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| 12/31/11
- | Mimic: (Marco Beltrami)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
on the rare 2011 expanded album if you seek excellent treatment (including improved sound
quality) of one of Marco Beltrami's most accessible horror efforts.
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Avoid it... |
if even ten minutes of the composer's more alluring lyricism in this genre cannot sustain your
interest beyond the somewhat standard but well executed stingers, dissonant challenges, and
varied percussive usage in this dynamically organic recording.
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| Rating: | ****
Read the entire review
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| 12/30/11
- | Drive: (Cliff Martinez)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
if you have a proven track record of success with the sound design that Cliff Martinez
provides for films, for his output for Drive, aside from a few more pleasantly tonal passages,
is extremely typical to his limited range.
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Avoid it... |
if you have difficulty forming emotional connections with anonymously droning, ambient,
electronic scores meant to intentionally emphasize vague ethos and distorted realities.
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| Rating: | **
Read the entire review
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| 12/29/11
- | The Iron Lady: (Thomas Newman)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
if you can accept a collection of somewhat unrelated but at least characteristic
representations of Thomas Newman's early 1990's mannerisms in a clinically uninvolved package.
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Avoid it... |
if you demand warmth and lyricism where little was possible, Newman's approach viable and
occasionally stirring but failing to engage you emotionally in a meaningful, cohesive
narrative.
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| Rating: | ***
Read the entire review
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| 12/28/11
- | Something Wicked This Way Comes: (Georges
Delerue/James Horner)
- Updated Review, With Additional Album |
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Buy it... |
on Intrada Records' 2009 release of James Horner's competent replacement score if you desire
the adequately whimsical, often unconventional choral and symphonic blend heard in the film.
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Avoid it... |
on that album if you seek the better primary theme for the boys in the film, in which case
Georges Delerue's rejected score will more effectively appeal to your romantic sensibilities
(though only the composer's 1989 re-recording of 12 minutes from this work is recommended).
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| Rating: | VARIED
Read the entire review
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| 12/27/11
- | Regarding Henry: (Georges Delerue/Hans Zimmer)
- Updated Review, With Additional Album |
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Buy it... |
if you never tire of dozing off to Georges Delerue's restrained but beautiful orchestral
lyricism or Hans Zimmer's predictably innocuous, harmoniously consistent light jazz and drama
style of the early 1990's.
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Avoid it... |
on the Zimmer album if the composer's intriguingly unique application of vocals, erhu-like
violin, muted trumpet, and acoustic double bass may threaten the otherwise conservatively
smooth atmosphere of its synthetic, contemporary tone for you.
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| Rating: | ****
Read the entire review
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| 12/25/11
- | Scrooged: (Danny Elfman)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
if you seek the origination point for many of the holiday and suspense techniques explored
with far greater notoriety by Danny Elfman in Batman Returns and The Nightmare Before
Christmas.
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Avoid it... |
if you have long awaited an official release of this very short score and expect to hear more
original music that compares favorably to the five minutes of outstanding, previously released
highlights for full orchestra and choir.
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| Rating: | ***
Read the entire review
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| 12/23/11
- | Die Hard: (Michael Kamen)
- Updated Review, With Additional Album |
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Buy it... |
only if you are a diehard fan of the movie and seek one of its collectible albums in order to
hear the music that Michael Kamen originally intended for the film before the recording was
butchered in the final editing process.
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Avoid it... |
if you expect the few moments of memorable, original material you recall from this soundtrack
in context to compensate for an otherwise mundane composition and extremely unsatisfying sound
quality.
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| Rating: | ***
Read the entire review
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| 12/22/11
- | The Adventures of Conan: A Sword and Sorcery
Spectacular: (Basil Poledouris)
- Updated Review, With Additional Album |
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Buy it... |
if you have an affinity for Basil Poledouris' music for Conan the Barbarian and its sequel,
for this live-action spin-off show allowed the composer to produce a refreshing and viable
extension of the same general sound.
