Bear McCreary Live

 

So Sang We all

Bear McCreary Live
Themes & Variations Tour
Indigo at the O2
London
18th April 2025

It was Friday the 18th of April, a Good Friday in more ways than one it turned out, when I saw one of my favourite living composers, Bear McCreary, on the very first night of his new Themes and Variations Tour. And I was pleased it was a Friday night, for sure... meaning I didn’t need to get up early for work the next morning and so could dwell on the previous night (at time of writing, although this review will probably go up a few days later) without having to worry about post-concert recovery time, so to speak.

And it was a concert I was half expecting and half wasn’t, in terms of the size and sound. Seven men formed the band including McCreary himself, of course, helming guitar, keyboards, accordion, hurdy gurdy and, as all were, chipping in on some of the vocals. Included in this small line up was Morgan Sorne, who also had a short set as a supporting act before the main show. He did some amazing stuff with his five octave ranged voice, recorded in little bursts and then repeated electronically as he added layers of harmony and percussion. He’s pretty talented and I really liked the stuff he performed. I’d go all in and grab a load of his CDs but, alas for me, it looks like you can only get his stuff digitally these days... so I’m going to have to miss out, it looks like.

Then he was joined by ‘Bear and the gang’ as they performed a large variety of songs from Bear’s recent rock concept album The Singularity (which I finally bit the bullet on and bought a CD of from the merch stall at the show, accompanied by the supporting graphic novel of the same name, along with the obligatory Bear McCreary t-shirt, of course) and these very heavy tracks were interspersed with equally weighty interpretations of music from Bear’s various TV show and video game scores.

Now, I’ve been an admirer of McCreary since his Battlestar Galactica days but, most of the TV shows and games were ones I’ve not heard of (a programme with a set list would have been really helpful and would have got me to part with even more of my money) but I enjoyed them all none the less, tapping my fingers and stomping my foot as much as my somewhat gammy knee would allow for, sitting down at the front near this huge speaker, as the group of artists on stage tried to hasten the atrophy of my inner ear (it was awesome).

And for these various cues (numbers?) they also brought out their secret weapon, Bear’s brother Brendan McCreary, who not only screamed out the accompanying vocals in harmonic ways that perhaps the human voice was not meant to explore but, also, he was jumping, dancing and otherwise gallivanting back and forth across the stage in the most energetic manner I’ve seen since Voice Of The Beehive played Kentish Town back in the 1980s. This guy was so enthusiastic about his performance that he was, on his own, one of the primary entertainments of the show.

But, honestly, all musicians shone in this outstanding performance and, as I said above, I didn’t know a lot of it but I was so consumed by the energy and melodic harmony of the thing that it just carried me away. I’ve been lucky enough to have seen so many film composers live, often multiple times, over the last 45 years... such as Williams, Goldsmith, Barry, Bernstein (that’s the Elmer of the two ;-), Glass, Nyman, Mansell and too many to mention in such a short review but McCreary’s show was easily up there with some of the best of these, including modern favourites such as Brian Tyler and Hans Zimmer. This guy and his band were absolutely amazing... as were the animated visuals accompanying the show, one of which looked a little like something Rick Griffin might have designed in the 1960s at his most surreal. 

And what an encore... his cover version of All Along The Watchtower from Battlestar Galactica followed by his cover of Blue Oyster Cult's Godzilla, which he transformed for his score to Godzilla - King Of The Monsters. I was really pleased he did these ones that night.

And that’s that. I shall leave this short review in awe now as my tired old mind is having trouble thesaurusing the satisfactory superlatives but I and my companions for the evening had an absolute blast with Bear McCreary’s Themes And Variations Live concert and we all made noises to the effect that we’d definitely jump at the chance to see him again, next time he’s back in good old London town... hope we don’t have too long a wait on that.

Drop

Date Expectations

Drop
Directed by Christopher Landon
USA/Ireland 2025
Blumhouse
UK Cinema Release Print

I have to admit, I saw the abominable trailer for Drop and decided to give the movie a wide berth, even thought it’s directed by Christopher Landon, who made the brilliant Happy Death Day (reviewed here), Happy Death Day 2U (reviewed here) and Freaky (reviewed here). However, I then found out the score is by one of my favourite living composers, Bear McCreary (who I am seeing in concert a the O2 in London in four days from now) and, yeah, I don’t see or watch many of the projects to which he’s attached so it seemed worth it to go and check this out for the music.

I was not disappointed, either. And when I say that I mean... I was really surprised because, the trailer made it look like a thriller relying on a very old, clichéd plot which, to be fair... it absolutely is.

The story set up is about a domestic abuse survivor called Violet (played brilliantly here by Meghann Fahy) who, after a year or two, leaves her young son (played by Jacob Robinson) in the care of her sister (played by Violett Beane) at home while she goes on her first date in a very long time. So she meets her prospective ‘match’ at a very expensive, high up in a skyscraper restaurant but, soon she starts getting message drops on her phone showing her house broken into and the lives of her son and sister under threat... with increasingly intimidating instructions that she must kill her date (played by Brandon Sklenar) before the night is out. So, yeah, told you it was an old plot. The last time I remember this being done just recently was the 2018 movie The Commuter with Liam Neeson (reviewed here) and, yeah, I really wasn’t looking forward to this for the story, for sure.

But, as I said above, this one surprised me. I mean, it’s one thing to be revisiting the same tired old ground but it’s quite another when the execution of the concept and the way in which the film is directed, shot and edited is so immaculate and gripping, as this one is. For example, the phone drops are presented as texts which are superimposed with the correct perspective onto various elements of the photographic compositions as the restaurant bound protagonists go about their business. Which is nicely done, for sure (and I bet there were some hard choices made by the director about placement and duration made with these on screen messages).  

But the real brilliance of the film is the sweeping photography, taken from various unusual angles to push the story along. Now, I rarely use the term Hitchcockian for many modern movies made past the 1990s but, this one certainly would earn that title. This does look and feel like something Alfred Hitchcock would probably enjoy if he saw it and I don’t even mean that in a second-hand Brian De Palma way, which would be stylish enough. This one just felt like something Hitch would possibly do or, as I said, certainly approve of.

And the acting on this one really holds up too, which certainly helps push the cinematography and shot design into ‘great’ rather than ‘good’ territory. Fahy and Sklenar really help sell this as two innocents who are fighting for their lives (one of them not even aware of what is going on) and the chemistry between them is so good that it really sells the idea that these two people are just wanting to go on a fun date. And their co-stars are very good in this too, with special shout outs to Gabrielle Ryan and Reed Diamond in this.

And then there’s that Bear McCreary score. I hope this one, someday, gets a proper, physical CD release so I can hear it as a stand alone piece (and not the stupid digital only version which I won’t be downloading) because it’s really incredible and supports the visuals in the best way. He’s not pulling a Bernard Herrmann here, which is a direction he certainly might have gone in and it would have been valid... but it does have the kind of sweeping tones which, while being completely contemporary sounding, a 1950s suspense movie might have had and it really complimented, supported and enhanced things very nicely.

So yeah, that’s me done and extremely surprised by Christopher Landon’s Drop. My expectations were low but I really had a good time with this one and will certainly be picking up a Blu Ray when it becomes available so I can show my folks. Catch this one at the cinema if you can because it looks great on a big screen.

Imaginary

Imaginary Fiend

Imaginary
Directed by Jeff Wadlow
USA
2024 Blumhouse
UK Cinema Print

Okay, so the latest from successful horror movie company Blumhouse is Imaginary and, I have to say, I really quite liked this one. I’d also have to say that I don’t think it’s going to be that successful with some audiences but, hopefully I’ll be proven wrong on that.

