Paul Mescal must be stopped

by Cláudio Alves

Something must be done about that Irish menace known as Paul Mescal. He's out there ruining perfectly great songs, attaching such emotional devastation to them one can't help but start tearing up when listening to them. It's akin to a cinema-induced Pavlovian response, and it's making me feel like an insane crybaby. Last year, it was "Under Pressure," forever bound to Aftersun. This year, it's "The Power of Love" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the ending to All of Us Strangers. Twisting the horror out of Taichi Yamada's ghost story, Andrew Haigh re-imagined the book's conclusion as a melancholic gut punch, romance played for earnestness rather than betrayal.

It's probably the picture's most divisive element, but it works partly because of Mescal and how fleshed out his depressed stranger grows into being, narrative circumstances notwithstanding. I won't go further because everyone deserves to discover those surprises by themselves. However, I want to pose a couple of questions. First, has any film forever changed the meaning and effect of a song? Second, what did you think about the All of Us Strangers final goodbye?

Mahler's 5th - the secret destroyer in "Decision to Leave" and "Tár"

by Lynn Lee

Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is enjoying a bit of a renaissance these days, thanks to its prominent placement in not just one but two of the most fascinating films of the year, Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave and Todd Field’s Tár.  Not that it’s ever really been out of the public eye.  It’s been a staple of classical orchestras for decades, and its fourth movement – the dreamily romantic Adagietto, which cinephiles may recognize from Visconti’s Death in Venice – long ago reached a degree of mainstream popularity rarely accorded classical works.

Just because it’s a war horse, though, doesn’t mean it can’t be used in constantly different and surprising ways.  The Fifth – like all of Mahler’s symphonies, but perhaps even more so – contains multitudes...

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Can Reznor and Ross make Oscar history?

by Cláudio Alves

In 2008, the music branch of the Academy caused a stir when it announced that The Dark Knight was disqualified from the Best Original Score race. The reason for this had nothing to do with the use of non-original compositions as it's often the case. Instead, AMPAS had deemed that the picture had too many composers. In total, there were five credited artists – Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, Alex Gibson, Mel Wesson, and Lorne Balfe. Even though the first two did most of the soundtrack and the remaining three signed affidavits relinquishing their chance at a nod, the Academy didn't budge.

Since then, rules have changed and then changed back again. Still, the presence of collaborative teams on the Academy's lists of nominees remains rare. In the past decade, only The Social Network, Lion, and Her have earned nominations for featuring the credited work of multiple composers. The first example even won Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross the Oscar. The erstwhile Nine Inch Nails members are back in contention this year. Thanks to Mank and Soul, they might become the first such team to receive a double nomination, effectively competing against themselves…

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HMMA Honors "Black Panther" and "A Star is Born"

We're not sure why or how the Hollywood Music in Media Awards came about but they're now in their ninth year honoring musicians in a few buckets worth of categories across all visual media. Their winners are determined by committee and like the NBR, who people tease for divvying up their prizes in a way that insures each studio buys a table at their banquet, there's a little something for everyone. The only multiple winners were Black Panther (Original Score -Scifi/Fantasy, Original Song - Scifi/Fantasy & Soundtrack Album), and A Star is Born (Music Supervision & Original Song).

The winners are after the jump though we're not listing the nominees because it's one of those silly awards shows that seems to have no consistency about how many nominees each category is allowed to have. All that said, you might see some of these winners again on the Oscar nomination lists, though...

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FYC: Best Editing, Baby Driver

by Tim Brayton

If you know one thing about Baby Driver, surely it's that the film was conceived from the ground up to move in perfect time to music. Every aspect of the film that could be tied to the rhythm of the soundtrack was: the movement of the camera, the blocking of the actors, and the cutting between shots.

Perhaps that sounds like an impressive trick. But "impressive" hardly starts to cover it: love the film or not (I was a little cool on it, overall), Baby Driver is indisputably one of 2017's most audacious piece of film craftsmanship, a high-wire act of choreographing every element of the film production process into one steady flow. And by no means the least of this craft came in the form of the editing done by Paul Machliss and Jonathan Amos.

The editors' work on this film began unnaturally early...

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