The Captain's Compulsive Oscar Watching Disorder

I rarely measure my age by birthdays anymore. In fact I think few adults do. Instead most grown-ups mark the years by the passage of their perennial obsessions. Be it shopping for Christmas, filling out brackets for March Madness, making a yearly visit to a favorite vacation, or blowing a large percentage of your income on the annual lawsuits you face as one of the nation's top manufacturers of fireworks, we all have activities that we use to mark the passage of our lives. For me one of the select items that I anticipate every year is the Oscar ceremony. When we reach that time when a small group of Hollywood will decree what is and is not worthy cinematic art, I feel forced time and time again by my many mental disorders to make my own predictions. I put hours of consideration and calculation as I attempt to prove that I have some level of prescience and not just guesswork. In the past you’ve seen me layout my many thoughts on these matters. I consider the favorites, the potential upset, and my own preferences, trying to find the compromise between them all that will produce the winner. As evidenced in my archives you can find many many ways to breakdown every Oscar race and spend a lot of words and column inches discussing everything AMPAS from the obvious to the trivial. Fortunately for you, I was not organized enough to use this web page to share my assessment of who I believed should and could have won the Academy Awards in the major categories. Plus most of the major races where pretty well locked up with little to discuss. Granted there were upsets (just none I would have predicted) and no one knew who would win the top prize of Best Picture, but there the uncertainty was so extreme any predictions on my part would have been proverbial shots in the dark. (Please note the film A Shot in the Dark never got close to the Academy Awards.)So I won't share with you all of my musings on the matter like I had last year. I'm still in the middle of reviewing most of the films nominated in my Bite-Sized movie reviews anyways, so I'm sure any thoughts I had on the movies themselves will come out through those. (This provides even more incentive for my minuscule band of readers to keep checking this space.)

Besides one of my main goals with this blog was to set my one agenda. I would not needlessly link to other's articles on recent events. I would write about things I cared about, that I could truly make a statement about. This would not be a webspace for second-hand analysis, but for my first hand thoughts. If I write about anything because I feel forced to or obligated to, just because it's "that time of year" I worry that I will start to become dull and predictable. I really can't be expected to offer new thoughts on a topic just because it occurs annually. Eventually my writing will become predictable and my posts tedious to the readers. Why would anyone want to see me trot out the same tired insights about events year-in and year-out? That's how you get clichés. I want my content to remain fresh which means I need to find fresh items to write about. I may define myself by the perennial events I follow, but there's no reason to define this blog that way.

All that having been said there are the twelve observations and notes I thought were worth mentioning about both the choices the Academy made in giving out their awards and the Oscar telecast itself.

12. I was slightly disappointed by Ellen DeGeneres's performance as host. The great Oscar hosts always brand the evening with their own style of wit and humor to give the ceremony a definitive mood. John Stewart did this well with his apologetic liberal bit last year. Steve Martin was absolutely phenomenal by showing how he is like so many of us holding Hollywood at arm's-length intellectually but fully embracing it emotionally. Even David Letterman made the Oscars his own with his Oprah-Uma bit. It's just a pity Dave's humor and the Academy's tastes are too divergent. Billy Crystal is a passable host because he doesn't have any real defining characteristics to bring to the ceremony, so it's okay every Oscars he's hosted has been a sort-of funny not-really-memorable affair. Chris Rock could be great but didn't go for it when he hosted. Whoopi Golberg doesn't do it for me. Any hosting arrangement with more than one person MC-ing is set up to fail because then no one leaves an impression. I had high hopes for Ellen. I've been a fan of her sticom, her stand-up, her writing, and her talk show. However she just never took over the show and left you you with a moment where you thought "Now THAT is why you let Ellen host the Oscars!"

11. Was it a little disorienting for anyone else to hear the lullaby from Pan's Labyrinth over and over even though it wasn't nominated for best picture or director? The telecast's producers kept using the song, especially early in the evening, and it just seemed odd to me. It seemed even more odd when it didn't win the biggest awards it was up for (Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay). When the film lost for Best Original Score, essentially an award for coming up with such a memorable song, it seemed sickly ironic.

10. I cannot remember a single Oscar night that did not involve Jack Nicholson in some way. The Academy always squeezes him in some how, almost as if they are required to by some secret by law in the AMPAS charter. I'm a little worried that when he dies they won't be able to have the Oscars anymore. We better start grooming someone to be the next Jack. My vote goes to Mark Wahlberg. Who's with me?

