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1/31/06 - The Academy Award nominations for 2005 have been
announced, and the list contains one notable surprise. Nominated for 'Best
Score' are Gustavo Santaolalla for Brokeback
Mountain, Alberto Iglesias for The Constant Gardner, Dario
Marianelli for Pride &
Prejudice, and John Williams for both Memoirs of a
Geisha and Munich.
These nominations are the first for Santaolalla, Iglesias, and Marianelli.
The two nominations for Williams make a total of 45 for the maestro (with five
wins), and the 11th straight awards in which he has been nominated during years
he has composed at least one score. With Williams' votes likely to cancel each
other out, look for the winner to be either Santaolalla or Marianelli. Absent
from this year's nominations, unsurprisingly, are any presence of the dominant
scores from the action, adventure, and fantasy genres. Tell us what you think
of the nominations at the Filmtracks
ScoreBoard.
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1/23/06 - The January/February, 2006 Cue Clue Contest is now under way!
Filmtracks and Family Recordings are proud to offer five winners a copy of the new compilation
Craig Armstrong: Film
Works 1995-2005, each personally autographed by the composer himself. Three clips for
this contest have been chosen for you to identify, and you only need to identify at least one
of the three clips correctly in order to be entered. You can double or triple your chances of
winning by identifying multiple clips. If you haven't already done so, visit the Filmtracks Cool Stuff page and enjoy the three mystery
clips. Good luck!
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1/21/06 - Craig Armstrong: Film Works 1995-2005: (Compilation) --All New
Review-- "One of the lesser known but consistently intriguing
talents in modern film music is Craig Armstrong, a Glasgow, Scotland native who has made a
career of bridging the gap between the pop and classical genres of music. Trained at the Royal
Academy of Music, Armstrong's early career has been balanced between classical commissions and
collaborations with the Northern Sinfonietta, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the Royal
Scottish National Orchestra on one hand, and arrangements and production work done for popular
artists ranging from Massive Attack to Madonna and U2 on the other. While several composers
have attempted this balancing act in the 1990's and 2000's, Armstrong's
works have featured both a sense for simple melodic beauty and a little bit of luck. Film
score collectors --those with hundreds, if not thousands of scores on their CD shelves-- first
took notice of Armstrong with 1999's stark, realistic, but enchanting The Bone
Collector..." **** Read the entire
review.
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1/17/06 - Stay: (Asche and Spencer) --All New Review-- "To understand
anything about this film and its score, you really have to study the underlying style of
editing that the film uses to transition from scene to scene.
On the surface, Stay is about a psychologist whose suicidal client makes bizarre
predictions that start coming true and pose ominous possibilities for everyone involved. It's
a reality-bending psychological thriller, and Marc Forster departs from his techniques in
Finding Neverland to use a scene-changing style in Stay that not only is
interesting to watch, but also makes statements about the film on secondary levels of plot
analysis. The strategy of carrying one element of a current scene into the next, transitioning
with common shapes and colors in each edit, is something that one might think would provide
intriguing opportunities for the music in that film. Either the composer could use an
instrumental technique to represent each creative change in scene, or the changes in setting
or camera view could be completely ignored...." * Read the entire review.
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1/11/06 - The Skeleton Key: (Edward Shearmur) --All New Review-- "A stock
thriller released in the height of summer, The Skeleton Key takes the notion of the
haunted house and places it in the Louisiana delta region outside of New Orleans. One of the
ironies of the film is that it seems to rain all the time in this place, and wouldn't you
know... a "hurricane of the century" would hit the real life location a few weeks after the
release of the film. The rain, unfortunately, is the only realistic leap of logic in this
rather trashy film. It's amazing how such established groups of actors can end up in a rehash
such as The Skeleton Key, with stereotypical horror twists and camera techniques that
no longer cause the majority of the audience to even squirm slightly in its seats. Kate
Hudson's primary character is given a skeleton (master) key to a mansion where she is the
live-in nurse, and there is inevitably a room in the attic with a rattling door and all sorts
of nasties within. Heck, there's even a gas station in this little town setting that looks
perfect for Deliverance...." ** Read the entire review.
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1/7/06 - The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants: (Cliff
Eidelman) --All New Review-- "Based on the stories of four girls in a novel by Ann
Brashares, director Ken Kwapis' The Sisterhood of the Traveling
Pants tells of the young lives of four high school seniors who have grown up together
since birth, and share a common bond with a pair of used pants that miraculously (given their
different shapes and sizes) fits them all. As they head off to lives of their own, they each
wear the pants for a week before shipping the pair on to the next girl on the list. Various
other rules involving the pants make The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants a story with
innocent and decent morals. Kwapis is no stranger to this genre of film, nor is his usual
collaborator, composer Cliff Eidelman. Together for The Beautician and the Beast and
Sexual Life, Eidelman's music has ranged from the fully orchestral in the former to a
tightly knit chamber piece for the latter. Eidelman's career has been one of significant
frustration for collectors of film music..." *** Read the entire review.
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1/4/06 - The Island: (Steve Jablonsky) --All New Review-- "As the
progression of director Michael Bay's films has declined in quality and
enjoyability, so have the scores that accompany them. The problem with
Bay is that his breathless action films are no longer snappy in their
humor, nor enticing in their edits. The man has simply lost his touch.
Sadly, this decline in filmmaking standards by Bay (though some would
argue there wasn't much there to begin with) is a problem compounded in
2005's The Island by the fact that several masterful films about
the subject have come before, including Logan's Run and THX
1138. The concept this time around is that future humanity has been
restricted to bubbles in which there is little education and less
individuality, and people are occasionally selected as winners of a
lottery to go off to a gorgeous island where they are unsuspectingly
harvested (reminds of that short story "The Lottery" where the winner in
the small town is ritually stoned to death)...." * Read the
entire review.
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