My new Woody Allen top Ten

1. Annie Hall
2. Love and Death
3. Hannah and Her Sisters
4. Bullets Over Broadway
5. Zelig
6. The Purple Rose of Cairo
7. Manhattan
8. Manhattan Murder Mystery
9. Sleeper
10. Blue Jasmine

So I'm finally finished the text of my Woody Allen book and as is my won', I've drawn up a top ten list to contrast with the top ten I drew up before writing the book. And what can I say except: what was I smoking? Firstly, my deepest and most heartfelt apologies to Love and Death, inexplicably absent from the top ten the first time around and now tightly ensconced at number two. I first saw the film when I was nine and didn't remember much except the battle scenes and the fact that he dies at the end. The film seems to me the high water mark of Allen's pre Annie-Hall comic films —a real head rush of parody, pastiche and allusion, unashamed of its smarts — it's Allen at his most literary, but at the same time most accessible. It's no-brow. Hannah and Her Sisters: I'd misremembered this film, again seeing it at the wrong age. It's got novelistic density and detail, moves with the assurance of great cinema, with the most layered, complex tone of any of his films. Plus, it has Diane Wiest as Allen's his most appealing flake. She may even be my favorite leading lady of his. The other major mover is Blue Jasmine, which cracks the top ten with its tightness and fluency — you would never guess form it that this was the guy who labored over Interiors of September. Allen seemed to come full circle with that film — his tragic muse finally outpacing his comic one, while Jasmine is both Allen and Mia, wrapped in one. 

REVIEW: BLACKHAT (Dir. Mann)

'One day, tracking shots that salalom around a maze of computer chips will look dated as montage shots of spinning newspapers, or those morse-code trails left by airplanes across maps in 1930s serials. Until then we have Blackhat, Michael Mann’s new cyber-thriller about hacking, a subject Hollywood has been trying to get right ever since Sandra Bullock ordered online pizza and accidentally tapped her way into an FBI mainframe in 1995’s The Net. From its opening scenes, in which an anonymous hacker brings down the cooling system of a Chinese nuclear plant, Blackhat announces itself as an ineffably superior beast, full of sotte voce chatter about “malware,” “remote access trojans” and “edge routers”, shots of pulsing dots swimming through fiber-optic cables and reluctant male warriors offering their profiles against   pixillated cityscapes suggestive of capitalism’s last stand. In other words, a Michael Mann movie. Our reluctant male warrior in this case is Nicholas Hathaway, a hacker languishing in high-security prison for relieving some banks of $46 million, though he is soon sprung by a US-Chinese coalition keen to use his expertise to track down the anonymous hacker — much like Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter, Mann’s adaptation of the Thomas Harris thriller Red Dragon. There, Lecter was played with cerebral suavety by Brian Cox. Here, Hathaway is played by super-hunk Chris Hemsworth, last seen swinging his hammer as Marvel’s Thor, a bold move on Mann’s against the stereotyping of computers nerds as overweight mole people. Whether audiences will buy what they get instead —which is to say, 200llbs of ripped Australian, whose bookshelves include Foucault and Derria and who pounds away at his computer keyboard with his shirt open three buttons to show an acreage of evenly tanned chest — will depend largely on how sun-kissed audiences will allow your average jailed computer hacker to be.' — from my review of Blackhat for Intelligent Life

One more and then I'm done

"... Shone’s reflections on Scorsese and his films are expressed with surprisingly lovely prose and demonstrate not only a great appreciation for the director’s work but an intimate understanding of what makes him tick, of the rhythm that beats beneath the surface of his films. In the chapter covering Goodfellas, he has this to say:“It marks Scorcese’s most ebullient performance as director, with editing, camerawork, and sound all working at full tilt to create a great, rolling, runaway ribbon of celluloid – cinema as guitar riff – that surges, chugs, and kicks like a Keith Richards guitar lick. ‘The moviemaking has such bravura you respond as if you were at a live performance,’ said Pauline Kael. ‘All you want to talk about is the glorious zigging camera, the freeze-frames and jump cuts. That may be why young film enthusiasts are so turned on by Scorcese’s work: They don’t just respond to his films, they want to be him.' Up to a point. That Steadicam shot through the Copacabana is a show-off piece of filmmaking, but it works because Henry himself is showing off in order to seduce Karen – so Scorcese seduces the audience, too. His exuberance is born of the vitality of his hoodlum antiheroes, who even as they dish out death are themselves full of life – vibrant, awful, vulgar life, with their wide suits and hot cars, their lacquered women and their terrible taste in home furnishings.” (page 149)" — Fourth and Sycamore

