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Deadline

By James Southall Monday August 16, 2010

1 Comment

Composed by Carlos José Alvarez
MovieScore Media MMS10014 / 2010 / 47:24

Brittany Murphy’s final film, Deadline is a fairly humdrum chiller about a screenwriter who goes off to an enormous house to finish off her screenplay and discovers a load of videos about the previous inhabitants. Strangely, for a horror film, there is almost nothing even remotely scary about it until the last five minutes or so – making the film very reliant on its music.

The Expendables

By James Southall Saturday August 14, 2010

1 Comment

Composed by Brian Tyler
American release: Lions Gate Records; European release: Silva Screen Records / 2010 / 71:49

Sylvester Stallone’s latest film brings together a whole host of 80s action kings – some of whom (eg Bruce Willis) have gone on to rather greater success than others (eg Dolph Lundgren) – a chance to mingle with a couple of younger pretenders (Jason Statham and 48-year-old Jet Li) – and generally have some fun. It’s been received extremely well by audiences looking for a kick of nostalgia, though Stallone’s signature line in the film (“If the money’s right, we don’t care where the job is”) pretty much sums up the careers of many of his co-stars in it.

High Road to China

By James Southall Thursday August 12, 2010

0 Comments

Composed by John Barry
BSX Records BSXCD 8864 / 2010 / 66:56

An old-fashioned adventure film starring Tom Selleck, High Road to China seems to be hanging on the coat-tails of Raiders of the Lost Ark (Selleck was reportedly Steven Spielberg’s first choice to play Indiana Jones). Needless to say, it didn’t quite match that film’s success and director Brian G. Hutton (who had also made Where Eagles Dare and Kelly’s Heroes) never made another film – and reportedly became a plumber!

Black Sunday

By James Southall Wednesday August 11, 2010

2 Comments

Composed by John Williams
Film Score Monthly Vol. 12 No. 19 / 2010 / 64:12

Thomas Harris’s 1975 novel about a terrorist attack on the Superbowl Black Sunday was prime territory to be filmed; and Paramount did so a couple of years later, hiring no less than Ernest Lehman to write the screenplay and John Frankenheimer to direct. Frankenheimer worked with so many great film composers; and for this movie, released in the same year as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he worked with the great John Williams.

Garbo the Spy

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Composed by Fernando Velázquez MovieScore Media MMS10013 / 2010 / 43:42 Garbo the Spy is a documentary about the Spanish-born Joan Puyol, who served as a double agent during the Second World War and, remarkably, managed to convince the Germans that he had a huge network of spies working under him (entirely fabricated) – the [...]

Piranha 3D

1 Comment

Composed by Michael Wandmacher Lakeshore Records LKS341872 / 2010 / 58:06 The first two Piranha movies marked the famously inauspicious debuts of directors who went on to rather bigger and better things, Joe Dante and James Cameron. The third (unrelated apart from its name) seems a bit different – it’s nobody’s directorial debut (Alexandre Aja [...]

Salt

2 Comments

Composed by James Newton Howard iTunes exclusive / 2010 / 62:32 Disappointingly, Salt is not a documentary about food seasonings, but a spy thriller. On the plus side, it’s directed by Phillip Noyce and stars Angelina Jolie, so might actually be worth seeing.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

1 Comment

Composed by Howard Shore E1 Entertainment E1E-CD-2313 / 2010 / 61:52 While (for now at least) no more books are on the horizon for the Twilight saga, the cash cow continues to be milked through the film adaptations. The success of this franchise is incredible and has gone well beyond the original target audience of [...]

The A-Team

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Composed by Alan Silvestri Varese Sarabande 302 067 032 2 / 2010 / 72:24 The latest attempt by Hollywood to cash in on 80s nostalgia, The A-Team has been surprisingly well-received in reviews, but not particularly financially successful. Alan Silvestri used to score an awful lot of straightforward action movies, but last summer’s GI Joe [...]

Iron Man 2

2 Comments

Composed by John Debney Sony Classical 88697 74654 2 / 2010 / 72:26 A couple of years ago I wrote a rather damning review of Ramin Djawadi’s “music” for Iron Man, one of the most unimaginative and downright poor scores I’d ever heard for a major film. It was reported at the time that director [...]

Knight and Day

4 Comments

Composed by John Powell Varese Sarabande 302 067 034 2 / 2010 / 54:42 Once, his presence in a film was a virtual guarantee of success; but Tom Cruise’s fall from grace (for reasons completely unrelated to anything he’s done on-screen) means the well-reviewed popcorn action film Knight and Day has only managed to take [...]

The Lightkeepers

3 Comments

Composed by Pinar Toprak MovieScore media MMS-10012 / 2010 / 47:54 A romance written and directed by Daniel Adams, The Lightkeepers sees Richard Dreyfuss play a grumpy old lighthouse keeper in Cape Cod in the early 20th century who finds himself drawn to two different women who move in nearby.

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