9. I was a little upset that they cut so many of the winners off mid-speech. Most people tune in to the telecast with the expressed purpose of watching those speeches. Be they emotional (Jennifer Hudson), goofy (almost anyone who won a short film award), or simply spontaneous (Alan Arkin who looked genuinely surprised to have won) they are usually the most enjoyable part of the evening. You know they could have found a few extra minutes to play with if they cut all of the fluff they loaded in like dance groups, foley artists, and Celine Dion. Let us watch the speeches, it's what we want to see for Pete's sake! Also, we should have a special channel we can turn to just to watch the losers squirm in their seats as the winner gives her speech.

8. I was not at all upset that they cut of William Monahan, who pretty much said he was on medication as he took the stage. I know he just won a major award, but come on. You don't give the biggest speech of your life in a chemical haze. If I want to hear the ramblings of a stoner with a writing gig and aspirations of intellectualism I'll just visit my local campus coffee house.

7. You have to believe me when I say I'm not out to rag on Ellen, but I wish she had just picked one outfit and stuck with it the whole evening. I thought her all white ensemble toward the end of the evening was very fetching, and felt like she could have just worn that all night long. When I first caught sight of her in her burgundy velor pantsuit I was almost convinced there had been a last minute switch and Hugh Hefner was our master of ceremonies. I think Ellen fell victim to a nefarious trend that has claimed many female award show hosts before her. The producers of these shows are convinced that viewers want females to put on mini fashion shows. Apparently you have to repeatedly come out in a new outfit if you're a woman and you'll be on TV for more than three consecutive hours or else no one will pay attention to you or care about what you have to say. If there was any woman out there who I thought could buck the system and get away with it, it was Ellen. Now sadly we seem to be doomed to an endless series of fashion show oddities when we're supposed to be celebrating film.

6. I enjoy Will Ferrel. I enjoy Jack Black. I even enjoy John C. Reilly. I wish we could have more comedians involved with the Oscars. Ask any actor and they will tell you its harder to sell the audience jokes then it is melodrama, yet dramatic films and performances have a near stranglehold on the Academy awards. Even knowing all that I still found the song and dance number too hokey and predictable to be really funny and too light and silly to be really memorable. Overall I felt it was a waste of a few quality minutes of airtime that could have been spent watching Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio awkwardly banter.

5. I couldn't help but notice that the Academy nominated both Abigail Breslin, a very capable child actor who played the utterly adorable beauty pageant hopeful in Little Miss Sunshine, and Jackie Earl Haley, the former child actor who played the utterly creepy neighborhood pedophile in Little Children. I wonder if the Academy did that on purpose to send a message to little Abby. If so, I wonder whether Haley's example was supposed to give her hope that she can continue to work as an actor into adulthood, or scare out of show business by letting her know people are only interested in former stars as career train wrecks reduced to playing despicable characters to get a part.

4. I'll admit I took a little pleasure in seeing Eddie Murphy lose. It's not that he hasn't been incredibly entertaining throughout his career. Nor is it because I dislike him as a person for things he has done in his private life (though there were a few who wanted to deny him the award on those grounds as if that has the least bit of relevance to his quality as a performer). Simply I hated those Norbit ads and I wanted to see someone suffer for cramming that stuff into my eyes and ears everywhere I turned this winter. I would have much rather seen either Michael Sheen or Paul Dano win, but you can't expect to get everything you want. I don't know if Eddie will ever get a chance to win another Oscar, but I do know he doesn't need a little golden statue to justify his career. Maybe, just maybe this will convince him to go back to making movie that don't offend my senses and intelligence.

3. The Man of the Evening Award has to go to Clint Eastwood. He charmed me right in with his appearance in the Nominees Montage. He captivated the audience when he presented the honorary Oscar to Ennio Morricone and then translated Morricone's speech. Then when he bantered with Ellen and co-directed a photograph with Steven Spielberg I instantly recognized that we were watching a classic Oscar moment. Everyone wishes they could age as gracefully as Clint. Most of Hollywood hopes to be half the filmmaker he is. Plus he'll always have one of the most memorable acting careers of an American film actor. The runner-up was obviously Al Gore, if only for getting Melissa Etheridge to speak so glowingly of any man.