REVIEW: FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

'Taylor-Wood has taken great care in the casting of her heroine: soft of voice, absent-minded of manner, Johnson manages to spill into scenes seeming both sleepy and flustered at the same time, as if she had gone to bed the night before knowing she was to star in a movie mainstreaming the pleasures of bondage porn, but had overslept and was now keen to get up to speed. What Christian does like to do — or certainly what he talks endlessly about doing, drawing up 20-page contracts which elaborate in power-point detail what he would like to do, if allowed — is to be found in what he calls his “play room”: red-velvet-lined vaulted deep in his penthouse kitted out with slings, harnesses, handcuffs, whips, and all manner of equipment seemingly on loan from the local circus.   “I thought you meant your x-box and stuff, says Anastasia, fuelling the delicious sense that both she and her director are in eye-rolling cahoots together against the resolute humorlessness of James’s book.  “Two things. I don’t make love. I fuck. Hard,” he tells her, leveling her with a particularly intense eyebrow-piercer.   “And the second?”  asks Anastasia, after a pause of such sustained magnificence that it hard not to fall just a little bit in love with her. I’m not sure how Johnsons’ career as the willing partner in middle-of-the-road sadomachistic fantasy is going to shape up, but somebody out to cast her in a comedy immediately.'  

— from my review of Fifty Shades of Grey for Intelligent Life

Finally, we have a race on our hands

'Even before the detection of Lou Gehrig’s disease while studying cosmology at Cambridge, Eddie Redmayne’s makes us acutely conscious of Stephen Hawking body in The Theory of Everything.  He inhabits it the same way small boys operate remote-controlled toys — with a mixture of offhandedness and feral concentration. His gangly frame is there to do his bidding, if he thinks about it at all. Shambling, shy and slouched of posture, hands shoved in pockets, he peers out from behind an unruly mop of hair, enunciating his words in a soft tumble, his mouth caught up in a crooked Cheshire cat grin, as if faintly abashed by his own brilliance.   Just how much of himself Redmayne brings to the role is was evident from his graceful turns at the podium at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and, last night, BAFTA, where he picked up Best Actor. Finally we may have a race. That’ll teach me for complaining about how becalmed the Oscars were this year. The Oscar could still go to Michael Keaton — the academy have a habit of looking after their veterans — but Redmayne has been charming on the campaign trail, and the role of Hawking is  catnip to the actors who gave him the SAG and who make up the largest voting bloc of the academy — he spend the latter half the movie communicating emotion solely through his eyes. Together with a Julianne Moore win for Still Alice, an Oscar for Redmayne would make a clean sweep of the top acting awards for  degenerative neurological diseases' 

— my piece on the Oscar race for Intelligent Life 

REVIEW: BIG HERO SIX (dir. Hall)

