Film Score Daily: Film Score Friday 6/26/15

Film music fans around the world were shocked on Monday to learn of the death of composer James Horner at age 61, in a plane crash. The son of Oscar-winning production designer Harry Horner, James Horner had a rise to success that can only be described as meteoric -- his first major feature, the period gangster drama The Lady in Red, was released when he was only 25, and three years later he scored two back-to-back smash hits, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and 48 Hrs., which rapidly put him on the A-list of Hollywood composers. Over the course of his career he earned ten Academy Award nominations and two Oscars, both for his work on the international blockbuster Titanic. Titanic and Avatar, his third film for director James Cameron, are the two top highest grossing films of all-time, both in the United States and around the world. But just as importantly, the long list of directors with whom he worked on more than one occasion indicates the regard with which he was held in the film industry -- Jean-Jacques Annaud, Michael Apted, James Cameron, Martin Campbell, Michael Dinner, Mel Gibson, Walter Hill, Ron Howard, Joe Johnston, Jonathan Kaplan, Nicholas Meyer, Alan J. Pakula, Vadim Perelman, Wolfgang Peterson, Phil Alden Robinson, Peter Yates, Steven Zaillian and Edward Zwick. He remained musically active up to the very end, with a concert piece, Pas de Deux, just released on CD, and a new score, for the boxing drama Southpaw, due in theaters next month. We will feature a more detailed obituary of this immensely popular composer in an upcoming column, but for now, our condolences go out to his friends and family.

Intrada announced two new limited edition CDs this week.

Chris Columbus, who went on to direct such blockbusters as Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, and the first two Harry Potter films, made his feature directorial debut with the teen comedy ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING, starring Elisabeth Shue as a babysitter who takes her charges (including Keith Coogan and future Rent star Anthony Rapp) into Chicago to help rescue a friend (Penelope Ann Miller). The original score was composed by Michael Kamen, fresh off his breakthrough hit Lethal Weapon, and while much of it was dialed out from the final film, the Intrada CD has plenty of unused Kamen music as well as the film's set-piece musical number "Babysitter Blues."

Their other new release is an expanded edition for the score to director George Miller's THE AVIATOR. The great majority of film fans are likely to be utterly baffled by the phrase "director George Miller's The Aviator," particularly since it's both a different George Miller and a different The Aviator than most moviegoers are used to. Like his more famous namesake, the director of The Road Warrior, Aviator's Miller was an Australian filmmaker who had a breakout, sequel-spawning hit in the early 1980s -- The Man from Snowy River. The Aviator, released in 1985, was a period survival drama based on the novel by aviation specialist Ernest K. Gann (The High and the Mighty, Fate Is the Hunter), with Christopher Reeve as a pilot who crash lands on a remote mountain with a young heiress (Rosanna Arquette). The film's melodic orchestral score was composed by Dominic Frontiere (The Outer Limits, Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold, The Stunt Man), and was originally released on LP by Varese Sarabande, later released on CD by La-La Land in a somewhat expanded version paired with Frontiere's hit Hang 'Em High. The Intrada Aviator is a remastered and substantially expanded edition featuring extra cues and previously omitted musical elements.

Varese Sarabande announced their next to limited edition CD Club releases, which are expected to begin shipping next week.

The monster comedy Gremlins, from screenwriter Chris Columbus, executive producer Steven Spielberg and director Joe Dante, was one of the biggest hits of 1984 (and was rumored to be one of the films that inspired the PG-13 rating, instituted later that summer) so a sequel was inevitable, but it was six years later when the creatures returned to the screen in GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH. Original Gremlins stars Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates returned and joined an ace supporting cast including John Glover, Robert Prosky, Robert Picardo, Dick Miller and Christopher Lee. The sequel was nowhere near the box-office success of the original, but Dante's distinctive blend of thrills and film-centric comedy was at its peak with this lavish effort, whose reputation has blossomed in the years since. Dante's regular composer Jerry Goldsmith returned for the sequel with an energetic score that embellished the film's many moods with new themes as well as his popular melodies from the original Gremlins, and, as in the original, contributed an on-screen cameo ("Did she say there was a rat?"). Varese released the original soundtrack on CD with a well-chosen 39 minutes of score, while their new, 25th Anniversary release features more than a dozen previously unreleased Goldsmith cues.

