Harry Gregson-Williams’s latest score for X-Men Origins: Wolverine has him generated all kinds of press. Jon Burlingame recently profiled the composer for Variety:
For Wolverine, says the composer, a traditional orchestral score seemed appropriate. “My job is to give the viewer a sense of adventure and, at the same time, never let up a certain [...]

There’s a reason why film music geeks are always badly dressed — they spend all of their cash on limited edition soundtrack albums. Why buy a shirt that fits when you can grab La-La Land’s premiere CD presentation of Les Baxter’s groovy The Dunwich Horror (just 1200 copies), or Elmer Bernstein’s straight-faced Airplane! (number [...]

Rating: *** 1/2

In my 2007 review for Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, I posed what I thought was a rather straightforward question: “What could be more bad-ass than a guy who goes out of his way to hunt vampires, right?” At the time, I assumed that the obvious answer was: “Nothing – nothing could be [...]

Fans of Jerry Goldsmith will have two more bottle caps to collect. Film Score Monthly announced they’ll release Goldsmith’s complete score for the ‘83 anthology Twilight Zone: The Movie, including the original Warner Bros. soundtrack album edits, bonus tracks and two songs (one of which was produced by James Newton Howard!) — just shy [...]

Hans Zimmer and Ron Howard preview the upcoming sequel to The DaVinci Code, Angels And Demons at Apple’s Quicktime site. A few seconds of scoring session footage speed by before an extended preview of the film (featuring Zimmer’s score) assaults your senses and ultimately your intellect. Sony Classical releases the soundtrack album on [...]

Rating: ** 1/2

There are few composers working today who have garnered as little goodwill from film music enthusiasts as Tyler Bates. For some (many?) reason(s), he’s become a favorite target to hurl message board missives of fetishistic fanboy derision. His last few major scoring efforts have failed to ignite a passionate fire of [...]

Rating: *** 1/2

Rachel Portman gets a lot of shit from the film music community, and much of it she doesn’t deserve. For some reason, when someone like John Williams scores multiple Sci-Fi adventure fantasies with the same set of stylistic devices back-to-back, most of us don’t raise a word of criticism – in fact we [...]

Rating: ****

It sort of staggers me that Elmer Bernstein always gets credit for being the first person to score comedy as though it were drama when John Morris did just that for earlier films that were just as famous and influential. In particular, I think of his scores for Mel Brooks three best films, The [...]