Tag: James Newton Howard

REVIEW: Jungle Cruise [2021]

Jared Mobarak

Pause for dramatic effect. The first thing you hear at the start of Jaume Collet-Serra‘s Disney theme park ride film Jungle Cruise is the melody from Metallica‘s “Nothing Else Matters.” We hear it again later during a flashback as if composer James Newton Howard thought the hard rock ballad somehow perfectly encapsulated the age of conquistadors enough to recruit the band himself. That’s obviously not the case. Disney President Sean Bailey apparently always wanted to collaborate with them and thought this property would be the best fit regardless of the…

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DESIGN: 2019 In Music

Jared Mobarak

Tracklisting:Disc 11. “Skyhooker” • Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow • 01:52 • Luce (OST), Lakeshore Records2. “Dance Monkey” • Tones and I • 03:29 • The Kids Are Coming EP, Bad Batch Records / Elektra Records3. “Pang” • Caroline Polachek • 03:34 • Pang, Perpetual Novice4. “F Delano” • Kishi Bashi • 03:24 • Omoiyari, Joyful Noise Recordings5. “Feel Something” • Clairo • 02:57 • Immunity, FADER Label6. “Problem” • Elijah Woods x Jamie Fine • 03:28 • 8:47, Big Machine / Bell Media7. “Love Has All Been Done Before”…

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REVIEW: A Hidden Life [2019]

Jared Mobarak

We lived above the clouds. With notoriously long post-production periods due to his uniquely poetic editing style, Terrence Malick‘s three-hour WWII romance A Hidden Life may have actually benefited from its three-year delay as far as thematic relevance to current events is concerned. As a rising tide of fascistic totalitarianism takes hold of world governments (including partisan blindness in the United States), a rarely told story like that of conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter becomes more important than ever. While it might have been lost in 2016’s shuffle, seeing it now…

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