2. As has happened to us all in year's past I fell for one of the films nominated for Best Picture and had to live with the certainty that it would not win. Returning readers may remember that I declared my loyalty to Capote in a year that was dominated by the choice between Crash and Brokeback Mountain. This year I decided after much deliberation that my favorite film of 2006 was The Queen. It was touching, charming, well-made, well-acted, and showed an incredible degree of craftsmanship. I was touched like everyone was by awards favorite Little Miss Sunshine. I saw the merits of both Babel and The Departed which my finely tuned Oscar sense told me were the only two films that really had a chance. Still I am here to tell you that the best movie of 2006 was The Queen do yourself a favor and watch it if you haven't, or watch it again if you have.

1. Even with everything else I mentioned we all know the 79th Academy Awards were only really about one thing: the coronation of Martin Scorsese as one of the all time greats. Welcome to the Pantheon Marty. You deserve it.

More Bite Sized Movie Reviews

Since I have seen so many movies, and have so much work out there in reality to avoid, I have returned with even more miniaturized movie reviews. Remember these aren't here to summarize the plot or give you some kind of rating, I only aim to share the most original insights I can bring for any and all of the films below.

The Last King of Scotland-

• This film serves as a great example of how to film female nudity (of various degrees and in an assortment of contexts) without ever stooping to exploitation. It has been said that the history of film is the history of men photographing women. In most cases that act of photographing seems to objectify or degrade the women being pictured. The twin engines of cinema as an art film accomplish this through an oddly paradoxical process. First the camera has the strange power to invade their intimate secrets and inner lives by getting closer than most men would dare to capture the woman's essence and trap here essence. Then the projector dehumanizes the woman by inflating her image to stretch across the theater screen and keeping her a safe distance from the leering audience. The process has happened in countless films and every time it reaffirms the traditional power structure between the genders that has made women feel oppressed and abused for so many centuries. This film however treats the women it photographs with respect. The camera keeps its distance the director gives each woman filmed a personality and each shot a meaning deeper than flesh. Those few seconds of the movie offer great insight into the art of filmmaking for any serious aspirant or scholar.
• Conversely I felt the film really mishandled its portrayal of violence. The violence I felt the most emotionally affected by all came either directly or indirectly through the action of our supposed protagonist, a young Scottish doctor who has traveled to Uganda and gets caught up in Idi Amin's rise to power. Though the audience knows Amin to have been a brutal dictator and the film acknowledges as much, Amin's tyranny is never given the same weight on screen as the Scot's blunders and misfortune's. In a strange way I feel the way the film treats the two characters is more responsible for the praise Forest Whitaker has received for this film than the actor himself. The movie honestly makes you feel more sympathetic to the most evil character in the picture than the hero we follow from start to finish.
• Forest Whitaker definitely acts his socks off though. His inspired use of an Ugandan accent makes me wonder if we could dub him the Hefty Black Male Meryl Streep. So long as that title hasn't been taken yet.

Little Miss Sunshine-

• Ensemble pieces must be difficult for the actors involved . Learning to share the screen can be difficult to those used to demanding the spotlight, but the reverse can be even more so. Yet countless actors throw themselves into these crazy little movies every year in the name of art, in the hope of having a good time, and possibly just to steal food from craft services. Usually making the sacrifices involved in an ensemble film have two affects on the actors involved: 1) They clearly demonstrate they can put their egos aside to focus on making the best movie possible; and 2)They give up any hope of being honored with an award. Sorry but awards go to people who chew up the scenery and put on big showy performances, and there's no room for that in a little art house ensemble piece like Little Miss Sunshine. This is a real pity because I believe of the eight best performance I saw in a movie last year six of them were in this film. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, or the Oscars, have concurred to a limited extent by granting nominations to child actress Abigail Breslin (because cute kids always get a nod) and to seasoned vet Alan Arkin (almost surely as a way of saying "we care about old actors too"). I think it's a shame they couldn't have acknowledged the far superior performances of Steve Carrell, Greg Kinnear, and my personal favorite, Paul Dano. Sadly that's just one of the difficulties involved in an ensemble picture.
• The yellow Volkswagen minibus that you've seen in the trailers and on the film's poster should win an award for Best Symbol/Metaphor in a Feature Film. Much like the Hoover family it carries it is a dysfunctional oddity. Out of place among traditional cars, it can barely run, it needs to be pushed to do anything at all, it looks and behave abnormally most times and occasionally it screams out for attention. Yet when you step inside you find just enough privacy and stability to develop some peace, happiness and hope.

