#Alexandre Desplat Asteroid City

[mikrokosmos]

Alexandre Desplat - Main Theme to Asteroid City (2023)

Last night I went out to the movies with friends and we saw the new Wes Anderson picture, Asteroid City. This is the first time in a long time that I've seen a film in a theater and I do have a lot to say about the movie and the unique way that it shows the kind of crisis and anxiety that artists have in the creative process. But from the first moment I fell in love with the score by the acclaimed film composer Alexandre Desplat. Just as Anderson uses picturesque scenes and stock characters of Atomic-Age Americana to evoke a nostalgia for this idealized past we can only experience as artificial recreations, So Desplat turn to post-war American music to capture not only an atmosphere of the era but also of the American Sublime. There are only a few moments that his score comes through mixed with retro country western tracks. The opening of this “suite” holds us with a high-pitched note held over a melody in the lower register of the piano. This distinct “Americana” sound feels that way because it is reminiscent of Copland’s orchestral writing. But then the oscillating xylophone and bells brings in a pulse that makes me think of American minimalism with the likes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Little wind arpeggios come in to heavily emphasize Philip Glass' style of “minimalism”, which can be heard throughout his scores. And this nod to Glass ends with a long held organ pedal point in the bass, reminding us of his iconic score for Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Then, unexpectedly, the held note which opened the score is revealed to be the opening to the serene and otherworldly prelude to Wagner’s Lohengrin (or at least a short pastiche). Why reference Wagner here? I'm going to guess that this is related to the Wagnerian sound of heroism, triumph, and the sublime all being paired with the reminiscent love for the cowboys of the Old West. And these long held notes, and evoking the repetitive and potentially endless sounds of looping American minimalism come together to create a musical depiction of the American Sublime of endless Horizons and expansive nature and the quiet beauty that places like the Southwest has. I might be reading a lot into it and I don't want to argue that this is what Alexander Desplat had in mind when he decided to write in an American musical style for matching aesthetics, but I think this adds a nice little cherry of a detail on top of an already complicated and multi-layered film.

[everdeenxmellark]

“you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep”

- asteroid city

[affection-and-queries]

Liner notes to the “Asteroid City” soundtrack (ABKCO, 2024):

Cowboys have been singing in movies as long as sound has been in movies. In our case, it was an unusually international group: Jarvis Cocker from Sheffield, South Yorkshire; Seu Jorge from Rio de Janeiro; the French banjo player Jean-Yves Lozac’h; Spanish Pere Mallén on the double bass; young Preston George Mota out of Dallas, Texas; and Rupert Friend from Oxford, England as “Montana” himself. We are pleased to add “Dear Alien” to the sturdy list of cowboy songs performed on the big screen. (Many thanks to Richard Hawley who guided Montana and the Ranch Hands each step of the path.) Other cowboy voices yodel over the radio in the story too: Roy Rogers; Tex Ritter; Slim Whitman; Burl Ives; Spade Cooley; Tennessee Ernie Ford; and the King of Western swing, Bob Wills with his Texas Playboys. Plus: we have our longtime collaborator Alexandre Desplat who composed a unique and wonderful original score which somehow puts us in the territory of extraterrestrial mystery while simultaneously evoking the smell of the greasepaint. We hope you enjoy these four sides of vinyl which might transport you back in time and space to 1955, a small town on the California/Arizona/Nevada desert, a play in three acts called ASTEROID CITY.

Wes Anderson

[danbenzvi]

On The Jukebox: “Asteroid City (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)”

Time to head back to the 50′s.  Track listing as follows:

Alexandre Desplat - “WXYZ-TV Channel 8″

Johnny Duncan & The Bluegrass Boys - “Last Train To San Fernando”

Slim Whitman - “Indian Love Call”

Les Baxter - “April In Portugal”

Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys - “Ida Red”

Henk Bouman, Musica Antiqua Koln & Reinhard Goebel - “Canon and Gigue in D Major: I. Canon”

Alexandre Desplat - “Opening Ceremony With Awards Presentation (Keynote Speaker: General Grif Gibson)”

Tex Ritter - “Jingle Jangle Jingle (2000 Remastered Version)”

