FILM SCORE FRIDAY 3/28/03

In an Oscar night full of surprises, two of the biggest surprises were the music awards:

ACHIEVEMENT IN MUSIC WRITTEN FOR MOTION PICTURES (ORIGINAL SCORE)

FRIDA - Elliot Goldenthal

ACHIEVEMENT IN MUSIC WRITTEN FOR MOTION PICTURES (ORIGINAL SONG)

"LOSE YOURSELF" - 8 Mile - Music by Eminem, Jeff Bass, Luis Resto, Lyrics by Eminem

I will have much more to report about the Oscar telecast in a column next week. After that, with any luck, I'll shut up about Oscar for a while, to the grateful appreciation of our website readers.

Dr. Phibes Rises Again - John Gale - Perseverance
Film Music of Richard Addinsell - Richard Addinsell - Chandos
The Hellraiser Chronicles - Christopher Young, Randy Miller -Silva
The Man Who Haunted Himself/92 in the Shade - Michael J. Lewis - composer promo
Thunderbirds - Barry Gray - Silva

Assassination Tango - Luis Bacalov - Soundtrack CD with 5 Bacalov cues due April 1 from RCA
Basic - Klaus Badelt
The Core - Christopher Young
Head of State - Marcus Miller, David "DJ Quick" Blake

April 1
Dreamcatcher - James Newton Howard - Varese Sarabande
The Guys - Mychael Danna - Sony Classical
April 15
Identity - Alan Silvestri - Varese Sarabande
April 22
Varese Sarabande 25th Anniversary Collection - Varese Sarabande
Date Unknown
Amerika - Basil Poledouris - Prometheus
The Big Sky - Dimitri Tiomkin - Screen Archives/BYU
Captain From Castile - Alfred Newman - Screen Archives
The Dreamer of Oz - Lee Holdridge - Percepto
Fear No Evil - Frank LaLoggia - Percepto
From Beyond - Richard Band - La-La Land
Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Denny Zeitlin - Perseverance
Mighty Joe Young, etc. - Roy Webb, et al - Monstrous Movie Music
Monte Walsh/The Crossfire Trail - Eric Colvin - La-La Land
Roughing It - Bruce Broughton - Intrada Special Collection
A Summer Place - Max Steiner - Screen Archives/BYU
This Island Earth, etc. - Herman Stein, et al - Monstrous Movie Music

March 29 - Richard Rodney Bennett born (1936)
March 29 - Franz Waxman wins first Oscar for Sunset Boulevard score (1951)
March 29 - John Williams wins second Oscar for Jaws score (1976)
March 29 - Jerry Goldsmith wins only Oscar (so far) for The Omen score (1977)
March 29 - John Williams wins third Oscar for Star Wars score (1978)
March 29 - Vangelis wins his only Oscar for Chariots of Fire score (1982)
March 29 - Dave Grusin wins his only Oscar for The Milagro Beanfield War score (1989)
March 30 - Luis Bacalov born (1933)
March 30 - Eric Clapton born (1945)
March 30 - Dimitri Tiomkin wins Oscar for High and the Mighty score (1955)
March 30 - Ennio Morricone, inexplicably, doesn't win the Best Score Oscar for The Mission; Herbie Hancock wins Oscar for Round Midnight score (1987)
March 30 - Alan Menken wins Oscars for Beauty and the Beast score and title song (1992)
March 31 - Michael Gore wins Oscar for Fame score and title song (1981)
April 2 - Marvin Hamlisch wins all three music Oscars, for The Sting and The Way We Were (1974)

DREAMCATCHER - James Newton Howard

"James Newton Howard's creepy chiller score establishes a teasing, ominous mood."

David Rooney, Variety

SPUN - Billy Corgan

"Not until Ross inhales his first bumper does Billy Corgan's melancholic soundtrack kick in and the opening credits roll."

Paul Malcolm, L.A. Weekly

"The film's main offense lies not in its fetid fetishes, however, but in asking us to sympathize with oleaginous schmo Ross (Jason Schwartzman), who pines for his ex while another lass is tied to his bed and Billy Corgan's acoustic warblings commiserate on the soundtrack."

