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Richard Rodney Bennett, 1936-2012
Composer Richard Rodney Bennett died on December 24, 2012, in New York, where he had lived since 1979. He was 76.
FULL OBITUARY COMING SOON.
THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY – Howard Shore
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
They say you can never go home again, but that’s not true for Howard Shore, the multi-award winning Canadian composer of the music for The Lord of the Rings. Prior to the release of the first LOTR film, The Fellowship of the Ring, in 2001, Shore was a respected but generally little-known composer, best known for writing a series of dark, brooding scores for director David Cronenberg, and thrillers like Seven and The Silence of the Lambs. Even when he was first announced as the composer for Fellowship, many commentators questioned whether Shore had the thematic strength to write the broad and expansive music the films required. Fast forward a decade, and Shore is a three-time Oscar winner and international film music superstar, with impressive album sales, sold-out concerts, and massive critical acclaim. When director Peter Jackson announced that he was making a new Middle Earth trilogy based on JRR Tolkien’s book The Hobbit, it was never a question of whether Howard Shore would return to score the films, but whether the music would stand up to the massive hype and sense of expectation that inevitably came with it’s release. For better or worse, the Lord of the Rings scores have become some of the best-loved of the new millennium, and for many fans whose first experience of film music came through those films and Shore’s now-iconic themes, there was bound to be an unimaginable sense of anticipation. So does The Hobbit continue the trend of excellent music in Middle Earth? The answer is yes and no, but not for reasons you might think. Read more…
Golden Globe Nominations 2012
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) have announced the nominations for the 70th Golden Globe Awards, honoring the best in film and American television of 2012.
In the Best Original Score category, the nominees are:
- MYCHAEL DANNA for Life of Pi
- ALEXANDRE DESPLAT for Argo
- DARIO MARIANELLI for Anna Karenina
- TOM TYKWER, JOHNNY KLIMEK and REINHOLD HEIL for Cloud Atlas
- JOHN WILLIAMS for Lincoln
These are the first major film music award nominations for both Danna and the Cloud Atlas Pale 3 team, although Danna has been nominated for both a Grammy and and Emmy. This is the 6th nomination for Desplat, who won the award in 2006 for The Painted Veil, the 2nd nomination for Marianelli, who won both the Golden Globe and Oscar in 2007 for Atonement, and the 23rd nomination for Williams, who previously won Globes in 1975 for Jaws, 1977 for Star Wars, 1982 for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and 2005 for Memoirs of a Geisha.
In the Best Original Song category, the nominees are:
- ADELE ATKINS and PAUL EPWORTH for “Skyfall” from Skyfall
- JON BON JOVI for “Not Running Anymore” from Stand-Up Guys
- MONTY POWELL and KEITH URBAN for “For You” from Act of Valor
- CLAUDE-MICHEL SCHÖNBERG, ALAIN BOUBLIL and HERBERT KRETZMER for “Suddenly” from Les Miserables
- TAYLOR SWIFT, JOHN PAUL WHITE, JOY WILLIAMS and T-BONE BURNETT for “Safe and Sound” from The Hunger Games
The winners of the 70th Golden Globe Awards will be announced on January 13, 2013.
LIFE OF PI – Mychael Danna
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Once in a while a film comes along which seems predestined to be scored by a certain composer; in 2012, that film is Life of Pi and that composer is Mychael Danna. Based on the successful novel by Yann Martel, and directed by Ang Lee, Life of Pi is a film which asks all the big questions – about life, death, religion, fate, identity, reality – and answers them through an incredible story told by Piscine Molitor Patel (Irfan Khan), commonly known as Pi, an Indian immigrant to Canada, who relates his life story to an enraptured journalist (Rafe Spall), who is researching a book. Born into a relatively wealthy family in Pondicherry, India, where his father owned a zoo, Pi’s life is thrown into chaos after the family decides to emigrate to Canada; the boat they are traveling on capsizes in a storm, leaving 16-year old Pi (Suraj Sharma) the only survivor – except for a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and an ill-tempered Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, who all are forced to share the same tiny lifeboat. What follows is an extraordinary story of friendship, trust, survival, faith and belief, as Pi must overcome his greatest fears and the overpowering forces of nature to reach safety. Read more…
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