Bill Monroe & The Bluegrass Boys - “Orange Blossom Special”

Tex Ritter - “High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me) (1991 Remastered Version)”

Burl Ives - “Cowboy’s Lament”

Alexandre Desplat - “Viewing of the Astronomical Ellipses (Opening Comments: Dr. Hickenlooper)”

Slim Whitman - “Rose Marie”

Slim Whitman - “Indian Love Call (1944 Version)”

Tennessee Ernie Ford - “Sixteen Tons (2000 Remastered Version)”

Eddy Arnold - “The Cattle Call”

Alexandre Desplat - “Special Seminar at the Playwright’s Request (Saltzburg Keitel’s Classroom)”

Asteroid City Cast - “Dear Alien (Who Art In Heaven)”

Johnny Duncan & The Bluegrass Boys - “Kaw-Liga”

Alexandre Desplat - “Emergency Assembly”

Alexandre Desplat - “A Bewildering and Bedazzling Celestial Mystery”

Les Paul & Mary Ford - “How High The Moon”

Bing Crosby - “The Streets Of Laredo”

The Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group & Nancy Whiskey - “Freight Train”

Jarvis Cocker - “You Can’t Wake Up If You Don’t Fall Asleep”

[greensparty]

Album Reviews: Asteroid City soundtrack / Deaf Charlie

This week I got to review two new album releases that are polar opposites: a soundtrack compilation and a side project from a music legend:

Asteroid City original soundtrack

Wes Anderson isn’t just one of the most visually stunning directors of the now, he is also a master of concocting a perfect soundtrack album as both a companion piece to the film and a mixtape to evoke the mood of the film, i.e. his 60s-centric rock soundtracks to Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, and Fantastic Mr. Fox. But he’s also done unique music selection for his films like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in which Brazilian musician Seu Jorge covered David Bowie songs. For Anderson’s new film Asteroid City, it’s set in 1955 in a fictional AZ desert town where a cross section of visitors come together in the town for a junior stargazer convention when strange occurrences happen. It is an event movies but as Wes Anderson would make it. To match the time period and locale 16 of the 25 tracks are classic country music from that era including Tex Ritter, Bill Monroe, Burl Ives, Slim Whitman, and more. But there’s also loads of the film score from Alexandre Desplat, a frequent collaborator of Anderson’s who won an Oscar for his score to Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. Also featured on the soundtrack is Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, another frequent collaborator of Anderson (The Fantastic Mr. Fox and The French Dispatch). In addition to performing some original songs for this film, Cocker also has a small role in the film too.

soundtrack album cover

I got the soundtrack for review before I saw the movie and listened to it on its own. Then I saw the movie (which I included in my Best of 2023 So Far) and listened again. So I had the experience of listening without the context of the film and how the music played, then having that context. The soundtrack is definitely a thorough compilation of that genre and time period, but I have to say I actually liked Desplat’s score the most. On prior soundtracks like Rushmore you get a combination of score and songs, in other situations there’s been a score album and a song compilation album. Here they combined it all, but I liked the score most. Cocker’s songs are good too, albeit nothing like the Britpop he’s known for. It’s hard to live up to the existing classic soundtracks Wes Anderson has done, but I appreciate that he was going for something different here.

For info on the Asteroid City soundtrack: https://abkco.lnk.to/acosTW

3.5 out of 5 stars

Deaf Charlie Catastrophic Metamorphic 

One of the cool things I’ve gotten to do here is cover Pearl Jam, both collectively and individually. I have gotten to cover their live performances (read my review of their 2017 concert documentary and live album Let’s Play Two and their 2018 Fenway Park concert review) as well as their excellent 2020 album Gigaton (read my review here). But individually each member has been doing some cool extra-curricular activities in recent years, i.e. Eddie Vedder’s solo albums including last year’s excellent album Earthling (read my review here), Mike McCready’s soundtrack work and his photography (read my book review of his book Of Potato Heads and Polaroids), Stone Gossard’s label Loosegroove Records (who reissued The Living’s album 1982) or Matt Cameron’s solo album Cavedweller (read my review here). Which brings us to PJ bassist and co-founder Jeff Ament. In addition to his solo work including his 2021 album I Should Be Outside (read my review here), he has a new side project Deaf Charlie along with drummer John Wicks, formerly of Fitz and the Tantrums. After releasing a single in 2020, their first album Catastrophic Metamorphic is being released this week. 

