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| 2/21/11
- | Space Battleship Yamato: (Naoki Sato)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
if you're not familiar with the legacy of the music for this concept or if you desire an
intelligent adaptation of its themes into a monumental revision that resembles the style of
Western fantasy blockbusters more than ever before.
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Avoid it... |
if you are a purist who staunchly defends the pop and vocal elements in Hiroshi Miyagawa's
legendary music of the past and reject any melodramatic Westernization of that sound despite
faithful thematic usage and an incredible recording mix.
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| Rating: | *****
Read the entire review
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| 2/18/11
- | The Next Three Days: (Danny Elfman)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
if you seek a lightly rhythmic suspense score with a surprisingly tender personality
maintained by soft instrumental tones led by piano and strings.
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Avoid it... |
if you expect truly engaging suspense material to emerge from what is ultimately a
conservatively somber exercise in ambience broken at the climax by one strikingly beautiful
cue of vocal and percussive redemption.
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| Rating: | ***
Read the entire review
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| 2/15/11
- | Poltergeist: (Jerry Goldsmith)
- Updated Review, With Additional Album |
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Buy it... |
if you appreciate engaging and intelligent horror scores that slowly and brilliantly transform
attractive harmony into frightfully atonal terror.
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Avoid it... |
if the famous "Carol Anne's Theme" is too sweet for your palette and the secondary religious
motifs in the score are too infrequently utilized to salvage the entirety for your non-horror
preferences.
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| Rating: | ****
Read the entire review
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| 2/12/11
- | The Tourist: (James Newton Howard/Gabriel Yared)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
only if you want to hear James Newton Howard channel the affable, comedic European
sensibilities of composers like Gabriel Yared, an irony hopefully not ultimately missed by the
filmmakers.
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Avoid it... |
if you expect this spy thriller to sound anything like Howard's Salt or its equivalents,
because The Tourist is instead an exercise in dainty romance and spoof-quality chase material.
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| Rating: | ***
Read the entire review
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| 2/9/11
- | The Ghost Writer: (Alexandre Desplat)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
if you are entranced by the intelligent and uniquely applied style of Alexandre Desplat at his
most rhythmically frantic and disjointedly paranoid reaches.
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Avoid it... |
if perpetually unnerving staccato movements of quiet disharmony and a bizarre, awkwardly
exotic primary theme promise to stick you with a thousand needles for the entire duration of
this dispiriting album.
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| Rating: | ***
Read the entire review
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| 2/7/11
- | The Mist: (Mark Isham)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
if you seek an adaptation of the Lisa Gerrard performance of the Dead Can Dance song "The Host
of Seraphim" that dominates the soundtrack on screen and on album with its seven minutes of
downbeat, spiritual beauty.
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Avoid it... |
if you expect absolutely anything remotely listenable to come from Mark Isham's synthetic
original music for this film, because it functions as unnerving sound effects to maintain a
horrific ambience of dread for a small portion of the film.
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| Rating: | **
Read the entire review
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| 2/4/11
- | 10,000 BC: (Harald Kloser/Thomas Wanker)
- All New Review |
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Buy it... |
if you appreciate raucous ear candy for what it is, with bold orchestral melodies and brutal
percussive and vocal rhythms pushing all the right "guilty pleasure" buttons.
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Avoid it... |
if you cannot tolerate hearing Hans Zimmer's King Arthur rearranged into an African adventure
score, for 10,000 BC is among the more controversial subjects of plagiarism discussion to
exist in the film score community.
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| Rating: | ***
Read the entire review
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