Richard Preston's article "Crisis in the Hot Zone," a real-life Andromeda Strain/Satan Bug published in the New Yorker in 1992, helped make the Ebola virus internationally feared and famous, and his best-selling book-length expansion The Hot Zone gave the true story even more notoriety. Ridley Scott was announced to direct a film version, possibly to star Robert Redford and Jodie Foster, but in the decades since the project has still gone unmade, while a competing Ebola-esque thriller OUTBREAK, directed by Wolfgang Peterson (at the start of his unexpected morphing into Roland Emmerich), raced to the screen in 1995 with an impressive cast including Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Cuba Gooding Jr., Donald Sutherland, Cuba Gooding Jr., and an uncredited, film-stealing cameo by the late, great J.T. Walsh. James Newton Howard composed the exciting score, released at the time on CD by Varese with, as was common in that era, only 30 minutes of score. The CD Club's two-disc Deluxe Edition features a whopping 103 minutes of Howard music.

The latest CDs from Quartet are an expanded version of Pino Donaggio's score for the 1985 romantic drama L'ATTENZIONE, and a re-release of John Williams' offbeat, monothematic and source-dominated score Robert Altman's modern-day 1973 reworking of Raymond Chandler's THE LONG GOODBYE.

What Happened, Miss Simone? - Additional Music: Joe McGinty, Joshua L. Pearson

COMING SOON

June 30
Broken Age - Peter McConnell - Sumthing Else
Gremlins 2: The New Batch: 25th Anniversary Edition - Jerry Goldsmith - Varese Sarabande CD Club
Outbreak: The Deluxe Edition - James Newton Howard - Varese Sarabande CD Club
July 10
Minions - Heitor Pereira - Backlot
Modern Times (re-recording) - Charles Chaplin - Naxos
Toy Story - Randy Newman - Disney
The Woman Astronaut - Penka Kouneva - Varese Sarabande
July 17
The Aftermath - John Morgan - Dragon's Domain
Game of Thrones, Season 5 - Ramin Djawadi - Watertower
The Music of Patrick Doyle: Solo Piano - Patrick Doyle - Varese Sarabande
Sharknado 3 - Chris Cano, Chris Ridenhour - Lakeshore
July 24
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Benoit Groulx, Benoit Charest - Varese Sarabande
Pixels - Henry Jackman - Varese Sarabande
Self/Less - Antonio Pinto, Dudu Aram - Varese Sarabande
Southpaw - James Horner - Sony
Wayward Pines - Charlie Clouser - Lakeshore
July 31
Ant-Man - Christophe Beck - Hollywood
I Am Big Bird: The Carol Spinney Story - Varese Sarabande
12 Monkeys [TV] - Trevor Rabin, Paul Linford - Varese Sarabande
August 7
Carny - Robbie Robertson, Alex North - Real Gone
Dark Places - BT, Gregory Tripi - Milan
Pocahontas - Alan Menken - Disney
Shaun the Sheep Movie - Ilan Eshkeri - Silva
August 14
Animals - Ian Hultquist - Phineas Atwood
Dawn Patrol - Joe Kraemer - Phineas Atwood
Luv - Nuno Malo - Phineas Atwood
The Vatican Tapes - Joseph Bishara - Lakeshore
Date Unknown
Canterbury N.2 - Guido & Maurizio DeAngelis - Kronos
The Dovekeepers - Jeff Beal - Varese Sarabande
Edipeon - Stelvio Cipriani - Digitmovies
Il Gigante Di Metropolis - Armando Trovajoli - Kronos
Il Pentito/Rappresaglia - Ennio Morricone - GDM
Indian Summers - Stephen Warbeck - Silva
La Victoire En Chantant/Coup de Tete - Pierre Bachelet - Music Box
L'Araucana: Massacro Degli Dei - Carlo Savina - Kronos
The Long Goodbye (re-release) - John Williams - Quartet
Peccati in Famiglia - Guido & Maurizio DeAngelis - Digitmovies
Ripper Street - Dominik Sherrer - Silva
Spooks: The Greater Good - Dominic Lewis - Silva
Stanno Tutti Benne (Everybody's Fine) - Ennio Morricone - GDM
Trishna - Shigeru Umebayashi - Caldera

THIS WEEK IN FILM MUSIC HISTORY

June 26 - John Greenwood born (1889)

June 26 - Dave Grusin born (1934)

June 26 - George Bassman died (1997)

June 28 - Richard Rodgers born (1902)

June 28 - Bjorn Isfalt born (1942)

June 28 - George Duning's score for the Star Trek episode "Metamorphosis" is recorded (1967)