album cover

At the age of 60, Ament is already a Seattle music legend. In the mid-80s he and Gossard cut their teeth in Green River (read my review of their Rehab Doll and Dry as a Bone reissues) and then they co-founded Mother Love Bone (read my review of the box set On Earth As It Is - The Complete Works) and after the death of MLB singer Andrew Wood, Ament took part in Temple of the Dog (their 1991 album is one of my all time favorites). So you need to leave all of that at the door and listen to this album on its own and not compare to the legendary works he’s done in the past. Deaf Charlie is very unique, a low-fi burst of energy that teeters on new wave 80s and indie rock. It’s like you’re listening in on two musicians messing around in their home studio, albeit an incredible home recording, and the result is catchy and infectious. As we await a new PJ album (reportedly due in 2024), it’s very cool to see Ament flexing his musical muscle in different ways. Check it out!

For info on Deaf Charlie: https://shop.pearljam.com/collections/featured/products/deaf-charlie-catastrophic-metamorphic-vinyl

3 out of 5 stars

[madeline-kahn]

Music in Film: Asteroid City (2023) dir. Wes Anderson soundtrack, including original score by Alexandre Desplat

[byneddiedingo]

Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan. Grace Edwards. Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola. Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman. Production design: Adam Stockhausen. Film editing: Barney Pilling. Music: Alexandre Desplat.

On the Netflix series Heartstopper, a teenage boy works up the courage to ask a girl he likes (and who secretly likes him) to go on their first date. He takes her to a movie that he likes and she doesn't, and the date is a disaster. The key fact here is that the movie is Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012). In my day, a comparable move would have been to take a date to see Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Like Demy, Anderson makes movies that display an uncompromising sense of style. The only question is whether that style works for you or not, whether you think it betrays a lack of substance or opens vistas of meaning. In Anderson's case it's certainly a consistent style: an absence of closeups, long takes with characters artfully placed, actors who deliver their lines deadpan facing front, tricks like switching the screen from standard Academy ratio to widescreen and from monochrome to color. Sometimes Anderson's style works for me and sometimes it doesn't -- I love The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), but I could barely sit through The French Dispatch (2021). In the case of Asteroid City, I still haven't made up my mind completely, but I'm leaning toward the favorable view. I think it captures something essential about the brutal innocence of 1950's America -- the film is set in 1955 -- and does it without clichés. There's an acidity of tone to the film that keeps it from becoming twee -- an adjective frequently applied to Anderson's movies. The performances of its all-star cast are often delightful: I particularly liked Bryan Cranston's performance as the TV host who serves as the narrator in the frame story. Cranston somehow manages to walk a line between Rod Serling and Walter Cronkite in his delivery. Scarlett Johansson and a bearded, pipe-smoking Jason Schwartzman manage to transcend the limitations of deadpan delivery as the film's romantic leads. Jeffrey Wright doesn't overplay the role of the pompous General Gibson, and there's a brief starry cameo by Margot Robbie. Asteroid City may be one of those films it's more rewarding to think about after you watch it, but watching it is fairly painless.

[aureiltia]

Asteroid City from Wes Anderson is such a good film. He never fails to amaze me; the colors, the cast, the shots, the soundtrack, THE ALIEN. For me, watching it was very fun. The actors having a special characteristic to each of their characters was such a yummy detail. As soon as I saw Indian Paintbrush on the titlescreen I knew the movie was going to have little sprinkles stop-motion and puppetry. When I heard the ding-a-ling-a-ling from the ceremony scene I knew from an instance it was Alexandre Desplat's works. You can just tell sometimes. I highly recommend this film to anyone, it is literal eye candy and fantastic film making. One of the best 2 hours of my life.

