‘Sugar’ Features TV On The Radio, Moby And Michael Brook Score

Yeah, it’s not the greatest shot in the world. We’ve got to work on our post show QA proximity and our flash. We just got out of a screening of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s “Sugar,” the highly anticipated follow-up to their film “Half Nelson” (which spawned a Ryan Gosling mancrush on us for months) that tracks the bittersweet dreams of Dominican baseball players trying to make it in the U.S.

In attendance were “Juno” director Jason Reitman (who we couldn’t corner) and members of Broken Social Scene (their music was used all over “Half Nelson”). The film was scored by Micheal Brook who scored Sean Penn’s “Into The Wild” (Broken must have been busy cause wasn’t that different from that kind of vibe. Songs included a lot of Spanish, Dominican Republican songs, a credits closer from Moby (a kinda obvious Play track, which we’re too tired to look up) and a montage baseball sequence to TV On The Radio. Can’t remember the song offhand, believe it’s on the last record (not the new one) and one of the characters actually asks the main protagonist, Miguel “Sugar” Santos, if he’s ever heard TVOTR and hands him his headphones which spawns the montage.

Fleck and Boden continue their exploration of characters on the margins, and more importantly, ethnic characters and stories, most stuffthatwhite people-like ’30-somethings are never, ever telling which makes their films always unique in approach at the very least. A review hopefully shortly, but let’s just say that Fleck and Boden have a masterful sense of shifting temporal space with sound, music and silence – the latter a moving technique some people should learn.