My Award Nominations: Editing

My roster of personal nominees continues growing this weekend with the visual post-production categories and music.

It's one of those years when I wish I could include about seven or eight nominees for Best Editing. It pained me to make some of these cuts (heehee), but I like the final five I've wound up with:

Review - Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation

In an age when cinephiles continue to bemoan the glut (and the fiscal success) of unoriginal populist entertainment, I feel it's important to remember not all unoriginal populist entertainment is created equal. There's that which is dumb, lazy or poorly made, and there's that which is so well executed it truly entertains despite its familiarity. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, the fifth in the series of Tom Cruise vehicles which had plateaued at 'mediocre' until Brad Bird's 2011 entry Ghost Protocol, falls comfortably into the latter designation.

Thankfully, you don't need to have followed the previous globe-trotting exploits of super spy Ethan Hunt (Cruise, barely aged since his first M:I outing in 1996) and his Impossible Mission Force, IMF, to enjoy Rogue Nation. You don't even need to follow this one all that closely. In a franchise whose primary draw is its star and his daring-do, story details erase themselves from one's memory as readily as the famously self-destructing messages that send Ethan on his next mission, should he choose to accept it. Which he does, of course.

One Category at a Time: Sound Editing

Some odd inclusions and exclusions in Sound Editing this year, in which I only correctly anticipated two of the five nominees. Pretty dismal performance on my part, but with such high-profile snubs, perhaps that's understandable. Among the slighted films are Super 8, which dominated the guild announcements with three nods from the MPSE. No room was made for animated efforts Tintin or Rango either. Ditto Mission: Impossible. But enough of that griping; let's examine those that did make the cut

My Awards nominations: Sound Editing

The most impressive Sound Editing of 2011 could be heard in:

The Adventures of Tintin (Brent Burge, Chris Ward, David Whitehead):

The deep groans of ships at sea, the resonance of voice-shattered glass, bullets and bazookas and tanks... oh my!

Drive (Lon Bender):

The drive sequences are mesmerizing in their sonic detail, but moments of relative silence are just as tense.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (Richard Hymns):

The WHAPs and THWAPS of bone-crunching fisticuffs, the sonic boom of airborne missiles, and all those awesome gadgets and gizmos...

Thor (Michael Babcock, Richard King):

The electrifying pounding of Thor's hammer, the creaks and cracks of the icy frost giants, the threatening machinations of The Destroyer...

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Erik Aadahl, Ethan Van der Ryn):

Tinny robot voices, those distinctively organometalic sound effects, and of course, explosions gallore... KA-BAY!!!

War Horse (Richard Hymns, Gary Rydstrom):

As they did on Saving Private Ryan, the piercing staccato of machine gun fire, the shattering bombast of artillery shells, but also the thunderous rumble of hooves.

Just missed: Thor, Hugo, Super 8, The Tree of Life

Reviews

As usually is the case for me this time of year, I need a space to catch up with capsule reviews I've neglected to post upon seeing the film in question. I'll update this post throughout the season as I see more films.