The only new show to make it to my DVR series list is “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” co-created by its sensationally talented star, Rachel Bloom. Each episode is a full-on original musical that takes place mostly inside the head of its slightly demented heroine, Rebecca, a Harvard and Yale-educated lawyer who walked away from her type-A career in a New York City law firm to move to West Covina, California, where her boyfriend from summer camp lives.
It has a tremendous cast of singers and dancers, most with Broadway experience, including Donna Lynne Champlin, who plays Rebecca’s new friend, Paula, Santino Fontana (from the Broadway “Cinderella”) as a bartender who for some reason he cannot understand is drawn to Rebecca, and Vincent Rodriguez III as Josh, the object of Rebecca’s obsessional affection.
My favorite musical number so far is NSFW, the very funny “Sexy Getting Ready Song.” Here’s my runner-up, Rebecca’s boy band fantasy song, performed by four Joshes.
And here’s an Astaire-and-Rogers themed song with Fontana.
The songs are by Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, who created the pitch perfect title number for “That Thing You Do” and the songs for the Drew Barrymore/Hugh Grant film “Words and Music.” They are funny and smart and earwormy in the nicest possible way. It’s on the CW Monday nights at 8/7 central and you can catch up on the previous episodes on Hulu.
Interview: Johann Johannsson, Composer of “Sicario”
Posted on November 8, 2015 at 7:14 pm
Jóhann Jóhannsson is an Icelandic composer who created the moody, evocative score for the intense law enforcement drama, “Sicario.” Previously, he wrote the score for the Stephen Hawking film, “The Theory of Everything.” It was a pleasure to speak with him about the way the bleak settings and the emotions of the characters influenced his composition and how he used the music to help build the tension of some of the most intense scenes.
This was his second collaboration with the director, Denis Villeneuve, after “Prisoners.” “He involved me very early o,n before he started shooting so I read the script and we had a discussion about the music and then he invited me to the set as well. I was able to go to the set in New Mexico and to sort of observe the locations and the environment of the landscape and to get a feel for the setting.” But it was not until he saw the first cut of the film, “I really started writing basically getting inspired by the images and creating a sound for the film. We talked about the need for the music to uphold the tension and the sort of sense of dread and the sense of moral ambiguity that the characters are facing with these serious moral questions. We see the moral universe fall apart, especially for Emily Blunt’s character. Denny talked a lot about kind of an analogy with a war film. He used this phrase which I liked a lot which was ‘subtle war music.’ It is an interesting contradiction. So we had these percussions on these sort of low tom-toms and those military steel drums as a very big part of the score, creating this kind of throbbing pulse that runs as a thread throughout the score. So that was one thing we talked about, we talked also about a lot of other music coming from below the earth in a way, coming from underground. So the sound of the tunnels and also about the melancholy of the border, the melancholy of the border areas, of the border fence and of the experience of the illegal immigrants and the sadness of the border, and the melancholy of some of the characters like the Alejandro character, the Benicio character, his tragic back story. So there’s a sort of melancholy and sadness also that we had to captured and communicated. So it’s kind of these two poles this sense of tension and melancholy.
He continued: “It is not a war with any heroes. It is kind of a desperate, hopeless war. The music communicates that and it is kind of deconstructive in a way, there are a lot of horns in the score they are just not playing fanfares. They are playing these sort of atonal burst of sounds, a sort of textural burst and flourishes that is the opposite a military flourish.”
When he was growing up, Jóhannsson watched a lot of American and European films and first noticed the scores that Bernard Herrmann wrote for Hitchcock and later for DePalma and Scorsese. “‘Vertigo’ is the best collaboration between a composer and director ever and his music really made me want to write film music. I think his influence can be felt in some way in ‘Sicario’ with my use of low woodwind and these kind of relentless low sounds are something that for me echoes Herrmann very much.”
He says that he drew a lot of inspiration from the landscape as well as the mood and atmosphere of the images. Cinematographer Roger Deakins “showed me a lot of the kind of amazing aerial footage that they had of the desert and of the border area and some of that ended up in the film. That was a huge inspiration for me. And I tend to draw a lot of inspiration from the landscape and from the atmosphere of the images.”
He prefers not to work with synthesizers. “There are electronic elements in there but they are all based on acoustic sources that are treated and processed through effects and through plug-ins and through digital manipulation. But all of it is based on acoustic recordings. So I recorded musicians in Los Angeles and in Berlin where I live. I recorded the orchestra also in Berlin and also in Budapest and it’s a 65 piece orchestra, full string and brass and woodwind and there are number of soloist and some feature players as well.”