The film stars DeWanda Wise as Jessica, step mother to two new children (played by Taegen Burns and Pyper Braun) who, with their father, moves back to her former home where, it turns out, she had a definite ‘childhood trauma’ event... though she certainly didn’t remember just what that was all about until something laying in wait reminds her. And when her boyfriend goes away on a concert tour (he’s presumably in a band) she’s left to look after the two girls, the youngest of whom has taken an ‘imaginary friend’, who takes the form of an old Teddy bear named Chancey.

And then things start going wrong and getting traumatic as Chancey isn’t ‘just’ an imaginary friend and, as it turns out, has his own agenda to abscond with the younger daughter, for reasons (perhaps way too obvious reasons) which come to light nearer the end of the movie.

Okay, so let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first. There are no real surprises a lot of the time but, that being said, there are a couple. A lot of the stuff is telegraphed way too soon, such as Jessica’s dad, when he visits her in hospital, talking about CB... I was just kinda waiting for an hour for everyone else in the movie to play catch up on that one.

And another problem is that the film suffers a little bit from is the dreaded curse of most modern day horror films... sound design that lets you know things are about to get tense and scary long before you’re supposed to realise this stuff on anything other than a subconscious level. So as soon as the ambient sound changes, you are on the alert right away. Don’t get me wrong, I think you are supposed to be unsettled by this audio phenomenon... I just don’t think your brain is meant to be aware of it while you are watching. So, yeah, that element, which is the modern cinematic equivalent of an old 1970s horror movie using a heartbeat on the soundtrack, kinda lets it down a bit. However, that being said, the sound cliché also happens to absolutely work... so you may know why you are feeling unsettled in certain scenes but, dammit, knowing it doesn’t make it any less effective, for sure.

Now I said that half the twists in the film don’t work and are telegraphed but, guess what? Yeah, that means the other half of the twists did actually work well. The director actually uses things like the bear appearing in different positions and beginning to move a little as a really nice piece of misdirection for a certain twist that is revealed when a child psychiatrist comes to visit the younger daughter. I really fell for that one hook, line and sinker so... yeah, this film sure has its moments. And I loved that the film goes full on into creating a surrealist world which the main characters get to visit... the element which I think may be too much for certain ‘hip’ young audiences who are, of course, the main target here. But I loved that the movie leaned into this surreal stuff for the end game and I found it refreshing, to be honest.

And now, I suppose, I should address the elephant in the room because, there’s a reason I went to the cinema to see this one. And that reason was... Mario Bava. There’s a moment, right at the end of one of the trailers, which it turns out also made the final cut of the movie, that is a dead steal of a famous moment in Mario Bava’s 1977 movie Schock. In that film, a kid rushes towards Dario Nicolodi and, runs off the bottom of the screen only to pop back up immediately into the frame as a different, grown up person. It’s a beautiful shot using a practical piece of sleight of hand with the photography to pull off the effect (something which Mario Bava was known for when making his movies). And it really is a complete copy of that moment used in this movie... I mean, it’s not as deftly done because, due to the subject matter, the shot has to use a lot of CGI but, it does deliberately echo the camera movement from Bava’s movie and, yeah, I’m sure the director knew exactly what he was doing here. It’s a nice piece of homage which, I think they should have left out of the trailer because... well... now the audience will see it coming.

Other than that... not much else to report. The score of the movie is nice and it’s credited to Sparks & Shadows... which is a company formed by Bear McCreary (one of my favourite modern day composers) so I’m guessing the score is a group effort by him and some of his colleagues/friends/apprentices. I’d love to hear this one away from the movie but, no such luck as it doesn’t seem to have had a proper CD release... so I guess I won’t get to listen to it, which is a shame.

Other than that, though... yeah, Imaginary is nicely acted, well put together, could have had more surprises but still, it’s nicely done and I could imagine picking up a Blu Ray of this one at some point. Like I said though, I suspect it’s not going to be as well received by everyone so... time will tell, I guess.

Freaky

Freaky Friday
The 13th

Freaky
USA 2020
Directed by Christopher Landon
Blumhouse

Warning: Big spoilers on this one so,
if you want to go in cold then don’t read this yet.

Okay, so this is kinda bizarre but, less than an hour after I came up with a title for my review of Freaky, I found out that one of the original working titles for the film was... Freaky Friday The 13th so... yeah, I guess I joined the dots maybe. Either way... this one wasn’t initially on my watch list (I hate the word Freaky, just one of those things) and I had decided to ignore it but then I found out that, not only was one of my favourite living composers, Bear McCreary, doing the score but that there was also a limited edition CD release (which I obviously pre-ordered). Then my cousin, who moved to Australia, saw it and recommended it to me so, yeah, I caved in and watched it (and then waited 10 months to post this review because it’s only, finally, just come out at the cinema over her in the UK... if I'd had known it was going to get a proper cinema release here then I would certainly have waited for it). Frankly, all the marketing people behind the movie would have needed to do was let me know that the film is written and directed by the same guy who made the truly brilliant Happy Death Day movies (reviewed here and here) and I would have been on board straight away (we need a third movie in that series guys!).

So, just like the first Happy Death Day movie (and, to some extent, the second) was a remake of Groundhog Day, so too is Freaky another ‘horrified’ remake of a popular classic. In this case, the tie in is specifically the Walt Disney movie (and all the other remakes) of Freaky Friday (a film I’ve never watched in either of its incarnations because it has Freaky in the title... see last paragraph) but, those were in turn based on the novel Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers which was, as I’m sure most of you know, cribbed itself from the English literary classic body swap novel Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers by F. Anstey, which in turn was made into TV shows and movies called things like Vice Versa and, of course, the famous Tom Hanks movie using the same concept, Big. So... a movie with a long lineage but, as far as I know, this one has a slightly unique take on the concept in terms of the characters.

In this one we have the main protagonist, Millie, a high school girl played by Kathryn Newton and we also have Vince Vaughn as the Jason Vorhees style serial killer known as The Blissfield Butcher. The Vaughn character initially doesn’t speak, just gives penetrating stares through his hockey mask and, in a pre-credits set up to show how much of a bad person he is, visits violent death to a group of four teenagers in quite gory ways. That’s one of the things which is interesting about this movie in that, although there were stabbings and any manner of deaths in the Happy Death Day franchise series, this film really goes back to late 1970s/1980s slasher levels of goriness. For instance, in this film you will see people stabbed in the eye with packing hooks, split into two pieces by a buzz saw and, in a particularly memorable death in the pre-credits sequence, a person has a broken bottle forced into his mouth and down his throat until we see the shards of glass bloating his neck out and trying to force themselves out again. So, yeah, I don’t know what rating this movie has but it’s definitely got the kind of 'old school 1970s' levels of violence which you just don’t really see done well in slasher movies these days (I’m not sure, at this point, if all this made it into the UK cinema print).

That being said, I really find films with gruesome deaths unwatchable and less than compelling unless  it's either a) an Italian giallo or b) there is substantial other stuff going on in the film to hold the interest and, thankfully, Freaky has that second thing in spades. Just like the Happy Death Day movies, it has a very strong, self aware sort of broad humour running through it and, much of the time, it falls into the realm of comedy more than anything else.

So, anyway, due to an old Aztec (I think) knife, when The Blissfield Butcher tries to stab Millie, he gets chased away but, at the stroke of midnight, Millie and The Butcher swap bodies. And that’s where the real fun begins, as it transpires that the real Millie, inside Vince Vaughn’s body, has to recover the knife from ‘police evidence’ and find The Butcher (inside Millie’s body) and stab him/her before another 24 hours is up or the change will become permanent. Comic shenanigans ensue as Vince Vaughn, effectively playing a teenage girl with a crush on one of her/his classmates, tries to convince his friends of his real identity while hiding from the police. Meanwhile, Kathryn Newton takes on the minimalistic, cold dead stare of a serial killer and starts murdering various people at high school in various, imaginative ways.

