137 Results for : film's

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    Observare
    Rebekka Fisher is unquestionably the resourceful type. When the Minneapolis jazz/funk musician found herself being treated as an ornament in a mostly-male band, she quit and formed her own band. Puzzled by the low number of female instrumentalists in the music industry, she started a networking organization for women artists and began publishing a newsletter. And just last July, after having a hard time getting a gig at a local club, she again took action. She teamed up with other female artists to hold a benefit concert there that wound up attracting over 300 people and raising $750 for the Family Violence Network. Fisher's strong sense of purpose has been evident since childhood when she began playing piano at age nine. She was the third of four girls. She inherited her father's gift of creativity - Ed Fischer's editorial cartoons are syndicated in over 100 newspapers nationwide and have won him many awards. (He altered the spelling of his last name for FischerToons to avoid being confused with another Ed Fisher.) When Fisher was 13 years old, she heard Carole King's 'Tapestry' album and knew what she wanted to do with her life. 'I also listened to Melissa Manchester,' she remembers. 'She has incredible vocal power. I saw her in concert. A couple of times during her show, she didn't even use a microphone, and everyone could still hear her.' The teenage Fisher was anxious to put her dream into action and tried to form a band. Unfortunately, she couldn't find the same commitment in her friends and had to settle for songwriting on her own and keeping a catalog of her work. The creative outlet also became a form of therapy when her parents began having difficulties in their marriage (they've since divorced). She took up guitar and drums and channelled her pain into her music. By the time she was fifteen, she wound up playing the piano at a resort where she'd taken a part-time job washing dishes. She abandoned the idea of forming her own band and joined an already established one. The format? Heavy metal. 'Yes, I played keyboards in a heavy metal band,' she laughs. 'I really wasn't sure what I was doing there!' She spent her adolescence moving from one band to another. Her first real gig, in keeping with the unusual turn her budding career was taking, was at a deaf school. 'Actually, it went over great,' she says. 'They danced to the vibrations of the music that they felt through the floor. The only glitch was when they started slow dancing to our cover of 'Wipeout.' I tried to tell them that it was a fast song, but they couldn't hear me!' Fisher went on to attend the University of Minnesota and earn a degree in Composition. As she began meeting other musicians and jamming with them, she noticed a difference in the professional behavior between men and women. 'When I'm jamming with women, they're more cordial and polite,' she says. 'I know it's a generalization, but so many times I've seen women jamming and saying, 'You do a solo,' 'No, you solo, it's your turn.' Meanwhile the song is almost over! Men I've jammed with, on the other hand, are more aggressive. They'll play right over you.' Fisher was initially intimated by the more aggressive playing style of the male musicians but still preferred jamming with them. Her determination to hold her own in a mostly-male jam led her to practice harder and sharpen her keyboard skills. Eventually, her more aggressive style of playing won her a nomination for Keyboardist of the Year by the Minnesota Music Academy. Unfortunately, stronger technical skills didn't solve all of her difficulties. 'When you're the only girl in the band, it's hard to feel like a part of the group no matter how well you play,' she says. 'I was left out of the 'guy talk,' which is an important part of band bonding. They just didn't want to talk that way with me around.' Fisher finally gave up the attempts at bonding when she formed the Rebekka Fisher Band. 'I'm more of the boss than a friend,' she says of her relationship with the three men who make up the rest of the band, 'and that's probably for the best.' The Rebekka Fisher Band's first CD was 1995's 'Dream World.' It was followed by a lucky break that led to 1998's 'Observare': an introduction to Matt Fink, formerly of Prince's band Revolution. Fink wound up producing 'Observare' in his home studio. 'I met him through a friend,' Fisher remembers. 'I needed a producer, so it worked out great. He's a nice guy. Since then, he's been a guest speaker at Music Tech, where I teach. He's running his own recording studio and writing music for publishing companies and commercials.' 'Observare' featured a wailing funk song called 'A Different Girl,' in which she recounts her experiences in a mostly-male band before quitting to form her own band: 'I was standing in a corner, behind the lights. I don't rock the boat, the leader gets so uptight. And I feel like I'm living in a vanity case. So get a different girl to take my place.' Not all her listeners were receptive. The press coverage of 'Observare' gave Fisher her first taste of negative reviews, which initially made her want to quit the business. 'That was really tough,' she acknowledges. 'This can be an awful business. But when those reviews came out, I was teaching a class at Music Tech about creating a positive environment, and that really adjusted my attitude. To teach something, you really have to know the material and believe in it.' As she rebuilt her confidence, she also joined the jobbing circuit, playing weddings, corporate events, jams, and fill-in situations. Again, she was struck by the differences between the sexes. She was often the only female instrumentalist. Most of the women artists were vocalists. 'It's hard to be that one person that stands out,' she says. 'I still don't completely understand why there are so few women instrumentalists and why they tend to focus on things like melody line instead of theory. That's mostly what led me to put together Women Sing.' Still in it's formative stage, Women Sing is the start of a networking and resource tool for female artists. The newsletter is written and distributed solely by Fisher and includes profiles of women musicians in history (the Fall/Winter 2000 issue features the 19th century composer Pauline Viardot-Garcia). Eventually, Fisher hopes to become more than a one-woman resource center. 