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2009 Academy Award Nominees
It’s been a long road of prognosticators and pontificating on the way to this year’s Oscar nominees, myself included. As the years pass, I become less and less interested in all the major categories
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Wings On Our Heels
CHARIOTS OF FIRE, the sleeper hit of 1981, picked up speed and sprinted towards the finish line in the final laps of awards season. Bolstered by its hit soundtrack, the film emerged victorious, surprisingly
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Oscar’s Eligible Scores – 2009
For years I’ve wondered why the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences don’t officially release a list of eligible original scores, like they do for the original song category. Well, they still haven’t.
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Homecoming
“Best” is an apt word for THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES. The 1946 film won 7 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Fredric March), Best Director (William Wyler), and another for Hugo
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The Godfather, Part II
THE GODFATHER, PART II is a rarity in Hollywood: a sequel that works as well as, or better than, the original. The film follows the Corleone mob family in two very different stories: the
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The Bridge on the River Kwai
Over 50 years later, David Lean’s THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI still stands as one of the all-time great antiwar films. Alec Guinness stars as Colonel Nicholson, the commander of a group of British
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Lili
As the movie poster rightfully proclaims: “You’ll fall in love with LILI!” This charming, simple film stars Leslie Caron as a sad and lonely orphan who hooks up with a traveling carnival and falls in
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Spellbound
Producer David O. Selznick, who had recently gone through a “successful” bout of therapy (not at all common in the mid-1940s), was determined to bring the world of psychoanalysis to the screen and hired
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CD Review: Exodus
There are innumerable issues that can crop up with with re-recordings of old scores. Sure, we can expect the sound quality to significantly improve, but will it match the intensity and quality of the
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The Devil and Daniel Webster
To close out a week in which my writing efforts have been alternating between Bernard Herrmann and LORD OF THE RINGS concert coverage, let’s celebrate with Herrmann’s Oscar. The innocuously-titled ALL THAT MONEY CAN BUY
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