CD Review: IDENTITY THIEF soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 02/24/2013
IDENTITY THIEF soundtrack | ©2013 La La Land Records

Ask Danny Ocean and David Holmes, and they’ll tell you that r & b funk goes with comic crime like a blowtorch and a safe, or in the case of IDENTITY THIEF‘s Internet skills and some poor shmuck’s I.D. There’s also no better way to play a sad sack in way over his head in the white trash boonies than a rocking country-western sound, as Danny Elfman more than proved with MIDNIGHT RUN. Both musical caper sounds combine to rambunctiously enjoyable effect for Chris Lennertz, who’s paying far more homage to these styles than scoring a big rip off. Where […]Read On »


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CD Review: LES MISERABLES soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 02/23/2013
LES MISERABLES soundtrack | ©2012 Universal Music

Even when musicals deal with less savory subjects like dueling New York gangs or starving English orphans, there’s always a romantic layer of production polish to give our delicate sensibilities a comfort zone from the muck and grime of real life, but by immersing viewers in a sewer of excrement along with its lovestruck duets, LES MISERABLES shouts aloud that it’s a stage-to-screen game changer. There’s an unheard level of primal scream singing here that throws us into the gutter along with Victor Hugo’s period Parisians, who sing about the lack of justice (or the psychotic belief in it) for […]Read On »


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CD Review: HOOSIERS soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER
HOOSIERS soundtrack | ©2012 Intrada Records

Jerry Goldsmith was always pushing the musical boundaries of every genre he scored, sometimes applying seemingly anachronistic approaches where only a symphony would seem right. Perhaps no movie is a bigger case in points, or passes for that matter, then 1986’s HOOSIERS, in which Goldsmith applied the kind of synthesizers he’d most often used for sci-fi to the holy Midwestern sport of basketball. Along with Vangelis’ Oscar winning “Chariots of Fire,” Goldsmith’s Oscar-nominated work here would help change the game of scoring sports movies, creating a soundtrack as venerated as his similarly, boldly stylistic work on PLANET OF THE APES […]Read On »


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Interview: Atli Örvarsson ain’t scoring no HANSEL AND GRETEL fairy tale

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 02/19/2013
HANSEL AND GRETEL WITCH HUNTERS soundtrack | ©2013 La La Land Records

More than ever, Hollywood is behaving like some hyperactive, post-hip kid tapping a pencil in history class or being put to bedtime, envisioning those usually boring world changers and fairy tale cherubs as pumped-up, sword-swinging, axe-hacking and shotgun-toting avengers who are anything but the stuff of their parents’ musty books. The result of these absurdist revisionisms have given film scores some memorable monster mashes, as heavy metal guitars, ripping electric percussion and blasting orchestras have jammed with the far more sedate fiddles of Abraham Lincoln’s prairie, or the daintily plucked harps of Lewis C. Carroll’s Victorian England. Now it’s time […]Read On »


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CD Review: CONAN THE BARBARIAN soundtrack – 3 discs

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 01/10/2013
CONAN soundtrack | ©2012 Intrada Records

What is best in life? How about getting just about every note of one of the greatest film scores ever written, as spread over three CD’s for 1982’s score to CONAN THE BARBARIAN. Ever since the 1982 CONAN THE BARBARIAN LP on MCA (also included here), just about every label from Varese to Milan has been trying to solve The Riddle of Steel with fits and starts of additional music, most recently with an admirably inclusive re-performance by Tadlow Records. But it’s Intrada that has gloriously mustered the full scope and lusty power of the Might that is Poledouris, his […]Read On »


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CD Review: A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM soundtrack (1,000 expanded edition)

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 01/07/2013
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM (1,000 expanded edition) soundtrack | ©2012 Quartet Records

In the annals of musical comedy theater, few productions remain as joyfully historic as 1962’s A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM wherein WEST SIDE STORY composer / lyricist Stephen Sondheim and writers Burt Shevelove (“No No Nanette”) and Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H) drew from the farces of the ancient playwright Plautus for a toga-switching, cross-dressing, door-slamming farce that showed Romans did indeed have a sense of humor when not weren’t staging far-less funny fights in the Coliseum. Hilariously adapted for the screen in 1966 by Richard Lester, the king of such antic English films as HELP! and […]Read On »


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CD Review: LOS ANGELES, 1937 (1,000 edition)

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 01/06/2013
LOS ANGELES, 1937 soundtrack | ©2012 Perseverance Records

As Peter Best was to The Beatles, Phillip Lambro is to film scoring history, the musician who could have been a contender if only it was felt that he had the chops to accompany an iconic act. In Lambro’s case, that historically elusive prize was 1975’s CHINATOWN, whose soundtrack he’d labored on before director Roman Polanski and producer Robert Evans summarily tossed the score after a teen-filled test screening (a similar fate that happened to Gabriel Yared years later on “Troy”), leaving Jerry Goldsmith a scant ten days to whip out what’s arguably one of the greatest scores ever written […]Read On »


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CD Review: WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HELEN soundtrack (1,000 edition)

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 01/05/2013
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN? soundtrack | ©2012 Quartet Records

By 1971, the question asked by most over-the-hill Hollywood starlets was “Whatever happened to?” or “What’s the matter?” as their onscreen romantic glamour was traded in for roles as homicidal harpies. In the latter query about WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HELEN, it’s Debbie Reynolds’ dancing teacher who wants to know what the heck is up with her partner Shelly Winters when their dance school for Shirley Temple wannabes starts to hit the bloody skids. Devilish camp humor was a big part of the appeal of watching Grande Dames shrieking whilst holding blunt instruments, “hagsploitation” that marked the studio swan song […]Read On »


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CD Review: HAWK THE SLAYER soundtrack (1,000 edition)

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 01/04/2013
HAWK THE SLAYER soundtrack | ©2012 Buysoundtrax

There’s perhaps no finer smell of cult cheese then an 80s so-bad-it’s good sword and sorcery movie, a genre that Buysoundtrax seems to love above all other labels as they follow up THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER with this hilariously entertaining gem that started off that decade. But where Albert Pyun’s movie drew from the Hammer ranks by getting VAMPIRE CIRCUS‘ David Whitaker to compose a classically symphonic score, HAWK THE SLAYER director Terry Marcel had LUST FOR A VAMPIRE‘s Harry Robertson (who also produced the picture itself) melds disco with an orchestra for a score of immense guilty pleasures. […]Read On »


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CD Review: CONDORMAN soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 01/03/2013
CONDORMAN soundtrack | ©2012 Intrada Records

For a studio who’s goofier late 70s / early 80s live action efforts involved a cat from outer space, an astronaut in King Arthur’s court and a midnight treasure hunt that tried to rope audiences in by offering a real prize, perhaps no oddball old regime premise was as face-palming as a cartoonist jumping off the Eiffel Tower in a bird suit. But if there was one composer who could turn this kind of Clouseau-esque bumbling into a class act, then it was Henry Mancini, whose score for 1981s CONDORMAN had a feeling of swooping, bold comedic adventure that’s made […]Read On »


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