'If Apple ever got their hands on Florence Nightingale they might end up with something like Baymax, the big, inflatable white blob at centre of the new Disney animation Big Hero Six. Baymax is a robot care-giver who asks people “On a scale of one to 10, how much does it hurt?” in a soothing, slightly effeminate voice like that of HAL from 2001 (in actuality Scott Adsit from 30 Rock), and who dispenses hugs that envelop you like a duvet — “It’s like spooning a marshmallow,” says one of the teen heroes of the tale, although adult viewers may find older memories prodded by Baymax’s air of poly-poly befuddlement. When his batteries are low, he lollops drunkenly across the screen like Chaplin on the deck of a rocking boat in The Immigrant, and when he gets stuck in a window — that old routine — he extricates himself by partially deflating himself with a gnatlike peeooowwww sound while maintaining a straight face that would be the envy of Buster Keaton. But then deadpan has always been the secret weapon of animators: Keeping a straight face is so much easier when you’re nothing but a straight line to begin with.  One of the best reasons to watch kid’s cartoons is to brush up on your physical comedy. You used to be able to tell Chuck Jones and Tex Avery cartoons apart by whether they focused on the character’s face after it was blackened by an exploding bomb or in the last few ticking seconds before it went off. The best of today’s kid’s movies play like silents, from the Chaplinesque pleasures of Pixar’s WALL-E, to the first ten, almost completely wordless minutes of UP. (Sometimes you feel all they do up at Pixar is watch old silent shorts.) Big Hero Six doesn’t match the grace of those films, but it’ll do for no.' 

— from my review of Big Hero Six for Intelligent Life

MOST ANTICIPATED ALBUMS OF 2015

Bob Dylan – Shadows In The Night (Columbia, 2/3)
Van Morrison – TBA (RCA)
The Decemberists – What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World (Capitol, 1/20)
Jose Gonzalez – Vestiges And Claws (Mute, 2/17)
Lana Del Ray — HoneymoonPassion Pit — TBA
Florence and the Machine
Adele — 25 TBA
Coldplay — A Headful of DreamsEllie Goulding — TBA
School Of Seven Bells – TBA
Band Of Horses – TBA
Laura Marling – Short Movie (Ribbon, 3/24)
Death Cab for Cutie — TBA (Atlantic, March)
James Blake — Radio Silence TBA
Beach House TBA
Radiohead — TBA
Father John Misty — I Love You HoneybearJustin Bieber — TBA
Corinne Bailey Ray — TBA
Drake — View From The 6 Fleetwood Mac — TBA

REVIEW: A MOST VIOLENT YEAR

From my review for Intelligent Life:—

'Finally, there is his wife Anna (Jessica Chastain), a beautiful gorgon in figure-hugging Armani and long ruby nails with which she ticks off points in the air, itching to call in her mafioso brothers and father to sort things out. “You’re not going to like it when I get involved,” she purrs,   like Jersey shore’s answer to Lucrezia Borgia.  The performance could easily have curled into camp and Chastain knows it: she nails things down tight, controlling carefully an accent it must have been tempting to let run loose, wielding her heavy lipstick and false eyelashes with the same fierce control she prods at her calculator with a pencil while doing the firm’s accounts. It’s fast turning into Chastain’s métier, after making her film debut for Pacino in his version of Wilde’s Salome: women who have tamed the  tigress of their own sexuality to make it do their bidding — lion and tamer in one.' 

A David looking for a Goliath

'One hesitates to use the word “egoless” with regard to Hollywood but one of the pleasures turned up by this year’s awards season has been watching the director Richard Linklater’s Capraesque path to and from the winner’s podium. His film "Boyhood", shot over a 12-year period in the life of its teenage hero, played by the newcomer Ellar Coltrane (above), has been the unlikely frontrunner to win the Best Picture Oscar since October. Unlikely because nothing about Linklater’s gently indolent films—from his debut, "Slacker", to "Dazed and Confused" to the "Before Sunrise" trilogy—exactly shouted “Oscar”. They don’t shout much of anything at all, offering up small-scale epiphanies and stoner pensées in a spirit of patient pointillism not a million miles away from the films of Eric Rohmer. Linklater himself has the matte, low-key affect of someone who comes to fix your fridge and stays to unblock your sink and then—since he’s here—rehang your pictures. Wherever James Cameron comes from in the moviemaking universe, Linklater hails from the opposite corner. There’s absolutely zero danger of him proclaiming himself "king of the world" if—as looks increasingly likely—he makes his way to the stage of the Kodak theatre to pick up Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director next month. Instead he is likely to do what he did at the Golden Globes last weekend: get up on stage and pump everyone’s hand, as if he’s at the biggest job interview of his life, and then deliver a speech almost entirely lacking in the false humility with which the egomaniacal traditionally adorn themselves on such occasions. He will be faltering, awkward, not quite up to the occasion, maybe even a little disappointing. That is how an honest man shows up on Oscar night.' 