[chinchillasorchildren]

2023 Golden Chinchillas

Best Original Score

Asteroid City (Alexandre Desplat)

The Boy and the Heron (Joe Hisaishi)

Killers of the Flower Moon (Robbie Robertson)

Oppenheimer (Ludwig Göransson)

Poor Things (Jerskin Fendrix)

The Zone of Interest (Mica Levi)

[msclaritea]

Wes Anderson on his new Roald Dahl film: ‘No one who is not the author should be modifying somebody else’s book’ – The Irish Times

Wes Anderson, the director of The Royal Tenenbaums and Asteroid City, has a celebrated eye for detail – right down to the choice of instruments for each score, according to the composer Alexandre Desplat, his regular collaborator.

The film-maker selected glockenspiel, triangles and other puppet-sized noisemakers for the percussion for Fantastic Mr Fox, and traditional taiko drums for the Japanese-set animation Isle of Dogs. When he made The Grand Budapest Hotel, he hung pictures of the characters, created by his partner, the costume designer Juman Malouf, around the hotel where the cast and crew were staying.

But even the best-laid plans can be meaningless when it comes to moviemaking, according to Anderson, who tells a story about The Darjeeling Limited, his Indian odyssey from 2007.

“You try to take control of it, but when you make a movie you’re saying, ‘I’m going to invite chaos into my life.’ When we made The Darjeeling Limited in India, we prepared everything very, very carefully. But it took us to strange places. We visited this little village, and we wanted to do a shot there and we needed a hut. And the elders of the village said, ‘We can build you the hut.’

“So we came back two weeks later and the hut was perfect, and we said, ‘Thank you very much. We’ll see you on Tuesday.’ And when we came back on Tuesday the hut had been decorated with all these flowers and swirls, and they painted it pink and blue. But the scene we wanted to shoot was a funeral.”

Anderson has certainly paid attention to detail today. We are at a hotel on the Venice Lido, during the city’s film festival, to hear about his new movie. When the director arrives he is wearing a tailored shirt the colour of the Adriatic Sea outside. Like the candy-coloured pinstriped suit he wore on the red carpet the day before, it’s a very Andersonian hue.

Dev Patel (left) as Dr Chatterjee, Ben Kingsley as Imdad Khan and Richard Ayoade as Dr Marshall in Roald Dahl's The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Photograph: Netflix

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which stars Ben Kingsley, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes and Dev Patel, is the first instalment of an anthology of Roald Dahl adaptations; three short films based on the short stories Ratcatcher, The Swan and Poison are in various stages of production.

“Henry Sugar is one of the friendlier ones,” Anderson says. “The others are the more familiar darkness of Dahl. Ratcatcher is very strange and a bit disturbing. I think The Swan is one of his best stories, and it’s extremely dark and quite brutal. Poison has an emotional brutality to it that’s pretty striking. It’s very early. We’re adapting stories that are from another time, with dated language. We’ve kept it how it is.”

This is not new terrain for Anderson – that big-screen interpretation of Fantastic Mr Fox dates back to 2009. He had been planning to adapt The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar since a sojourn at Gipsy House, Dahl’s family home, in Buckinghamshire, some 20 years ago. The Dahl family, represented by Felicity Dahl and Dahl’s grandson Luke Kelly, set the rights to the story aside until Anderson could figure out a way to untangle the nested stories of his childhood favourite.

“I was planning this for a long time – years and years and years,” Anderson says. “I probably wouldn’t have done it except that I realised, reading the story to my daughter, that what I liked about the story is how Dahl tells it. I like his voice, his description, his metaphors and the way his words bring it to life. And I thought, well, maybe I can do that with a movie. That’s how I figured out that it had to be a short and that we had to use Dahl’s words.”

Benedict Cumberbatch as Henry Sugar in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Photograph: Netflix

That Fiennes, an Anderson regular, plays Dahl in a replica of the author’s study adds another layer to the mise en abyme of this 39-minute film. Its plot, or plots, run thus: the rich, idle man of the title (Cumberbatch) happens upon a journal detailing a guru (Kingsley) who can see without using his eyes. Sugar sets out to emulate that skill so that he might cheat at cards. Things do not go according to plan.

Following on from the stylised Asteroid City, the film swaps out scenery, casts actors (including Rupert Friend and Richard Ayoade) in multiple roles, plays with dollies and camera movement, and engages in Brechtian high jinks as Fiennes rattles through a slavishly faithful framing script.