Pan's Labyrinth-

• Many have referred to this film as a dark or adult fairy tale simply because it contains elements drawn from fantasy and folklore. Trust me when I tell you the bulk of this movie is focused on more earthly affairs of a sad and gruesome nature. The fantasy elements may even be nothing more than a clever coping mechanism by the protagonist. You will leave the theater discussing the complex moral and psychological issues that form the basis of this film and not the visual wonders that make a world of (sometimes morbid) wonders come to life. This is not to diminish the literary merits of some fairy tales, simply to let U.S. audiences know they should expect little of the fell-good buoyancy or simplistic moralizing you may be used to after Disney raised three separate generations of children on watered-down treacly versions of classic fairy tales.
• The original Spanish title translates as "The Labyrinth of the Faun", referring to the mythical creature exemplified by Pan and Mr. Tumnus. The character of Pan is neither seen nor mentioned in the film itself. I normally wouldn't mind that sort of misnomer as occasionally artist's suggest additional layers of meaning in their work through a title that refers to a larger concept or idea (The West Wing writers used to love doing this). However in this case I and my film going companion's spent most of the movie trying to guess when Pan was going to show up. When we realized Pan was not involved just another nameless faun, it left me a little upset. More upsetting was my eventual realization that the only reason the English title refers to Pan at all is because the filmmakers assume Americans are too stupid to understand what a faun is, or that they will assume its a movie about deer hunting.
  

The Da Vinci Code-

• With all of the controversy stirred up by this film for some of the implications it makes about religion, I wonder if anyone has ever bothered to mention how staunchly feminist this movie is. Of all the messages to resonate most from this movie, the idea of women deserving equal treatment and status to men. Given that all the Sturm und Drang has focused on particulars of Jesus' life which one either accepts or rejects on faith alone, I can only assume this means that everyone agrees women have been oppressed by Christianity for centuries and deserve a more prominent place in the religion. It will be good news to many that all of the Catholics who protested the movie's portrayal of Christ have decided to support the ordaining of women from now on.
• Dan Brown author of the Da Vinci Code novel has come under scrutiny for lifitng some of his historical theories from other books about the hidden history of Christianity. I am surprised Kevin Smith hasn't sued over all of the clear thematic and dramatic similarities between this story and Smith's Dogma. Both films mostly focus on ways the Catholic church has hidden the true history of Christianity. Both films feature women in crisis who enter quests involving Jesus' bloodline. Both films claim that Jesus had a close relationship with someone other than the twelve apostles and that relationship reveals a hidden aspect of Christ's life. Both films have killer angels. Both films feature a high ranking Catholic who is out to deliberately deceive the public. Both films feature some truly disgusting greasy mullets. It's downright creepy ow similar the actually are.
• The filmmakers had to realize it would be risking making this movie. After all its best hope is to be the third best movie ever made about the holy grail. Right out of the gate they had to know they could never top Indiana Jone and the Last Crusade or the even more brilliant Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In fact watching The Da Vinci Code movie mostly made me want to go back and watch these movies again. I don't believe it's a good sign when your movie makes people think about movies they would rather spend their time seeing.

We'll cut it off again with that. Stay tuned to this spot for even more Bite Sized Movie Reviews.

My Bite Sized Movie Reviews for 2006

Since I still have many major blog projects on the backburner (by the time I finish the NBA Pay Scale, we'll be lucky if there is any NBA season remaining), I have decided to post some quicker items that require less extensive thought and research by me and may be more immediately useful to you the reader. I also worry that I haven't branched out in the topics my blogs cover lately. My last seven blog entries have all been sports related and even that has been limited to two even simpler topics my NBA Pay Scale rankings and my ludicrous bowl predictions. I've had an entry on why I love drum corps in draft status for months, yet I likely won't post that until I figure out how to adjust all the little kinks of editing the HTML properly. In the mean time I have decided to try writing about something that may actually appeal to, well, you know, other people.

