Giving it away to just anybody

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have officially become score sluts.

The Gorge, which debuted on AppleTV+ Friday and which I watched last night, marks their third score for a major motion picture in the past calendar year. 

I haven't landed yet on how much I like The Gorge, but let's just say the star ratings I'm deciding between are 2.5 and 3. And I'm starting to question how "major" the major potion pictures to which they're giving away their talents really are these days.

Of course they are not actually "giving them away." Writing a score for a movie is a gig that pays you money. Like anyone else, Trent and Atticus like to get paid for doing the thing they are good at doing. 

But it may just be my love for Nine Inch Nails, whom I have considered my favorite band for more than 30 years, that makes me think it's also nice if the movies they score have a certain artistic validity to them beyond that paycheck. The same way you would call out Christopher Nolan if he directed, I don't know, Sonic the Hedgehog 4. 

This hasn't been a problem for Ross and Reznor before now. In fact, let's use this moment in time to give a quick overview of this period when the two have been working regularly on movie scores, given that it is almost the 15th anniversary of their first and what remains their best score: The Social Network. 

Next came two more collaborations with David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, both of which continued the "event movie" status of their work. Two of their next three are documentaries I haven't seen, Before the Flood and The Vietnam War, which, if not "event movies," certainly carry with them a seriousness of purpose. Sandwiched in between those was maybe our first sign of them branching out into less significant subject matter, though I suppose a movie about a bomb set off at the Boston Marathon (Patriots Day) still meets the description of a "serious" movie.

In 2018 we see them starting to shift down into a bit more of a minor key, scoring Jonah Hill's Mid-90s and their first Netflix collaboration, Bird Box. So as long as seven years ago, you could say they're already making movies just for money, though I loved the novel on which Bird Box was based and I probably liked the movie just a smidge better than some people. I'd argue that at this point, we don't yet feel inundated by their work.

Their first TV work came in 2019 for Watchmen, which I have not seen (no HBO), before scoring an excellent movie for director Trey Edward Shults, Waves. This is a prelude to what I might call their breakout years as household names among casual cinephiles, when in 2020 they scored the best picture nominee Mank and the best animated feature nominee Soul, their first work in a movie designed to be viewed by people of all ages. If we are indeed saying they became household names that year, it could be because they were nominated for Oscars for both scores, the first time since they won for The Social Network, and won for Soul.

Perhaps exhausted by all the accolades, they did not produce a movie score in 2021. However, their foot has been on the pedal ever since. Strangely 2022 brought two more movies I have yet to see, Bones and All and Empire of Light, the latter of which seems particularly out of step with what I would have once thought of as a prototypical Ross/Reznor score. And while no artist wants to be thought of as making prototypical versions of themselves, I'd argue you could also say it's an indication that they're willing to work for anyone who approaches them.

In 2023 it was back to working with Fincher for The Killer, and their second animated movie, Teenage Mutant Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which I loved. Then last year it was Challengers and Queer, the latter of which I also have yet to see, both of which are collaborations with Luca Guadagnino, with whom they worked on Bones and All. Which also describes the next project Wikipedia has listed for them, Guadagnino's After the Hunt, which is due in theaters in October. (Incidentally, Wikipedia failed to list The Gorge, so it's possible there is another project in there that I didn't get.)

So why this moment in time to slut shame them?

I don't know. I suppose on some level it's not warranted. Even though Challengers, Queer and The Gorge have all been released in one 12-month period, if you go back to looking at the release years only, they're averaging two per year. They had two in 2024 and now it looks like they will have two in 2025, just as they had two in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022 and 2023 -- every year except 2021, when they had zero. (I'd have liked to think that meant they made a new Nine Inch Nails album that year, but they didn't, and haven't made one since 2018. Maybe now we're getting at the source of my frustration, since I don't want them to pack away Nine Inch Nails for good, especially as Reznor turns 60 this year.)

Perhaps two scores per year is what they've determined is the maximum they can make while still giving their full attention to each score. And I have no doubt that's exactly what they're doing. As I had the stirrings in my mind about the idea for this post even from hearing they were associated with the movie, I gave a special ear to the Gorge score as I was watching, and found it to contain thought and purpose -- maybe more so than some of the past efforts I've listened to. (I bought every score up to Gone Girl, but then stopped buying them, in part because I stopped buying much music in general.)

So I'm not saying Reznor and Ross have started phoning it in. I think they put as much into their scores as they ever have. Although I did not always love how Guadagnino employed their score in Challengers -- one of my complaints was how he would bring it up and down in the same scene without any apparent motivation for this, when it would have seemed to make more sense just to let it play through -- I did think it was a good score, and maybe was as surprised as anyone else when they didn't get their fourth Oscar nomination for it. (That's right, even making as many scores as they do, they have only been nominated those three times.)