“We loved making it,” Anderson says. “We loved working with Benedict Cumberbatch and the wonderful Ben Kingsley and Dev Patel and our old friend Ralph Fiennes. For this movie we needed actors who could take pages of text and bring them to life. Some actors are great at moments, but you would not ask them to go perform this play on stage. It’s not their thing. Their thing may be spontaneity, but it’s a different kind of work. English actors tend to be able to do everything. At the last play I watched in the West End, I sat down at the end to make a list of names on the playbill.”

Benedict Cumberbatch as Henry Sugar and Ben Kingsley as the croupier in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Photograph: Netflix

Anderson’s fidelity to Dahl’s text runs counter to the recent move by Dahl’s publishers to edit language gauged as offensive out of his work, a revisionism that Anderson has repeatedly denounced.

“I really don’t like it,” he says. “If I bought a painting – let’s say a Titian – and Titian called me up and said, ‘You know, I always thought there should be a little girl in the background of the painting; if I could just come over and fix that.’ I would say, ‘I’d rather you didn’t; this is my Titian.’ I feel that if somebody writes a book or somebody makes a film and it goes out into the world, then it’s ours. It’s too late to change it. And if I don’t believe that the artist or the author themselves can change his or her work, then the idea of somebody else changing it? I don’t even want to start that conversation. But, certainly, no one who is not the author should be modifying somebody else’s book.”

[ Yes, Roald Dahl sometimes got it wrong. But it isn’t up to us to make it right ]

That said, he has reservations about some of his own completed works, notably The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, a pretty failure that remains a source of disquiet for its creator.

“I’m a little bit obsessed with what I should have done differently,” Anderson says. “This goes to, like, the scheduling of the movie, the budgeting. It was a very, very big movie. It was very complex. It was the kind of movie where if you’ve made it once then you really know how to do it. We went 20 days over schedule. We went $10 million over budget. We struggled. I have got so many ideas about how we could have improved it in the cutting room. Maybe let’s just leave it at that.”

The layered storytelling of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar fits neatly with the director’s similarly complex recent features, notably The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch and Asteroid City. That’s hardly accidental.

“I read it when I was probably eight years old, and it was doing a thing I had never seen before. There’s a story within a story. You meet a character and he says, ‘Let me tell you something,’ and then he tells a story inside of the story. I think my recent films all probably come from Henry Sugar in the first place.”

Anderson grew up in Houston, in Texas, the son of a writer and an archaeologist. He was a huge fan of Dahl and of the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. (He organised a private screening of his movie Rushmore for the critic on the eve of her retirement. Her response? ���Did the people who gave you the money read the script?”) After graduating from the University of Texas he relocated to California, where he and his friend Owen Wilson wrote Bottle Rocket, which Anderson now describes as “the film that’s least like me”.

“I wanted to be like Spike Lee,” he says. “He’s one of the reasons why I became a film-maker. I was so inspired by She’s Gotta Have It. And I read his book Spike Lee’s Gotta Have It back in 1987. I tried my best to just follow his roadmap, which didn’t work at all. I didn’t even get into NYU. So I had to find another way.”

Wes Anderson not Spike Lee

His other way has brought together a regular troupe of actors and collaborators. Owen Wilson, his former roommate, has featured in seven films; Willem Dafoe, Anjelica Huston, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton and Adrien Brody have appeared in five apiece. Desplat has composed every Anderson film since Fantastic Mr Fox. Robert Yeoman has served as director of photography for all of Anderson’s live-action films. Adam Stockhausen, his production designer, has been on board since Moonrise Kingdom, his 2012 film. These recurring credits coalesce into a recognisable style even though Anderson says he always believes he’s making something completely different from before.

“The idea of not doing things as they are normally done – you’ve got to find out how it’s normally done first,” Anderson says. “And that has happened over the course of making the movies. The best people to ask are the people I work with. People like Sanjay Sami, my key grip. He has expertise and irony. He has watched us deconstruct the way people make movies and find our own ways. And that’s fun.

“Each of the collaborations is so different. With casting it’s almost like a recipe: how are these people going to mix together? With Bob Yeoman the preparation is quite simple. We used to watch a lot of movies together before each movie, but now we’ve communicated about all these things so much, we have a well of shared references. He knows where I’m going. With Adam Stockhausen, we work mostly by email. We go scouting. The process tends not to be very preconceived. It’s a discovery process and research.”