One of the tensest moments in the film comes at a scene where a character finally approaches the man he has been waiting to kill when he is at dinner with his family. “Danny and I agreed that it needed something very minimal and something very subtle basically to underline the sense of dread and the sense of tension. And so Danny didn’t want anything complex or anything that was too manipulative. So it was all about scoring it in the most subtle but effective way possible. And I used recordings of a 32 foot organ pipe, the lowest notes on the pipe organ which I recorded in a cathedral in Copenhagen and I processed those sounds as well electronically and combined them with processed orchestra, like the orchestra playing drone, like a sustained note and processed electronically and manipulated. It’s a combination of the many, many elements to create the kind of complex texture textural drone. And a drone can be a very fascinating and complex sound. It’s not just playing one note on a keyboard and sustaining it, it is about creating this very complex sound world that is minimal but has this complexity when you sort of stay with it and when you give it your full attention.”
The music alternates with silence in the opening scene. “We had score right in the beginning when they were driving towards the house and when they burst through the wall and then the rest of the scene has no music and then the score comes back when they discover the bodies and it’s basically a reprise of the armored vehicle music which then develops through high and low strings. And so again it was about evoking dread and the kind of tension and the horror of finding these bodies without it being obvious.”
He will work with the director again on his next project, “Story Of Your Life,” with Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker, a science fiction film. “It is a very strong script and really fascinating story which I have only just started working on couple weeks ago so it’s very early days but it’s a very strong project.”
Why why why why why is it so hard for Hollywood to figure out that there is a wildly enthusiastic audience for G-rated movies? The only major G-rated release of the year is “The Peanuts Movie,” which opened last Friday (Pixar’s “Inside Out” and the upcoming “Good Dinosaur” are both PG). And even up against the new James Bond, it did very well, $45 million, one of the best openings of the year. (Bond did a respectable $73 million, less than expected but still very strong.)
Industry observer The Wrap attributes it to “masterful marketing, nostalgia and pitch-perfect reviews.” I’d put it differently: good quality, family-friendliness, and careful updating of beloved characters.
Studios are so cynical about the G-rating they intentionally put one word or joke into a film just to mak sure kids (or their parents) will not think it is too babyish. Here’s hoping the lesson, or I should say 43 million lessons from this week results in more G-rated films in the next year.
Sarah Gavron directed “Suffragette,” starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham-Carter, and Meryl Streep in the story of some of the women who fought in the decades-long struggle to give women voting rights in the UK. I spoke to her in an especially appropriate location, Washington DC’s Sewall-Belmont House, a museum and archive of the National Woman’s Party and the fight for women’s voting rights in the US.Copyright 2015 Focus Features
The movie’s main character, played by Mulligan, works in a laundry, as her mother did before her, and the movie’s focus on the participation of ordinary working-class women, and not just the leaders, is based on years of research. “We dove into these archives in the Museums of London and the Women’s Library and discovered these accounts of these working women. And so often women have been marginalized in history books, but working-class women even more so. And it was really striking that this movement brought together women from all categories, despite the kind of class apartheid of Edwardian Britain. They worked alongside each other. The working women had so much to lose and they sacrificed so much. They went to prison, they lost their jobs, they lost their relationships and their families and homes as it was very shaming in that community to go to prison and so they were risking a lot. And they are also very instrumental. There were working-class women in the leadership of the movement like Anne Kenney who was a millworker. And there were women on the ground. We wanted to depict their stories because it felt like to tell a story of the women with no platform and no entitlement would be a way of connecting with audiences all over the world today.
The women fighting for the vote were following in the paths of activists who created the first grassroots political movements, to end slavery and to get universal suffrage for men, which was not granted until . “Emmeline Pankhurst kept saying that previous political movements and charters to fight for male suffrage also resorted to civil disobedience and I think that that was kind of instructive in terms of the tactics that they employed and as we said on the civil disobedience front that the women only turned to it after 40 to 50 years of peaceful efforts. And even then, they would never harm human life; it was always attacking property.” And some of the women in the movement came from families that had fought to end slavery, so they were familiar with political activism, the opportunities and the options for making their case. “I think it was just that campaigning genius which run through these families. Emmeline Pankhurst’s own family had been involved in so there was a connection there. But they were also coming up with original tactics for this movement and pioneering a lot. It’s kind of impressive the way they brand themselves, the way they got their message out, the way they used the media. And it was new media at the time, it was that emerging cinema and photographs just beginning to appear in these newspapers. They knew how to use it and they were employing new tactics a lot of the time.”