Really I think it's that I would hope they would look at the script of each movie they're scoring, when they're approached to score it, and make some qualitative analysis before they accept the gig. I'm not saying The Gorge looks like a failure on paper, or that it even was a failure, though I might think it's a mild failure. I'm saying that the basic narrative components don't seem quite Reznor-Ross-worthy. That no matter how good Scott Derrickson made it -- and it's at least fine in that regard -- it might never have been Reznor-Ross-worthy.

And that's another thing about their standards seeming to lower imperceptibly. They don't even have the argument of working with a visionary director here. Although Derrickson has made some pretty good films (The Black Phone, Doctor Strange, Sinister), for some reason I always think of him as the man behind the Day the Earth Stood Still remake, which I thought was pretty terrible.

Maybe again I just wonder: Are we going to get any more Nine Inch Nails? Probably not at this pace of making movie scores, especially as they continue to hike up their skirts for unworthy suitors. (The slut shaming metaphor lost a little of its usefulness just now.)

Then again, the last period of NIN fertility saw the guys release Not the Actual Events, Add Violence and Bad Witch in consecutive years from 2016 to 2018. And though I don't love any of those albums (some of them are EPs), they were legitimate, vocals-based Nine Inch Nails albums, unlike the two instrumental Ghosts albums released in 2020. During those same years, they also scored five films.

So it is possible for Trent and Atticus to have it all, even if they accept gigs to write music for films that might be beneath them. They just have to decide they want it all. And though I think they will never get too old to score movies, the days of them composing new angst-ridden industrial-edged popular music, and simulating the related emotions as they play it on stage, are limited. Give me a little more Nine Inch Nails now, because you can always score Sonic the Hedgehog 4 later. 

My first Netflix movie in the theater

Roma. Marriage Story. The Irishman. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Mank.

All these titles from acclaimed directors, and plenty others I don't want to look up, had their debuts in the cinema before streaming on Netflix, where the majority of people saw them. I have always been one of those majority.

In 2023, I'm finally seeing my first movie in the theater that I could have waited just two weeks to see on Netflix.

Unlike other people, though, I didn't have to pay for it. (Thank you, critics card.)

I wasn't actually planning to see David Fincher's The Killer this week. In fact, I didn't even know it was coming out this week. All my cinema-related yearnings had been geared toward another movie with "Killer" in the title, Killers of the Flower Moon, which I wanted to review this week to inject some life into the recently sluggish ReelGood website. It eluded me last weekend in Sydney when my wife suggested I go to a movie to pass the time on Saturday before our flight, then reneged the offer when she learned I wanted to see a three hour and 26 minute movie. With my mother-in-law in town from Sunday to Tuesday, and the movie never starting later than 7:30 on any given night, it just hasn't worked out.

Since I may now wait until my opportunity on AppleTV+ to see that one, it seemed appropriate that I jump the Netflix debut on The Killer. I mean, I can't have movies by Martin Scorsese and David Fincher come out in the same seven-day period, and wait until their streaming debuts weeks later to slake my readers' thirst on what I thought of them. (Said thirst is entirely hypothetical.) 

But until Wednesday, I didn't even know The Killer would be an option. That's when I saw it already listed on the marquee of the theater downstairs from where I work, a day before you could actually see it. I did end up seeing it the next day, and churned out the review that very night so I could get some new content up on the site before the weekend. (Here's the review if you want to read it.)

It may not have been the ideal movie to pop my Netflix/theater cherry. Although we do get some decent Fincher technique in this film, not to mention enough locations to make James Bond wonder why he never goes anywhere, I didn't think this was one of Fincher's most cinematic films. In fact, I am almost certain it's his least cinematic. Which is not to say it isn't cool to watch at certain points. It's just not a very interesting, original story, and the craft that is applied to that narrative skeleton doesn't stand out in a way that would justify revisiting this familiar territory. (I get into some particulars in the review if that interests you.)

More to the point, there isn't anything about it that I thought begged to be seen on a big screen. As I was watching it I kept thinking of a Steven Soderbergh movie that I found similarly underwhelming, Haywire, though I like this movie more than that one. As I also touch on in my review (I promise I will stop begging you to read my review), Soderbergh makes so many movies that you really don't care if one of them feels like a throwaway. (And it does seem to lessen the disappointment when three or four in a row feel like throwaways.) With Fincher, this is only his third feature since 2011, so if one doesn't land with you, it might be a long wait for the next.

