Monday, March 23, 2009

Music in One Week

A number of people have been accessing my entry on the fabulous music in Michael McGowan's 'One Week'. As a follow-up to that posting in January I'd like to suggest that you visit the 'One Week' website to get a further listing of the soundtrack entries with samples and Itunes links.

http://www.oneweek.ca/music

The website has plenty of other nice features including a map of all the stops in the film and great photos.

On a side note, the great Canadian film C.R.A.Z.Y. had an awesome soundtrack of fairly well known songs. The budget for that soundtrack was $600 000 almost 1/3 of the whole budget of One Week. The cost of their soundtrack was so much that the producers couldn't approve it so the writer/director cut his own salary to cover the cost. As it was, he wasn't able to get all his desired choices as some of the other songs he wanted were even more prohibitably priced. The $600 000 was only for screenings in Canada and as a result the film was never screened in the U.S.

Michael McGowan deserves great credit for obtaining such an amazing soundtrack on a relatively small budget.

Photo (Joel Plaskett)

Julian D.

Monday, March 2, 2009

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas has greatly moved readers of the award-winning "children's" novel by John Boyne as well as viewers of the film directed and written by Mark Herman. Film critics have been moderately positive with rankings of 63% on Rotten Tomatoes and 55% on Metacritic as compared to a very strong 7.8 among film viewers on IMDB. In the IMDB poll of viewers 87% gave it a rating of 7 or higher. One of the harshest reviews from critics was from Manohla Dargis of the New York Times.

Manohla Dargis's Review

Compare it with Roger Ebert's very strong review in favour of the film.

Roger Ebert's Review

I'm hoping our audience will side with Roger's review.

For an example on how viewers have reacted consider the samples on the fine Canadian user review site: cinemaclock.ca.

Cinemaclock reviews

For many interesting details on the production of the film, read the production notes:
Boy in the Striped Pajamas Production Notes

Also included in the official website are these discussion notes:
Boy in the Striped Pajamas Discussion Notes

We'd love for you to share your thoughts.

Julian D.