As I have long studied the art and craft of cinema I figured I could offer the service of movie reviews for my audience. After all almost everyone watches movies and most people form some opinions of their quality or at the very least entertainment value. With all of the proliferation of film criticism on the web I hardly figure my readers will be in need of any kind of full bodied write-ups of the movies I've seen. If you want a recommendation on whether or not you should see a film I encourage you to please go read serious critics like A.O. Scott, Elvis Mitchell, Peter Travers, Stephen Hunter, or Roger Ebert whenever he gets well enough to review movies again. I think a forum like the bloggosphere is much better suited to present their audience with more subtle or specific insights. This can be accomplished through detailed analysis, humorous critiques, specialized reviews, insider information, or simply new and exciting perspectives.

Since I lack any of those things I have decided to limit my film reviews to only a few notes about each film that I think no one else has mentioned. I want to provide the little globules of my thoughts and reactions to the film that you can have fun with, take with you into your own conversations, and use at your convenience without having to wrestle with all those bulk paragraphs and multi-star ratings that make other movie reviews too cumbersome for the average film buff. It's all the thoughtful insight someone trained in film can bring to the conversation but in a condensed form. Consider them the bite sized version of a movie review. Much like the bite sized versions of candy bars they give you most of the pleasure of their full sized cousins with less of the empty calories/column inches.

(ed. I have been notified by the fine legal department at M&M Mars that they prefer I use the term fun sized when referring to their smaller candies. Also they would like it if I used the term "livin' large" in stead of obesity and "lazy liar's disease" instead of diabetes.)

I don't know if it's a great idea, but I do think it's something relatively new to the net. After all if I can't be the best film critic, I can at least try to be original.

My Film Reviews for 2006

Borat: Cultural Leanings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan-

• First, how well can you remember the full title of this movie. It might be a fun game to break out at your Oscar parties to see if people can recite the complete title, and make them pay some kind of penalty for every word they screw up (in theory you could make some one do twelve shots on that challenge alone, so be reasonable when assessing penalties). I feel like Oscar parties need more crazy games.
• As part of Sacha Baron Cohen's method for portraying the character of Borat, he reportedly spent almost all of his waking hours acting like the character with the cameras rolling. As my younger brother rightly pointed out, this would mean there are hundreds of hours of footage of him doing tons of things as Borat which we never saw. This lead me to ask two questions. In all of that footage, how many times do you think he broke character because he just couldn't keep a straight face anymore? Then how many times do you think some American he was trying to befuddle recognized him? I'm setting the respective over/unders at 0.5 and 11.
• One of the major debates this film has sparked is where the infamous scene of Borat and his producer fight au naturale ranks on the list of Funniest Scenes of Full Frontal Male Nudity. I would rank it second after Paul Giamatti's harrowing escape near the end of Sideways and above Graham Chapman's unwitting public exposure in The Life of Brian. Harvey Keitel's infamous scene in Bad Lieutenant would rank somewhere around 212th; there wasn't anything funny about that scene. When you include Daniel Auteuil baring it all in Cache, we seem to have reached a golden age for hilarious male nudity.

Casino Royale-

• A long beloved, iconic character was in desperate need of a new direction. The stories had become lazy and the hero had started to verge into self-parody. He had become too tied to his trademarks by decades of overuse, so now they seemed cliché and goofy. By deconstructing the character to his fundamental elements, abandoning all of the retched excess of the past several stories, and resetting the story to a point in history where you could reestablish a more realistic backstory, and start building a new more plausible and understandable set of stories and motivations for the protagonist. A totally brilliant and original move back when it was called Batman: Year One. I just wish some critic had noticed that James Bond was just getting pretty much the same treatment that superheroes were getting in comic books back in the 1980's and '90's. I guess that would have been too hard as it would have required someone to acknowledge that comic books came up with a useful literary idea at some point. We couldn't let funny books get any respect though, could we?
• On the upside this (actually very well done) film gave us the hope that future installments might polish up other aspects of the bond franchise. I would love to see some of the underlying elements that suggest a larger, sinister organization at work to be expanded into a more feasible version of SPECTRE. A character of Jame Bond's caliber merits truly terrifying and fascinating nemeses not just cartoonish super-villains. I sincerely hope that this new and improved bond eventually meets his match in a new and improve Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Blofeld, for those who don't remember was a major recurring villain in the Bond franchise, whose appearance inspired Dr. Evil of the Austin Powers films. However no Bond film to portray him ever truly presents him as a serious or credible threat. Most of the actors to have played him went over the top and turned in hammy performances. Here's hoping we see a very real and very frightening version of Blofeld soon.
  