In 2005 Anderson relocated from New York to Paris, where he has remained ever since. He loves being an American abroad, even if his French is not all that it could be.

“Until I was 23 years old my life was only in Texas. I had travelled a little bit in America. But the parameters of my life were compact. The people I knew lived in a small visible space. But I was always interested in movies. And movies were from everywhere. They were my way to get out and see the world. And the more I saw, the more I wanted to get out and see. I like the idea that having breakfast can be an adventure. And when you’re in a foreign country sometimes that’s exactly what it is. In Paris, just walking in a different neighbourhood is like going to the movies. I like the feeling of being a little bit outside of the place where I live.”

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is on Netflix from Wednesday, September 27th

It's too bad that Wes Anderson feels the way he does about Life Aquatic. That's the only one I like. So weird! I was also studying Brazilian music at the time. Seu Jorge became a favorite.

[marvelousgeeks]

As a story, Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Life of Henry Sugar might not be everyone’s cup of tea—it’s certainly not mine. But as a Wes Anderson short film, it is another delightful splendor with a fantastic cast bringing their whimsical A-game. Returning to the dazzling world of Wes Anderson is Ralph Fiennes as the author while featuring a first-time entrance for stars like Benedict Cumberbatch and Dev Patel. Alongside them, the short film also stars Rupert Friend, Ben Kingsley, and Richard Ayoade. Further, unlike in his latest feature film, Asteroid City, longtime collaborator Alexandre Desplat returns to the score the small chronicle.

While the enjoyment of the film will depend entirely on the story and whether viewers are fond of Anderson’s stylistic blasts, the execution is riveting for what it allows the cast to bring to our screens. It is astonishing that it took this long to cast Cumberbatch in such a world when he fits right in, even as he sticks out sorely for playing the titular character. Cumberbatch embraces every bit of Anderson’s world, imbuing it with his chops in a fascinating fashion that will leave viewers begging for more of him.

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[larstudy]

-I still don't understand the play. -Doesn't matter. Just keep telling the story.

-They're strange aren't they? Your children... Compared to normal people. -Yes. -That's correct. -It's true.

-Sometimes I think I feel more at home outside the Earth's atmosphere. -Oh wow, me too.

🎧 Last train to San Fernando - Johnny Duncan

🎧 A Bewildering and Bedazzling Celestial Mystery - Alexandre Desplat

Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)

🩷🩷 I really liked this movie, each shot was a masterpiece and each line of dialogue was significant. And omg the aesthetic is fantastic, I can't stop thinking about it 😫

[fewbat]

The Fourth Annual Davey Awards - The Nominees!

Hello! Every year I hold the annual Davey Awards for brilliance in motion pictures that move. This is our fourth year, and it promises to be one that is a year. Let's get to the nominees. Please note that there are some big movies (The Boy and the Heron, Poor Things, The Iron Claw, Ferrari, Wonka, The Taste of Things, for example) that I haven't been able to see and won't be able to see for a while. However, The Boy and the Heron's score was released to streaming services recently and I like the little impatient so-and-so that I am listened to it, and felt compelled to include it for consideration. Without further adieu:

THE 4TH ANNUAL DAVEY AWARDS® NOMINEES

BEST PICTURE

THE ADULTS

ASTEROID CITY

BARBIE

BLACKBERRY

THE HOLDOVERS

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

MAESTRO

MAY DECEMBER

OPPENHEIMER

PAST LIVES

BEST DIRECTOR

GRETA GERWIG - BARBIE

MATT JOHNSON - BLACKBERRY

MARTIN SCORSESE - KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

TODD HAYNES - MAY DECEMBER

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN - OPPENHEIMER

KELLY REICHARDT - SHOWING UP

BEST ACTOR - LEAD

MICHAEL CERA - THE ADULTS as ERIC

HANNAH GROSS - THE ADULTS as RACHEL

SANDRA HÜLLER - ANATOMY OF A FALL as SANDRA VOYTER

JASON SCHWARTZMAN - ASTEROID CITY as AUGIE STEENBECK/JONES HALL

PAUL GIAMATTI - THE HOLDOVERS as PAUL HUNHAM

LEONARDO DI CAPRIO - KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON as ERNEST BURKHART

