More musics. This batch includes pieces from 2 projects (a musical and a stage performance) as well as some other pieces.

• Dispersion Relation – Jazz
  
• Glee Club Polka
  
• Running Fanfare – short brass fanfare
  
• Crisis – orchestral action for that movie trailer feel
  
• Conflicted – musical
  
• Narcissus – musical

I’m not sure if the dots are really necessary, but that’s how the title’s listed on imdb. Now, maybe some of you haven’t seen the first movie, 28 Days Later (not to be confused with the Sandra Bullock film, 28 Days, because except for the titles, they have no similarities whatsoever), but that really doesn’t matter. There are no characters returning from the first film, unless you count the poor beleaguered city of London, and all you really need to know is explained in the captions at the beginning.
Just a slightly longer summary here, so you can keep reading the review: Some scientists, who apparently thought they could cure the human race of anger and thus stop war and violence (scientists really aren’t very practical sometimes), created a virus that induced rage — blind, uncontrollable rage. “In order to cure, you must first understand,” says one scientist, shortly before an infected human tears his throat out. I’m not sure this virus angle was the best way to go about their little project, but okay. The virus is unleashed on an unsuspecting British public, and the island is quickly decimated. A small band of survivors join forces, have a nasty run-in with Christopher Eccleston, and we have a happy ending in learning that the virus was, at least, contained on the island, where it eventually dies off naturally.
Or does it? The chief medical officer (Rose Byrne) of the NATO team now helping to resettle the island isn’t sure that they can relax yet, and of course her worst fears are realized. You see, the virus’ effects are apparent within seconds of contamination, usually by a bite, so it should obvious who has it and who doesn’t. Except it isn’t.

See? Anyone would run from a bunch of those things.

Don (Robert Carlyle, of The Full Monty and The World is Not Enough) is waiting to welcome his kids — they were on a school trip abroad when all hell broke loose, and are now returning home. But Don is racked with guilt over the fate of his wife, Alice (Catherine McCormack, perhaps still best known to U.S. audiences as Mel Gibson’s ill-fated wife in Braveheart), who he left to the mercy of creatures who have none. Now, I think that we get so used to people in horror/survival movies coming up with some last-second trick to save others that we forget that sometimes there really isn’t anything to be done. So when someone fails to manage such a trick, we end up labelling them cowards. But whether that’s true here or not, Don is terribly ashamed.
And in this kind of movie, my friends, guilt and shame will kill you, and probably lots of other people as well. Like its predecessor, the movie goes for a pretty realistic look — these are ordinary people, not models, and they react in normal ways. So when Don gives in to his guilt, you understand completely why he’s doing it, even though you know it’s the worst possible thing he could do. The infection is unleashed again.
Don’s kids, Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton — and yes, I think those must be their real names) now have to scramble to survive, as the virus again spreads like wildfire and the troops (led by Idris Elba, one of the few good things about The Reaping, though he has only a very small part here) fight to regain control. You can tell they had a lot more budget this time — they get to block off much larger and busier parts of London, not to mention firebombing major landmarks in convincing fashion. Sadly, they also gave in to the always horrible temptation to do MORE without worrying about whether it’s better or not — not often, but when they do, they really give in. Remember what I said about the scene at the end of The Hitcher, how it was probably the most gruesome film death I’d ever seen? I have to demote that to second place now. Two words: helicopter blades. The squeamish should look away when you see it coming, and you will.
I was very nervous going in, but I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. In spite of all the Americans running around, it still has the same sort of English feel as the first film — there isn’t as much incidental music as there is just background noise, giving it an edgy feel, and having more of an ensemble cast instead of a couple of stars really works well. I didn’t even mind the kids, and usually I hate it when child actors have to carry much of the plot, as they do here. But they’re good actors, so they do pretty well.
I can’t say the same for the camera work, though — it’s as choppy and confusing as anything in The Bourne Supremacy, and might cause motion sickness. There’s a scene where the kids and the medical officer are walking through a pitch-dark building, with only the night-vision scope of a rifle to guide them, which is easily as creepy as Clarice stumbling through that basement in Silence of the Lambs, but is then spoiled when things start to happen and I can’t even tell who they’re happening to.
Overall, though, I’ll give this one three idols. It’s over-the-top gruesome where it doesn’t need to be (I’m still cringing over the helicopter incident, and then there was the totally unnecessary eye-gouge, presumably to mirror a similar scene in the first film… which was also unnecessary) and I hope that NATO troops really aren’t as slow as they are here. It seemed to take them at least an hour to find two kids riding around on a Moped on otherwise totally deserted streets. But the film does draw you in and keep you jumping in sympathy with the characters, and the acting is very good. I still wish they could have fit Christopher Eccleston in somehow, but you can’t have everything.