And it’s a real pleasure. The film actually feels a little like those Happy Death Day movies so, I’m assuming that this is a certain amount of the director’s style coming to the forefront and he does familiar stuff like the long, sweeping establishing shots following the leads and also splitting the story into chapters by day, counting down from the night of the pre-credits killings until Friday the 13th, when everything is destined to come to a conclusion, one way or another.

Everything’s pretty cool and, like the director’s previous two movies, the teenagers who Millie hangs out with are mostly nice people and so you’re invested in the characters more. Vince Vaughn really plays the comedy routines well and truly lifts the film with his presence. However, Kathryn Newton certainly matches him all the way and switches from teenage angst to deadened psychopath really well... there’s a lot to enjoy in the performances of this movie. And, of course, the great Bear McCreary’s score is another mini masterpiece. This guy writes compelling music for pretty much all of the films he touches, really helping to glue the edits together with his riffs and elevating the movie to another level... this is top notch stuff.

So, yeah, not much else to say other than, Freaky is a great film I can recommend to most lovers of the comedy horror genre. I do look forward to seeing a sequel at some point (although it would be nice to see Vaughn come back for that, somehow, without giving too much away here). If I had a choice I’d really want to see a third Happy Death Day movie before this one though, or, actually, even a double sequel which ties the two franchises together might be nice. Either way, good movie, worth a watch, give it a go.

Scored to Death 1 and 2

Scorey Movies

Scored To Death
Conversations With Some Of
Horror’s Greatest Composers
by J. Blake Fichera
Silman-James Press ISBN: 978-1935247142

Scored To Death 2
More Conversations With Some
Of Horror’s Greatest Composers
by J. Blake Fichera
Silman-James Press ISBN: 978-1935247234

Just a quick shout out of two books my friend Dr. Rob gifted me for both Christmas and my birthday recently. Anyone who has been reading any of my reviews with any regularity over the years has probably picked up on the fact by now that I love movie scores. I listen to them all the time and, funnily enough, the guy who gave me these two tomes is the only person I know in real life, who has the same kind of passion and dedication to them as I do although, curiously, he doesn’t listen to a lot of horror scores, it has to be said. Which is the subject of these two tremendous tomes by J. Blake Fichera...

Basically, what Fichera’s done here (and also apparently on some podcasts of the same title, which I really need to catch up with some day when time is not my enemy) is to take some key film score composers who are still with us (or were when he started out on each of these two projects) and interview them with a special emphasis, for the most part, on their contributions to the horror genre.

The first volume collects interviews with Nathan Barr, Charles Bernstein, Joseph Bishara, Simon Boswell, John Carpenter, Jay Chattaway, Fabio Frizzi, Jeff Grace, Mairizio Guarini, Tom Hajdu (of Tomandandy), Alan Howarth, Harry Manfredini, Claudio Simonetti and Christopher Young. The second volume comprises interviews with Michael Abels, Richard Band, Holly Amber Church, Charles Clouser, Robert Cobert, Disasterpeace, Koji Endo, Brad Fiedel, John Harrison, Kenji Kawai, Joseph LoDuca, John Massari, Bear McCreary, Rob, Donald Rubenstein and Craig Safan. Of those two lists, I have at least one score from the majority of them listed (some of them, many shiny discs... I’ve even been to concerts by some of the guys) so there’s a lot of familiarity with their work and styles for the most part but, even when the interview was with a composer I hadn’t experienced myself, I found the answers they gave to Fichera’s questions very interesting and I especially liked the back story provided by many of the composers about how they came to find their calling of writing music and how the film scoring side started for them.

Even certain questions which were duplicated, more or less, through various chapters, were interesting because you get to get a feel for how each different composer (of very different ages in some cases) correlate with their answers or, indeed, contradict each other as their processes differ. Some of them, for example, find the script a helpful start but many of them would rather not read the script and compose from what the director actually managed to get worked up into the rough cut. Although many composers, as I expected, hated the more common practice these days of providing a temp track with the cut (where a film would be cut to found music from other sources which, because of using these tracks to support the rough cut, brings the danger of the director loving the temp score... perhaps the most famous example of this would be Stanley Kubrick rejecting Alex North’s score for 2001 - A Space Odyssey and licencing the music on the temp instead), there are actually a couple of people in these books who welcome the inclusion of the temp track as an aid to a communication of the emotional feel of the pieces they need to compose. Of course, the worst thing I hear sometimes when I listen to a score is actually hearing the temp track kinda bleeding through into the composer's own music, because you can recognise the structure of the cue and realise straight away what track from another film was probably there in its place when the rough cut was assembled. You can often tell when a composer has been asked to imitate something fairly well known.

And of course, the composers won’t always jell with various readers. A couple of composers came across as a little naive to me, for example and another one or two came over, it seemed to me at least, at just the wrong side of pretentious. I suspect that all comes down to the baggage and life experiences a reader brings with them as much as anything actually on the printed pages here though and it really is to be expected. Sometimes they get it a little wrong too. Without naming names, for example, one composer quoted a very famous film composer saying that they weren’t, because of their period, as experimental as he and always did things with a big orchestra when in fact, the composer he was referencing was as much known for his smaller, unusual groupings of instruments and spirit of experimentation as the composer pointing the finger here (probably more so).

It’s not a surprise that my favourite composer, Bernard Herrmann, comes up a lot on almost everyone’s favourites or most influential, although I wish people wouldn’t keep thinking that movies like Psycho are horror films (nor William’s Jaws, nor Shore’s Silence Of The Lambs for that matter)... it’s like one day, everybody in movie appreciation land just woke up and forgot the genre of thriller ever existed.

Overall though, these two tomes are both entertaining and illuminating and it’s great hearing about experimental instruments, the odd score I’ve not heard and the odd film I’ve not seen (I watched the phenomenal Under The Silver Lake, reviewed here and grabbed Disasterpeace’s score for said film on CD as soon as I found out about them from this book... um... yeah, actually this book is another one of those which is turning out to have an expensive afterlife affair with my wallet). It’s good that the almighty Ligeti was referenced as one of those composers who, inadvertently because it certainly wasn’t his intent, invented and influenced the vocabulary of horror film scoring and is still regarded highly by many composers today (who also list Penderecki, obviously, as an influence on the genre). I was also delighted and bemused to find that composer Kenji Kawai, who wrote the scores for the original Ringu and some of its sequels and spin offs, lists Burt Bacharach as one of his primary influences.

Probably the worst part of the second volume, for me, was when one of my absolute favourite contemporary score composers, I won’t name him here, talked about a certain common practice as to how modern film and TV composers write scores these days and his approach seemed to me to be very disheartening and disappointing. In fact, I could almost picture Herrmann and Morricone spinning in their graves about what he said here. That was a real eye opener.

All in all, though, if you are someone who has an active interest in either horror films, film scores or that wonderful place where both those things come together to make art, then Scored To Death Volumes 1 and 2 by J. Blake Fichera are definitely worth your time and money. And, of course, if you have the scores, then you can play one or two of them after reading each chapter, which is a nice thing to do of an evening, for sure. Definitely pick these two up.

Fantasy Island

Isle Be Back

Fantasy Island
2020 USA Directed by Jeff Wadlow
UK cinema release print. 

Warning: Small spoilers.

Yeah, I kinda wondered if this would happen. Hot on the heels of the fairly recent The Banana Splits Movie (reviewed by me here), which took an old TV show from decades ago and turned it into a horror film, we have yet another beloved (to many, I’m sure) TV show, this time from the late 1970s/early 1980s, which has undergone a horror movie make over. This time it’s Fantasy Island although, for some reason, the UK certification card billed it as Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island... I don’t see why because it is definitely featuring at least one (technically two) characters from the original TV show, where guests would arrive on the island by plane and Mr. Roarke, played by Ricardo Montalban, would greet them and use the magical powers of the island to give them their fantasy (the real one, not the one they thought they wanted) and teach them a life lesson about themselves in the process.