'I'd love to turn the newsletter into a regular magazine covering schools, online classes and networking areas,' she says enthusiastically. 'The best thing would be to go around the country and do women artist showcases. I would love to do that!' She knows it will be a tough road. 'It's hard to promote women in music without coming across as male-bashing,' she says. 'That's not what I'm about, but sometimes the very act of focusing solely on women will be interpreted that way.' She once placed a bumper sticker on her car that read, 'In Goddess We Trust' and started finding pages from the Bible posted on her windshield. Still, she keeps looking for other people to contribute and help her make the organization grow. In the meantime, Fisher has other matters to attend to. She still teaches songwriting classes at Music Tech. She would like to do more benefit concerts. And she and her band recently found the time to release their fourth CD, a five-track collection called 'Inner Spaces.' The songs have an added, subtle electronica influence, adding more fire and intensity to the already powerful funk grooves. Her new work began attracting attention before it was even released. One of the songs, the cool and ominous 'Driving,' is being featured on the soundtrack of an independent film called 'Vixen Highway.' 'When I heard the title,' she says, 'I called to make sure it wasn't a porno film. What's funny is that one of my composition students turned out to be one of the film's directors, so I asked her what it was about. It's a dark comedy, something about a gang of women on the road who kill a lo
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    Boy & the World
    Brazilian artist Ale Abreu's Academy Award(R)-nominated masterpiece is a riotous explosion of music and color that critics proclaim is "one of the most beautiful animated features ever made." (David Noh, Film Journal International) Cuca's cozy rural life is shattered when his father leaves for the city. Determined to reunite his family, Cuca embarks on a journey that unfolds like a tapestry - the film's stunning visuals becoming more complex as his small world expands. The story of a changing world through the eyes of a curious child, Boy and the World depicts a clash between village and city, nature and industry, the rich and the poor - and despite the tumult, the heart and soul of the people beats on as a song.
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    Caravan
    Composer Tim Story follows up his critically-acclaimed collaboration 'Lunz' with a soundtrack from another part of the world. From the production company of award-winning Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, Caravan is a feature-length documentary set in Nepal and north Africa. A unique glimpse into two seldom-seen cultures, the film traces the compelling journeys of two adolescent boys: Pemba in Nepal, and Rabdoulah in Niger. Each will embark on an adventure that few of us Westerners will ever experience -the centuries-old salt caravans. For followers of Tim Story's elegantly introspective 'ambient chamber' music, Story might seem an unconventional choice to score a film set in such exotic locales. Steadfastly evolving his own unique palette of Western classical instruments and subtle electronics, Story was never seduced by the 'world music' flourishes that have become so commonplace. But as Caravan's music supervisor Alán Cantos enthused, 'I saw a thousand adventures, dunes, sky, stars, and empty spaces... and I was only two-thirds into {Tim's} first CD!' Discovered one day on a Madrid radio station, Story's music had stayed with Cantos, prompting him to share it with Caravan's director Gerardo Olivares during one of the film crew's shoots in Niger. It became a kind of soundtrack for their long days and nights in the desert. When the time came for the filmmakers to commission a composer to score the film, the choice was already becoming clear. There are the occasional geographic cues in Story's music for Caravan: the tongue drums deftly played by Louie Simon, the oriental flute in one piece, or the chants of Tibetan Buddhist monks in another, all of which conjure for the listener a vivid sense of time and place. But this soundtrack is no world music travelogue. Caravan is a film about people, and Story's music searches for the nuances and truths of human nature. Always a particular strength of Story's solo work, moments of sheer beauty and unsettling dangers intermingle in this music, deepening the film's tone with uncommon delicacy. Beautifully articulated by Kim Bryden's oboe and Martha Reikow's cello, Story's spare yet rich themes map for us the emotional terrain of Pemba and Rabdoulah's journeys, and in doing so, give us a recording that is strikingly haunting and surprisingly cohesive - even when removed from the context of the film itself. Remixed, re-sequenced and in some instances even re-composed for this CD release by Story himself, Caravan shows clearly why the Grammy-nominated composer has been called 'a master of electronic chamber music' (CD Review, USA), and 'a true artist in the electronic medium' (Victory Review, USA).
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    The Complete Metropolis
    Incorporating more than 25 minutes of newly discovered footage, this 2010 restoration of METROPOLIS is the definitive edition of Fritz Lang's science fiction masterpiece. Backed by a new recording of Gottfried Huppertz's 1927 score, the film's dazzling visual design and special effects are more striking than ever. And the integration of scenes and subplots long considered lost endows METROPOLIS with even greater tension and emotional resonance, as it dramatizes the conflict between wealthy uber-capitalists and rebellious subterranean laborers - orchestrated by a diabolical scientist capable of destroying them both.