LILY GLADSTONE - KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON as MOLLY KYLE

JONATHAN GROFF - KNOCK AT THE CABIN as ERIC

BRADLEY COOPER - MAESTRO as LEONARD BERNSTEIN

SALMA HAYEK-PINAULT - MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE as MAXANDRA MENDOZA

NATALIE PORTMAN - MAY DECEMBER as ELIZABETH BERRY

GRETA LEE - PAST LIVES as NORA MOON

DAVID JONSSON - RYE LANE as DOM

VIVIAN OPARAH - RYE LANE as YAS

RUPERT FRIEND - THE SWAN as NARRATOR/PETER WATSON

TEYANA TAYLOR - A THOUSAND AND ONE as INEZ DE LA PAZ

BEST ACTOR - SUPPORTING

SOPHIA LILLIS - THE ADULTS as MAGGIE

MILO MACHADO-GRANER - ANATOMY OF A FALL as DANIEL MALESKI

RACHEL McADAMS - ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET as BARBARA SIMON

RYAN GOSLING - BARBIE as KEN

KATE McKINNON - BARBIE as WEIRD BARBIE

GLENN HOWERTON - BLACKBERRY as JIM BALSILLIE

KIEFER SUTHERLAND - THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL as QUEEG

DA’VINE JOY RANDOLPH - THE HOLDOVERS as MARY LAMB

DOMINIC SESSA - THE HOLDOVERS as ANGUS TULLY

HARRIET SANSOM HARRIS - JULES as SANDY

ROBERT DeNIRO - KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON as WILLIAM KING HALE

DAVE BAUTISTA - KNOCK AT THE CABIN as LEONARD BROCHT

CHARLES MELTON - MAY DECEMBER as JOE YOO

JULIANNE MOORE - MAY DECEMBER as GRACIE ATHERTON-YOO

EMILY BLUNT - OPPENHEIMER as KITTY OPPENHEIMER

HONG CHAU - SHOWING UP as JO

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Dustin Guy Defa - THE ADULTS 

Wes Anderson, Story by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola - ASTEROID CITY

David Hemingson - THE HOLDOVERS

Samy Burch, Story by Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik - MAY DECEMBER

Nathan Bryon & Tom Melia - RYE LANE

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach - BARBIE (Based on the toy brand by Mattel)

Matt Johnson & Matthew Miller - BLACKBERRY (Based on the book Losing Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff)

Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese - KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (Based on the book of the same name by David Grann)

Steve Desmond & Michael Sherman and M. Night Shyamalan - KNOCK AT THE CABIN (Based on the book The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay)

Christopher Nolan - OPPENHEIMER (Based on the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY 

Simon Beaufils - ANATOMY OF A FALL

Jared Raab - BLACKBERRY

Jarin Blaschke, Lowell A. Meyer - KNOCK AT THE CABIN

Matthew Libatique - MAESTRO

Olan Collardy - RYE LANE

BEST EDITING

Laurent Sénéchal - ANATOMY OF A FALL

Lucy Donaldson - A HAUNTING IN VENICE

Thelma Schoonmaker - KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Michelle Tesoro - MAESTRO

Jennifer Lame - OPPENHEIMER

BEST SCORE

Alexandre Desplat - ASTEROID CITY

Joe Hisaishi - THE BOY AND THE HERON

Robbie Robertson - KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Ludwig Göransson - OPPENHEIMER

Christopher Bear, Daniel Rossen - PAST LIVES

Gary Gunn - A THOUSAND AND ONE

PRODUCTION DESIGN

Des. Adam Stockhausen, Set Dec. Xocas Montes, Kris Moran - ASTEROID CITY

Des. Sarah Greenwood, Set Dec. Katie Spencer - BARBIE

Des. Ryan Warren Smith, Set Dec. Markus Wittmann - THE HOLDOVERS

Des. Jack Fisk, Set Dec. Adam Willis - KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Des. Anthony Stabley, Set Dec. Salinas Mazure Maria - SAW X