Jessica Winter, Village Voice

In Part Four of the This Year's Movies series, I reported that Willard's writer-director Glen Morgan also directed Final Destination and The One. In fact, Willard is Morgan's first feature as a director, and the other two films were directed by Morgan's writing partner, James Wong. For more on Willard, see the review below.

THE WEDDING PARTY, the remake of The In-Laws being scored by Lalo Schifrin, has undergone a title change to, fittingly enough, The In-Laws.

Michael Kamen will be writing the scores to AGAINST THE ROPES and EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING. Cliff Eidelman is scoring THE LIZZY MCGUIRE MOVIE.

FROM: Kathleen Evans <kathleenevans522@yahoo.com>

SUBJECT: Master and Commander
 
Just saw your note on the soundtrack for Master and Commander. Christopher Gordon is one of three working on the soundtrack. The other two participants are Richard Tognetti (who taught Russell Crowe how to play the violin and works with the Australian Chamber Orchestra) and Iva Davies, who is the lead composer for the soundtrack. Iva Davies is the leader of the Australian rock band, Icehouse. [Davies also wrote the score to Russell Mulcahy's first feature, Razorback]

Your piece on Walter Scharf contained a couple of errors: The Tree Still Stands (not "The Tree Stands Still") was not strictly a symphony but rather a "Symphonic Portrait on the Stages of Hebraic Man" with lyrics by Arthur Hamilton. Further, Scharf is also survived by a son, Allen and a sister, Deenah. It's a pity your tribute did not mention Scharf's best two recordings : "Wilderness Trail" (on the National Geographic label) and "Legend of the Living Sea" (Ocean Records), both eminently worthy of CD release, however unlikely.

FROM: Ben Tunningley <binijangle@yahoo.com>

SUBJECT: jerry goldsmith in concert
 
Just a quick note to let you know that we've had two great concerts given by Jerry Goldsmith and the LSO at London's Barbican. Apart from some of the usual staples (medleys of TV and film themes to name but two) they treated us to suites from The Last Castle, Patton, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and First Knight. Both conductor and orchestra were on cracking form as usual - odd to see the pony tail gone though!.

And someone asked a question during the concert: "Apart from you and John Williams, who are the most consistently good composers working today?"

Answer: [a shrug of the shoulders] "Well, that's it."

By the way, did anyone write about Howard Shore's performance with the LSO of an hour's worth of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in London a few weeks ago? Great stuff.

FROM: "Martin Thornton" <ThorntonML@mosso.co.uk>

SUBJECT: Michael Legrand radio documentary this friday
 
BBC Radio 2 are transmitting the first part of a 6-part documentary about Michael Legrand this Friday (28th March) at 10pm GMT. You can listen online by pointing your browser to www.bbc.co.uk/radio2. The documentary is titled The Music Never Ends - The Michael Legrand Story.
 
Hope some of your readers find this interesting!!!

After a couple weeks away from the cinema (not counting a few arthouse flicks like the unwatchable Irreversible, which makes Salo: the 120 Days of Sodom look like Lilo & Stitch), I have resumed my life of obsessive moviegoing, and here are the films I've seen in the last few days:

SPOILERS AHEAD!

I was shocked when talented, tasteful, middlebrow Lawrence Kasdan (who's directed two Best Picture nominees, no mean feat) opted to make a film of Stephen King's novel DREAMCATCHER, which involves deadly alien worms burrowing out of people's anuses (both Dreamcatcher and Irreversible seem like the cinematic incarnation of the old joke that ends with "Rectum? It nearly killed him!").

I am even more shocked now that I've seen the film, which is extremely enjoyable and not much good at all. The opening section, introducing the four leads and their psychic powers, is cleverly structured but this is just about the last time one can tell the movie was written by Lawrence Kasdan and William Goldman. The childhood flashbacks are cloying and unconvincing, not helped by the weak child actors, and the dialogue throughout is largely terrible, sounding like it was taken directly from the book (and though King is a wonderful horror novelist, dialogue is not his strong suit).