Fincher is starting to have that in common with his most regular collaborator, Trent Reznor, though it would be more like their careers are trending in opposite directions. Reznor, as part of Nine Inch Nails, used to only put out an album every five years, only lately becoming so much more prolific and churning out about three musical scores a year. Meanwhile, it's almost unimaginable that Fincher had a five-year period that included Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He's now become the comparative recluse.

I did enjoy hearing the works of Reznor and his buddy Atticus Ross, as I always do -- if you don't remember, Nine Inch Nails is my favorite band. (There's actually a cheeky reference to nine-inch nails in the dialogue of The Killer, as the trio of writers do their best Tori Amos impersonation.) However, I don't plan to buy the score, something I've done for both Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, hoping they'd do something similar for me as what the Social Network score did. Much as I love the musical genius of Trent Reznor, he can't top his own work with that Social Network score -- not to mention the majority of the band's output.

The Social Network also seems to have been a peak for Fincher. Although I've admired each of the movies he's made since then, I haven't loved any of them, and The Killer will now be tussling with the likes of The Game to stay out of the bottom of my Fincher rankings. 

It may be no coincidence that he's started to shrink a bit, now two movies into his Netflix deal. Mank certainly didn't preview a receding of his ambitions, though I did wonder why he'd be willing to let the majority of people see that movie on such a small screen. So The Killer concerns me in that regard as well, because now he's making a movie that does not demand to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

I went to the cinema hoping I could urge it in that direction, but The Killer killed my aspirations. 

TIL: Trent Reznor is scoring a Pixar film

When a person gets his life together, funny things can happen.

Trent Reznor, the primary and sometimes only creative force behind the band Nine Inch Nails, spent many years languishing in addiction and suicidal thoughts. He made only about one album every five years. They were brilliant, but they took him ages because he had so much personal baggage on his plate. (Can you have baggage on a plate? I like mixing metaphors.)

Ten years ago he married another musician, Mariqueen Maandig, and started churning out children, four to date. Instead of sapping his time, fatherhood has made him more productive, as he has made several new Nine Inch Nails album as well as scores to approximately 73 films, working closely with sometimes NIN band member Atticus Ross.

I never thought I would say it, but the man who penned the lyrics “I want to fuck you like an animal” is now scoring a Pixar movie. A Pixar movie about jazz, at that – a genre in which he expects to be working on the score. (And may already have been for the new Watchmen series?)

That movie is called Soul, and it’s coming out next June.

Although I miss the tortured heyday of Nine Inch Nails, it does my heart good that Reznor, at age 54, is feeling so much better now.

The last decade of his career has been a lot more about movie scores than Nine Inch Nails, and there’s almost a perfect line of demarcation with the start of the decade. Two thousand ten was when he submitted his first (and still best) score for The Social Network. He had supervised soundtracks before, such as Lost Highway and Natural Born Killers, but never had he previously scored an entire film. He’s obviously loved it as I can barely count the scores since then, which have included several more Fincher films, Patriots Day, Birdbox, Mid 90s, and so on.

But this latest development of scoring a children’s movie is another watershed moment for him. It feels kind of similar to Ice Cube going from “fuck tha police” to starring in kids movies about long and arduous road trips. But I was also happy for Cube when he entered his “Uncle Ice Cube” phase. It feels like a fair tradeoff in artistic credibility if it means you are also a happier person.

Although I always liked Reznor’s lyrics – they can be fun to scream at full volume, even if you are only pretending you are as anguished as he is – I would never have counted Nine Inch Nails as my favorite band if it weren’t for Reznor’s sonic inventiveness. Granted, many of those sounds were dark and industrial, as you can’t have angry lyrics over music that doesn’t sound angry. But even in the midst of his darkest periods, he wrote songs like “A Warm Place” from The Downward Spiral, which had a lot more optimism embedded in them.

Soul seems like a particularly warm place, even if it involves souls separated from their bodies in a kind of afterlife – think a high concept similar to Inside Out. And clearly he’s not worried what fans who fell for his aggressive despair will think. I mean, if he’s not feeling it, he can’t really make it.

If things hadn’t started going right for him, though, he might not still be here. Again, I’ll take it, and on Thanksgiving, I’ll give thanks for it.

Not just Trent Reznor's appendage

If you're watching a movie about the Beach Boys -- one that's actually allowed to use their music -- you wouldn't expect to be focusing on the non-Beach Boys music.

Yet that's precisely what I did when watching Love & Mercy, because I found an interesting name in the opening credits, reminding me who was responsible for its score: Atticus Ross.

I have previously known Ross only as a collaborator of Trent Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman and my favorite working artist, who has turned lately to scoring high-profile movies. He won an Oscar for his Social Network score, and has also scored David Fincher's two most recent films, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl.