— from my Oscar handicapping piece for Intelligent Life

Most Anticipated Movies of 2015

Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens — dir. J J Abrams 

 Hail Caesar (Universal) — dir. Joel and Ethan Coen w/ Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Channing Tatum, Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill

Hughes — dir  Beatty, w/ Alden Ehrenreich, Lily Collins, Matthew Broderick, Annette Bening, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and Candice Bergen  

Crimson Peak — dir. del Toro w/ Chastain (Oct 16th)

St James Place — dir. Spielberg  w/  Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda 

Inside Out (Pixar) — dir. doctor w/ Amy Poehler, Mindy Kaling, Bill Heder, Lewis Black   

Mad Max: Fury Road dir. George Miller w/ Tom Hardy (May 15) 

Far from the Madding Crowd dir. Thomas Vinterberg w. Mulligan (May 1) 

Tomorrowland dir. Brad Bird (May 22)

Trainwreck dir. Judd Apatow (July 17) 

 The Martian (dir. Ridley Scott, November 25)

Joy dir. David O. Russell w/  (December 25) 

Our Brand is Crisis (Warner Bros.) — dir. David Gordon Green‘s with Sandra Bullock, Scoot McNairy, Billy Bob Thornton, Anthony Mackieand Ann Dowd

Beasts of No Nation — dir.  Fukunaga w / Elba   

Everest (Universal) — dir. Baltasar Kormákur w/ Jake Gyllenhaal, Josh Brolin, Jason Clarke, John Hawkes, Sam Worthington, Keira Knightley, Robin Wright 

That's What I'm Talking About — dir. Linklater   

Life (no distributor) — dir.  Anton Corbijn w/ Robert Pattinson Dane DeHaan  Ben Kingsley, Joel Edgerton 

 The Revenant (20th Century Fox) — dir.  Alejandro González Inarritu (director/screenplay) w/ Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Will Poulter, Domhnall Gleeson 

Triple Nine — dir. Hillcoat w/ Winslet, Harrelson, Ejiofor, Affleck (Sept 9th)

Carol (Weinstein Co.) — dir. Todd Haynes w/ Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler  

Midnight Special — dir. Nichols w/ (Nov 25th) 

Ricki and the Flash — dir. Demi — w/ Streep (Aug 7th)

Sea of Trees (no distributor) — dir. Gus Van Sant w/ Matthew McConaughey, Ken Watanabe, Naomi Watts, Katie Aselton, Jordan Gavaris 

Knight of Cups (no distributor) — dir. Terrence Malick w/ Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Freida Pinto, Wes Bentley, Isabel Lucas, Teresa Palmer

 Maps to the Stars dir. David Cronenberg w/ Julianne Moore   Mia Wasikowska  John Cusack, Olivia Williams and Robert Pattinson (February 27) 

While We're Young  dir. Noah Baumbach w/ Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried (March 27) 

Queen of the Desert dir. Werner Herzog w/  Nicole Kidman, Robert Pattinson, Damian Lewis and James Franco.

'Whether as a gift to yourself or an extremely covetable stocking filler, Tom Shone's monograph Martin Scorsese - A Retrospective (Thames & Hudson) is a must for fans, combining enviable access with memorable insight. So while the archive of stills and behind-the-scenes shots is a gold mine, there's plenty of Shone's prose to savour, too. (Surely only Shone could write - of Goodfellas and The Wolf Of Wall Street - that Scorsese "seems fascinated by characters as spiritually dead as they are galvanically alive, rotten with their own ripeness, like apples in Dutch still lives".)' — Olivia Cole, GQ

BEST FILMS OF 2014

1. Selma
2. Interstellar
3. Under The Skin
4. Birdman
5. Leviathan
6. Boyhood
7. Grand Budapest Hotel
8. Foxcatcher
9. A Most Wanted  Man
10. Ida

