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2/24/03 - 8 Femmes (8 Women): (Krishna Levy) "One of the most
creative films to come out of any country in recent years, Fran?ois Ozon's
international hit 8 Femmes is a large-scale comedic parody of murder
mysteries and musical productions from yesteryear. It's the French story of
eight oddly matched women who get stuck in the mansion of a murdered man.
Through their outwitting of each other, they pursue the mystery and attempt
to stay out of each other's suspicions. The fact that the film is an utterly
ridiculous musical is what gives it its comedy and undeniable charm. Each of
the eight women performs her own song, which is no small event given that the
eight actresses are well known in France and aren't scene in such roles
everyday. The songs are all interpretations of famous songs from the 1960's
through 1980's (along the lines of what Baz Luhrmann did with Moulin
Rouge, but done with a playful tongue in cheek attitude). Likewise, the
orchestral score by Krishna Levy is a parody of sorts of the classic romance
and suspense scores of Miklós Rózsa and Bernard Herrmann
(respectively). The overall result is a delightful listen...." **** Read the entire
review.
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2/23/03 - Adaptation: (Carter Burwell) "The team of director,
screenwriter, and composer that brought you Being John Malkovich is
back for a creative encore. The story of Adaptation is one of
evolution, life, frustration, and the great unknown, and its primary
character is a sexually inadequate and mentally troubled screenwriter who is
having a nightmare of a time adapting a novel into a screenplay for a movie.
The audience is treated to this man's problems with a blunt slap across the
head, and Carter Burwell's score emulates that feeling perfectly. As Burwell
states, it is difficult to write a score about nothing in particular, and
more specifically, a film about not knowing if there is anything to know. He
went ahead and had to score the film as though he personally knew what both
the film and the meaning of life are all about, and the resulting collection
of inharmonic clangs and suffering mutilations of overlapping themes makes
for a ear-wrenching musical experience both in the film and alone on album.
Burwell's sense of humor about the project is perhaps the most intriguing
element of the entire project, for the music itself could easily drive a
person --or animal, for that matter-- insane...." * Read the entire
review.
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2/16/03 - Ararat: (Mychael Danna) "The collaboration between
Mychael Danna and director Atom Egoyan is well into its second decade, with
Danna continuing to produce a unique sound when compared to his contemporary
peers. The film Ararat is the tale of the persecution of the Armenian
people in 1915. It is a grim, but defiant showing which, necessarily, is
heavy on the religious history of the event. Danna therefore produces a score
rich with human emotion and simplisticity in its existence. Much of the music
for the film was recorded on location by Danna in Armenia. While the
orchestral portions, including the massive performances of theme in a
selection of tracks, were recorded in London, the choral voices and many
traditional instruments were performed by native musicians on location (with
a few instruments added in Canada at a later date as well). The daunting task
for the recording of Ararat, therefore, was the piecing together of
all these elements into the impressive finished product as heard in the film
and on album...." **** Read the entire
review.
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2/14/03 - Narc: (Cliff Martinez) "The career of Cliff Martinez
has begun to grow a consistent following with listeners around the world. His
ambient electronic score for Traffic was well recognized for its role
in the film and his more orchestrally inclined work for Solaris is a
popular item on album despite the film's short-lived fame. For Narc,
Martinez returns to the Traffic end of that scale, abandoning the
orchestra and delving once again into the drifting, sparse realm of his
solitary electronics. At its most powerful, the music for Narc offers
drum loops and electronically altered guitar sounds that, at least
momentarily, break the monotony of the mass of Martinez's underscore. The
majority of its forty-minute playing time, however, is occupied by subtle and
sometimes nearly indistinguishable background chords of his keyboards. It is
not atypical for a Martinez score of this nature to feature less than ten
notes in any two-minute period of time...." * Read the entire
review.
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2/11/03 - The nominees for the 75th Annual Academy Awards for
"Best Original Score" include many names you will recognize: Elmer Bernstein
for Far from
Heaven, Philip Glass for
The
Hours, Elliot Goldenthal for Frida, Thomas
Newman for Road to
Perdition, and John Williams for Catch Me If You
Can. This is the 14th Oscar nomination for Elmer Bernstein, who is
the industry's favorite to take home the statue. He will face realistic
competition from only Goldenthal and Glass for the award, likely determined
by the result of the "Best Picture" category. The only considerable omission
this year is a weighty one; Howard Shore's The Lord of the
Rings: The Two Towers has been considered by most film music critics
to be among the three best scores of the year, and its absense from the
nominees makes the entire list problematic. The nominees for "Best Song" are
better rounded, with a thankful and predictable absense of Madonna's Die Another
Day the only headline to be found there. View all the nominees
and talk about them at the Filmtracks
ScoreBoard.
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2/7/03 - The Swarm: (Jerry Goldsmith) "The film The
Swarm ushered in the end
of director and producer Irwin Allen's fantastic voyage through the ranks of
Hollywood's disaster
film renaissance in the 1970's. Unlike the previous hits of The Poseidon
Adventure and
The Towering Inferno, audiences and critics gave a resounding sigh of
impatience with the
genre by the time The Swarm hit theatres in 1978 (despite a similarly
loaded cast of
actors). Plots were getting more bizarre and the special effects weren't
holding up in the Star
Wars/Close Encounters generation. Allen's career would fizzle from
that point on, but
the composer of music for The Swarm was red hot at the time and would
only get better.
Jerry Goldsmith was already a composer considered at his height in the late
1970's, fresh off of
his Academy Award win for The Omen. He took over a genre that had been
marked with
memorable scores by John Williams, including The Towering Inferno,
which is still
considered by the majority of critics today to be the best disaster score of
the 1970's. Goldsmith
rose to the challenge in scoring The Swarm and produced what was one
of the few bright
spots for the entire production...." **** Read the entire
review.
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2/6/03 - Filmtracks has nearly finished its new structure and
design for all album reviews at the site. These changes are the result of
years of feedback from Filmtracks visitors (you guys!) regarding readability,
length, and quantity of reviews. On average, new reviews will be shorter and
will include a new feature called "Filmtracks Recommends," which will be a
quick pro and con summary of the review. By reducing the size of each new
review by a few hundred words, we can feature more reviews for more titles.
Ten new reviews from January have been held up for the accompanying redesign
of those reviews, but that redesign target date has been pushed back to
February 14th. So, to keep you up to date on new albums, those ten reviews
will be published in the current (1999-2002) review format while we tidy up
the redesign. When the redesign is finished, each review will have a "print
version" for those of you who have, over the years, asked for an easily
printable format for Filmtracks content. Comment areas will be condensed and
moved to the bottom of their pages so that loading time for the main review
content is improved. Thanks once again to everyone who has contributed to
this ongoing PHP project... It's been four years since the last overhaul of
Filmtracks' review format, so it's about time!
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