Welcome to Score Keeping, a feature where I l dive into overlooked and highly praised songs, scores and soundtracks that accompany great films. Please press play. Let’s go back. The year is 1975 and relatively unknown actor Sylvester Stallone has just finished writing the first draft of Rocky in three days. He was inspired… Read more »
Entries by Aja Essex
Trailer: Good Time
Capturing a city as it is is a priceless tool as a filmmaker. Cities have as much personality as any character in a film and if used right can become the whole focal point of the film. The “as it is” part is what some filmmakers don’t get quite right. It easy to romanticize a… Read more »
Trailer: Endless Poetry
I think sometimes we take our master filmmakers for granted. I think it comes from our somewhat misconstrued idea that with old age comes a deterioration of an artist work, even though even in the past few years we’ve seen elder stateswomen and men such as Martin Scorsese, Agnes Varda, Claire Denis and Steven Spielberg… Read more »
Score Keeping: The Internal Sounds of Pollock
Welcome to Score Keeping. A feature where I l dive into overlooked and highly praised songs, scores and soundtracks that accompany great films. Please press play. The film score as a tool can serve many purposes. Among these many utilities the most common would be to elevate and support the action on screen. Meaning the… Read more »
Silence: Faith in the Father
[This blog post contains spoilers for the film Silence.] Faith is, I think, the single most complex aspect of human existence in both belief and practice. I mean faith in both a secular and spiritual sense. Putting your trust in something bigger than yourself with no guarantee of reciprocation of any kind is something that… Read more »
Raw and the Discovery of Feminine Power
There’s a quote that has resonated with me after reading it a few years ago. While I can no longer find the source or the exact wording, the gist has always stuck with me. It’s about how we perceive cinematic depictions of powerful women versus how we perceive the same for men. It goes something… Read more »