BEST TV SHOWS of 2014

1. True Detective
2. Silicon Valley
3. Last Week Tonight With John Oliver
4. The Americans
5. Veep

And.... one more

"This is the best kind of coffee table book. It fulfills the brief of being picture-led with rare and telling images, but it's Shone's prose that sticks; a bravura high-octane sprint that adroitly mixes up biographical detail and aesthetic judgments... a smart engaged tracking shot of a book." — Teddy Jamieson, The Glasgow Herald

BEST FILM PERFORMANCES OF 2014

1. Steve Carell — Foxcatcher
2. Phillip Seymour Hoffman – A Most Wanted Man 
3. Chadwick Boseman — Get On Up 
4. Angelina Jolie — Mailificent
5. Naomi Watts — St Vincent 
6. J K Simmons — Whiplash
7. Ralph Fiennes — The Grand Budapest Hotel
8. Kristen Wiig — The Skeleton Twins
9. Mark Ruffalo — Foxcatcher
10. Edward Norton — Birdman 

Mesmerized by this video for Nils Frahm's Says, created by visual artists Romain Assénat and Ana Silva:—

"We had the visual idea during a show of Nils in Germany, two days after, we’ve created a device for capturing this idea: a video-feedback with ink on glass captured in one take, in a very analogue way and without any post-production."

BEST SOUNDTRACKS OF 2014

I. Interstellar —Hans Zimmer
2. Birdman — Antonio Sanchez
3. Under the Skin — Mica Levi
4. The Grand Budapest Hotel — Alexandre Desplat
5. Gone Girl — Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
6. The Theory of Everything — Jóhann Jóhannsson
Boyhood — Various Artists
7. Palo Alto — Various Artists
8. Lost Themes — John Carpenter
9. You And The Night —M83 

BEST SONGS OF 2014

1. Morning — Beck
2. Hero — Family of the Year
3. Do You — Spoon
4. Rather Be — Clean Bandit
5. Small Window — Luluc
6. Head Underwater — Jenny Lewis
7. Afraid of Nothing — Sharon van Etten
8. Waitress Song — First Aid Kit
8. The Long Way Around — Jackson Browne
9. Seasons (Waiting On You) — Future Islands
10. Airwaves — Ray La Montagne

BEST ALBUMS OF 2014

1. Morning Phase — Beck
2. Passerby — Luluc
3. Stay Gold — First Aid Kit
4. GIRL — Pharrell Williams
5. Are We There — Sharon Van Etten
6. Four — One Direction
7. After the Disco — Broken Bells
8. Lost in the Dream — The War on Drugs
9. The Voyager — Jenny Lewis
10. Benji — Sun Kil Moon

SCORSESE REVIEWS Contd.

"A tribute volume that is hefty, handsome, and smart. The graphic design is downright overwhelming — stunning images from every major Scorsese feature, both inside and outside his elegantly composed frames — but the real draw here is Shone’s text, which tells the stories behind the pictures with intelligence and grace. It’s that rarest of creatures: a coffee-table book that’s also a helluva good read." — Jason Bailey, Flavorwire  

"Scorsese: A Retrospective by Tom Shone (Thames & Hudson £29.95) is a glorious coffee-table delve into the great director’s 23 feature films — including this year’s superb The Wolf of Wall Street. The book features stills, behind-the-scenes shots (Martin Scorsese on his back during the making of Taxi Driver, pointing at his temple to show Robert De Niro where Travis Bickle should aim his finger gun) and page upon page of Shone’s typically fluid, effortless prose." — Sunday Times

"Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective celebrates one of America’s most original and audacious filmmakers. Written by incisive film critic Tom Shone and lavishly illustrated, this book—like a Scorsese film—packs a passionate wallop and is elevated by scrutinous attention to detail.' — Bookpage

On my iPod: Nov 29th 2014

1. Johnny and Mary (feat. Bryan Ferry) — Todd Terje
2. I Can't Live Without My Mother — Sun Kil Moon
3. Repeat Pleasure — How to Dress Well
4. In Conflict — Owen Pallett
5. Immunity (w. King Creosote) — Jon Hopkins
6. Do You — Spoon
7. Seasons (Waiting On You) — Future Islands
8. Fireproof — One Direction
9. Sordid Affair — Royksopp
10. Wonderful Unknown – Ingrid Michelson

Thank-you to all who came to my event yesterday at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble, bringing my Scorsese publicity binge to a nice close. Photo by Smith Galtney.