June 28 - John Scott begins recording his score for North Dalls Forty (1979)

June 29 - Joseph Carl Breil born (1870)

June 29 - Bernard Herrmann born (1911)

June 29 - Ralph Burns born (1922)

June 29 - Mischa Spoliansky died (1985)

June 29 - Bert Shefter died (1999)

June 30 - Stanley Clarke born (1951)

June 30 - Jerry Goldsmith begins recording his score for The Boys from Brazil (1978)

June 30 - Craig Safan begins recording his score for the Amazing Stories episode "The Wedding Ring" (1986)

July 1 - Sigmund Krumgold born (1896)

July 1 - Anton Karas born (1906)

July 1 - Hans Werner Henze born (1926)

July 2 - Jeff Alexander born (1910)

July 2 - Fabio Frizzi born (1951)

July 2 - Miklos Rozsa begins recording his score to Plymouth Adventure (1952)

July 2 - Frederic Talgorn born (1961)

July 2 - Nathan Van Cleave died (1970)

DID THEY MENTION THE MUSIC?

LIKE SUNDAY, LIKE RAIN - Ed Harcourt

'It all doesn’t quite add up and fly, but in its recurrence the bittersweet melody of the title (composed by British musician Ed Harcourt) fills in the emotional voids where the script and the players fall out of rhythm."

Tom Meek, Paste Magazine

"So much of 'Like Sunday, Like Rain' is suffused with such lovely, understated melancholy that it’s a shame when it nudges too hard, as with Reggie’s smarmiest dialogue or the deployment of its gently maddening piano-heavy score. Whaley aims high for this sort of material, but his film, sweet as it is, gets a little too precocious."

Jesse Hassenger, The Onion AV Club

"The film’s repetitive and dour score doesn’t help matters much, and it’s played so often over scenes that would benefit from actual dialogue that it quickly scans as a cop-out, one done to cover up a thin script. Reggie and Eleanor eventually come to bond over music -- Reggie is both math whiz and a cello prodigy, Eleanor’s big secret is that she used to be a musician, too -- but 'Like Sunday, Like Rain' is so out of tune that even those late-breaking attempts at emotion can’t strike a chord."

Kate Erbland, The Dissolve

"Actor-turned-writer/director Frank Whaley employs studied tracking shots and a mind-numbing piano theme to chart Reggie's quasi-romantic relationship with twentysomething Eleanor (Leighton Meester), who's hired by Reggie's cold, wealthy mom (Debra Messing) to be the kid's nanny."

Nick Schager, Village Voice

"Tech credits are adequate, although composer Ed Harcourt’s orchestral score, intended to emphasize Reggie’s musical talent, grows wearying with too many intrusive passages."

Justin Lowe, Hollywood Reporter

OCTOBER GALE - Mischa Chillak

"As in 'Cairo Time,' writer and director Nadda uses location and score to great effect. Cinematographer Jeremy Benning highlights the blues and grays of the frigid lake and overcast sky, and aerial shots of Helen's boat amid rugged granite islands emphasize her isolation. There's an Old Hollywood romanticism to Mischa Chillak's music, underscoring the noirish elements in Nadda's subdued and intimate thriller, where regret is as deadly as a firearm."

Serena Donadoni, Village Voice

"[Patricia] Clarkson plays Helen, a Toronto physician trying to move along her sorrow over her late husband by clearing out the lakeside island cottage the couple shared during their long marriage, and where her husband died in an accident. A hand-held camera and a plaintive piano trot diligently after Helen as she cleans house and flashes back to happier times in the sack with the dear departed, one of whose more winning post-coital habits was to park his used chewing gum on the missus' bare abdomen."

Ella Taylor, NPR

3 HEARTS - Bruno Coulais

"The story’s big coincidence feels contrived; not so the relentlessness of the pair’s desire. Charged by dynamite performances and Bruni [sic] Coulais’s ominous score, this romantic tragedy is more gripping than most thrillers."

Graham Fuller, New York Daily News

"However, Jacquot does overplay his hand sometimes. In particular, Bruno Coulais' score is almost laugh-out-loud overwrought, with its 'Inception'-esque braaaams meant to act as gloomy sonic foreshadowing, but coming off as hokey and wholly out of place. And an intermittent, overly serious voiceover adds nothing to the movie, telling the audience what we already know about the characters and narrative. It's a bit of hand holding the movie doesn't need and gains little from, and counterintuitively works to highlight the artificiality of the film itself."