This time around, the wonderful Michael Peña, who you may remember from his comic turn in the Ant Man movies, replaces Montalban as Roarke and we even have a kind of replacement for his sidekick Tattoo but, the way this happens would probably constitute a major spoiler so I’m not going to say much about that.

What I will say is that yes, it pretty much follows the original formula of the TV show to the letter and, yes, it’s definitely turned into a horror/adventure vehicle... albeit a kind of family friendly one, to be sure. I mean, gosh knows how it managed to land itself with a 15 rating here in the UK... I think this one should probably be a 12 at the very most.

Okay, so this is kind of a fun film but its only going to work for you, I believe, if you are willing to accept the supernatural and magical properties of the island fairly early on. Don’t go expecting any scientific explanation for anything that’s going on in this movie because you certainly aren’t going to get one. In truth, this is a little more like reading one of those old 1950s EC Horror comics like Tales From The Crypt or Vault Of Horror and, if you’re expecting anything more sophisticated than that, then you may be in for a bit of a disappointment. I mean, when you see various bad guys... such as Kim Coates playing absolutely to type as a henchman... and their eyes suddenly explode in their sockets to emit a black ooze... you know there’s something less than scientific going on here, right?

Some of the acting in this is pretty good with Peña giving the film a much needed shot of gravitas in certain places and with an equally sobering performance from the always watchable Maggie Q as one of the guests. It’s nicely put together, not too flashy in terms of shot set ups... although there is a moment where the director seems to go deliberately overboard with vertical spaces made up from trees... and it’s edited in a way that you aren’t going to lose where everybody is. Why and how everybody is, however, is a different matter and I’ll come to that shortly.

Okay, so even if you can make friends with the lack of subtlety of the supernatural element in this movie, there are a few things in this which are not so great. One of them being the fact that the writers/director feel the need to telegraph certain elements such as one character who, right when she gets a nosebleed at the start with some sinister music playing, you know is going to be revealed as something less obvious than she at first appears. And you can see all those all important life lessons coming a mile off, to be honest.

Another thing is how it’s somehow trying to be some kind of ‘family friendly horror’ movie. It just doesn’t work and I’m sure there must be a much stronger cut of this movie out there because every time one of the human characters gets cut up, or whatever, it always seems to be just off camera with no red blood in sight. The only real blood is the black ooze from the eyeball pops in this, which I’m guessing is just a way of getting around certain censorship issues. Not that I particularly wanted to see various violent deaths etc but, honestly, the absence of follow through on the things you know are happening just means the film loses a certain amount of credibility, as far as I’m concerned. At least in terms of the overall tone of this movie.

I’m not even going to talk about one character reveal when, even though that character admits to be ‘acting’ in the earlier parts of the movie, still makes no sense in terms of the character motivations and the actions of said character in one of the earlier scenes.

And then there’s the ending. Honestly, I’ve got no idea what is going on or why any of the ‘surviving’ guests are leaving the island without trying to kill Roarke and his crew. I’m really not sure why no questions are going to be asked when various ‘guests’ don’t survive their stay and, yeah, just really baffled by the bizarre denouement on this one.

The one shining light for me, which was worth the price of admission, was Bear McCreary’s score, which gives a good sense of uneasiness throughout. Alas, at time of writing this, the soundtrack is only available as a dumb electronic download rather than a proper CD but I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it gets a real release at some point. We’ll see what happens.

So, yeah... short review but there’s really not much more to say about this one. Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island is not a film I could really recommend to anyone. It’s fine in places but it’s not brilliant and, while I’m glad I saw it, I don’t think I’d need to ever watch it again. That being said, I do hope this somehow allows for other revamped TV shows from the 1960s - 1980s, redone in the horror genre because, like The Banana Splits Movie before it, sometimes this is a good idea.

Godzilla - King Of The Monsters

Ghidorah, Mon Amour

Godzilla - King Of The Monsters
USA/Japan 2019 Directed by Michael DoughertyUK cinema release print.

Okay, so Godzilla - King Of The Monsters is the third in an predominantly American made series of new ‘Monsterverse’ films based on the various Toho Kaiju Eiga such as the Godzilla films. The first of these was Godzilla (reviewed by me here) and the second being the much better Kong - Skull Island (reviewed by me here). Now the fourth entry in this series, due next year, will be Godzilla Versus King Kong which brings me to ask... why have so many of these films got titles ripped from older movies utilising the same characters.

This film is particularly problematic in this aspect since Godzilla - King Of The Monsters was the title for the American release print of the 1954 film, Godzilla (aka Gojira) which started it all. You know, the one where a lot of it was cut, Raymond Burr was added into the linking scenes and Akira Ifikube’s masterful score was mostly replaced with old Universal monster movie cues tracked in. So, yeah, this particular title evokes some bad memories and associations at best.

However, while I can see exactly why many of the critics are giving this one fairly negative reviews, it’s actually far superior to the 2014 Godzilla movie and I enjoyed this one a lot.

There are four main monster characters in this one plus, or so we are told, some new ones. There is The Big G himself, of course, in what I suspect is a slight redesign that does the character absolute no favours. He pretty much looks like a mean thug in this... just the kind of giant, fire breathing reptile monster you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alleyway on your way home from work one night (as opposed to the more friendly and convivial giant reptiles you might wish to pass on the street). Which could have worked really well for the character if he was, as he was in a few of the early Toho films, being portrayed as a villainous force of nature that needed to be stopped. However, it’s made abundantly clear from the story here that he is definitely being seen as the heroic saviour of mankind so the extra mean look didn’t really work all that well for me, it has to be said. Just a pair of googly eyes would have done the trick.

We also have three more ‘fan favourites’...

We have Rodan, who starred in his own films as well as crossing over with the Gojira movies back in the 1970s and probably later. We also have everybody’s favourite larva turns giant moth creature Mothra, who is also seen as one of the ‘hero kaiju’ in this (as she pretty much always is whenever she’s in the movies, it has to be said). Lastly we have the kaiju who I always think of as Godzilla’s arch enemy, the three headed dragon-like creature Ghidorah (or King Ghidorah as he used to be known). It’s actually the best of the Ghidorah’s I’ve seen in the way the various heads of the creature interact with each other and, as far as I’m concerned, even though he’s the lead non-human villain of the piece, he’s also the best of the monsters in the movie. In a nice touch, the less clued in audience members (as far as the history of the genre goes) don’t find out Ghidorah’s name until much later in the movie. Instead, the humans have designated him Monster Zero, in a nice touch to the history of the character and his designation in his second appearance back in Invasion Of The Astro Monster (aka Godzilla Vs Monster Zero).

In addition to these, I’m pretty sure I spotted Kumonga a couple of times but it wasn’t shouted out to the audience like the others were.

And its a really fun film with some nice twists and turns to the characters and all the human story built around the monsters, in structure at least, is really well done and gives the film a certain lift absent from the previous US attempts to bring the Godzilla character to life. That being said, the human element of the story is also where the film fails in some regards. By that I mean...

Well, like the two predecessors, the film is cast with some major A list actors who always do a fantastic job with the material they are given to work with. I mean we have Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Ken Watanabe (reprising his role as the modern version of Dr. Ishiro Serizawa), Ziyi Zhang, Sally Hawkins (back as Dr. Vivienne Graham), Charles Dance as the human villain of the piece (or one of them... don’t want to get into spoiler territory here) and David Strathairn (back again as Admiral William Stenz). These are all fantastic actors and they all do a hell of a job with the dialogue they are given. Which is the main problem, I think, if any were to be found in such an entertaining confection as this. The dialogue is truly atrocious and the phrase ‘trying to get a silk purse from a sow’s ear’ comes to mind. Some of this dialogue is just embarrassing, even when it’s not trying to jargon the ears to death with its fictional, scientific gibberish.

