CD REVIEW - EASY VIRTUE + NEWS FROM CINEMEDIA & COSTA COMMUNICATIONS


Easy Virtue
Music by Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Marius de Vries etc.
Decca 478 1417 (EU)
17 Tracks 50:25 mins

A new screen adaptation of Noel Coward's 80-year-old play Easy Virtue hits UK screens on 7th November, with the soundtack album preceeding it on 27th October. The film stars Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Veronica Whittaker and Colin Firth, with Marius de Vries responsible for any original scoring, though, as the album suggests plenty of Coward's music features, along with numbers by the likes of Gus Kahn, Cole Porter and even film scorer and songsmith Bronislau Kaper. Well loved offerings include "Mad About The Boy," "A Room With A View," "Makin' Whoopee," "You're The Tops," "Mad Dogs and Englishmen," "You Do Something To Me," "All God's Children Got Rhythm," "When You're Smiling," "Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag," and "I'll See You Again. More up-to-date fare, though given a suitable period spin, includes "Car Wash by Nick Whitfield, "Sex Bomb" by Mustafa Guendogdu & Errol Rennalls, and "When The Tough Get Going" by Billy Ocean, Robert Lange, Wayne Brathwaite & Barry Eastmond; all presumably voiced by the film's cast, though no actual credits are given for the performers.
De Vries' contributions to the album include the piano solo "In The Library," plus two dances - the "Easy Virtue Foxtrot" and the "Easy Virtue Tango.

From CineMedia

COMPOSER BEAR MCCREARY RE-VISITS THE REST STOP

La-La Land Records To Release Soundtrack For Rest Stop: Don’t Look Back

The soundtrack for Rest Stop: Don’t Look Back will be released by La-La Land Records on October 21, 2008. Composer Bear McCreary, who also scored the first Rest Stop film, composed the score.

The soundtrack album also includes five songs penned by McCreary: “Rattlesnake on the Highway” and “Lonely Woman performed by Brendan “Bt4” McCreary, who sang “All Along the Watchtower” on the Battlestar Galactica Season 3 soundtrack, “Jesus, He Forgives You Too” and “Down Home Salvation” performed by Rev. Buford “Buck” Davis and His Minstrel Singers, and “All That Remains” performed by Raya Yarbrough, a song featured in both Rest Stop films as well as several episodes of Battlestar Galactica’s third and fourth seasons.

Composer Bear McCreary is one of the top young composers working in Hollywood. His work on the television series Battlestar Galactica has been described as offering “some of the most innovative music on TV today,” by Variety, and his blog www.bearmccreary.com/blog, which features in-depth inside looks at the process of scoring Battlestar Galactica, was called "one of the best blogs in the business. It's a fascinating look at the process of making music for film and television and the care he takes with aligning the score with the twists and turns of each character's plot lines," by The Hollywood Reporter.

McCreary also scores the hit series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles for Fox. His film credits include Wrong Turn 2 and the Rest Stop films. McCreary was among a handful of select protégés of late film music legend Elmer Bernstein (THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN) and is a classically trained composer with degrees in Composition and Recording Arts from the prestigious USC Thornton School of Music.

Shawn Papazian, who produced the first Rest Stop film, directed the sequel. “This time around, since I was at the helm, I wanted to add a dirtier, grittier flare to the score that was unique but in some way similar to the first Rest Stop, yet take it to another level of funk. Bear brilliantly discovered musically my jumbled rhetoric and brought the soul of the score to life,” he describes. “We were able to unleash instruments that played beautifully and organically within the beats of horror that I feel will make this movie sound artistic in a way that genre movies of this nature have never sounded like before. He truly scored.”

One year after running away from home, Nicole (Julie Mond) and Jesse (Joey Mendicino) are still missing. When Jesse’s brother, Tom (Richard Tillman), returns home from active duty, he sets out with his friends Marilyn (Jessie Ward) and Jared (Graham Norris) to locate the lost couple. Their search leads them to the stretch of old highway with a mysterious Rest Stop, where they find themselves in the same predicament as Nicole and Jesse: confronting the madman (Brionne Davis) driving the menacing yellow truck. As their search continues, a run-in with the ubiquitous Winnebago Family leads Marilyn and Jared to ghostly encounters with Nicole. Meanwhile, Tom is kidnapped and tortured by the psycho, but upon his escape he uses the arsenal at his disposal to take his revenge. But bullets alone may not be enough to stop this sociopath bent on death and dismemberment.

So like Nicole and Jesse, Bear McCreary revisited Rest Stop. “In that movie, we established a rich and lush sonic soundscape, filled with distorted banjos, wailing electric bass and detuned country fiddle,” said McCreary. “All these elements returned for Don’t Look Back with a vengeance…The sound I was going for was ‘Lynyrd Skynyrd Trapped in Hell.’”

Warner Home Video presents Rest Stop: Don’t Look Back available on DVD September 30, 2008. The original soundtrack will be available in stores or from www.lalalandrecords.com on October 21, 2008. Also available from La-La Land Records are the soundtracks for Battlestar Galactica Season One, Season Two, Season Three, Eureka, and Wrong Turn 2, also composed by Bear McCreary. La-La Land Records will be releasing the soundtracks for Terminator – The Sarah Connor Chronicles later this year.

From Costa Communications

COMPOSER ELIA CMIRAL

SCORES

SPLINTER

Splinter Sweeps the Awards Ceremony at ScreamFestLA

In Theaters Halloween 2008

Composer Elia Cmiral creates a haunting score for “Splinter,” the first full-length film by award-winning director Toby Wilkins. Splinter premiered at ScreamFestLA and swept the awards ceremony, including Cmiral taking home the award for “Best Musical Score.” The movie also won “Best Editing,” “Best Makeup,” “Best Direction” and “Best Picture.” In the film, a convict and his girlfriend carjack a couple on a weekend retreat in the woods. The couples soon find themselves trapped together in an isolated gas station, on the run from a deadly parasite that occupies the woods outside. “Splinter” opens in theaters on October 31, 2008.

ScreamFestLA, a film festival devoted entirely to the horror genre, showcases some of the best independent short and full-length horror films each year. “Splinter” director Toby Wilkins won Best Horror Short for his film “Staring at the Sun” in 2005, garnering the attention of producer Sam Raimi, who then chose Wilkins to produce, direct, and write a number of short films for his production company, Ghost House Pictures. This year, the festival was held at Grauman’s Mann Chinese 6 Theatres in Hollywood, Calif.

No stranger to the world of thrillers, Cmiral scored “Tooth & Nail” and “The Deaths of Ian Stone,” both featured at last year’s After Dark Horrorfest. Most recently, he finished scoring “Pulse 2: Afterlife,” the sequel to last year’s Wes Craven film, “Pulse,” for which he also wrote the score. This was Cmiral’s second collaboration with Craven, having scored “Wes Craven Presents: They” in 2002. In addition, he scored John Frankenheimer’s suspense thriller “Ronin,” starring Robert DeNiro. Cmiral continues to provide highly original and evocative scores for major Hollywood studios as well as independent filmmakers, including “Journey to the End of the Night,” “Stigmata,” “Bones” and “Species 3.”

Born in Czechoslovakia, Elia Cmiral quickly established himself as one of Europe’s leading young composers after graduating from the prestigious Prague Music Conservatory. He wrote scores for several European films and three ballets before coming to the United States to attend USC’s famous Film Scoring Program, after which he was hired to produce tango-based music for “Apartment Zero,” composing a now-classic full length score in a scant ten days. By the mid-1990s, Cmiral had garnered a reputation with Hollywood executives, leading to his scoring the successful “Nash Bridges” television series.