Calling all Scorsese-loving New Yorkers!

On Saturday Nov 22nd at 6pm I will be presenting a sequence of my Top Ten Shots* from the films of Martin Scorsese and signing copies of my book Scorsese: A Retrospective at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble. Come early to be sure of a seat. 

Barnes & Noble 

97 Warren Street,  

New York, 

NY 10007212-587-5389

6pm Nov 22nd  2014

INTERVIEW: HANS ZIMMER

Film composer Hans Zimmer is too sensible to play favorites with his scores, but he hasn’t taken any new work since completing his score for Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar this summer. “I threw everything into it,” he says. “Right now, I'm not willing to go on another journey. I don't quite want to leave it.”

This would make sense. Both score and film are about the sweet sorrows of intergalactic parting, ramped up to full ambience across the Escher-like distances of Einsteinian space-time. The $165-million epic is Nolan and Zimmer’s fifth collaboration together, after the Dark Knight Trilogy, and Inception, Zimmer’s score for which singlehandedy rewrote the rule book for the blockbuster: Zimmer’s dire, insistent “BRAAAMMM”, sounded by an army of brass instruments, all playing in unison, at the very bottom of their register, is now the klaxon-like call of summer. “I called Hans before I even knew exactly I was going to do this project,” says Nolan. “We realized we spent so much time on the other films we'd done, near the end of the process, trying to penetrate the mechanisms we'd created and get back to the heart of the story.” This time, he thought, “Let's flip the process. Let's start with the score and then build out.“

A short time later, an envelope arrived at Zimmer’s office containing a single sheet of paper on which Nolan had typed, using the same typewriter given him by his father when he was 21, a short précis of the film, drawing as much on Zimmer’s own relationship with his 13-year-old son Jake, as the father-daughter relationship portrayed in the film. Zimmer worked for a day and called Nolan’s wife Emma and the pair drove down to Zimmer’s studio in Santa Monica, where the composer made the usual nervous sounds when playing a filmmaker a new score, sneaking glimpses at him to see how it was going down. Zimmer could tell Nolan was moved. At the end of it, he said simply,  “I suppose I better make the movie, now.”

“Well, yes, but what is the movie?" asked Zimmer, and Nolan started describing this “huge, epic tale of space and science and humanity on this grand scale.”    
“Chris, hang on, I've just written this highly personal thing, you know?”

“Yes, but I now know where the heart of the movie is,” replied Nolan, who referred to Zimmer’s demo throughout production to keep himself and the film on track. It’s the piece of music that plays over the end credits. The score itself, released on iTunes on November 18^th, is as remarkable for what it does not contain as what it does. It has no driving drums and string figures, no dominant-key brass swells such as was used to herald the villain’s layer in the later Bonds. Instead it comprises a series of hymn-like compositions for 34 strings, 24 woodwinds, four pianos, and 60 choral singers, in which the strains of 19^th century romanticism and the ticking clockwork of Phillip Glass can be heard equally. But the star of the show is undoubtedly the 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ housed at the 12th-century Temple Church in London and played in the movie by its director of music, Roger Sayer. It was Nolan’s idea.
“He has a quiet way of suggesting things,” says Zimmer, “He very quietly said to me, ‘What about the pipe organ?’ Have you ever done a score with that?”

Zimmer immediately saw the shape of it, saw the consonance with that of a rocket ship, and also a breathy rhyme between the air pushing through the pipes of the organ and that being fed into the suits of astronauts. “Between the 17^th century and the invention of the telephone exchange, the pipe organ was the most complicated man-made creation,” he says. “Stand next to them and you can hear them breathing, like giants. I just loved the idea that we were, in a funny way, following on in this great endeavor, built over generations — the idea of exploration and invention and time. I have a suspicion, which Chris and I talked about, I said to him, ‘I think all movies, all futuristic movies are inherently nostalgic’.”