Coupled with that is some unusually stylised acting from pretty much all the players. Every eyebrow twitch or look or head movement seems to be directed to the camera with the express intention of underlying and punctuating every dramatic moment to the nth degree. It’s like the director was saying... “More gravitas. More weight. Less subtle... give me moooore!” all the way through. Seriously, just between Chandler, Watanabe and Hawkins we have more chin and brow action than you’d get on an episode of Battle Of The Planets (aka Gatchaman). I was sitting there in the audience thinking I was stuck in some kind of artificial ‘gravitas well’. It might be that this style of acting is more appreciated in Japan, one of the primary targets for these films I suspect but... all I’m saying is that, as great as these performers are, they all looked like they were trying to get away with understating, as far as possible, some really broad strokes in terms of their physical presence and... well, it’s certainly something that stands out.

However, for all this, the film still manages to be immensely superior to some of the other Godzilla movies over the years and, frankly, there are some really nice references to the history of Kaiju Eiga productions for the ‘old school’ days... such as the use of the ‘oxygen destroyer’, featured in a few of the movies including Gojira’s 1954 debut. Heck, there’s even a revelation that one of the main characters is descended from the characters played by The Peanuts in the original Mothra movies... which is a really nice touch. There are also a fair few references to Skull Island and the history of the organisation Monarch, which is being established.

An inconsistency with the previous two movies is that this one doesn’t have a similar opening title sequence as those two, utilising real and fake news coverage. However, this one does use this device over the end credits to help set up the coming Godzilla Vs King Kong movie so at least there is some brand consistency here. And, by the way, you might want to stay until the end of the credits for another scene that might be important in a future movie in the franchise.

The cherry on top of this film is the new score by Bear McCreary. I’ve been saying how good this composer is for years now (since the modern Battlestar Galactica TV show which he scored) and he really delivers the goods here, utilising not just his own music which perfectly matches the mood of the film but also bringing in some new versions of the Ifikube scores with the two main themes you might associate with Godzilla plus the Mothra main theme (alas, the Mothra lyrics don’t make an appearance here). The score is brilliant and... mixed way too low during the action scenes so, yep, waiting for the double CD to turn up from Amazon any day now. Can’t wait to hear this one away from the visuals.

And there’s not much more ‘spoiler free’ stuff to say about Godzilla - King Of The Monsters, I think. Some good acting (despite the script obstacles to it), some great action, a nice story idea and, alas, the death of my two favourite human characters... one in the first third of the movie and another during the inevitable act of heroic redemption at the end. Definitely a film to watch if you liked the previous two and are a fan of the genre in general. Despite bad reviews for this, which are mostly unwarranted, I think we have a remarkably ‘on the right track for once’ American look at the title character and I am really looking forward, now, to next year’s monster smack down.

Happy Death Day 2U

Bury My Heart
At Wounded Tree

Happy Death Day 2U
2019 USA Directed by Christopher Landon
UK cinema release print.

Well this was an unexpected surprise.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the first Happy Death Day movie (which I reviewed here), especially since I only really went to hear Bear McCreary’s score and found myself caught up in what I personally think is a bit of a modern phenomenon of a teenage slasher movie... the premise of which was that it was another version of Groundhog Day but with the central character, Tree Gelbman, having to relive the same day over and over until she can figure out who it is who’s killing her at the end of the day so she can kill them and reset her life back to normal. It was such a nice idea with a great cast and some neat directorial and writing flourishes that I really didn’t see how they could go anywhere on a sequel which wasn’t just a rehash of the first movie and, yeah... I wasn’t expecting too much from this follow up, truth be told.

Which why it’s such a pleasure to be taken by surprise here because, yep, despite the central concept and the slightly clichéd but nicely handled expansion of that idea of a narrative being based on a repeat loop structure... Happy Death Day 2U is one of those rare film sequels which, while maybe not being quite as good as the first film, certainly lives up to any expectations of what a second part should look and feel like. So yeah, this movie in no way lets the first movie down and is a thoroughly entertaining ride.

Once again the insanely talented and charismatic Jessica Rothe plays Tree and back for the ride are pretty much all the main actors from the first film (and I do mean all) such as Israel Broussard, Phi Vu and Ruby Modine... but the fun doesn’t stop there because the writer/director manages to bring in a new bunch of characters and throws them into the mix too, played by people like Suraj Sharma and Sarah Yarkin. Frankly, it’s a testament to Landon that none of these characters feel like unnecessary add ons and they have a proper place in the continuing story of Tree and her ‘time looping’ dilemma.

And, like I said, the concept is expanded just a little so that we’re following some of the same stuff, in a way but... with different elements thrown into the mix.

So, for example, the film starts off focusing on Phi Vu’s character and as you twig right away, he is obviously going to start off in a loop because, right from the outset, you can see the director putting those little memorable incidents into his walk to his room mate’s bedroom on campus so the audience can pick up on these anchor points for the next time around... which is obviously why they’re there. However, rather than just run with that, Landon very quickly moves you into the next phase of the movie where some other freaky stuff starts happening and... yeah, the beauty of this movie is that, while it still very much uses a repeat structure to tell its story, it doesn’t do it in as static a way as the first and every time you think you’ve got the hang of how the movie is going to go for the rest of the running time, he manages to pull in another slightly different element and this keeps things fresh throughout the whole of picture, I’m glad to say. He even, at one point, manages to bring an audio element in from the first film,  just for a second or two, which acts as a kind of sound flashback to remind the audience of what the next part of a specific cycle should be, without having to add in a visual element to go with it... which impressed me greatly, I must say.

So I don’t want to give away too much here but, yes, you will find out exactly how (if not yet why) the incident in the first film took place and, although in some ways it would have been nice not to have to peek behind that curtain, the catalyst for all this stuff is a story element which has a lot of use to trigger different outcomes throughout the film so... I guess what I’m saying is, if they had to do a sequel, well this one is definitely a good way of solving certain problems. Also, it’s nice to see actors playing very specific character stereotypes in the first movie being given a chance to play their same characters in a different way at certain points. So there’s a lot on offer if you liked the first one and are happy that this isn’t just a repeat. And that includes the opening Univeral logo too... which was in a repeat loop at the opneing of the first movie but for this one... yeah, I'm not giving that away here either.

The film is pure fun from start to end and, surprisingly perhaps, manages to also be quite moving in certain moments. There were tears in my eyes during a specific scene and that’s just not the kind of emotional level that you would normally expect from something that, on the surface, masquerades as just another teenage Hollywood slasher movie. Like the first one, this movie has a lot of heart with the kind of strong, moral centre you’d not necessarily expect to be witness to in this kind of cinematic territory. And once again we have Bear McCreary picking up on the themes and ideas he used on the score to the first movie and expanding on them, enhancing the emotions just as you would hope. He does another great job here and I just wish this sequel score was put out on a proper CD instead of a low quality electronic download (at time of writing this article... I’ve still got my fingers crossed for some kind of physical release in the near future).

So, yeah, I managed to get through this review completely spoiler free, it looks like but, if you are reading this and are thinking of seeing the movie, please make sure you stay through the first part of the end credits. There’s a mid-post credits scene here and it’s fairly lengthy, explains the not so common sensical ending a little better (although I’m still a little baffled by the mechanics of the resolution scene... need to see it again). This sequence also sets up a much bigger picture for the third movie which, given the identity of a character unmasked early on in the film and which at first I thought might be a loose end the writer had forgotten about, might mean that the third film in the series (which I’m very much hoping is inevitable now) will have a much bigger scope to the first two. We shall see.

In the meantime, if you’ve not seen the first film then don’t see this one yet (and in fact don’t even watch the trailer) as it reveals the end of the first movie in a handy recap sequence. So go watch that once first because... well... it’s kind of brilliant. If, however, you’re already an admirer of the first film then Happy Death Day 2U definitely doesn’t fall too short of what your best idea of a version of a continuation of the story could be, I suspect and, frankly, it’s a fun ride all the way through. So go see it.