The big bathroom-centered horror setpiece at the end of Act One is pretty effective (though I find it hard to care about a character who'd risk his life just to satisfy his compulsion to have a toothpick in his mouth), but after that the film becomes increasingly incoherent with a remarkably lame climax. Confusion abounds -- How did Jonesey's near-fatal car accident help him fight the alien menace? Why don't the friends' psychic powers alert them to the presence of deadly aliens nearby? Why does the alien speak with a British accent (an idea which may have read well in the book but which is ludicrous on the screen)?
 
The casting overall is at least intriguing. The four leads are played by rising actors (Jason Lee, Timothy Olyphant, Damien Lewis, Thomas Jane) who are both vaguely familiar and equally obscure, so it's hard to predict who'll be the hero and who'll end up as alien food. In the most counterintuitive casting of the year, Tom Sizemore plays the sensible military man while Morgan Freeman plays his lunatic superior, and this might work if Freeman weren't given terrible dialogue and distractingly wild eyebrows.

James Newton Howard's score is disappointing but not without interest. This is his fifth score for Kasdan, and while only Wyatt Earp comes close to the quality of the great early Kasdan scores (Body Heat, Silverado, Accidental Tourist), Kasdan allows Howard to work in an appealingly wide variety of styles (Mumford, for one, is musically all over the map). Though the score is a letdown after Howard's first-rate work for Signs, it's encouraging that the composer didn't merely settle for imitating his own recent triumph.

A much more satisfying horror film is WILLARD, a surprisingly assured directorial debut from Glen Morgan which benefits from Shirley Walker's best score in ten years and a fairly astounding performance from Crispin Glover. Though Willard failed to make much of an impression at the boxoffice, I suspect it will rapidly become a cult favorite.

After watching the nearly four hours of GODS AND GENERALS, one gets the impression that the Civil War must have been the most dignified war of all time. The soldiers spend all their non-battle time giving eloquent speeches demonstrating their respect for each other and their love of God, while no one ever uses a more racist expression than "darky." The novelty of an epic movie with Stephen Lang in the lead role wears off quickly, and Jeff Daniels is the only person onscreen who demonstrates recognizable human behavior, but alas he has much less screen time than he did in Gettysburg. The film is quite pleasant to look at, clearly designed for the big screen unlike Gettysburg, which had the somewhat frayed look of a TV program, but this is a stunningly lifeless movie, and the John Frizzell and Randy Edelman score only occasionally finds a fresh approach amidst all the predictable pageantry.

CRADLE 2 THE GRAVE manages to be a big improvement over Romeo Must Die and Exit Wounds thanks to its nonstop action and the always magnetic Jet Li, though DMX never projects anything more than a desire to appear cool at all times. And, I hate to say it, Tom Arnold is actually pretty funny. The score by John Frizzell and Damon "Grease" Blackman is fine but each cue is forgotten the moment it ends.

DAREDEVIL is an uneven but enjoyable attempt at making a genuinely dark and violent comic book movie (this superhero actually kills people), especially surprising since the director's previous film was Simon Birch. The photography's frequently much too dark -- I can take Gordon Willis/David Fincher dark, but I can't abide films that are so dark you literally can't see what's going on, also known as the Peter Hyams Syndrome -- and the direction of the action scenes is confusing, substituting tight shots and fast cutting for coherent, thrilling action.

Graeme Revell's score is reasonably effective, but Revell must be the coldest of all the regularly employed film composers, and this movie could have used some real emotion in its score. Michael Clarke Duncan and Colin Farrell are adroitly cast and Jon Favreau is hilarious as always, while Ben Affleck tries hard but is much more at ease as a light romantic comedian than as a tortured hero. Also, having just seen Jet Li in Cradle 2 the Grave earlier in the day, the bulky Affleck's martial arts maneuvers seem less than convincing. On the other hand, the POV effect used to illustrate Affleck's heightened senses is wonderful ­ I could have watched that all day long.

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