Movie Review: Bridge of Spies *Hanks, Spielberg and Cold War Cloak & Dagger*

Remember when Spielberg films were events? A new film by Steven Spielberg was the equivalent of a MCU film, a Star Wars film, because we knew something amazing was going to happen.  Last week, Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies opened with $15.9 million and got beaten by Jack Black’s Goosebumps.  What changed? Well, frankly, Spielberg did. He stopped evolving as a developer, forgot how to conjure the magic from deep within our childhoods and flat out did not know how to end one of his movies to save his life.

His last film, Lincoln, should be a classic. Daniel Day-Lewis turned in one of the most amazing performances by any actor I’ve ever seen, period. The film, though, is bookended by a beginning so laughably childish it would be out of place in a 3rd grade play and an ending that muddied the point of the entire film and added another 20 minutes to an already weighty endeavor. So, it’s a shame the public, after more than a decade of Spielberg underwhelming, has caught on, because Bridge of Spies is his best film since, probably, Catch Me If You Can.

Thomas Newman’s Latest 10 Movies vs. Greatest 10 Movies

Latest vs. Greatest looks at directors, actors, actresses, screenwriters and composers to assess the state of their career as it stands.  We’ll look back at the latest 10 movies the artist has done, rate them and then average them out to see where they stand today.  We’ll also rank their 10 greatest movies and give them the same treatment to compare what they have been doing to their very best work.  (A quick side-note: if an artist is/has been a regular on a TV show we’ll also grade the seasons individually; artists need 10 projects to qualify).

Thomas Newman is the second composer we’ve looked at in this column and he has the “honor” of following John Williams who scored a perfect career 10.00.  This is no knock on Newman.  He has a style of his own and has been scoring some of the cinema’s most memorable films for the last thirty years.

Unlike Williams, Newman has a very distinctive style to most of his work.  Not being a music professional, don’t kill me if I’m not describing it correctly, but he uses staccato string work to distinctive effect in his best scores: Finding Nemo, WALL-E, Road to Perdition, Saving Mr. Banks, etc.  It’s a signature style.  He may be the only composer I can recognize within ten seconds of screen time as the movie’s scorer.

The danger with having that kind of signature style is repetition and self-plagiarism.  James Horner had a signature style and he’s been self-plagiarizing his old work for most of the last fifteen years.  Newman, though, seems to relish in opportunities to experiment and expand his chosen path and since he just picked up a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Saving Mr. Banks, I would say it is an experiment that is still working very well.

In talking about John Williams, we talked about composers being attached to particular directors, much as the classical composers had patrons for which they did their work.  Newman is most tightly associated with Frank Darabont, Andrew Stanton and Sam Mendes.  His work on Mendes films has such an effect on the films that I cannot imagine Road to Perdition without his haunting  and beautiful music underscoring scenes of horror in falling rain.

Behind Hans Zimmer and the MAESTRO (John Williams official KT honorific), Newman is my favorite contemporary composer (when Howard Shore is not making a Middle-earth film).  Let’s look at the last ten films he’s scored.
NEWMAN’S LATEST TEN:
1. Saving Mr. Banks (2013)…………………..9.00
2. Side Effects (2013)……………………………..5.50
3. Skyfall (2012)……………………………………….9.50
4. The Iron Lady (2011)………………………….6.75
5. Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)..7.25
6. The Help (2011)……………………………………7.50
7. The Adjustment Bureau (2011)……….9.25
8. The Debt (2010)……………………………………8.00
9. Brothers (2009)…………………………………….6.00
10. WALL-E (2008)………………………………….10.00
NEWMAN’S CURRENT AVERAGE: 7.875

A very solid current score (higher, actually, than John Williams).  Any Newman score these days is likely to net you almost an eight and that’s consistent quality.  The highlights of his current work are Saving Mr. Banks, The Adjustment Bureau and – nearly – the best score of his career in WALL-E.  Let’s tally the ten best of that career.  A quick note, composer scores are unique to the score not the movie.  Many a great score has been in a crap movie and vice versa, so these scores are based on the quality of the music:

NEWMAN’S GREATEST TEN
1. Road to Perdition (2002)…………………….10.00
2. WALL-E (2008)……………………………………….10.00
3. Finding Nemo (2003)…………………………….  9.75
4. Cinderella Man (2005)…………………………  9.50
5. Skyfall (2012)………………………………………….  9.50
6. The Adjustment Bureau (2011)…………  9.25
7. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)…  9.25
8. Lemony Snicket’s A Series of
Unfortunate Events (2004)……………………….9.25
9. Saving Mr. Banks (2013)………………………. 9.00
10. Scent of a Woman (1992) ………………….. 8.75
NEWMAN’S GREATEST AVERAGE: 9.425

You can’t do much better than that.  If he wasn’t following Williams’ 10, that would be a daunting number for any composer to beat.  Williams is the best composer of the 20th Century, so this is an outstanding number and one a lot of the actors and directors we’ve examined would be jealous of having.  In fact, it’s the third-highest number we’ve had across any discipline. 

Though he’s been scoring since the 1980’s, Newman’s skill and prominence have never been higher.  He’s doing the best work of his career, and I can’t wait to hear what he has in store for us over the next few years.  He’s officially attached to two future projects: the troubled Pixar film The Good Dinosaur and a unannounced Disney project releasing in 2018.  Newman seems to becoming Disney’s composer of choice.  Not bad work if you can get it.

Top 5: Movie Scores of 2012

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I think it’s true that the music we like by the time we’re 16 (maybe earlier) is the music we’re going to like for the rest of our lives.  I was barely out of high school when the NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears abomination hit and-in my crotchety 19-year old opinion-broke music.  I listen to a wide variety of stuff, but I grew up in an extremely strict household and music was tightly monitored.  My brother could start his own blog about “The Day My Mom Found Nirvana’s Nevermind in My Room”.  The prohibition extended to movies, as well, but for some reason I was allowed to listen to movie scores.  So while other kids on the bus were cranking Metallica or Pearl Jam, I had John Williams, Hans Zimmer and Jerry Goldsmith.

If Mozart or Beethoven were alive today, they’d be composing movie scores.  It’s THE venue to deliver instrumental music to the largest possible audience.  Plus it pays, which some people tend to forget, is why the great classical composers composed.  They had patrons; kings, barons, popes and others who sponsored their music and made requests of what they were to compose.  Very much like the relationships that develop between directors and their composers of choice.  Steven Spielberg and John Williams is the most obvious pairing.  The duo have worked together for nearly forty years, but most directors have a compose they prefer to work with.  Alfred Hitchcock had Bernard Herrman.  JJ Abrams has used Michael Giacchino since Alias, long before he was an Academy Award winning composer.  Sam Mendes uses Thomas Newman.  Chris Nolan has used Hans Zimmer for every film since Batman Begins (save The Prestige) and will for Interstellar.

While 2013 has been a down year for the movies, there have been several very nice scores already, some (The Lone Ranger) for truly awful films.  That can be another top 5: best scores from the worst movies.  But looking back to 2012, here are my top 5 movie scores along with my favorite track from the effort.  Happy listening and happy Friday!

1. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey by Howard Shore

2. The Dark Knight Rises by Hans Zimmer

3. Skyfall by Thomas Newman

4. The Adjustment Bureau by Thomas Newman & AudioMachine

5. Lincoln by John Williams