The Cloverfield Paradox

Mostly Armless

The Cloverfield Paradox
USA 2018 Directed by Julius Onah
Paramount Pictures

Warning: Yeah... this one’s going to go right into
spoiler territory very quickly. You have been warned.

Okay, so... originally entitled God Particle, The Cloverfield Paradox is another ‘Clovered up’ movie which fits around the previous two Cloverfield pieces to give us a tale which actually, in some ways, goes a good deal of the way to explaining the cause of the events in them... and probably any others that come after it too. Although, with the information gleaned from this one, there probably doesn't need to be any further movies made in the cycle, to be honest as, well... this one seems to wrap it all up.

The film stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw (so brilliant in Miss Sloane, reviewed here) as Hamilton, a physicist who specialises in all that large Hadron Collider stuff you hear about from CERN. The film starts off in the not too far future with her making the decision to leave her husband on Earth, for what they hope will only be 6 months, in order to conduct experiments in smashing particles together on a space station orbiting the planet, where that is perceived as being less dangerous for everyone else. This is hastily undertaken with the object of creating a new energy source as various countries are in ‘oil wars’ with each other to take ownership of this rapidly diminishing resource.

So, yeah, from there we jump via the opening credits, ushering in Bear McCreary’s cool new score and with a similar typographic design to 10 Cloverfield Lane, to two years later when Hamilton and her fellow astronauts, played by a cast which includes such luminaries as Daniel Brühl, Chris O'Dowd and Ziyi Zhang, are still up in space trying to end the world’s escalating problems. And then, of course, everyone's worst nightmare is realised when the thing that they've has been trying to get right for the previous couple of years actually works. Particles collide and the Cloverfield space station is victim to what a pop culture scientist scaremonger on Earth has been referring to as The Cloverfield Paradox... not that there actually seems to be much of a paradox in this move but, you know, you can’t have everything.

From here on out the film starts getting both interesting and plain B-movie cream crackers, depending on whether you find yourself buying into the suspense of the situation or laughing uncontrollably at some of the 'bug nuts craziness' on show here. Or possibly, you know, a mixture of the two... which is how I reacted.

Okay so, for example, a scene where a hitherto unknown character just materialises inside the walls and wiring of the space station and has to be cut free of the all the various wires and pipes that are penetrating her body is pretty cool. Especially when we find out that she knows the crew but they don’t know her.

On the other hand, a wall metamorphosing itself and trying to pull Chris O’Dowd into it and then slicing off his arm perfectly, with absolutely no pain, no blood and no need for cauterising... that was pretty unique and just the silly side of funny, I have to confess. Especially when the crew later capture the arm wandering around on its own, put it in a box, realise it’s trying to communicate with them and then throw it a pen so it can write them a note. Yes, this happens, I’m not making it up... you aren’t in a 1930s Hollywood B-movie here... this is bang up-to-date movie making on display, not The Beast With Five Fingers, apparently. What’s even better is that it writes that they should cut open one of their fellow crew members. That’s okay because, when all the worms from the lab went missing, they took over the body of one of the team somehow and then exploded out from him in a little homage, in some ways, to the original ALIEN movie. So... hmm, yeah. Luckily for them, their essential missing giro which helped run their particle collider happens to have somehow materialised inside this guy’s body too... so, good for them.

Yeah, okay the film is quite ludicrous and you will probably point and ridicule it at some point in your viewing experience but it’s never boring and it did keep me guessing/entertained for a while. There are a fair few problems with it though...

One of these is with the fact that none of these shenanigans where the crew are getting attacked by their own ship in various ways make a lick of sense, even when you throw the Large Hadron Collider into the equation. How did Chris O’ Dowd’s arm know what to write, for instance. This is probably my biggest obstacle within the film, to be honest.

The other big problem is that this is set in the Earth’s future, whereas it’s implied that the previous movies weren’t in that time shift at all. That being said, though, it is kinda implied that the particle experimentation also effects time as well as various multiversal dimensions and so it’s conceivable (and highly probable, I suspect) that this event set up a similar set of various parallel worlds, one of which is our Earth as it was in the past, allowing ‘things’ that go slither in the night to touch down on our increasingly unstable planet... one of which is presumably our world as it was in the time of the first two movies.

So yeah, in those terms at least, the film finally answers the questions, albeit in no real detail (but who needs that?) as to where the monsters from Cloverfield (reviewed here) and 10 Cloverfield Lane (reviewed here) came from (or rather, how they came to be here in the first place). Which is good enough from me.

Amid all this cheesiness, though, we have some genuinely nice performances, some interesting shot set ups, nicely choreographed sequences and it’s all held together quite well by McCreary’s intense and never knowingly winking score, adding a much needed sense of gravitas (and indeed, gravity) to the film to stop it becoming too comedic when the script really is not doing itself any favours. Probably the least effective of the Cloverfield series of movies but certainly not without relevance and definitely something which, mostly, doesn’t let the side down. Probably only watch this one if you’ve seen the previous two, though. Or you might not want to watch the others.

Score - A Film Music Documentary + Score - A Film Music Documentary... The Interviews

The Winds Of Score

Score - A Film Music Documentary
USA 2016 Directed by Matt Schrader
Epicleff Media Blu Ray Zone A

plus

Score - A Film Music Documentary
The Interviews - Educational Edition
by Matt Schrader
Createspace
ISBN: 978-1974367412
A NUTS4R2 TWO-IN-ONE REVIEW

“… the really simple brass ‘brahms’ of Inception. Now, when Chris (Nolan) and I did those, they were a story point, an absolute story point. They were in the script. And then they sort of became ubiquitous, in a funny way, in trailer music. People were just sort of using them as transitional pieces. So the idea that they actually tell a story got lost. They’re just a sound effect. So their meaning got distorted and so there’s a sort of misuse of that.”
Hans Zimmer.


Score - A Film Music Documentary is something I didn’t think I’d get to see over here. I’d just assumed it would be one of those films that didn’t get a UK release and would sink without a trace with no other venue to watch it on other than the slight possibility of a dodgy download somewhere. However, I was very pleased to find that there is this Blu Ray release in the US (it’s also been released in the UK but only as a DVD release for some strange reason). I was also surprised to learn that there is an accompanying educational edition, book companion to the film with full length transcripts of the many interviews conducted for this... about 90% of which doesn’t seem to have actually made it into the film so, actually, it’s a very valuable resource independent of the actual documentary itself. I was delighted to be presented with this on my 50th birthday by a friend earlier in the year, before I even knew this tome existed.

There is also, as it happens, a release of Ryan Taubert’s score for this film but, alas, it’s only available as an electronic download and not as a proper CD edition so I probably won’t get to hear it away from the movie. I really do fail to see how a movie about film scores would ignore a segment of the fan base for such things and not release it in a high quality presentation on the best available media. I guess it says something about the studios who control these properties that they’re a little out of touch, I guess.

So, anyway, this really is not a bad documentary and, although it deals primarily with the state of scoring or the film industry now, it’s actually quite unique in its own way because it interviews a lot of the ‘now’ composers who are the ‘new guard’ including some of my absolute favourites like Bear McCreary, Brian Tyler Hans Zimmer and Marco Beltrami. I mean, there’s a whole host of names in here and chances are that, even if movie music isn’t your thing, you’ve heard at least a few scores by each of the many interviewees here. And it was certainly nice to finally be able to put faces to the names I have adorning the, literally thousands, of film score discs I have lining every wall and alcove of my immediate environment.

Although it’s been said by some people that the film only deals with modern scoring from the 1960s and onwards, I think that’s a little unfair as the documentary is only an hour and a half long (personally, I would have liked it to be at least four hours) and there are some deliberate nods to many of the composers who have made landmark scores in the past. Admittedly, there are less golden age composers than I thought would have made the grade (where are Korngold and Tiomkin?) but the film does acknowledge certain aspects of the past with dedicated segments to composers such as Alfred Newman, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams although, of those, the only one still living, Johnny Williams, is not actually interviewed for this movie. That being said, I’m kind of glad that the overall focus of this one is a little slanted to modern composers and their methods/practices because, frankly, we’ve already seen a lot of the other stuff countless times... I think interviews with people like Christopher Young, Junkie XL and the great Hans Zimmer are far more valuable at the moment.

