Soundtrack News & Reviews

On the news front, Screen Archives Entertainment have set Twilight Time’s next Blu-rays for pre-order, and both Picnic (1955) and The Roots of Heaven (1958) will contain isolated score tracks of George Duning and Malcolm Arnold’s respective scores. See, some wishes can come true (albeit when there are like-minded people, and music elements still survive).

Soundtrack Reviews + News

Just uploaded are a quartet of fun action & sci-fi scores for video games. La-La Land Recorss have released a pair of beautifully mastered 2-disc sets for hans Zimmer's Crysis II [M] and Bear McCreary's SOCOM 4: Navy SEALs [M], and Bioware's released Inon Zur's music from Dragon Age II [M]. I've also added a review of Zur's score for the first Crysis [M] (Sumthing Else Music) to rounf things out.

In a recent interview in May, Winifred Philips spoke to the Sound Byte Blog regarding life as a working film and video game composer. The Q&A runs a meaty 20 mins., and it's a genial piece where Phillips discusses her career, including recent releases such as Sim Animals (2008), Spore Hero (2009), and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (2010).

Lastly, Universal recently released Ridley Scott's Legend (1986) on Blu-ray, and the Digital Bits noted a few extras from the DVD weren't ported over. Missing are "the 3 animated storyboard sequences, the production notes (that help to provide context for some of the extras), the standard cast & crew bios and - most importantly - the DVD-ROM features which included a script-to-screen viewer." I reviewed the DVD when it emerged in 2002, and I keep having to clarify the following: the Tangerine Dream score is NOT isolated on the DVD; it's the album tracks dumped into a separate audio track *in mono*. It's a useless feature on the DVD and BR, and Universal most likely was told by The Dream's management not to isolated the score in stereo, rather than the studio being cheap.

Those interested in the BR edition can read a Q&A between Film Score Monthly's Andy Dursin and Special Features producer Charles de Lauzirika.






Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

The Walking Dead

Now up & running is a review of Anchor Bay's shiny Blu-ray edition of The Walking Dead [M], AMC's rather daring series which premiered in 2010, and returns in the fall of 2011 - meaning those hooked on the series won't be sated with more tales of emotional trauma from a world overrun by zombies for MONTHS.

Damn!

I still think series creator Frank Darabont benefitted from the allowances ABC made towards the makers of Lost, whereby stories often focused on the offside, private moments of characters rather than the next big pre-ad break shock; and the upped gore level in Dead Set (2008), the brutally violent U.K. series that made it okay for filmmakers (and satirists) to indulge in slimy viscera and serious bodily trauma on TV. Darabont gave free license to effects meisters KNB, and the results are pick-axes to the head, gunshots inflicted upon various facets of the head, and a lovely moment involving the smearing of rotting internal organ matter on clothes.

Bear McCreary's sparse score isn't yet available on CD, but in our interview [M] last year, he reflected on working with Darabont, and some of the scoring ideas for the series.

Coming next: thoughts on the recent screening at the Tiff Bell Lightbox (TBL!) of Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and a review of the 1988 TV remake. What? Didn't know there was one? I'm sure stars Patrick Duffy and Loni Anderson also forgot. Or tried to, after firing their agents.






Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com

Targeting the 80s Action Genre

The late, great Michael Kamen scored two iconic action films of the eighties – Lethal Weapon (1987), and Die Hard (1988) – and they were the genre’s definitive films, in fact, because they provided the template for filmmakers to imitate and composers to emulate for around a decade.

Screenwriters tended to use ‘Die Hard on a plane/train/boat/chuck wagon/wobbly tricycle’ when pitching ideas to agents, and journalists liked to use the same phrases to describe what story, treatment or script the latest overpriced scribe had managed to sell for $1.5, $2.5, and $4.0 million to a sucker studio.

Those two action films had ripple effects – mostly cinematic clones, and egotistical excess on the part of producers, directors, writers, an stars – that yielded some good and some painfully derivative material, but the genre did provide composers plenty of chances to score movies with, well, anything they wanted.

Big was in, and much like the massive orchestral scores that followed in the wake of Star Wars (1977), using top Hollywood musicians was the norm for major studio productions. It’s no surprise that the aforementioned two were produced by Joel Silver – himself an icon of the genre, and a man whose career was built on Thinking Big. He is (or was) the only private individual who owns two Frank Lloyd Wright homes, bought from the profits of his cinematic blockbusters. (Heck, even the Silver Pictures logo is derived from a Lloyd Wright design.)

As composer Bear McCreary describes in our interview for the music of Human Target: Season 1, the series’ showrunner, Jonathan Steinberg, wanted to recreate the sense of fun that was native to eighties/early nineties action films, where people were treated to explosions and dry, self-effacing humour.

Crafting big sounds isn’t a lost art, but finding that balance between thrills and tongue-in-cheek humour without bludgeoning viewers with the Laugh Now! sledgehammer is, and McCreary found it tough early into the project while sketching out the series’ main theme.

So, uploaded is an interview [M] with the composer (who discusses both the music of Human Target and The Walking Dead), a review of the limited 3-CD [M] set from La-La Land Records (which is addictive for fans of the action genre), and a review of the series [M] which looks just lovely on Blu-ray (Warner Home Video).