The Departed-

• There seems to be a new trend in Hollywood to use Boston as the go to city for any kind of gritty drama. This comes after decades of New York being the undisputed capital for gritty drama in America. In the last several years we've had The Practice, Crossing Jordan, Boston Public, Mystic River, Little Children, and now The Departed. Almost all of these movies could have been set in New York with minor rewrites, yet somehow the creators seem to find something more palatable or more compelling about Bean Town. I doubt it can all be attributed to America's brief love affair with the Red Sox, so I've been trying to determine what other reasons there could be. To some degree I think film makers like to play off the common perception of Boston having a more homogeneous Catholic culture for all the white characters and a richer history of racial tension. Largely though I attribute the recent migration of the grim and gritty to Boston to the long term effects of Giuliani's clean up of the city. New York just doesn't work as a dark and depressing city anymore, it's too tourist friendly, too commercial, too corporate. Now if you want to set a movie in an East Coast metropolis with lots of interesting ethnic neighborhoods, organized crime, funny accents and cold weather your pretty much stuck with Boston. What are your alternatives? There are too many fat people in Chicago to ever work as the setting of a Hollywood movie. Baltimore has been forever marked by John Waters (heck, The Wire is supposed to be the best cop drama ever, yet it's still struggling to stay afloat on HBO). The Sopranos only works in New Jersey because of all the tongue-in-cheek jokes they get away with at Jersey's expense. Philly might have worked if the word Philadelphia wasn't permanently tied to Tom Hanks dying of AIDS for two generations of movie-goers and if Rocky Balboa hadn't reminded everyone of how depressing the sports scene in the city has actually been. Really we're pretty much stuck with Boston being the peak of the cultural ziggurat and all the Bill Simmons smugness that entails until Providence can get its act together and start producing better dramas than Brotherhood.
  
• Martin Scorsese has reached an interesting point in his career. Now that he's made so many different movies of so many different genres and so many different settings and worked with so many different themes and styles and actors that now he seems to have mastered every possible storytelling technique and every possible movie making trick. The analogy I've been using is that Scorsese is now like a master chef who has incorporated all the different elements of world cuisine into his oeuvre. Anytime you eat a meal prepared by someone like that it can fill you with the hazy memories of all the most wonderful and most exotic food you've ever had. In the same way it seems like The Departed kept reminded me of other movies from other genres and other times. In the hands of moss directors this would be a confused and muddled mess. It speaks to the artistic brilliance of Scorsese that he not only makes them work together with incredible film craft but he makes all these diverse elements create a single flavor that's rich and satisfying like a well made meal.
  

The Illusionist-

• We all have had this cinematic experience at least once before in our film-going lives: sitting in the theater, seriously digging the movie playing on screen, making generally complimentary comments to those around us when suddenly the film does something strange to totally botch the viewing experience, in the end you're wandering out of the theater having truly enjoyed 80% of the movie and truly despised 20% and trying to decide what your final opinion of the film actually is. I call these "toss-up" movies because whether you ultimately like or dislike the picture is a toss-up on how well you can tolerate the bad 20% for the sake of the good 80%. I always feel like Jerry Seinfeld on a date with these kinds of movies. You know they're overall pretty good. You feel petty for letting something relatively minor bother you so much. Yet you just can't look over such a glaring flaw in forming your overall assessment. Needless to say, The Illusionist was one of those movies to me. I thought the actors, cinematographer, and art direction people all did great jobs. Then near the end the writer and director got too clever for their own good, and my opinion of the whole movie suffered as a result.
• Philip Glass contributed the score for this film. I have become much more familiar with his film work of late and I have to say I'm of two minds.I found his score for absolutely The Fog of War marvelous, and I think it may have been my favorite score since Thomas Newman's work on American Beauty. However I could immediately recognize the music in The Illusionist as Glass's work because it was so similar to his other scores. Individually any of his film scores works very well. Collectively they all seem to similar and derivative of each other. I still haven't settled how I feel about this.

I'm going to cut it off here, because other wise my snack food sized portion of film criticism might become too fattening. I would hate for you gentle readers to gorge your self. Just watch this place for more soon.