A quick test of this hypothesis reveals it is broadly true, in so far as filmmakers have frequented sought to anchor the emotions of their futuristic visions with backwards-facing scores. In 2001: A Space Odyssey Kubrick balanced György Ligeti’s Atmosphères with Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz. For Star Wars, John Williams used a 19^th century musical syntax, full of tumbling Korngoldian brass fanfares and sweeping Steineresque strings, as befits a tale set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Williams’s entire career has been built on this principle of musical reverse-engineering. Spielberg called him “a modern relic from the lost era of film”. His score for Close Encounters of the Third Kind contains an echo of  ‘When you Wish Upon a Star’. Close your eyes and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is scored like the romance it is. Jurassic Park is a hymn with strains of Elgar, not such much Jurassic-era as Darwinian. Zimmer’s own Hollywood career began with a similar stroke of counter-intuition in the opposite direction, when he scored Barry Levinson’s Rain Man — a road movie, crying out for slide guitars and a harmonica or two — with a set of sleek, syncopated synthesisers, such as much accompany a visit to Mars. Some might say that was exactly the trip as it felt to Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant, tunnelling through inner space. 

Zimmer’s score for Interstellar isn’t without controversy. Some audience members have complained of not being able to hear the dialogue in some sections of the movie, so rumbling are the bass notes on that pipe organ; one cinema in Rochester has even put up a sign reading “Please note that all of our sound equipment is functioning properly. Christopher Nolan mixed the soundtrack with an emphasis on the music. This is how it is intended to sound.” The pay-off came for the composer when he showed the finished film to his 13-year-old son Jake at Nolan’s editing suite in his garage. “He's sitting next to me, and we're talking about a 16 year old teenager, sitting next to his father.  As a 16-year old the last thing you want to do is let your father know that there any emotions.  The last 20 minutes, he's crying and I mean sobbing. I'm looking straight ahead because I'm trying to not invade his space and embarrass him.  We get to the end of it and I lean in slightly, and I go, ‘So, Jake, what do you think?  Is it all right?’  He goes, ‘All right, Dad?   It's a-maz-ing.’  When he said ‘amazing’ I wish I could have recorded it.”

My Top Ten Scorsese Shots

On Nov 22nd at 6pm I will be presenting a sequence of my Top Ten Shots* from the films of Martin Scorsese and signing copies of my book Scorsese: A Retrospective at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble. Admission is free, but come early to be sure of a seat. 

Barnes & Noble 

97 Warren Street,  

New York, 

NY 10007212-587-5389

6pm Nov 22nd  2014

* Clue: only two of the above are in my top ten.

SCORSESE REVIEWS Contd.

'An admiring but clear-eyed view of the great American filmmaker’s career, acknowledging the early masterpieces such as Taxi Driver and Mean Streets but also pointing out the bummers (the rancid Cape Fear) and the slumps that have marked Scorsese’s long career. Although the pictures are marvelous, Shone gives the book the heft of a smart critical biography. Unlike the auteurists who always struggle to praise anything by favored directors, A Retrospective shows how Scorsese struggled to find suitable material after that string of personal films in the 1970s established his name... The excellent chapter on After Hours shows us how that quickly packaged and cheaply produced 1985 black comedy got the director back on his feet. Shone goes against the critical grain in praising the 1986 Paul Newman-Tom Cruise hit The Color of Money and dissing Scorsese’s long in the works The Last Temptation of Christ but his arguments are always strong and his insights are fresh. The oversized book’s beauty is matched by its brains.' — Joe Meyers, Connecticut Post

'Thames &Hudson do themselves proud with Tom Shone’s retrospective on the Martin Scorsese filmography stretching right back to the late 60’s where the, then young, director made his start in the business... Anyone looking for that tall and heavy book on one of the most continuous prolific directors working today need look no further than this."— Filmwerk