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Avoid it... |
in its original form if you have no interest in the entertainingly booming dialogue track and
seek far superior sound quality, in which case the 2011 re-recording is a fantastic
alternative.
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| Rating: | ****
Read the entire review
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| 12/21/11
- | Conan the Destroyer: (Basil Poledouris)
- Updated Review, With Additional Album |
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Buy it... |
if you're extremely devoted to Basil Poledouris' music for Conan the Barbarian and are willing
to overlook poor performance execution and recording quality on the original album for an
expansion of the same sound.
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Avoid it... |
in its original form and instead seek the 2011 re-recording of the complete score if you hold
Conan the Barbarian with such high regard that you can't tolerate hearing inadequate players
mangle parts of its lesser sequel.
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| Rating: | ***
Read the entire review
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| 12/20/11
- | King Arthur: (Hans Zimmer/Various)
- Expanded Review |
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Buy it... |
if your elevated testosterone levels demand hearing the new age vocal elements of Gladiator
and the masculine force of Crimson Tide elevated to their most bloated, melodramatic heights.
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Avoid it... |
if you are instead waiting for Hans Zimmer to write a complex and original large-scale action
score to transcend his familiar chord progressions and extremely basic structures that blow
you over with symphonic and synthetic force.
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| Rating: | ****
Read the entire review
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| 12/18/11
- | Trading Places: (Elmer Bernstein)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
only if you are an extreme enthusiast of both this film and Elmer Bernstein's quality comedy output of the early 1980's.
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Avoid it... |
if you expect the mostly adapted music to play well outside of context, for the soundtrack on album serves only to make a person wish to
view the film again.
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| Rating: | ***
Read the entire review
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| 12/17/11
- | The Great Train Robbery: (Jerry Goldsmith)
- Updated Review, With Additional Album |
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Buy it... |
if you appreciate Jerry Goldsmith music at its most exuberant and boisterously enthusiastic,
in this case comedic due to its airy atmosphere and light waltz rhythms.
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Avoid it... |
if you find Goldsmith's breezy, overly-positive comedy music to be remotely trite, because The
Great Train Robbery reminds significantly of the composer's campy fluff from the 1960's.
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| Rating: | ***
Read the entire review
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| 12/15/11
- | The Artist: (Ludovic Bource)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
if you remain loyal to the emotionally extroverted and optimistically romantic tone of early
Golden Age film music, a genre resurrected with impressive attention to detail for this silent
film.
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Avoid it... |
if there is too fine a line between tribute and parody for a score like this to succeed for
ears that are too accustomed to the subtlety and weight of more recent orchestral techniques
for film scores.
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| Rating: | ****
Read the entire review
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| 12/14/11
- | Kingdom of Heaven: (Harry Gregson-Williams)
- Expanded Review |
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Buy it... |
if you desire an intelligent and respectfully restrained powerhouse of a musical
representation of religious history, complete with pensive choral techniques of immense
beauty.
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Avoid it... |
if you prefer your Ridley Scott historical epics to feature music with heavy electronic
embellishments and obvious, overwrought melodic expressions akin to Hans Zimmer's Gladiator.
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| Rating: | ****
Read the entire review
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| 12/13/11
- | Batman Begins: (Hans Zimmer/James Newton Howard)
- Expanded Review |
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Buy it... |
if you have endless excuses for the viability of Hans Zimmer's simplistic ostinato approach
that caused similar brooding atmosphere and masculine propulsion to become the norm for
blockbuster scores after their perceived success in this entry.
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Avoid it... |
if you expect a truly Gothic sound for Gotham, a complex variation of melody for Wayne's
duality, or any of the heroic stature of Danny Elfman's original classic, all elements
unnecessarily avoided by Zimmer for his own convenience.
