Archive
A SYMPHONY OF HOPE: THE HAITI PROJECT – Christopher Lennertz et al.
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
On January 12, 2010, the city of Port-au-Prince in Haiti was effectively flattened when it was struck by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Within a matter of seconds over 50,000 people had been killed, and over a million people left homeless. Diseases such as cholera blighted the survivors and thwarted relief efforts, and since then the humanitarian crisis in the country has reached staggering proportions, with over 250,000 residences destroyed and basic services and infrastructure left in ruins. Reacting to the global call for help, film composer Christopher Lennertz was inspired to act. Calling upon his fellow composers and other members of the Los Angeles film music community of musicians and engineers, Lennertz teamed up with the charity Hands Together to create A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project, a musical fundraising project intended to help the people of Haiti. Read more…
A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project
Last Saturday, March 26th, I had the honor attending the recording sessions for “A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project” at the Eastwood Scoring Stage at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, CA. The brainchild of composer Christopher Lennertz, the Symphony is musical fundraising project designed to help the people of Haiti in their desperate time of need.
A year after the terrible earthquake which destroyed the lives of thousands of Haitians, it was clear to Lennertz that the need for assistance was greater than ever. In response Lennertz came up with the idea of the “Symphony of Hope”, and invited 25 leading film composers to collaborate with him on a project to benefit the Haiti Earthquake Relief fund. Read more…
SPLINTER – Elia Cmiral
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Czech/Swedish composer Elia Cmiral has fallen a long way down the film music pecking order since the comparative heights of Ronin in 1998 and Battlefield Earth in 2000, to the point where is now a go-to guy for a large number of low budget horror directors. Cmiral’s latest film, Splinter, is another one in a long list of gore-fests: directed by Toby Wilkins, it stars Shea Whigham, Paulo Costanzo and Jill Wagner as a young couple and an escaped convict who find themselves trapped in an isolated gas station by an evil parasite which, when contracted, mutates the body of the host into something resembling a human porcupine. Read more…
PULSE – Elia Cmiral
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Once upon a time, for a short period, Elia Cmiral was considered a ‘hot property for the future’ in Hollywood music circles. Having taken a tortuous circuit to the mainstream – via his Czech homeland, his adopted country of Sweden, and work on the TV show Nash Bridges – his first major film, the 1998 Robert De Niro thriller Ronin was pretty much roundly praised. Then, two years later, came the nadir: the ill-fated, critically derided Battlefield Earth, which almost single-handedly re-destroyed John Travolta’s career, and catapulted Cmiral into the realms of straight-to-video Z-grade horror movies. Pulse is only his fourth cinematic feature since the turn of the millennium and, unfortunately, neither the film or the score is likely to alter his career trajectory. Read more…
BATTLEFIELD EARTH – Elia Cmiral
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The definition of a “turkey” in cinematic terms is, in my own words, a film which fails to impress on ever conceivable level, from acting to direction to writing, up to and including any and all of the technical departments. Battlefield Earth, a big-budget science fiction epic wannabe adapted from the best-selling pulp novel by L. Ron Hubbard, is a turkey. A great, big, bloated, clucking turkey complete with giblets a wattle and a parson’s nose and everything. It’s a rare occurrence for such a high-profile movie to be this bad – there are normally at least one or two redeeming features, even it’s only a high quotient of campness a la Showgirls – but Battlefield Earth fails on every conceivable level, with the possible exception of its music. Read more…
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