I say "he" and not "they," even though Ross worked with Reznor on each of those scores, because Reznor is known for subsuming other creative talents into himself. This is not to say that Reznor elbows these others out of the way to claim sole credit -- in fact, the opposite may be true. In the past, Reznor has listed other members of Nine Inch Nails as though they were full members, rather than what they really were: musicians who joined him for tours. Generally speaking, Reznor plays almost all the instruments you hear in the album recording of any of his songs -- the pianos, the guitars, the synthesizers, probably even the odd horn -- with only the occasional guest (say, Adrian Belew) being credited for his or her contributions. He is literally a one-man band, who has a group of revolving associates who sometimes join him for performances.

Ross has been one of those revolving associates, the most consistent one over the past decade. He has been a producer/programmer on each of Nine Inch Nails' last five studio albums, but he didn't really come out of the shadows to be recognized for his work until The Social Network, when he was of course listed with Reznor as a co-nominee.

Half of me assumed that this was just another instance of Reznor's characteristic generosity, that Reznor did all the work and just brought Ross along for the ride. After all, I didn't have any sense of Ross apart from Reznor, no notion of what any Ross solo work might sound like or even whether any existed. And since the music from their three movies sounded pretty much like Nine Inch Nails music without the lyrics, I figured Reznor was the one who deserved the credit and Ross owed Reznor a hearty thank you for allowing him to ride Reznor's coattails.

After hearing the Love & Mercy score, I'm not so sure. In fact, I might even like it better than his last two scores with Reznor.

That's not to say the score jumps out and grabs you. It doesn't. It's quite in the background, and about a third of the way through I realized I hadn't even consciously noticed it. I mean, there is a lot of Beach Boys music in this movie, understandably, as well as some other diegetic music that's appropriate to the film's two time periods. (I noted with no small amount of humor that Kenny G's saxophone breakout "Songbird" is playing when Brian Wilson goes to buy his Cadillac and meet his future love interest. It's followed by a song I like a lot less ironically, Heart's "These Dreams.")

But once I started specifically paying attention to what I knew must be Ross' contributions, I started really tuning in to some great sonic accomplishments. They are in the same mode that has been the primary reason why Fincher has used Reznor and Ross in the past -- setting a mood of eerie disconnection and creeping dread. The score announces itself in the moments when the paranoid Wilson is becoming untethered from reality, when they make the perfect complement to his encroaching mental illness. It's the score for Brian Wilson going way too deep inside his own head.

If it were only that simple, though, it might be just another installment in what I have found to be two fairly generic scores in a row by Reznor and Ross with Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. I mean, those scores have their moments, Gone Girl more than Dragon Tattoo, but ultimately I have not listened to them more than twice each. (Only once for Dragon Tattoo, actually, though you really can't blame me -- it's 37 tracks long. That's 37 full-length tracks.) But overall those two scores have depressed me as follow-ups to The Social Network, which felt like it opened a new world of possibility for the creativity of Reznor beyond what I'd already known and loved from Nine Inch Nails.

What's got me looking forward to purchasing the Love & Mercy score is that Ross has also done some sonic arrangements that sound like a combination of Beach Boys music, static, voices, distortion, and shapeless horror. During one of his moments of dawning concern over the possible degradation of his mental faculties, Wilson puts on a pair of headphones in the studio and hears what sounds like shrieking ghouls. I'm pretty sure Ross composed that also, and I want to hear that again.

I perhaps didn't realize the extent of Ross' noodling around until the closing credits, which list the songs from the score -- and then the clips of Beach Boys songs that appear in each song. Some of the songs contain snippets from like nine different Beach Boys songs, assembled as a kind of sonic soup that's swirling around in Wilson's brain as he tries to reconcile his own artistic aspirations with the type of music he is expected to write ... with a touch of paranoia over his fears of inadequacy and irrelevance, overlaid by a certainty that any day now the song-writing muse could just vanish entirely.

The brain of a possible paranoid schizophrenic isn't a wonderful place to be on a good day. Ross' score -- which I'm getting more and more convinced I'm going to buy as I type this -- shows you just how unwonderful it can be.

Trent Who?

A viewing 18 years overdue

In 1997, I bought the Lost Highway soundtrack.

In 2015, I finally saw Lost Highway.

There's a logical explanation for this, actually.

You see, Trent Reznor of the band Nine Inch Nails was the supervisor of this soundtrack, contributing two of his own songs ("The Perfect Drug," "Driver Down") and in all other ways overseeing its compilation. This included splicing in little bits of dialogue as he had done when assuming the same role on the soundtrack for Natural Born Killers three years earlier.

As that soundtrack had been a certified Experience with a capital E in its own right, independent from watching the movie, I had the same hopes for this one. So much so, in fact, that I never bothered to actually watch the movie.