COSTUME DESIGN

Milena Canonero - ASTEROID CITY

Jacqueline Durran - BARBIE

Sammy Sheldon - A HAUNTING IN VENICE

Jacqueline West - KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Cynthia Lawrence-John - RYE LANE

MAKEUP

BEAU IS AFRAID

BLACKBERRY

JULES

SAW X

THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR

VISUAL EFFECTS

ASTEROID CITY

THE KILLER

OPPENHEIMER

SAW X

THE SWAN

SOUND

ASTEROID CITY

BEAU IS AFRAID

THE KILLER

MAESTRO

OPPENHEIMER

ANIMATED FILM

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

SHORT FILM

Terrence Davies - PASSING TIME

Wes Anderson - THE SWAN

Warren Beatty - TRACY ZOOMS IN

Wes Anderson - THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR

---- We of course announced our honorary Davey winners earlier this month. The list of winners will be released next month. Happy movies.

[rotated8]

Episode 1 Show Notes

Cohost: @ang1emar00n

Soundtrack:

WXYZ-TV Channel 8 - Alexandre Desplat Glider - Japanese Breakfast, Live Good Riddance (feat. Ashley Barrett) - Supergiant Games (Hades)

(Some) Links:

Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part I: Exploding Forges - A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (Other Lord of the Rings posts)

Friends at the Table

Asteroid City criticism

The Power Broker - Robert Caro

The Carlos Museum

Bonus Content:

Warrenton Roundabouts?!?

[thejacksmit]

First Take: Asteroid City - a little bit of everything from Mr Anderson

SYNOPSIS: Following a writer on his world famous fictional play about a grieving father who travels with his tech-obsessed family to small rural Asteroid City to compete in a junior stargazing event, only to have his world view disrupted forever.

Wes Anderson. One of the most unique directors currently working in Hollywood, master of both animated and live action features. And definitely a director who has truly found his style - one which has become a meme in and of itself. With his latest, not only has he produced his most ‘Wes Anderson’ movie yet, but also done something truly bonkers: write a play for the stage and adapt it to film, while really screwing with us viewers in the process, German expressionism style.

This is exactly what you would expect from Anderson though, who manages to do all this in a tight 1 hour 45 minutes that runs ‘relentlessly, without a break’ to quote one of the many title cards we get during this story. What ultimately makes this film is the script - yes, casual audiences will not understand the full extent of what is going on within Anderson’s screenplay (for which he worked with Roman Coppola in its early stages of production), and it actually very cleverly references this - the ultimate act of self referential filmmaking. Bob Yeoman once again acts as DOP, with Alexandre Desplat providing the score, reuniting all of the key collaborators for a properly unique tale of what happens when a town (and a playwright) lose their mind.

This cast though, is just pure star power. Jason Schwartzmann, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johannson, Bryan Cranston, Tilda Swinton, Willem Dafoe, with Margot Robbie, Edward Norton, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Liev Schrieber, Tony Revolri and more in support… this is a who’s who of talent, some of whom get big roles, and in one particular supporting cast member’s case (who we won’t spoil, or name, to avoid revealing the surprise when their credit comes up) just one line. All that really needs to be said is that this film isn’t your typical multiplex cinema-filling kind of product - it is a product very much of its directors style, and knowledge of his prior work will go a long way to enjoying it fully.

THE VERDICT

If you’ve been an Anderson fan for years, you will 100% get this and enjoy it, like a good majority of a rammed screen 10 last night at Odeon’s monthly Spotlight screenings did - but for the casual cinemagoer, I can see why this has had an incredibly limited run. It is a properly ‘out there’ film, as expected, but this is truly one best enjoyed with a good audience.

RATING: 4/5

[musicpromoapp]

Listen to Jarvis Cocker and Seu Jorge’s New Song for Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City

ABKCO has revealed the details for the soundtrack to Wes Anderson’s new movie, Asteroid City. The album is out this Friday, June 23, and has music from composer Alexandre Desplat’s score, original songs by Jarvis Cocker, and a smattering of country, folk, pop, and classical songs. One of the new Cocker songs is “Dear Alien (Who Art in Heaven),” which the Pulp frontman made with Richard Hawley and…