The movie opens with... I think it was Marco Beltrami... demonstrating a dying piano way up on a deserted hill which is connected to a studio by loads of wires which react to the wind. So the wind and environment are helping create the musical texture and, as he says, the notes travel through the wire faster than the wind carries them so you kind of hear the echo of the notes first. This is a great opening hook to start the film off with. It then shows the importance of score by using snippets of the Rocky films under Bill Conti’s famous ‘getting stronger’ theme and really gets the message home for an audience who are perhaps unused to contemplating such things (although whether any of them would sit still for a movie about film scores is anybody’s guess).

The documentary has a number of interview snippets with various composers, mostly new guys although there are some people like Quincy Jones also added into the mix and it’s an extremely valuable bunch of excerpts for the modern film score afficionado, it has to be said. There are also numerous, valuable clips of the various composers either conducting or overseeing the recordings of the films from various scoring sessions, which makes for some interesting watching. Especially when they show the cues being performed in one half of the screen and the accompanying visuals for such movies as Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (scored by Joe Kraemer) and Casino Royale (scored by David Arnold) in the other half.

It’s also nice that you have legends like Hans Zimmer and his contemporaries paying their respects and expressing their admiration of some of the past ‘greats’ of film score composers such as John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. It’s just nice to see that the importance of these people is so well appreciated still. Plus, a good visual representation of how leitmotif works, as seen when notes of recurring motifs are highlighted during sections of Howard Shore’s score to The Fellowship Of The Ring.

There are also some very interesting choices of interviewee such as a music psychologist, Siu-Lan Tan, who talks about the way music effects us. How music can be delivered directly into the specific reward centre of the brain, the same place where sensations such as chocolate and sex are processed (ha, I knew it). Actually, I found her the most fascinating of the subjects in a way and I am now on a mission to seek out and read her books about this specific subject.

It’s also nice that there’s a lot of fun stuff in here too and if you want to see Bear McCreary rocking the Hurdy Gurdy and talking about the history of the instrument and why he used it on the TV show Black Sails, this is the place to do that. Indeed, a longer take of him playing the instrument and talking about it is one of the very nice extras accompanying the film on the Blu Ray and DVD release of Score - A Film Music Documentary.

The book, Score - A Film Music Documentary: The Interviews, is available separately and, rather than just reiterating all the great stuff found in the movie, it actually gives you way more information when it comes to each composer and their attitude and approach to the art and craft of scoring. There are a couple of slight niggles with this volume though.

One is found in the very first words of the first chapter. Each chapter comprises an interview with a specific composer and starts off by listing a few of the scores they are known for plus a list of awards, nominations and other musical affiliations but I was quite annoyed to see that the first score listed for David Arnold was for Independence Day - Resurgence, the sequel to a film Arnold actually did write the score for. Alas, as I’m sure most fans of film music will be able to tell you, the score for this sequel was actually by Thomas Wander and Howard Kloser. Now, I don’t know if maybe Arnold did actually do some work on this and his score was rejected but I’m guessing that this would surely have been known before this book went to print. So, yeah, that’s a problem. When the same kind of error occurs later in the book for Tom Holkenborg, it’s at least understandable as I think the book may have already been published before he was taken off of Justice League and Danny Elfman took over scoring duties on that one.

The other slight problem I have with this book is the amount of typos. There are absolutely loads of sentences which start off with a lower case letter dotted around the book. At least, I hope these are typos and not some bizarre attempt to change the way English grammar works, at any rate.

In spite of all that though, the volume is something which I think most film score junkies will appreciate. It’s true there are some things you expect certain composers to talk about... so included in David Arnold’s section is his enthusiasm for using Monty Norman’s James Bond theme at various points in a Bond movie and director James Cameron talks about the importance of the temp score and working with James Horner. However, there’s also a lot of stuff which people may find less familiar and it’s in these words by the people in the front line that you gain the real knowledge from.

For instance, Quincy Jones starts off talking about how hard it was to be a black composer in 1960s Hollywood. But it’s interesting to learn how he'd make a conscious effort to get away from representational music (what we would call ‘Mickey Mousing’) and to score something more in touch with mood and feeling/setting (something which Bernard Herrmann used to do, I believe). Similarly, the composing team of Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) and Atticus Ross talk about completely coming at the score from a soundscape kind of sensibility to ensure that each section is appropriate for the mood and tone of a picture and scene. Being an admirer of their score for the US version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I found their interview section very refreshing and informative.

It’s also interesting to read about the contradictions between composers talking about their work too. Some think the sole job of the score is to just illustrate what’s already on the screen but others, such as Hans Zimmer, more correctly talk about the music enhancing rather than supporting the film. Filling in bits to give the audience emotional direction, for example.

Another interesting point is when the great Bear McCreary makes a really good case for why composers have to use orchestrators and why it’s actually, in the long run, more preferable to the lifestyle than doing it on your own. It’s something I’ve never been quite comfortable with in terms of the artistry of the profession but Bear more than justifies this practice here. He also talks about how you should put the directors in a very comfortable state of mind and connect with them to have the most productive dialogue in the first place.

On the other hand another of my favourite modern film score composers, Brian Tyler, is not a fan of letting what he writes go to orchestrators and mixers and, although he kinda admits it’s a necessity, he will sometimes go and remix it all again afterwords anyway. He also cherishes the imperfections of timing and performance because that's how the music feels "alive and original" which is nice. When you see a concert I’ve always been conscious that this is the only way you will ever see it performed exactly a certain way... no repeats, it’s always going to sound different every time. It’s interesting to see Tyler celebrating this natural phenomenon as being extremely beneficial to the final performance recording of the art form.

And then there’s Garry Marshall. Now, it could be that I was reading his section with the wrong tone but he seemed to come across, at least to me, as either a complete nutter or a total idiot. For example, if he wants a sequence in a film to seem like something is important... he’ll just put in a song by U2. I don’t know, maybe he’s just got a really great sense of humour and I was reading it incorrectly but... yeah... if I were a composer I might have second thoughts about collaborating with him on the strength of his words here, that’s for sure.

However, the book is, as I said, a really useful and insightful tome, in spite of the occasional piece of misinformation and rampant typos . An excellent companion piece to Score - A Film Music Documentary. If you’re a fan of the art of motion picture music then chances are you would have already seen/read this one or added it to your list. If not, then you really should and both the book and the film are certainly good for people who have no idea about the art and want to get up to speed. I’m really happy to have both the Blu Ray and the paperback and these get a big, raised conductor’s baton thumbs up from me. They’re certainly noteworthy.

You can read my review of a Hans Zimmer concert here and a review of a Brian Tyler concert here.

Best Scores Of 2017

 
NUTS4R2s Top
Fifteen Scores of 2017

Okay... so I’ve been fairly ruthless again this year with my selections. If the film was released first run either at the cinema or ‘straight to home’ releases then it’s eligible on my list, as long as the score got a CD release. If it only got a vinyl release or, worse still, some kind of rubbishy electronic download (okay, those two formats are almost as bad as each other these days), then it’s not going to be on here.

Also, no archival releases are on here. As with most recent years, there have been some absolutely fantastic CDs of great, past scores in 2018, most of which would easily win out against the newer ones... so it’s not really fair to let them be on this list.

Anyway, here’s are my picks in reverse (aka ascending) order...