Oh, I should probably also mention that Nine Inch Nails was my favorite band at the time. And continues to be today.

If the Lost Highway soundtrack had captivated me the way the Natural Born Killers soundtrack had captivated me, I might have prioritized a viewing before now. It didn't get to that level. I did listen to it a number of times, and acquired at least one new favorite song from it ("Eye" by Smashing Pumpkins), but it didn't transcend. And then I heard that no one liked the movie, and that was that.

Fast forward 18 years, and the BluRay is staring me in the face on a library shelf in Australia. This was undoubtedly not my only opportunity to watch it over the years, but I'm pretty sure it was the first time I had seen it in a free rental scenario. And so I decided it was finally time to check this long-delayed viewing off my list.

Yep, a pretty big disappointment after all.

Lost Highway is not without its moments. It definitely has some chilling bits in its first half, when Robert Blake is used most effectively, and he may just be the creepy weirdo breaking into the home of Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette and sending them video tapes of themselves sleeping. Some of this stuff works on a basic visual level. But where it goes is decidedly unsatisfying after its mid-point shift, when Lynch (did I mention this was directed by David Lynch?) inexplicably saps all the atmosphere from the movie. He makes a futile attempt to restore the atmosphere in the last 20 minutes or so, but by then a viewer will have been legitimately bored to death.

I did feel a certain sense of deja vu watching it, a result of all these songs I'd heard before. And since I hadn't listened to the soundtrack in probably ten years, it wasn't like I was ticking off all the appearances of songs I was expecting -- they really did come at me like half-remembered fragments of dreams. As in "Oh yeah, that insane sax solo by Pullman's character is from this movie." But overall I found that the songs appeared in what seemed like pretty different contexts from what I was expecting, most notably the usage of "Eye," which just plays in the background while two characters are dancing, in a not-very-creepy scene.

The biggest disappointment, though, was the reminder of something I think I already knew, which was that "The Perfect Drug" -- the only actual Nine Inch Nails song on the soundtrack -- does not actually appear in the movie. ("Driver Down" is an instrumental that's credited to Reznor himself.) When I got to the end and it hadn't played, I thought we might get it over the credits, but that's just the reprise of David Bowie's "I'm Deranged."

Lost Highway itself was too deranged to be a mainstream film, but not deranged enough to be a really satisfying entry in the Lynch canon. Oh well, on to the next one.

As we have now stepped away from the era in which we regularly purchase whole soundtracks, I don't know if there will ever arise another Lost Highway scenario, where I buy the soundtrack without ever seeing the movie. I did buy Reznor's score to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo before I had seen it, but then I saw the movie just a couple days later. And now I don't even have blind faith in Reznor anymore, because the Dragon Tattoo score was such an over-long, self-indulgent affair that I didn't finally buy his score to Gone Girl until months after I'd seen it. I've only listened to that one all the way through twice, and don't envision a third listen any time soon. (Though just so you don't mistake this paragraph for being anti-Reznor, I'll close the paragraph by stating for the record that I absolutely love his Social Network score, and have listened to it all the way through at least ten times.)

I'm also now one step closer to completing David Lynch's feature filmography, though Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me still elude me. I'm eager to correct at least the former of those omissions ... and also eager to see if the man ever gets off his butt and directs another feature. It's been nearly ten years since Inland Empire, Mr. Lynch.

Fincher and Reznor and Mara - oh my!

I'd been stuck in a long flirtation with my second viewing of The Social Network.

I'd encounter it in the darkened corners of the library video section, and it would call out to me. "What me again, lover ... watch me again."

Okay, so there was nothing untoward about my desire to see The Social Network a second time. I ranked it third among the movies I saw in 2010, and I have a sneaking suspicion that if I were ranking now, it might be #1. Neither of the movies I ranked ahead of it -- 127 Hours and Tangled -- are defending their spots very well. I bought Tangled on BluRay and watched it a second time, and though I still loved it, the near ecstasy I experienced watching it the first time just wasn't there. And it's telling that I have had no such flirtation for my second viewing of 127 Hours. I've intellectually contemplated the idea that I should want to see it again, and thought about it in that respect, but it hasn't gone any further. And it's not that I'm squeamish over "the scene," which was actually one of my favorite parts in terms of the visceral intensity that makes me love movies. I just can't be bothered to prioritize a second viewing.

But my second Social Network viewing was so hard to resist that I finally broke down and borrowed it from the library yesterday. Truth is, I hadn't even been planning to go the library at all, but I had my son out on a walk and wanted to kill some extra time, to give my wife (sick at home) a little more downtime before we returned. Not only did I come away with The Social Network, but it made its way into the DVD player that very night, when my wife retired early due to her aforementioned physical malady.

