scores (and movies) of the year. Basically a crashing melee of splashy drums and subtle moments of background stringscapes (the movie also includes some well-known classical pieces). The music continuously halts and jerks around to the chaos of a theater production and the pitter patter of the main character's turmoil and roiling psyche.

Enemy -  Daniel Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans

Touches of menace and mystery abound in this rich orchestral score of bass dirges, winds (clarinets weave in and out), prickly, rubbery string sounds (spiders are a visual motif), and the hits of timpanis and oddball percussion.

Gone Girl - Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross

Here's a score that is pretty much perfection and because the film is so shifty tonally, likely exceptionally tricky to have composed. The muted marimbas and itchy static distortions in "Sugar Storm" and the clue unraveling scenes are now familiar Reznor & Ross territory, but I was struck in particular by the pretty swaths of slow chord changes in the flashbacks that recalled the vibe of Angelo Badalamenti, especially "Twin Peaks." When a grisly murder scene occurs, the repetition of loud, devilish drone tones synced with blazing fade-out edits, brilliantly becomes an aural and visual shock to the senses in a score and film that is otherwise so quietly sly.  

The Grand Budapest Hotel - Alexandre Desplat

It's pretty remarkable how productive Desplat has been over the last decade and a half. His music for milquetoast flicks (like this year's The Imitation Game) is always quietly sturdy and reliable, but his recent collaborations with Wes Anderson seem to shake loose something in him that gives way to more adventurous instrumentation and melodies. His score for Grand Budapest Hotel is super sprightly, winsome, and madcap (love the little snare drum moments) and perfectly pitched to Anderson's painterly pastel mis-en-scene. 

Nightcrawler - James Newton Howard

I've never been a huge fan of Howard's usually too-on-the-nose, intrusive (and often, melodically unmemorable) movie scores. As expected, I ran hot and cold with his work on Nightcrawler which was often too loud, frenetic, cloying and more apt for his defining decade of 90s action flick film music than what this moody thriller needed. But he may have been the perfect choice to offer up a darkly comic main theme (thrumming electric guitar and all) that recalls the simultaneously urgent and uplifting cheese of local news music.

Starry Eyes - Jonathan Snipes

The main theme from this movie has been going through my head since I've seen it. The fragile music box melodic strain mimics the lead character's starlet dreams and the electro tuned 80s VHS horror vibes are well-suited to the movie's aura. Luckily, Waxwork is planning an album release. This week I reviewed this underrated horror indie here.

The Tale of Princess Kaguya - Joe Hisaishi

Joe Hisaishi's gorgeous music adds intensely to the joy and deep melancholy of this elegantly animated Studio Ghibli fable. The often plaintive score ultimately bursts into a soaring, major-keyed song of "Celestial Beings"--a stirring resolution to this film's unique journey. 

Under the Skin - Mica Levi

Like Enemy, Under the Skin relies more on imagery and atmosphere than dialogue. Levi's mesmerizing score provides a swirly, unbalanced background of distorted strings and synth beds and in the surrealistic "death" sequences, slides into the creepiest, crawliest violin riffs since Herrmann's Psycho.

spring movies

Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin is like a wet nightmare. Set in drizzly, perpetually overcast Glasgow, mysterious Scarlett Johansson acts as our tour guide, driving and meandering about countryside, castles, deep woods and also clusters of modern malls, bland housing complexes and pulsating discotheques.  It's a bit unclear what exactly Johansson's character is--perhaps an alien lifeform.  We watch her allure men to a dreamy, watery other-world within a rustic flat. Supposedly Glazer secretly filmed the film's extras, which explains how authentic and interesting they are--a sea of unique faces and an array of body types unusual to see depicted in movies these days.  The scientific observational but also humanistic feel of these sequences brought me closer to the main character's odd dance between mechanic and sympathetic. While the imagery of Johansson is quite captivating--her black bob, put-upon accent, and full red lips--she also composes an unsual being that feels immediate. The film is mostly an atmospheric and hypnotic chiller, like Glazer's last picture Birth, with a terrific brittle string score by Mica Levi (his first!). I appreciated the ambivalence of the film and can understand the meaning in its repetitiveness but I do think it could have been trimmed slightly as it gets a bit wearying towards the finale.  Like the city itself, Under the Skin feels like an old, ancient horror story with newer stylistic choices encroaching upon it. ***

Oculus (not to be confused with the virtual reality machine) is an original, surprisingly solid horror flick. Mirrors have long been a source of creepy thematic imagery--I'm thinking especially in 1945's Dead of Night.  The curled-edged antique monstrosity with a long, menacing history in Oculus hangs on the wall of an office in a suburban home in the early 2000s. The film follows the home's children, ambitiously cutting between present day and a traumatic past. I can't commend the movie's awkward, uneven acting, but kudos to the trickery and dark-natured humor (it quietly lampoons suburbia and soon-to-be-obsolete high-tech gadgetry) Mike Flanagan (he directed, co-wrote, and also keenly edited) often pulls off. ***

The Polish movie Ida by Pawel Pawlikowski is a quietly powerful piece, gorgeously evoked in the clear-eyed and expressionistic tradition of Dreyer, that hits hard in its concise 80 minutes (I wish more of the overly shaggy movies these days would take this cue).  Set in the earlyish 1960s, a young nun (Agata Trzebuchowska) visits her Aunt Wanda, a judge (Agata Kulesza) and learns that she was born Jewish and her family was murdered during the war.  The film feels slender, like a novella, but not slight and it is beautifully shot (the evocative black and white cinematography is by Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski) with unexpected, meticulous cuts (the editing is by Jaroslaw Kaminski).  The soundtrack is an unusual mix of genres and is well-chosen, especially the haunting John Coltrane tune "Naima." With her hardened countenance, dark eyes, and dry humor, Kulesza is fantastic as the guilt-ridden, fiercely intelligent, hard-drinking Wanda whose guilt and despair puts her in between two paths on how to move forward with her life. The movie is a potent study in circumstance and what we cannot change. ****


-Jeffery Berg