It is difficult for us to imagine today, with two women currently running for the Presidency with considerable support, that anyone could argue against the rights of women to vote and serve in government. But the way the issues are argued still has some resonance today. “It’s interesting when you read the debates in parliaments between MPs about whether they should give women a vote. It’s a lot of fear, it is fear of change, it’s fear if women get to vote family structures will breakdown, women will stop having children, women won’t vote for war. And women didn’t have the intellectual capacity, they were two emotional. The counter was what these women were. I mean someone like Christabel Pankhurst who was a Lawyer although she couldn’t practice as a lawyer — she was extremely eloquent and I think her intellectual prowess was proof alone that she was more than capable. So I think that they were just countering it with their speeches and the way they were behaving. They just realized that they had to use whatever they could to make their point.”
At the time depicted in the film, the UK was led a a woman, Queen Victoria. But she opposed women’s suffrage. “I think it’s very different if you were born into power and it’s hereditary and not out of a democratic system and so I don’t think that you can compare that in a way.”
The movie ends with a sobering list showing the years when different countries granted women the right to vote, ending with Saudi Arabia, which just this year began to extend a partial voting right to women, though they still need to be driven to the polls by men. “When we were researching we started to just look up when other countries got their vote and it was kind of extraordinary to realize how recently many of these countries had won their vote for women and it’s a reminder I think of how precarious those rights are and how important it is use our voting rights and how fought for they were and how recently they were won. We brought it up to present day because one of the aims in the film is to say that this is just not piece of history, this is a film that resonates with also issues we’re still attacking in the 21st century. Having the vote is just symbolic. There still many issues on which women don’t have any right and in many countries where women are given very very few rights. Like education. There are 63 million girls worldwide denied education and the correlation between lack of education and babies dying in early infancy. You know education is so key and then sexual violence. There are so many issues we’re still dealing with apart from representation.”
While the movie is grounded in history, the central character is fictional. “We read a lot of accounts of working women and we really she is based very closely on a number of the working women that we read about. So the reason we create a fictional character is to kind of give us leeway in terms of the timing and where we put her with her and how we began into the story but in terms of what happens to her you will find out in the research there are women who went through everything she went through. Some women were writing about their experiences at the time, like The Hard way up – The Autobiography of Hannah Mitchell – Suffragette and Rebel Anne Kenny was also a working woman who wrote a memoir and Anne Barnes another working woman. And female academics particularly have gone and dug into the working class woman’s life now and gone through records and accounts and factory accounts.”
Gavron wanted to make this film for ten years, and there was six years of research to get the script. One of the people they worked with was Anne Pankhurst, a descendent of Emmeline. She was struck by the challenges the women faced. “It was really the length to which they went and the violence they faced and the personal cost, the fact that they were prepared to go to prison, hunger strikes, be forced-fed 49 times Emily ward begged and she was even most forced-fed it was sort of extraordinary we know that’s a form of torture and it was even more so a form of torture with the equipment they used and so it was that that I found most shocking.”
They had to use the “pockets of London” that could still pass for a hundred years ago. “We wanted to film in the house of Parliament. No one ever had filmed in the house of Parliament in the whole history of cinema but we decided that we had to be suffragette about it and we did not give up, we filed a petition and finally got access. So then we had stunt people and vehicles and we were staging this government protest in this very place that barred women for centuries so that was very exciting. The testimony was shot in the very room where women appeared before Members of Parliament to make their case. One of the supporting actors stood up, an old man, and said, ‘My grandmother was a working woman who gave her testimony to Lloyd George.'”
Gavron hopes the film will inspire people to learn about the women who fought for the vote and to join them in pursuing justice and equality. “I hope that people come away remembering or realizing how hard fought for the vote was if they didn’t know and also feeling empowered to speak out against current day inequalities.” What makes her happy is when people come out of the movie saying, “I will never miss a chance to vote again.”
Anne Kenny was also a working woman who wrote a memoir and Anne Barnes another working woman. And female academics particularly have gone and dug into the working class woman’s life now and gone through records and accounts and factory accounts.”