I loved it again -- probably not more than the first time, but probably about the same amount. Especially the first half.

See, the first half contains all the Rooney Mara parts.

The old acting adage "There are no small parts, just small actors" certain applies to Mara. She's only in two scenes in this movie -- well, three, if you count her brief reaction shot to reading Mark Zuckerberg's blog post about her. And you should count that scene, because the look of indignant, hurt, disbelieving betrayal in her eyes, as they well up with tears, is itself a clinic on acting. The fact that I require so many adjectives to describe her performance in that one shot means that this girl has got chops, chops out the wazoo.

Which is why, of course, David Fincher cast "this girl" to be his Girl. When I spoke about visceral intensity in terms of Aron Rolston cutting off his arm in 127 Hours, that has a fairly literal interpretation. But visceral intensity can come in less obvious forms, and Rooney Mara is certainly one of them. There's something about her eyes that just penetrate through to the truth of any matter, and those eyes are going to tear people to shreds in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

But it's not just the reunion of director and actress that makes me excited for the Hollywood remake of Stieg Larsson's most famous novel. Don't forget a third essential collaborator who will be back for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo -- Trent Reznor, who won an Oscar (which he graciously shared with Atticus Ross) for his Social Network score.

That was another part of my second Social Network viewing that I really loved -- hearing Reznor's music, which I've heard many times on my ipod, in the context of the movie once again. The way those songs are interwoven into the action is simply chilling, particularly the two memorable uses of "Hand Covers Bruise" -- when Zuckerberg jogs back across the Harvard campus after getting dumped, and when Eduardo Saverin gets all up in his face after seeing his shares diluted down to worthlessness. I was enjoying the music so much that I pumped up the volume on the wireless headphones, far beyond the level that would have been needed for me to hear the dialogue.

It's appropriate that I should have just watched The Social Network a second time on the heels of a month in which I watched three movies from Hammer Studios, two of which featured director Terence Fisher, two of which featured actor Christopher Lee, and all three of which featured actor Peter Cushing. It's increasingly rare these days that you see collaborators work together with such frequency as they did back then. Oh, you might get an actor who likes working with a director, or even a pair of actors and a director (Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton being one example). But a director, an actor and a composer -- well, that's the kind of teamwork that goes beyond the relationship that exists on opposing sides of the camera.

You wouldn't want to push that kind of thing too far, of course. The most interesting filmmakers are the ones who test their boundaries by collaborating with people who can expand their artistic vision in differing ways. After all, does anyone think the Depp-Bonham Carter-Burton partnership has an ounce of fertility still in it?

But I'm just glad I've got at least one more film in the Mara-Fincher-Reznor partnership to look forward to.

I haven't been able to determine if there are plans to remake The Girl Who Played With Fire, and if so, whether the same principal talents would be involved. Perhaps it depends on the success of the first movie, due out next month. And even if successful, perhaps Fincher would not consider it a challenge to reprise as director. His only other experience making a sequel -- Alien 3, which was of course not a sequel to his own movie -- was an unmitigated failure. I could easily see Mara staying but Fincher and Reznor exiting. Actors often have sequels written into their contracts, whereas directors and (certainly) composers tend not to. (The whole continuity thing, you see.)

So I'll savor The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo when it comes out. The trailers have certainly primed me for that.

And, somewhere down the road, the flirtation will begin again for that third viewing of The Social Network.

My favorite Oscar of the night

Early on in last night's show, when we paused to prepare a cocktail, put an appetizer in the oven or put our son to sleep, my wife told me that she didn't feel like she had a horse in the race this year.

"I mean, there were a lot of really good movies this year," she clarified. "But there's no one that I'm really pulling for, like when Bill Murray was up for Lost in Translation."

I nodded my head at that one -- Murray's loss to Sean Penn that year is one of those things that still stings me when I think about famous Oscar misses. The rest of my response was kind of a non-commital affirmation, the kind you give you when you generally agree, but don't have anything more to add, or are otherwise distracted and can't be bothered to contribute a response.

But a few minutes later, thinking on it, I realized I myself had a horse in the race this year -- a horse I may have been pulling for more than any horse that's ever run in the Oscars.

When the Best Original Score Oscar came up to bat, I felt myself get nervous and jittery. Trent Reznor, the erstwhile Nine Inch Nails frontman, was nominated alongside collaborator Atticus Ross for the unforgettable score for The Social Network. I felt reasonably confident he would win, but as I heard snippets of the scores of films like The King's Speech and Inception -- composed by formidable talents like Alexandre Desplat and Hans Zimmer -- I got nervous. Since the conventional wisdom was that The Social Network had "peaked too early," I was told to fear its prospects in any and all categories -- especially those categories where frontrunner The King's Speech was also nominated.