Want highly subjective recollections of the eighties action genre? Well, check out the prior blog on the recent screening of Die Hard at the Bloor Cinema. Now if only they could find decent 35mm copy of Lethal Weapon…

I’ve also been doing some site tweaks, and I’ve organized the interview index on the main site to parallel the setup on the mobile site, so there’s now proper groupings for Composers, DVD labels & producers, Filmmakers, and Music Producers. The main interview intro page will no longer take 6 years load 900 interview headers and pictures, and has been condensed to load just the latest five Q&As, with the index link to the upper right.

Mark R. Hasan, Editor

KQEK.com

Two Degrees of Richard Hatch

La-La Land Records’ release of Battlestar Galactica: The Plan and Razor marks the last major album tied to the series’ music, and I’ve uploaded a review of the disc, which also comes with a live version of the vocal track “Apocalypse.” Given that piece was nicely recorded in stereo, one can imagine a live album might be the final nod to the series built on the 1978 big-budget and really goofy TV series.

The original show began with a feature-length pilot that was re-edited into a theatrical film which I actually saw in a theatre (probably at the Uptown or something) as well as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (with nudie-cutie title sequence) before I was shipped at the age of 10 to Germany for six weeks to be primarily with septuagenarians and eat dry chicken on Sundays.

(I was cheated into the deed by my mother when I was 8, never thinking she’d actually buy the stupid ticket as soon as I turned 10.)

The original Galactica series starred Richard Hatch, a limited actor with an okay screen presence who just popped up in InAlienable, a low (low) budget sci-fi tale of parasitic infiltration and pregnancy written by Star Trek’s Walter Koenig. Sadly, the film doesn’t feature something like a jiggly-wiggly Judy Geeson mating in her birthday suit, or giving birth in real time to a cheap alien puppet, but I’ve dissected the flaws of the film (available via Anchor Bay on DVD) that has some intriguing arguments about humanity and tentacled babies named Benjamin who smell like strawberries.

More blather to follow.

- MRH

Caprica 2.0

Uploaded is a review of the Caprica pilot (Universal), which forms the teaser for the prequel TV series meant to cover the Adama and Graystone families in the fat Battlestar Galactica franchise. It's a well-paced little movie that affects even if you've never seen a single Galactica episode (which sadly, I haven't. Yes, shame on me - but I'm working on fixing that this summer).

Also uploaded is an interview with Caprica/Battlestar Gallactica composer, Bear McCreary, whose score was recently released by La-La Land Records on CD.

Coming soon in the realm of sci-fi is a review of The Invaders: Season 2, where ARCHITECT David Vincent tries to save our planet with his novel combination of basic self-defense skills and ARCHITECTURE.

Seriously.

- MRH

New TV Scores on CD

Just uploaded are a trio of soundtrack reviews from three fine composers:

- Sean Callery’s 24: Redemption (Varese), released in conjunction with Fox' DVD of the pre-season teleplay.

- Joe Harnell’s The Incredible Hulk: Prometheus, Parts One and Two (Five Jays Music), featuring the complete scores for this two-part arc.

- Bear McCreary’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (La-La Land Records), gathering music from Season 1 as well as material leading towards Season 2.

Coming next: two naughty films.

And imminent: book reviews of Lalo Schifrin’s Mission Impossible: My Life in Music, and Lalo Schifrin: Entretiens avec Georges Michel.



- MRH

Music from TV

Composer Bear McCreary keeps surprising me with his refreshing stylistic fusions and instrumental combinations in film and TV, and La-La Land’s new album features all sorts of giddy cues from the Sci Fi Channel’s Eureka series. This is a long and very fun CD, peppered with plenty of retro eighties sounds reminiscent of vintage synth gear.

Also reviewed is the second Bionic Woman [BW] album from Five Jays Music (limited to 1500 copies), featuring the entire score (plus bonus cuts) from Joe Harnell’s The Return of Bigfoot Part 2. Detractors will likely brand the music as cheesy, but they’re dead wrong about the music by the composer best remembered as the brains who wrote ‘The Lonely Man’ theme from The Incredible Hulk.

Harnell was a very underrated composer who wrote a huge amount of music for TV – and this is one of his best.

There’s a broad generation of ex-kids who watched the Bigfoot episodes (one that aired in 1975 on the Six Million Dollar Man [SMDM], and a 1976 follow-up crossover episode split between SMDM and spinoff series BW) and were totally engrossed in the gripping comic book tale of the famous bionic lovers re-teaming again to A) prove Bigfoot (Ted Cassidy) exists, and B) stop a volcano from exploding and ruining the world.

There’s aliens (Stephanie Powers sporting the biggest hairdo of her career), a magical serum, Lee Majors muttering “Sass…qvatch” while dying, a glowing psychedelic revolving tunnel in a mountain, and a TV remote that saves the world.

How can anyone resist?

Until Universal and the Weinsteins come to terms with the rights of both series, BW and SMDM will still remain unavailable to North American audiences (crappy 2007 BW remake excepted) on DVD.

That leaves us the albums (the first CD being Kill Oscar Parts 1 and 3), and not only is Harnell’s music still immensely evocative of the series, it’s a great fusion of funky orchestral urban jazz. Every theme every fan remembers from BW is here, and the score’s richness certainly leaves one hungry for a third CD (and if they all help convince the lazy parties to coordinate DVD releases of both TV series, even better).



- MRH

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