15. The Limehouse Golem by Johan Söderqvist
Söderqvist wrote a pretty cool thriller score which included some nice string orchestrations for this Victorian mystery tale. I could also hear some very specific influences from Jerry Goldsmith making their way into the film (although I don’t remember if those sections I’m thinking of made it onto this album). This CD was a very limited release from Varese Sarabande but... well... at least we eventually got a CD version. You can read my original review for this movie here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/the-limehouse-golem.html

14. Wind River by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
Wind River had a very quiet and contained score, to match the icy visuals of this stark chiller. Everything seems like it’s a lesson in restraint as the score keeps sounding like it’s going to burst forth in anger at any moment. It also contains some vocal passages which I really didn’t like at first but which have grown on me and work as a part of the stand alone listening experience. My review of the accompanying film can be found here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/wind-river.html

13. Pirates of the Caribbean - Salazar’s Revenge/Dead Men Tell No Tales by Geoff Zanelli
Probably the best of the poor crop of sequels to the original, much better movie, Zanelli’s score uses the themes developed by Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer throughout and, it has to be said, he does so in a much less subtle but certainly way more entertaining manner than most of the sequel scores manage. I was pleased that this didn’t jettison the soundscape developed over the years and was delighted with the results. My review for the ‘not as good as the score’ movie can be found here.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/pirates-of-caribbean-5.html

12. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women by Tom Howe
This is a lovely selection of cues from an amazing movie. When you have a dialogue based film with a script that sparkles the way this one does, without relying on any action sequences, some composers are better off just letting their music get out of the way as a support to the visuals. However, Tom Howe provides a rich accompaniment which raises the emotional highs and lows of the characters perfectly. It was an absolute nightmare to get hold of this CD, for some reason. After my third supplier told me it had somehow been lost in the post (How, when every other thing I ordered this year arrived safe and sound, did three copies of this from three different suppliers get lost in transit?) I despaired of ever getting to hear this before it went out of print but, thankfully, it’s here now and worth the wait. My movie review is here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/professor-marston-and-wonder-women.html

11. Happy Death Day by Bear McCreary
This is one of a few movies with scores by the wonderful McCreary in it this year, for what turned out to be a kind of teen slasher remake of Groundhog Day, no less. Bear’s score matches the slow burn shock of waking up every day and I love how the first four cues on the album, titled Day One through to Day Four, have similar, chilling, slow building openings to the tracks to enhance the familiarity of where the main protagonist wakes up every morning. The film wasn’t without some minor flaws but the same couldn’t be said for the score, which is absolutely marvelous.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/happy-death-day.html

10. Dunkirk by Hans Zimmer, Lorne Balfe and Benjamin Wallfisch
I’m not the greatest fan of Christopher Nolan’s, admittedly epic feeling, movies but I do like the scores on some of them and this one is no exception (thankfully, it’s no Inception, either). The film is quite intense in the way it piles on the suspense but I think, if you took away this score which, it seems to me, is doing all the work, then the whole film would collapse. So a score which, I suspect, saved the move in some ways. As reviewed here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/dunkirk.html

9. Spider-Man Homecoming by Michael Giacchino
The first of two Giacchino scores in my top fifteen this year is one which I wasn’t overstruck on when I first heard it (asides from the immediate impact of the Marvel Logo music being a new version of the old cartoon series theme). However, it’s really grown on me and it’s had a fair few spins this year. I reviewed the film here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/spider-man-homecoming.html

8. Blade Runner 2049 by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch
This unwanted sequel to the greatest movie ever made really missed the mark in a big way but I was really interested in seeing what the director’s more recent collaborator, Jóhann Jóhannson, was going to do with the score. Alas, he was replaced fairly late in the game with Zimmer and Wallfisch, both excellent composers in their own right but almost every decision about this film seemed ‘off’ to me. However, this final score, with an overpriced limited edition soundtrack which then turned out to be not so limited after all, is an okay listen, although it never quite seems to get to the heights of sonic empathy it really sounds like it wants to in terms of relating to the original Vangelis score for the original classic. The CD album suffers from the placement of songs dropped into the score which doesn’t help maintain a steady atmosphere in places. My review of Blade Runner 2049 is here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/blade-runner-2049.html


7. War of the Planet of the Apes by Michael Giacchino
My second Giacchino score is his second score for the Planet Of The Apes series but, it’s also the first one of the modern films, as far as I am concerned, that doesn’t sound out of place with the stylistic leanings of the majority of the scores from the original, five films from the late 1960s and early 1970s. This one has some really great stuff in it including a kind of march for the apes to counter some of the rich, emotional stuff at other points in the movie. I reviewed this one here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/war-for-planet-of-apes.html

6. A Ghost Story by Daniel Hart
About the worst thing you can say about this truly interesting score by Daniel Hart for this amazing film is it’s too short. I could quite happily have listened to a double CD of this stuff. It even has a not unlistenable song on it which carries a lot of the emotional weight at times. My look at A Ghost Story is here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/a-ghost-story.html

5. Shin Godzilla by Shiro Sagisu and Akira Ifikube
The score from Shin Godzilla is a far greater achievement than the actual movie itself, as far as I’m concerned. Shiro Sagisu’s new material blends in perfectly with the new recordings of Akira Ifikube’s melodies from some of the original films and it’s a pure joy to listen to this. The CD is a bit pricey, as it comes from Japan but, worth every penny as it’s been in my player quite a bit since it arrived. I recently reviewed this one here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/shin-godzilla-aka-shin-gojira.html

4. La La Land by Justin Hurwitz
Despite what I said in my initial review, this film has both a strong score and a pretty good, if small, range of songs in it too. When I’d listened to the songs a second time, after writing my review, I realised just how great they were and what I’d been missing. The album had a strange release in that it was split, unnaturally, into two albums... one for mainly score and one for mainly songs... which is an expensive way to do it, especially when I suspect most people, myself included, were going to recompile it into a proper album reflecting the combined order in film sequence. Then, towards the end of the year, a third double CD in a box was released with even more stuff and alternate material which is finally, more or less, what should have been released in the first place. My slightly wrong headed review of this movie is here.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/la-la-land.html

3. Jackie by Mica Levi
I was absolutely gutted this music by relative newcomer Mica Levi didn’t win the Oscar for best score last year. Well, at least it got nominated, I guess. Like her earlier Under The Skin score, this one is just pure genius and may take you to emotional places you didn’t realise you had. Any other year, this may well have been my number one choice but, as you can see below, the competition for the top spot was tough in 2017.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/jackie.html

2. King Arthur - Legend of the Sword by Daniel Pemberton
Well, this is one of those ‘not so rare as you may think’ instances when a quite terrible movie has a truly stupendous score which takes on a life of its own as a stand alone listen. This is right up there with Pemberton’s equally cool score for the same director’s recent reboot of The Man From U.N.C.L.E and it basically feels like... well... medieval rock n’ roll. The percussion and various other effects like the use of breathing as a musical instrument really serves to give a fresh and ‘beyond toe tapping’ suite of musical delights. I gave this one a lot of play and you can read my response to the less than stellar movie it’s trying its best to support here.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/king-arthur-legend-of-sword.html

1. Wonder Woman by Rupert Gregson-Williams
I couldn’t believe I missed just how brilliant Rupert Gregson-Williams’ score for Wonder Woman is on my first listen through at the cinema. I sure as hell twigged it when I heard it away from the images which inspired it, though. This is a case of my number one film from 2017 and the score from the same both taking the top spot. While Gregson-Williams occasionally uses Hans Zimmer’s Wonder Woman theme from Batman VS Superman (to very good effect... less is more) he also introduced numerous rich, extremely emotional and, for sure, powerful themes which tend to sweep me off my feet every time I listen to it. In fact, when I was walking around London with earphones on and listening to this thing, I began to start tearing up exactly the same way that I do when I see the movie (actually, tearing up may be a bit of an understatement). A truly soulful set of cues which, considering just how much good music has been left off the CD, really needs an expanded 2-3 disc release from one of the boutique soundtrack labels like La La Land or Intrada. This disc has been played to death by me this year and I suspect it will be getting a lot of spins by me over the next decade or more. My review is here.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/wonder-woman.html