Here was the plan. 50 pieces of music in one month. Well, that was the plan… the NEW plan is one piece of music every day. Keeping up the former pace was causing me too much stress for a stupid challenge.
Today is the 6th, so here’s the first 6 pieces:

• Artifact Neat African hybrid


• Aretes Written for a documentary on glaciers – “a cross between Windham Hill and Enya”


• Bach’s Cello Suite #1 Prelude As performed on a dulcimer. I always thought this would work well.


• Fenster’s Explanation Your standard-type musical number for a female lead.


• Gearhead Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! All your Hard Rockin’ Prayers are answered!


• Riptide This is another rock piece… written for a different documentary… on a subject that had nothing to do with rock music. But that’s why there are large gaps in guitar (much narration).

Oh, you knew I’d have to review this one. My head’s still spinning, but I’ll see what I can do. It’s my fault; I went to the theatre with the Ultrascreen across town, and everything was so huge! It was hard to read the credits, and some of the fight scenes left me reeling.
Speaking of fight scenes, I’m sure this isn’t going to help much, but please, people: Don’t bring your four-year-old to this film. In fact, don’t bring your one-year-old, either. There were kids there that young, and I believe they enjoyed the movie about as much as I enjoyed seeing (and hearing) them there — which is to say, not at all. It may be based on a comic book, but that doesn’t mean it’s family-friendly. It’s PG-13 for a reason, people! There’s violence galore, and blood, and death! Relatively sanitized death, but still. And Venom is really pretty creepy. So don’t scar your little children. Also, if they’re not there, they can’t annoy the rest of us by crying for mommy or asking to go to the bathroom three times. Two hours and twenty minutes is an eternity to a child’s bladder.
Anyway, I imagine you know the basics: Spidey’s back, and there’s gonna be trouble. This time, trouble comes in the form of Flint Marko, a.k.a. Sandman (Thomas Haden Church, who I really only know from watching the occasional episode of Wings, years ago, so this was kind of a shock) and Brock, Eddie Brock Jr., a.k.a. Venom (Topher Grace — I hear he was in some other TV show, which I’ve never seen). Neither character gets called Sandman or Venom except in the closing credits, but all the fanboys (and fangirls) know who they are.
Sandy is an escaped convict when we meet him, struggling to find the daughter he loves. He’s in prison because he loves her so much that he robs lots of banks to try and get the money she needs for an operation, or whatever it is that will fix the unnamed disease she has. She needs an oxygen tank to breathe and a crutch to walk, so it must be something pretty serious, but I’m not sure what would cause both those problems. But it requires money to fix anything, and with health-care costs what they are these days, Daddy has to skip the auctions and bake sales and go straight to grand larceny.
Meanwhile, Eddie wants to make a name for himself as a photographer for the Daily Bugle and smarms his way into a job. Peter’s job. I don’t know how good a photographer he is, but he’s great at being smarmy. Unfortunately, he’s also ambitious and very vengeful. Add to that one icky black alien Venom symbiote; and add to our desparate escaped felon one accidental trip into the middle of an experiment in a particle physics lab, and poof! You have two super villains ready to make our hero’s life miserable.
Now, the birth of Sandman is really cool. They borrow the micro-cam from House to show us the freaky cellular process at work in turning a man into sand, and the sequence of him trying to learn to use his powers is fascinating. It just seems odd that a particle physics lab would be running experiments on a big pile of sand in the middle of the night. I’m no physicist, but I think they usually work with much smaller particles than sand. Much smaller. Venom, as previously mentioned, is seriously creepy, but also very cool. He was never my favorite villain, but he was used to excellent effect here.

Spidey unexpectedly finds himself playing with sand. Cool, huh?

I could keep going a lot longer and still not tell you everything that happened. This movie, like its two predecessors, was packed with plotlines and characters and all the CGI effects you could possibly want. Just think of the post-production on this baby. It’s now the most expensive movie ever made in non-adjusted U.S. dollars (not quite sure what that means; I’m quoting imdb.com), at nearly 300 million. I’d say that most of that went towards effects, but they had a lot of actors to pay, too. Everyone is in it!
Tobey and Kirsten, James Franco as Harry Osborn/Green Goblin Mark II (though he isn’t very green, so they just call him the New Goblin), Rosemary Harris as the delightful Aunt May, J.K. Simmons as the cigar-chewing J. Jonah Jameson, Dylan Baker as Dr. Curt Conners, still not having turned into the Lizard yet — all your favorites are back, and there’s more. Bryce Dallas Howard (looking lovely and being talented as always) is Gwen Stacy in a small and rather thankless role, and perennial character actor James Cromwell is Capt. Stacy — he was a lousy Zephram Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact, but if he’d actually had any real scenes, I think he’d be a great Capt. Stacy.
It all boils down to it being too much of a good thing. There are too many villains, real and imagined, and too many thing happening. I’ve barely mentioned all the problems Peter and Mary Jane have with their relationship, or the whole Goblin thing, and this is already pretty long. Even at nearly two and a half hours, there’s not enough room for everything they try to do. It has all the action you expect and the characters you remember, but it never quite hits the emotional quality of the first two films, especially the second. That wonderful scene with the train passengers tenderly helping the injured Spidey after he saves them is the first thing I think of when I think about these movies, and there’s not a lot here that competes with that. There are some very good scenes with best friends Pete and Harry, but there’s still a certain depth lacking. Let’s not even mention Pete as ladykiller, which only gets embarrassing.
Three idols here. It was enjoyable, and I wouldn’t mind owning it on DVD, but this one was more polished and less endearing than the others, and Spider Man should always be endearing. He’s the underdog, the regular guy doing unbelieveable things who we just have to root for. That’s still here, but it’s starting to be clouded over by the glitz. Do see it on the big screen if you get the chance, though crossed eyes and dizziness may occur if you watch it on the really big screen. Just remember: PG-13!

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Unless of course you’re Cris Johnson, who can see up to two minutes into his own future, and therefore gets as many chances as he wants to make a first impression.
So Nicolas Cage is great. I’ve always liked him. Julianne Moore is great. And I’ve liked Phillip K. Dick’s rather dark, philosophical stories ever since I was a kid rummaging through my dad’s sci-fi collection looking for something to read. Therefore, Next, starring Cage and Moore and based on The Golden Man absolutely has to be a really great movie. Right?
*sigh* No, afraid not. For one thing, the film is only very, very loosely based on the story. The original Cris Johnson isn’t exactly cut out to be a leading man, for starters, and while movieCris is, unsurprisingly, a nice, honest guy trying hard to be an ordinary person, storyCris is — not any of those things. I’m not sure why it is that so many Phillip K. Dick stories are adapted for the screen, and yet the movies never end up with anything more than a passing resemblance to the orignal, top-notch source material, but there we are.
But in the land of celluloid, Cris is a small-time magician/mentalist in Las Vegas — you know, the kind of act where they guess where people are from and make watches disappear, and which can only thrive in Vegas. He supplements his income (the cost of living there probably is awful) with a little dishonest gambling, though he makes sure only to cheat the house. He’s a nice guy, remember. But the casinos are on to him, and Julianne Moore, at the head of a truly scary FBI team, is on to him, and after Peter Falk shows up for two scenes and then vanishes, poor Cris hardly gets a moment’s peace.
He has, in fact, just enough time when he’s not running for his life to find and woo his dream girl. (This is where fifteen chances to make a first impression really come in handy.) He knows that Liz Cooper (Jessica Biel — and I imagine there are lots of men who dearly wish they could see her in their futures) will appear in a certain diner at exactly 8:10, but not the day or even whether it’s morning or evening — because somehow, when this woman is involved, he can see well beyond his usual two-minute mark. This is pretty contrived, but I was willing to go along with it for the sake of the plot.

Cris waits dramatically for the bus that’s due to run him over in a minute and a half.

Soon, however, I was forced to give up on the plot, which was suddenly full of FBI squads, a stolen nuclear bomb, and enough CGI effects to keep every studio in Hollywood busy for weeks. Visually, it’s really an amazing film — the stunts are also contrived, but this actually makes sense, since Cris is in the middle of things manipulating what’s going to happen next. Mercifully, they keep the number of instant replays involved in Cris’ power down to a minimum, since those would probably have made any non-precognitive human dizzy. Unfortunately, the filmmakers do stoop to using such replays for their shock value a little too often. Still, the overall effect is marvelous, and I quickly learned it was best not to think of the plot and just to sit back and feast your eyes.
Julianne Moore, though, is capable of being a very scary lady. She was certainly an excellent fanatic in Children of Men, and here she actually steps it up a notch. I don’t know her exact title, but she’s important. A few words into her cell, and teams are shutting down all communications within a two mile radius. A wave of her hand, and suddenly every lounger in sight is an agent hurrying over to her for instructions. It makes me wonder how many of those road workers that you see standing around are actually waiting for a signal from Julianne.
Though no one else really seems to belive her when she says what Cris can do, apparently even her boss is too afraid to say no to her, because she gets her way. With his (reluctant) help, she knows she can find that bomb before it goes off. Now, the whole bomb thing is still troublesome. It was stolen from Russia, we know that, but the question of who stole it is never explored. Or even mentioned. In fact, they don’t even hint at why it was stolen. Apparently, for some reason, a small group of heavily armed and well-financed French-speaking people decided to steal a nuclear bomb and plant it in southern Califorrnia. They hint at a mean and ruthless boss somewhere, but don’t expect to learn anything about him, either. The only point is that the boss knows about Cris and wants him dead so the grand plan (if there is one) won’t be ruined, and the only point of that is so Julianne and her team have someone to shoot at and Cris has some bullets to dodge. (Precognitives can dodge very well, unurprisingly, but he must have had storyCris’ super-speed as well as his future sight, because he dodges.)
I predict I’m going to give this one just two idols. And I’m right! I might have edged up close to three if I hadn’t stayed for the last ten minutes or so. The ending was — well, I’m still torn on the best adjective. I hate to go as far as “awful”, but I think I may have to. It was definitely not good, and the general mood among my fellow moviegoers after seeing it seemed much the same as mine — namely, that if any of us had the same powers as Cris, we would’ve gone to see The Invisible instead.

Yep, you get two reviews this week! In case anyone’s actually excited by that, though, I should add that this will probably not become a habit with me. It’s just that there was a new Anthony Hopkins movie out, and how could I resist that?
He is of course playing a brilliant psychotic, because that seems to be all he does these days, but he’s a brilliant brilliant psychotic. He plays Ted Crawford, a wealthy man who seems to be some kind of aerospace engineer, but for some reason spends most of his time building machines of various sizes whose sole purpose is to move little glass spheres along shiny metal tracks and through shiny metal hoops. They remind me of a clock I had as a child, which showed the time by stacking ball bearings along little plastic tracks, but Sir Tony’s don’t seem to tell time. As Det. Flores describes one such machine, “It’s a… thing. That does… stuff.”
Sir Anthony is married to the lovely (and much younger) Jennifer, played by Embeth Davidtz. In real life, she’s 41 to his 69, so you just know they’re headed for some kind of trouble. When he isn’t making his gadgets, he’s having his wife followed, and he knows she’s having an affair. The other man is Rob Nunally (Billy Burke), who happens to be an LAPD hostage negotiator, and Sir Tony being as brilliant as he is, he figures out a way to use that little fact to his advantage.
If you’ve seen the previews, you know that he just up and shoots his wife, apparently without any concern for the consequences. But herein lies the brilliance. An open-and-shut, suspect-confessed, we’ve-got-the-murder-weapon case suddenly isn’t any of those things.

I still can’t figure out what it does!

Enter Ryan Gosling as Deputy District Attorney William Beachum. Willy, as Sir Tony calls him when he isn’t calling him “old sport” or “kiddo”, came to LA from a dirt poor childhood in Oklahoma and is now quietly, almost bitterly, determined to succeed beyond even his own wildest dreams. He’s just maneuvered his way (through slightly underhanded means) into a coveted job at Wooton Sims, a top law firm, and he’s leaving the low-paying, overworked life of a DDA behind. He even quickly finds himself a beautiful woman, in the person of his future supervisor, Nikki Gardner (Rosamund Pike, from Die Another Day, who still looks too gorgeous to be a real person). As soon as he finishes this nice, slam-dunk case, that is.
He soon learns the error of his ways. In spite of the old saying that anyone who represents himself has a fool for a client, Sir Tony runs his own defense, and in a deliberately hesitant, uncertain sort of manner, mops the floor with poor Ryan. Now, I hadn’t seen him in anything since Murder By Numbers five years ago (where he was a homicidal maniac), so I wasn’t sure how he’d measure up as the opponent to such a good, experienced actor.
Turns out he does really well. I didn’t quite want to root for him at the beginning — he isn’t a bad guy, but he’s so focused on remaking himself he’s forgotten everything else, and you kind of want to slap him. But then, very slowly and convincingly, he remembers what the law is meant to do, even if it doesn’t always succeed, and by the end of the movie, he’s remade himself in a very different way than he’d intended, and I wanted to congratulate him.
Four and a quarter idols here. There isn’t anything new in the moral dilemma front, but it’s still an interesting struggle, and the film doesn’t beat you over the head with it as so often happens. And the ending is excellent — not a total surprise, but clever and convincing. It’s shot almost like a film noir — everything seems to be either too dark or too brightly lit, and if you look a little, you’ll find reflections and shadows everywhere, showing how easy it is to deceive the eye sometimes. So I guess we have two movies with the same moral this week, even though it would be hard to find two more different mainstream films. And I suppose the secondary moral here is to beware of intelligent men with bizarre hobbies and too much time on their hands.