Trailer of the Week: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

For Presidents’ Day, a love story.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a movie that everyone can enjoy. It uses elements of science fiction, nonlinear narration and neosurrealism. This film shows how you can take all of these elements and blend them together into a profound movie that touches the core of human experience.

Does that go too far?

I don’t think so.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was met with overwhelmingly universal acclaim, and Winslet’s performance was generally praised. Many critics cited the film as the “best movie of the decade”. The film has a 93% certified fresh rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website based on 216 reviews. The consensus is that the film is “a twisty, trippy, yet moving take on love, Kaufman-style.”

Roger Ebert commented, “Despite jumping through the deliberately disorienting hoops of its story, Eternal Sunshine has an emotional center, and that’s what makes it work.” Ebert later included the film in his “Great Movies” series.

That just goes to show you aspiring screenwriters and filmmakers out there that story is king.

The songs are:

Sneakers by James Horner

Mr. Blue Sky, by E.L.O.

A Beautiful Mind by James Horner

Trailer of the Week: Wall·E

In this writer’s humble opinion, Wall·E should have been nominated for Best Picture.

WALL-E won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing at the 81st Academy Awards. Walt Disney Pictures also pushed for an Academy Award for Best Picturenomination, but it was not nominated, provoking controversy as to whether the Academy deliberately restricted WALL-E to the Best Animated Feature category, Peter Travers commented that “If there was ever a time where an animated feature deserved to be nominated for best picture it’s Wall-E.”

Most of the characters do not have actual human voices, but instead communicate with body language and robotic sounds, designed by Ben Burtt, that resemble voices.He recorded 2500 sounds for the film, which was twice the average number for a Star Wars film, and a record in his career. Burtt began work in 2005, and experimented with filtering his voice for two years. Burtt described the robot voices as “like a toddler [...] universal language of intonation. ‘Oh’, ‘Hm?’, ‘Huh!’, you know?”

In addition, it is the first animated feature by Pixar to have segments featuring live-action characters (Fred Willard as CEO of Buy n Large Corporation and clips from Hello, Dolly!).

Music featured in the trailer:

• “At Last” - Etta James
• “Super Strength” - Two Steps From Hell
• “With Great Powers” - Immediate Music
• The Great Escape (1963): “Main Titles” - Elmer Bernstein
• The New World (2005): “A Dark Cloud Is Forever Lifted” - James Horner
• “Sneak” - Non-Stop Music
• “Olympia” - X-Ray Dog
• “The Portal” - X-Ray Dog
• Wall-E (2008): “The Spaceship” - Thomas Newman

Music featured in the teaser:

• Brazil (1985): “Central Services / The Office” - Michael Kamen
• Oscar and Lucinda (1997) - Thomas Newman

 

Soundtrack of the Week: Titanic

Despite the over-exposure of “My Heart Will Go On” during the late ’90′s, the soundtrack for the movie Titanic was nearly as epic as the movie itself.

James Cameron intended for Enya to write the score for the movie. However, Enya declined and James Horner stepped in. There is quite a bit of wordless vocals in the soundtrack provided by Norwegian singer Sissel Kyrkiebø. The background choir is digital.

“My Heart Will Go On” won both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Original Song.

Titanic: Music from the Motion Picture was released in 1997.

A second soundtrack, Back to Titanic, contains new recordings, unreleased recordings, and source music for the film. This includes the music from the party below decks, and music from the string quartet that played on the deck as the ship sank.

This soundtrack was released eight months after the first, but still achieved commercial success.