Christopher Nolan: The Director's Cut

From the longer cut of my Christopher Nolan profile:— 

MICHAEL MANN: “He works within the system here in a very commanding way. He has large ideas. He’s a complete auteur.  He invented the post-heroic superhero.  He can come up with an idea for a science fiction heist inside the moving contours of a dreaming mind and he had the boldness and audacity to have that singular vision and make it happen.  His work is very, very focused and it’s truly his own. He operates very much in the present, in the now.   We’re living in a post-modern, post-industrial world with decaying infrastructure. Many feel disenfranchised. Seclusion is difficult.  Privacy is impossible.  Our lives are porous.  We swim in a sea of interconnectedness and data. He directly deals with these intangible but very real anxieties. He’s tuned into the reality of our lives, our imagination, our culture, how we think, how we try to live. The quest to understand that and to tell stories from there, that is a central motivator for him, I think.” 

ANNE HATHAWAY: "We see him very, very calm. You never really see him blow a gasket or get frustrated... usually by the time we come to set the puzzle is solved for him.  For the both times I've worked with him, he's totally open to being surprised by things and discovering things on set and certainly he's always shown me amazing generosity as a director in terms of letting me find me, find my way through the part.  Yeah, he has the whole film in his head before we start shooting. I remember when we were doing the scene in Batman where I pull my mask back and it becomes the cat ears for the first time.  Chris came up to me before we shot the one and I guess we you're working a few weeks at that point, but we haven't, and we're having a great time but we were way more bonded at the end of experience than we were at the beginning.  It's just kind of the way it goes. He came up to me and made a point of saying to me, "Now listen, I'm going to do a lot of takes on this one just because I have the way I want it to look in my head for so long I'm not going to be able to move on until I get exactly right.  It's a complicated shot.  There's a lot of things at work here. The camera has to go, the prop has to work, you're mask has to go up. He just took me through it, and he said, "So if I do it a lot of times, I don't want you to get discouraged, it's not you.' I just thought it showed a great emotional awareness, on his part.  He didn't have to do that, it was so generous of him to make sure that I wouldn't take it personally."

ZACK SNYDER: "I think everyone wants their movies to be successful but I think there's sort of what Chris has been able to generate with the movies that he has made, including the Batman movies I think, is original work that doesn't rely on the whims of pop culture but in  informs pop culture. Which I think is the real trick of any filmmakers not to be a slave to trends but to then create those trends. They look to you for their direction. The Batman movies came out of nowhere. That take, that tone, came out of nowhere. If I had told you it's going to be a super-serious Batman movie that treats Batman like this mythological figure that is completely based in reality. You'd be like, okay that sounds like I don't know if that's going to work." 

NICOLAS ROEG: “His films have a magic to them. They’re like incidents in one’s life; some things happen swiftly and some things take a long time to reveal themselves. They're marvelously disguised. Memento has this backwards-running time scheme, and yet you automatically find yourself applying the situation to oneself, to one’s daily life, which is very strange. The slipperiness of time, especially when it involves memory, that feeling of 'it's all true... but it wasn't like that', he’s got that on film, somehow. It’s a very rare thing. People talk about 'commercial art' and the term is usually self-negating; Nolan works in the commercial arena and yet there's something very poetic about his work."

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: "Chris knew this was something different than he’d done before. It had all and more of the concept, scope and awe you may expect, yet it’s about family, father’s and daughters, genuine relatable challenges, with real humans rather than archetypes. Chris has always created an  original world on screen as well as the rules within that world, but I think this story if more personal to him, more intimate, more flesh and blood. ...I’ll never forget the days on the glacier in Iceland. Cold, sleet, snow, altitude, two helicopters, a vast desert of frozen earth and caverns, over a hundred crew members in action, the combined elements made for a tremendous affair that many people might have considered overwhelming and dire. Not Chris. Chris was in his element. He was on fire. His focus, his stamina, he was conquering something- I remember looking at him, he looked 20 years younger, his eyes were bluer, his hair blonder and standing taller, a Nordic soul emanating,  like his feet were slightly off the ground in a state of levitation. On this glacier, in the most extreme natural and technical conditions you could imagine, it was as if he was some transmigrant incarnate — like he’d been there before."