All it took was the "Tr" sound to come out of Nicole Kidman's mouth, and I let out a little cheer for my boy Trent.

At this point I should probably give you a little background.

Two thousand eleven marks the 20th anniversary of my awareness of Nine Inch Nails -- and about the 19th anniversary of when I started calling them my favorite band. I heard NIN's seminal album Pretty Hate Machine in the fall of 1991, when I was a freshman in college. I bought the CD that Christmas, and as they say, the rest is history. I have been a die-hard fan of the band through all its ups and downs, its interminable periods of inactivity (it's taken as long as five-and-a-half years for Trent to release a new Nine Inch Nails album -- not once, but twice), its periods in and out of rehab for Mr. Reznor (which probably coincided with some of those periods of inactivity). Throughout all that, never once has any other musical act chipped away at the title of my favorite. For musical genius that seems to approach Rain Man status in terms of sheer outside-the-box complexity, Trent Reznor has been my musical hero for nearly two decades. I've seen him perform live five times, and I've purchased pretty much everything he's ever been involved with, even soundtracks for movies I have still never seen (David Lynch's Lost Highway).

So when Nicole Kidman said his name last night, and those six signature notes of "Hand Covers Bruise" (the Social Network "theme song") played as he got out of his seat, I was as thrilled as a proud papa. No longer the angry depressive and nihilist who burst onto the scene in 1989, Reznor was a dapper 45-year-old with facial scruff and a handsome tuxedo, proud but modest, embracing the ceremony without irony. To paraphrase Vince Vaughn from Swingers, I thought, "My baby's all grownsed up!"

When he got up there, he gave an eloquent, composed and grateful speech, one that never for a moment seemed self-indulgent. Not only that, but he allowed equal time for Ross, a collaborator who -- let's be honest -- Reznor probably didn't need in order to give birth to the haunting brilliance of the Social Network score. I may never know the quantity of Ross' contributions to the project, but I'll always know that Reznor gave him equal credit for their masterpiece.

And if you haven't listened to the Social Network score in its entirety, you should go do that. Yeah, it probably speaks a little more to a Nine Inch Nails fan like me than it would to a regular person, but not a lot more. The compositions are both beautiful and catchy, rarely containing any of the fury of Nine Inch Nails, but displaying all the craftsmanship and musical experimentation in the best Nine Inch Nails work. And the thing I was most amazed about, upon first listen, is that I didn't miss the lyrics. As a good preview for his work on Social Network, Reznor made a massive four-disc Nine Inch Nails album called Ghosts a couple years back, which is entirely instrumental. I think the music is really good, but I've only listened to the whole thing all the way through once. I'm sure that has something to do with the imposing length of the album (over 40 tracks), but it's also that without lyrics, you can't really "attach" to the specific songs. I thought I needed those lyrics to keep me involved -- until I heard The Social Network.

In addition to his own original creations, I also love that he reimagined Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" for the Winklevoss crew sequence -- which was also used in the show last night.

As much as I am happy for Trent Reznor the artist, I'm happy for Trent Reznor the person. Sure, being an emotional mess contributed to some of his most brilliant work. But even if it's taken some of the "teeth" out of his music (NIN had an album called With Teeth), I'm really glad Trent has found happiness in his life. In 2009 he married former West Indian Girl singer Mariqueen Maandig, who was with him at the Kodak Theater last night, and they are now collaborating on a musical project called How to Destroy Angels, whose first EP is quite interesting (especially the song "A Drowning," which gives me chills). The future seems bright for a happy Trent -- in an extremely intelligent podcast interview about this soundtrack last year, he told us to expect new Nine Inch Nails material and new How to Destroy Angels material in 2011. Not only that, but I just read something I should have known already -- he'll also do the score for Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, due out later this year. Could Reznor be a perennial Oscar contender, like Zimmer and Desplat? Could he one day become the Randy Newman of nominees, without all the sarcasm and mean-spiritedness in his acceptance speech?

Who knows. For now, I just want to bask in having seen my favorite musician honored at my favorite awards show, by the people who make my favorite passion.

I wanted to hear "Hand Covers Bruise" all night last night, most notably when best picture was announced. But it turned out that I heard it at the most important time, for me personally, to hear it, and that is more than enough.

A couple other isolated thoughts on last night's show, which turned out somewhat decent after a disastrous start. If you've read these observations elsewhere, you can rest assured that I haven't -- I didn't read anything else about the Oscars before posting this:

1) The disastrous start wasn't right at the start. Right at the start was great, with the opening pre-recorded bit of hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway going into Alec Baldwin's dream. Spot on stuff. And it was a delight to see the ever-wonderful Baldwin.

