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10/28/01 - Joy Ride: (Marco Beltrami) "Just in time for
Halloween, a horror flick is released about a teenage summer vacation
excursion gone awry. Is it just me, or is there something wrong with the
timing there? Either the production of the film was delayed (by the will
of Allah and Osama bin Laden?) or someone working one night in the studio
realized --all of a sudden-- that Joy Ride was going to be a
terrible film and figured that nobody would notice or care about the
apparent error. Likely, it was the latter. I used to wonder why films like
this get made. As I child, I thought that bad films like this were
produced only so that bad music could accompany it. In the case of Joy
Ride, that may very well have been the case. The cliche tale involves
a college freshman, his dorky brother, and his dorky girlfriend, who
decide to harass a trucker known only by his CB handle. As fate would have
it, of course, the trucker gets mad, and decides to break a couple of
minor traffic safety laws while gaining his crazed revenge. What great
joy!..." * Read the entire
review.
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10/21/01 - Mythodea: Music for the NASA Odyssey
Mission: (Vangelis) "It's not everyday that a NASA space mission gets
its own new age opera, but here we are. NASA launched the spacecraft
Odyssey last April so that it could survey the surface of Mars. With the
orbital craft now finishing its approach to Mars, it's likely to begin
making news (that is, unless it blows up or experiences other typical
malfunctions which plague the NASA Mars program). Mapping the chemical
surface of the red planet, the Odyssey will try to determine where there
has been (and could still be) water on the hostile world. With an enormous
amount of American resources tied into the program, the Odyssey will pave
the way for more planetary roving devices to be landed on Mars by the
Americans in 2004. The publicity machine for NASA has been putting an
adventurous spin on the mission and pushing the "we won't know what we'll
find" idea to help sell it to the people of the world. One part of the
publicity campaign is the space opera contracted for and arranged by new
age artist Vangelis specifically for this mission...." *** Read the entire
review.
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10/16/01 - The October, 2001, Theme of the Month is a
birthday bash! This site has staggered through the last six years in a
sort of digital drunken stupor, and with this five-year (or six, depending
on how much stock you put in domain names) anniversary, I've taken a step
aside to provide those few curious among you with a glimpse of Filmtracks
in years past. I've collected a bunch of dusty old Filmtracks memories,
including 20+ copies of ancient Filmtracks home pages, for this month's
"Theme" and thrown in some silly commentary about it all. This includes,
by popular request (and the shame of the webmaster), the embarassing
layouts during the trailblazing 1995-1996 year. So come on in and check
out the real story behind the one quote on Filmtracks' home page from the
very beginning... Be warned, however; this
is a seriously graphic-intensive retrospective.
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10/14/01 - Bubble Boy: (John Ottman) "Brought back into the
mainstream vocabulary of the world by a classic episode of the TV show
Seinfeld, the concept of the "bubble boy" has been a source of much
amusement for the politically incorrect populus. The film Bubble
Boy, comically portraying the teenage (coming of age) years of such a
bubble person, was an immediate critical disaster, making one wonder once
again why films like this are even attempted. The most publicity for the
project came, ironically, when the film was boycotted and blacklisted by
the "bubble people" of America (I'm sure there's a politically correct
euphemism for their unfortunate kind, but it escapes me at the moment). By
speaking out against the film's obviously poor portrayal of teenage life
for a bubble boy, they caused the film to actually gain more attention
than it probably should have... thus, defeating the point of the
boycott. Anyways, the score for the project was a task for John Ottman,
who had to share the film's soundtrack with numerous songs. Some of
Ottman's rough demo/synth renderings for certain scenes would be replaced
by songs as well...." *** Read the entire
review.
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10/13/01 - Octopussy: (John Barry) --All new review--
"In the late 1970's and early-1980's, John Barry's affiliation with the
James Bond series hit its second roadblock. Due to his short move to the
Los Angeles in 1975 and his subsequent move back to London in the 1983, he
missed the opportunity to score For Your Eyes Only, for which Bill
Conti wrote a disappointing score with only a few fugelhorn solos to
impress (some even consider Conti's score to be a disaster in the
series). Barry, out of loyalty to the original Bond franchise, turned down
the hack job that was known as Never Say Never Again in 1983, but
jumped at the chance to score the legitimate Octopussy in the same
year, uniting his music once again with Roger Moore. The Octopussy
score had always been elusive on CD for a number of years, until Rykodisc
began releasing the 80's Bond scores in the late 1990's. Its original
release was in 1985 on the A&M label and was one of the very first scores
released on CD. In 1995, it was released on the "Music Collectors
Anonymous" label with Conti's for Your Eyes Only...." **** Read the entire
review.
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10/6/01 - Original Sin: (Terence Blanchard) "When a film
fails as miserably as Original Sin, both critically and popularly,
it makes the score for that film all the more difficult to evaluate. By
the time that reknown jazz artist and composer Terence Blanchard was
brought in to score the film, the project was already a bust. Unless your
existence revolves around the unfathomable need to see two hours of
Angelina Jolie's naked bosom-heaving and open-mouth sucking, there is
absolutely no redeeming aspect to Original Sin. The film received
one of the worst combined critical responses in the last decade, with
reviewers going so far as to cheer when the deliriously awful film finally
ended. Handling such a situation as a composer, especially a failure of a
film which involves countless slow-motion close-up scenes of badly
photographed fornication, often leads a lack of inspiration for that
composer. For Blanchard, he had to look beyond the ridiculously illogical,
though surprisingly predictable, plot and concentrate on two things: the
period of the story, which was circa 1890, and the location, which was the
exotic and lush Cuba...." ** Read the entire
review.
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10/1/01 - Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: (James L. Venable)
"This, the supposedly final film of Kevin Smith's acclaimed New Jersey
chronicles (a series of cult driven urban films which include
Clerks, Mall Rats, and Chasing Amy), is a spin-off of
the series, with the popular characters of Jay and Silent Bob deciding to
get even with the world. Upon learning that a "Bluntman and Chronic" film
is going to be made about them, but without providing them with any
royalties, they set out on a journey across the country to Hollywood,
where they are determined to destroy the film. The clumsy and often
drugged pair live out all the fantasies along their way, including
appearances by God, Star Wars idols, and countless beautiful women
who all look like casting rejects from Charlie's Angels. Then, of
course, there's the orangutan, but we won't go into that. With previous
collaborations with Kevin Smith, the relatively unknown composer James L.
Venable (who has spent most of his time writing for television) is called
upon to write a farce...." ** Read the entire
review.
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