Kevin Jagernauth, The Playlist

"In a sense, '3 Hearts' is an invitation. Jacquot and the actors invite the audience to feel the story as the characters feel it, and to see, in the usual, flailing mistakes that people make, the movements of a grand destiny. Some will resist the movie’s offer and find the musical score by Bruno Coulais melodramatic, because it rumbles a single ominous chord each time the characters advance toward their destiny. But most of life is melodramatic -- emotional, involving and lacking the dignity of straight drama. '3 Hearts' is life as felt from the inside."

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

"That’s fairly ridiculous, but masterpieces have been fashioned around much less believable plots. Story, however, has never been Jacquot’s strong suit. His best film remains 1995’s 'A Single Girl,' which simply follows a young chambermaid (Virginie Ledoyen) around on her first day at work, dispassionately observing her as she learns the routine and internalizes having just told her boyfriend that she’s pregnant. '3 Heart's gives Jacquot plenty of opportunities to pan sinuously from one face to another, but his visual dexterity -- and Bruno Coulais’ foreboding 'Inception'-style BRAAAAMs on the soundtrack -- are squandered on some of the dopiest machinations ever written."

Mike D'Angelo, The Dissolve

"A romantic drama with the sensibility of a thriller, Benoît Jacquot’s '3 Hearts' is a good example of how a talented director and cast can elevate the most tired of concepts. The film finds meaning in its stylistic dissonances, right from the beginning. It opens with a man (Benoît Poelvoorde) missing a train back to Paris and making his way to a small café by the station. He spies a woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who wanders into the café briefly. He follows her out and strikes up a conversation with her. Meanwhile, the soundtrack blares dramatic blasts of noise; you might be forgiven for thinking you’ve wandered into an Inception remake. What’s going on here? Beneath the casual (though not particularly realistic) dialogue, emotional tectonic plates are shifting. The man, Marc, is a tax inspector; the woman, Sylvie, co-owns a local antique shop; they’re not remarkable people, but something remarkable is happening to them. After a long night of walking and talking, they’re in love. She’s basically ready to leave her husband; he, after years of being single, thinks she might be the one. They decide to meet again in Paris. Braaaaaaaahhhm."

Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

"There’s no doubt that Jacquot knows his way around a world in which smoking, longing looks over wine glasses and furtive, shadowy kisses take the place of spoken dialogue. If he doesn’t always close the circle on some of his foreshadowings and subplots (one involves Marc’s investigation of the small town’s mayor), he manages to hold the viewer’s interest, heightened by frequent Hans Zimmer-esque 'thromps' of foreboding minor-key chords."

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

"The quiet meet-cute that opens Benoît Jacquot's '3 Hearts' is so refreshingly convincing and gracefully depicted by way of the director's slyly abstracted visual rhythm that it's easy to miss the gloomy underpinnings of the encounter. Jacquout's camera roams down the quiet streets, and he cuts the film to accentuate the sense of Marc (Benoît Poelvoorde) and Sylvie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) being alone in this small, sparsely populated town, as if it were a stage that exists solely for their coming together. The score, however, curiously groans menacingly when he misses his train out of town -- the incident that allows him to bum a cigarette off of Sylvie, co-owner of a small, lucrative antique gallery. It's what you might call 'love at first sight,' but the director routinely refuses to sentimentalize such feelings as mere fate. Instead, this lively, alluring drama allows the director to explore the darker implications of romantic desire, both the sudden sort and the kind that's built up over time."

Chris Cabin, Slant Magazine

"Of the three hearts in play, the man’s seems most at risk. A workaholic out of place in a country where employees recently demanded that they be allowed to turn off their cell phones after hours, Poelvoorde’s over-stressed tax officer appears to be constantly on the brink of a heart attack -- a chest-tightening, cold-sweat-inducing feeling that extends to the audience, courtesy of Bruno Coulais’ unusual score (by meller-music standards, at least), which mixes that ominous foghorn sound so popular since “Inception” with more traditionally swoony piano-and-strings motifs."

Peter Debruge, Variety

"The refined production design reflects the bourgeois spheres in which these characters move, with cinematographer Julien Hirsch also opting for elegant moves and, of course, plentiful closeups that help reveal the emotional costs for all the characters of their own as well as their loved ones’ behavior. But the most effective technical contribution must be Bruno Coulais’ pared-back score, with its 'Inception'-like drone that imparts a sense of foreboding even before the first shot appears on screen."