2) The disasters started about the time Melissa Leo won her Oscar. That acceptance speech took years off my life. It was an absolute train wreck. What made it so terrible is that it was already going so terribly before Leo dropped her now-famous f-bomb. That section of the show felt like it took a half-hour, in part because the pacing ground to a halt once Kirk Douglas took the stage -- it was a nice idea and I was really charmed by what he was able to accomplish, but I must admit it made me impatient (which was sort of the point, as he did that bit where he made the nominees wait in agony for the winning name). So then when Leo began her choppy acceptance speech which committed just about every sin a speech can commit, it felt like the show couldn't regain its pacing for the next half-hour. Other seeming casualties of the temporary bad vibe was the awkward banter between Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, which just did not hit.

3) And speaking of Timberlake, his joke about being Banksy -- which I actually thought would get more laughs -- was the only Banksy appearance of the evening, that I'm aware of. A little disappointing. But perhaps I should read one of those articles I haven't read yet, which would tell me where else he may have made his presence known.

4) Is it just me, or did Hathaway seem to be doing a lot more actual hosting than Franco? It was like she was taking the hosting duties seriously, and he was standing there with an awkward grin on his face, like he was playing his stoner character in Pineapple Express. Even putting on the Marilyn Monroe dress did not really "work." Franco didn't embarrass himself or anything, he was just kind of ... "absent." At least Hathaway picked up the slack, though her song about Hugh Jackman was the most obvious thing that could have been lifted out of the show -- it was done well, but it was lacking in context and seemed pretty insiderish.

5) Give it up for the two youngest nominees, Hailee Steinfeld and Jennifer Lawrence, who were both ten times more adorable than I thought they would be from their films.

6) As a guy who frequently has bushy hair myself, I loved that "I should have gotten a haircut" guy.

7) Why haven't we heard more about Florence from Florence and the Machine before now? What a voice. Gwyneth Paltrow, on the other hand, looked constipated. I think the Tangled song should have won, and not just because I love Tangled so much. Zachary Levi and Mandy Moore reminded me that that song truly is special -- I would say easily the most strictly memorable of the four that were nominated. (Though I might have liked to see "Mother Knows Best," from the same movie, nominated as well.)

8) Christian Bale's acceptance speech was one of the highlights of the night for me. The tempestuous personality was all charm last night, and I loved his decision to thank people by first name only -- it was intimate and it felt special.

9) The auto-tune bit was one of my other highlights. It was such a good bit that I wanted to see it go on for five minutes longer. I love anything auto-tuned -- I think it's one of the great ways to use modern technology for high comedy.

10) I still love Billy Crystal. And the Bob Hope bit worked pretty well. How did they get "Bob Hope" to "announce" the next presenters?

11) Interesting choice to suppress the applause during the "In Memoriam" section. Without reading more about it, I don't know if that was done by shutting off the microphones in the audience during that section, or a sign that told people not to applaud. I agree that it must seem very sad for relatives/friends of the less famous dead people when no one applauds their person.

12) Sandra Bullock nailed it. Jeff Bridges was good, but Bullock nailed it. Class and humor, in one complete package. And then Colin Firth's acceptance speech was just what we've come to expect from him. Shouldn't he have been an Oscar winner already? Sure seems like it.

13) I loved the decision to do away with the periodic clips from the best picture nominees that run throughout the night. They did a good enough job incorporating that stuff into other pieces throughout the night, most notably what was probably the best highlight of the evening: The montage before best picture was announced, which was cut to Firth's speech in The King's Speech. That was expertly done and I had chills the whole time watching it. Even the words matched up perfectly to the images, such as when Firth says "enemies" and former best friends Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg from The Social Network give each other a steely look. Well played.

14) I loved Steven Spielberg's decision to put into context what it means to lose best picture -- that you now have something in common with Citizen Kane and Raging Bull. Great touch.

15) At first I was not sure about finishing the show with the elementary school kids singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," but I ultimately decided that it was nice not to have the hosts give just a few awkward words at the end before the credits roll. It was an attempt to have what my wife and I call a "Saturday Night Live clap clap" moment at the end -- you know, like at the very end of SNL, when everyone's out on stage and the music has this quality of reminiscing about the good times of the evening just passed. I'm not sure if it worked 100%, but it was better than the awkward alternative. (Also, loved that one kid who was totally over-emoting.)

I'm sure there's a lot more I could/should say, but I'm working without notes and going from memory only, so let's just cut it off here.

Besides, I have to go read all those Oscar stores I haven't read yet ...