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    The Cobweb
    Step inside the Castle, a large private psychiatric facility. Here, Dr. Stewart McIver (Richard Widmark) devotes night and day to his profession while neglecting his pining, voluptuous wife (Gloria Grahame). A colleague (Charles Boyer) with a fondness for booze and a pretty face seeks to comfort the wife. Now add Lauren Bacall, Lillian Gish, John Kerr, Susan Strasberg, Oscar Levant and subplots of love, life and derangement and you have the entanglements of The Cobweb. Some critics gleefully skewered the film's labored storyline about patient involvement in the choice of library draperies, but pay no heed. With it's top cast and Vincente Minnelli's command of color and melodrama, this film is popcorn for fans of soaps.
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    Dumbo
    70th ANNIVERSARY EDITION. Blu-ray/DVD COMBO PACK. Let your spirits soar as you travel beyond the big top to Walt Disney's timeless classic! In celebration of this landmark film's 70th anniversary, DUMBO now includes a thrilling digital restoration and never-before-seen bonus features! When Mrs. Jumbo's little baby finally arrives, Dumbo and his oversized ears become the talk of the circus. With the help of his loyal best friend, Timothy Mouse, a magic feather and a ton of courage, Dumbo uses his sensational ears to soar to fame as the world's one and only flying elephant! Full of daring adventure, memorable characters, award-winning music and inspiring messages about the power of friendship and belief in yourself, DUMBO will become a treasured part of your family's collection of classic movies.
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    None but the Lonely Heart
    Down-and-out Londoner Ernie Mott makes the best of things ' finding love here, dabbling in crime there. Still, there's a core of decency in Ernie. But a world of poverty and despair has little use for decency. Cary Grant plays Ernie in a milestone work set just before World War II. Gone is the usual Grant elegance. Instead, wistful Cockney Ernie is closer to the star's 'umble roots and Grant took great pride in his performance, which earned him an Academy Award? nomination as Best Actor. He also helped lure Ethel Barrymore back to Hollywood, and she responded vibrantly with 1944's Oscar?-winning Best Supporting Actress portrayal of Ernie's dying mother. Let the moods of this masterwork wash over you. In it's ebb and flow you'll find a moving eloquence close to the heart of the film's leading man.
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    Dark of the Sun
    Take elite commandos, send them on a do-or-die assignment and sit back and watch the action explode. The men-on-a-mission formula that worked in 1967's the Dirty Dozen and in Where Eagles Dare (released in the U.S. in 1969) provides another salvo of volatile screen adventure with this strike-force saga released in 1968. Rod Taylor and Jim Brown are among a mercenary unit rolling on a steam train across the Congo, headed for the dual tasks of rescuing civilians imperiled by rebels and recovering a cache of diamonds. The film's violence is fierce, unforgiving, ahead of it's time. Quentin Tarantino would offer a tribute of sorts to this red-blooded wallop of a cult fave by using part of it's compelling score in Inglourious Basterds.
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    Straight Time
    After years behind bars, Max Dembo faces Straight Time. He hopes it will mean a new life, a job, a place to call home, perhaps even a girl of his own. Instead, it's a one-way ticket to disaster. Dustin Hoffman plays Max, a freed con trapped by an indifferent criminal system and his self-destructive bent. Before and during the film's shoot, Hoffman apprenticed himself to Edward Bunker, the ex-con whose book No Beast So Fierce inspired the movie. The resulting experience is intensely real and superbly acted by Hoffman and a terrific ensemble cast (Theresa Russell, Harry Dean Stanton, Gary Busey, M. Emmet Walsh and Kathy Bates). As Newsweek's David Ansen wrote, Straight Time has an edgy, lingering intensity.
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    Test
    Set in the free-spirited San Francisco of 1985, Chris Mason Johnson's Test lovingly portrays this exciting and harrowing era as young Frankie (dancer Scott Marlowe in a breakout acting debut) confronts the challenges of being an understudy in a modern dance company where he's taunted to "dance like a man!" Frankie embarks on a budding relationship with hunky Todd (Matthew Risch, HBO's "Looking"), a veteran dancer in the same company and the bad boy to Frankie's naiveté. As Frankie and Todd's friendship deepens, they navigate a world of risk - it's the early years of the epidemic - but also a world of hope, humor, visual beauty and musical relief. The captivating dance sequences were especially choreographed for the film by acclaimed U.S. choreographer Sidra Bell. The film's vibrant soundtrack includes work by '80s icons Jimmy Somerville (Bronski Beat), Klaus Nomi, Romeo Void, Laurie Anderson, Martha and the Muffins, Cocteau Twins and Sylvester.
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