Review - Fury

It is April, 1945. The second world war draws to an agonizingly bloody close on German soil. Materializing out of a haze of sunlight and gun smoke, a German officer atop a weathered white horse trudges through a scorched battlefield, floating in silence like a ghost amongst the dead bodies and burning debris. There's a sad beauty to this image that greets us at the onset of Fury, steeped in an eerie serenity that the film's title does not suggest.

Naturally, this moment ends in an abrupt and brutal fashion more typical to the rest of this rockem' sockem' war story. Written and directed by David Ayer, many of whose previous films and screenplays (End of Watch, Harsh Times, Training Day) have been gritty studies in rock-hard masculinity, Fury follows the perilous travails of a tank unit as it pushes the Allied advance deeper into enemy territory in the dying days of WWII.

Brad Pitt headlines as Sgt. Don 'Wardaddy' Collier, commander of a 30-ton M4 Sherman tank (the eponymous Fury, whose moniker is scrawled across the cannon barrel as if the bow of a ship) and its testosterone-oozing crew. This includes Shia LaBeouf as its devout trigger man, Michael Peña as its empathetic driver, and Jon Bernthal as its certifiable mechanic. No, not “certified”, “certifiable”.

IFMCA winners

The International Film Music Critics Association has unveiled their winners for 2013. If you assume they're the sort of group that always attempts to align themselves with the Academy's tastes, then you may be surprised by their selections. But if you are more familiar with this organization's modus operandi, then you'll find them expectedly bemusing. Not a single one of their winners was recognized by AMPAS' music branch this year, not even Oscar favourite Steven Price who had reaped four nominations for his Gravity score. Instead, the big winner was Abel Korzeniowski, who took home three honours including Film Score of the Year for Romeo and Juliet, a film which has otherwise been completely off the awards radar.

Peruse the film category winners after the cut.

One Category at a Time: Original Score

There are all sorts of theories on how the Academy votes for Best Original Score, arguably the most subjective of the craft categories. Appraisal of music is so prone to personal tastes that just when you think you've got the Academy pegged, they go and do something unpredictably awful (like award Gustavo Santaolalla a second consecutive Oscar for a score that makes liberal use of pre-existing compositions) or go and do something unpredictably cool (like give Trent Reznor an Oscar for an extremely atypical electronic soundtrack).

My Award nominations: Original Score

I find myself repeating what I did with my Adapted Screenplay nominees: I hate to be negative on such a great year for film, but I gotta say that it was not a particularly great year for Original Scores specifically. The five listed after the cut are good, but in a normal year I think only a couple of them would have made my ballot. But enough crapping on my own nominees! Here are the five that made it: