Just launched the website for A Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project. The brainchild of composer Christopher Lennertz, the idea was to take 25 film composers and create a symphonic work based on a traditional Haitian melody. Proceeds from sales of the resulting album will be sent to the Hands Together charity to benefit Haitian earthquake victims. I built the site with a WordPress framework, and heavily modified a pre-existing template. The biggest challenge on the site was to connect …
Watchmen
In the interest of full disclosure: I never read Watchmen, the ground-breaking graphic novel from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Released back in 1986, the 12-part series revealed a darker, grittier alternate universe, in which superheroes existed, and helped us win the Vietnam War, but now we’re closer to nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Five-term president Richard Nixon has outlawed masked vigilantes, and now most of the former “Watchmen” group have retired – but when The Comedian (a former …
300 (IMAX)
Tonight I went to the all-media press screening for 300, which was shown in IMAX. I’m not gonna discuss the film, since that was already done here. Instead, I’ll talk about the quality of the presentation. I’ve never seen a regular movie on IMAX before – just some 3D IMAX movies that were CGI based (The Polar Express, The Ant Bully) – so I was curious to see how well it held up blown up. In that respect, 300 isn’t …
300
Tonight I went to a special music industry screening for 300. based on Frank Miller’s graphic novelization of the Battle of Thermopylae. Since the original graphic novel is not very long, it made sense that director Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead) expanded on it a bit, making the film a very solid 2 hours. King Leonidas of Sparta (Gerard Butler) leads a small group of Spartan warriors fighting against the exceptionally large Persian army led by Xerxes. The graphic …
Dawn of the Dead
Ok, I’ll admit it – I never saw the original Dawn of the Dead, but I did see the original Night of the Living Dead. So, I pretty much knew what to expect. But the level to which it was implemented, well, it’s a modern horror film. Not one of those slow, lumbering 70’s horror flicks. The pre-title sequence was excellent – so much so, that the audience (all press folks, mind you) cheered and applauded when the titles slammed …