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Showing posts from August, 2006

Movie Trailer Music Euphoria

The group Immediate Music has created a lot of original music for movie trailers, including Lord of the Rings , Spiderman 2 , King Kong , Superman Returns , The Chronicles of Narnia , and X-Men: The Last Stand . Until recently, this increasingly popular sub-genre of music has not been made available to the general public. Now, the CD “Epicon” has been released for all to enjoy. This is from the official press release : Ever since director John Boorman had the brilliant idea to track Carl Orff’s rousing ‘O Fortuna’ piece from ‘Carmen Burana’ into his 1981 film ‘Excalibur’, the sound of movie trailer music has never been the same. “Back-end music”, as it’s often called, follows a formula that any moviegoer will instantly recognise: a eclectic mix of orchestral music underscores an often dizzying array of moods steadily building to an overpowering sonic explosion that stirs audiences into a near-euphoric state of anticipatory frenzy. The Globus Music MySpace page has several samples fro

Monday Morning with Mike Moeller and Miracle Morgan

(Yes, one of my mottos is “avoid alliteration always and allow alternative articulations.”) As some of you know, I had the privilege of helping produce a documentary about Morgan Moeller, a Knoxville girl who suffered from DKA (diabetic ketoacidosis) with cerebral edema in 2001. Well, this morning I got to join Morgan and her father Mike on the Bob Bell Show (on Joy 62, WRJZ). Mike and Morgan shared some of their family’s story, which Mike has written about in his book Above the Clouds . One area of the story Michael Cummins and I chose to omit in our film (because of thematic and time constraints) was Morgan’s interaction with the spiritual realm. During her coma, she went “above the clouds” and met her three guardian angels: David, Jacob, and UM. Yes, the third angel’s name was UM. During one of the breaks, Mike explained to us a recent development of Morgan’s story. Mike got a call from a stewardess who had read his book. She told him, “I know who UM is.” She explained that when you

WORLD View

Want to know how much I love The Lake House ? Click here . (Look for the subheading, “Spoiling a romance.”)

WORLD TRADE CENTER (2006) – Film Review

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Oliver Stone is nothing if not controversial. This time around, though, the controversy surrounding World Trade Center is based on the fact that the award-winning director has jettisoned his usual trademarks in favor of telling a simple and straightforward story. Reverent, heartfelt, restrained, spiritual, patriotic—the film is all these things and much more. There is no need for extravagant effects and Stone thankfully avoids sensationalism. Most of the horror the movie portrays isn’t visual—it’s aural. Rather than being forced to watch what we have already seen a hundred times, we simply hear the first plane’s impact. When the policemen run into the elevator shafts for safety, we don’t see much; instead, we endure the seemingly-endless and gratuitous sounds of the towers collapsing. What we hear is more than enough to make the movie real. In fact, the sense of claustrophobia/peril is so real that there were times I feared John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peñ

WTC Opening Night

Advanced tickets for World Trade Center are now available. For those of you in Knoxville, we’re going to see the film opening night, Wednesday, July 9. If you’re interested, you can purchase your ticket here and meet us in the lobby of the Pinnacle at 10:00pm. You can watch several scenes from the movie here .