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| Rating: | **
Read the entire review
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| 12/12/11
- | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: (John
Williams)
- Expanded Review |
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Buy it... |
if you, like most film music collectors, marvel at the ingenuity with which John Williams
explores each of his mind-bogglingly complex ideas for individual concepts within his fantasy
scores.
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Avoid it... |
if you are a strong believer in issues relating to the thematic continuity of any franchise,
for the maestro largely tackled this score as though it were a series of self-contained
vignettes with surprisingly little regard for his previous identities.
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| Rating: | ****
Read the entire review
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| 12/11/11
- | The Phantom of the Opera: (Andrew Lloyd Webber)
- Expanded Review |
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Buy it... |
on the "special edition" album only to appreciate a few minutes of interesting new score
material by Andrew Lloyd Webber for this otherwise butchered adaptation.
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Avoid it... |
if you have any love whatsoever for the original, famed 1986 cast recording and don't wish to
hear this magnificent composition inexplicably and excruciatingly crucified by questionable
alterations and absolutely hideous vocals.
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| Rating: | *
Read the entire review
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| 12/10/11
- | The Village: (James Newton Howard)
- Expanded Review |
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Buy it... |
if you succumb to the intoxicating effect of elegant solo violin performances in flowing
rhythmic and enchantingly melodic duties, aided here by similarly whimsical piano and woodwind
beauty to create authentic period character and subtle suspense.
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Avoid it... |
if the score's fifteen minutes of undeniably lovely passages cannot sustain a listening
experience interrupted by several horror cues of terrifying orchestral blasts on an album with
poor mastering of volume levels.
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| Rating: | ****
Read the entire review
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| 12/8/11
- | Moneyball: (Mychael Danna)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
only if you seek the source songs heard in the film and its trailers, because Mychael Danna's
original score tepidly concentrates on the cold statistical suspense of the concept in
disappointingly minimal fashion.
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Avoid it... |
if you expect to hear Danna deliver any emotional warmth or inspirational whimsy to address
the family or baseball elements in the plot, a strange underperformance for an otherwise
typical character story from within the sports genre.
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| Rating: | **
Read the entire review
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| 12/6/11
- | Humanoids from the Deep: (James Horner)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
on the 2001 album pairing this score with Battle Beyond the Stars, for its sparse, mundane,
and derivative suspense really doesn't merit its own album.
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Avoid it... |
if you have no need to hear James Horner shamelessly emulate Jerry Goldsmith in yet another of
his early scores for B-rate films, though the similarities here are not quite as obnoxious.
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| Rating: | **
Read the entire review
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| 12/5/11
- | Battle Beyond the Stars: (James Horner)
- Updated Review, With Additional Album |
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Buy it... |
if you want to know where it all essentially started for James Horner, not to mention the fact
that Battle Beyond the Stars is an impressively engaging score by any standard.
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Avoid it... |
if enduring the inspiration for Horner's eventual self-regurgitation is as disturbing to you
as hearing the composer blatantly pull material from Jerry Goldsmith's Star Trek: The Motion
Picture for this score.
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| Rating: | ****
Read the entire review
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| 12/2/11
- | A Dangerous Method: (Howard Shore/Richard Wagner)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
if you accept the necessity of Howard Shore's adaptation of Richard Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll"
into a position that dominates his stark and gloomy original material for the score.
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Avoid it... |
if you have never cared for that portion of the Wagner opera and desire more than just a few
minutes of Shore's own, ominously powerful main theme for the hysteria of the main female
character.
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| Rating: | ***
Read the entire review
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| 12/1/11
- | Gorky Park: (James Horner)
- Updated Review, With Additional Album |
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Buy it... |
if you groove to James Horner's style of drums, guitar, and synthetic rhythms in Commando and
could tolerate an earlier, more dissonant and brutally raw variation on that distinctive
sound.
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Avoid it... |
if extended performances of the alluring orchestral love theme in this work are your primary
target, for they occupy only a quarter of the score's running time.
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| Rating: | ***
Read the entire review
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