Boyd van Hoeij, Hollywood Reporter

THE VOICES - Olivier Bernet

"In tapping [director Marjane] Satrapi to interpret this project, the producers have done about as well as one could expect with such material. Still, a bit more consistency in style would have gone a long way: The pic’s tone is all over the place, from the bright red razor slash that underscores its opening titles to the 'Amelie'-esque flights of fancy along the way (lensed a bit too darkly by French horror helmer Maxime Alexandre, and augmented by CG butterflies and other surreal touches). Even the music, which pits ironically selected oldies against a misleading score from 'Persepolis' composer Olivier Bernet, doesn’t quite fit either the movie 'The Voices' is pretending to be or the nastier one lurking beneath."

Peter Debruge, Variety

THE NEXT TEN DAYS IN L.A.

Screenings of older films, at the following L.A. movie theaters:AMPAS, American Cinematheque: Aero, American Cinematheque: Egyptian, Arclight, LACMA, New Beverly, Nuart, Silent Movie Theater and UCLA.

June 26
THE BLUES BROTHERS (Ira Newborn, Elmer Bernstein), CHEECH & CHONG'S NEXT MOVIE (Mark Davis) [New Beverly]
BRAIN DEAD (Peter Francis Rotter) [Silent Movie Theater]
CLUELESS (David Kitay) [Nuart]
DR. STRANGELOVE, OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (Laurie Johnson), THE LOVED ONE (John Addison) [Cinematheque: Aero]
KILL BILL VOL. 2 (The RZA, Robert Rodriguez) [New Beverly]
LEGEND (Tangerine Dream), LABYRINTH (Trevor Jones) [Cinematheque: Egyptian]

June 27
THE BLUES BROTHERS (Ira Newborn, Elmer Bernstein), CHEECH & CHONG'S NEXT MOVIE (Mark Davis) [New Beverly]
CONAN THE BARBARIAN (Basil Poledouris), CONAN THE DESTROYER (Basil Poledouris) [Cinematheque: Egyptian]
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Ennio Morricone) [Cinematheque: Aero]
HANDS ON A HARDBODY (Neil Kassanoff) [New Beverly]
HAROLD LLOYD'S WORLD OF COMEDY (Walter Scharf) [New Beverly]
TIMES SQUARE [Silent Movie Theater]

June 28
THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (Erich Wolfgang Korngold) [Cinematheque: Aero]
HAROLD LLOYD'S WORLD OF COMEDY (Walter Scharf) [New Beverly]
LADYHAWKE (Andrew Powell), DRAGONSLAYER (Alex North) [Cinematheque: Egyptian]
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (Ennio Morricone) [New Beverly]
TRACK OF THE CAT (Roy Webb), THE OX-BOW INCIDENT (Cyril J. Mockridge) [UCLA]

June 29
ANGST (Klaus Schulze) [Silent Movie Theater]
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (Ennio Morricone) [New Beverly]

June 30
THE BIG KNIFE (Frank DeVol) [LACMA]
HUMAN HIGHWAY [Silent Movie Theater]
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (Ennio Morricone) [New Beverly]

July 1
ANGST (Klaus Schulze) [Silent Movie Theater]
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (Ennio Morricone) [New Beverly]

July 2
BONNIE AND CLYDE (Charles Strouse), THE BOSTON STRANGLER (Lionel Newman) [Cinematheque: Aero]
JAWS (John Williams) [Arclight Hollywood]
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (Ennio Morricone) [New Beverly]

July 3
DJANGO UNCHAINED [New Beverly]
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (Ennio Morricone) [New Beverly]
THE ROAD WARRIOR (Brian May) [Nuart]
THE THIRD MAN (Anton Karas) [Nuart]

July 4
BLOW OUT (Pino Donaggio) [New Beverly]
THE BOATNIKS (Robert F. Brunner) [New Beverly]
JAWS (John Williams) [Cinematheque: Aero]
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (Ennio Morricone) [New Beverly]
THE SHINING (Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind) [Cinematheque: Egyptian]
THE THIRD MAN (Anton Karas) [Nuart]

July 5
THE BOATNIKS (Robert F. Brunner) [New Beverly]
JAWS (John Williams) [Cinematheque: Egyptian]
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (Miklos Rozsa), THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (Cyril J. Mockridge) [New Beverly]
1776 (Sherman Edwards, Ray Heindorf) [Cinematheque: Aero]
THE THIRD MAN (Anton Karas) [Nuart]