A movie’s music is one of its most important aspects; a characteristic that is often taken for granted.  A film can reveal so much within its music.  Beyond the creepy background music of thrillers that tells you the killer is around the corner, music has the ability to expose characters’ feelings, actions, and a film’s tensions. Thanks to Den of Geek for the article and in their latest music in the movies column, Den of Geek salutes the work of  James Newton Howard, the purveyor of themes for many M.Night Shyamalan films.

An accomplished musician at a young age, James Newton Howard studied at the USC School of music, and after he graduated, began a career as a session musician, working with some of the biggest names in the business before embarking on a career as a composer for film and TV. He composed the iconic score for the TV show ER, as well as scoring a wealth of memorable scores for movies over the years.

With the imminent release of The Last Airbender on Blu-ray and DVD, I thought now would be the ideal time to look at his work with the director M. Night Shyamalan, as well as two of my other favourites in his back catalogue…

Wyatt Earp

If I were to pick a genre where the highest number of my favourite scores came from, it would be the western. It seems that the vast majority have amazing scores, and James Newton Howard’s score for the much-maligned Kevin Costner-starring biopic can certainly be ranked alongside some of the best.

The score is as epic as the film itself, with Newton Howard acknowledging scores that came before, but opting for a more reined in approach for much of his work here, but unleashing grand themes when called upon, particularly in the gunfight during the film’s finale.

The Sixth Sense

The first of many collaborations with director M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense isarguably their finest work together. I was lucky enough to be in America when this film opened, so managed to go in knowing very little about it, which made what unfolded all the more effective.

Despite the gradual dip in quality of the director’s later work, this remains an excellent film that benefits from an eerie scene-setting score that plays on the audience’s emotions, eliciting high levels of sadness as well as being chilling at the same time. A great score for an excellent film.

Unbreakable

For the pair’s second collaboration, Shyamalan sought Newton Howard’s involvement immediately after completing The Sixth Sense. Shyamalan wanted a score that sounded distinct and simple, so Newton Howard limited himself to just strings, trumpets and piano, setting out to record a classic piece of work.

There’s an air of tension and a reoccurring leitmotif that carries much of the piece, and the recording sounds incredible, with large parts of it being recorded in a converted church. Definitely one that comes highly recommended.

Signs

Newton Howard pitches this as though he’s scoring a classic thriller, which helps to elevate the material on screen and portray the required levels of suspense effectively. It’s an incredibly bass-heavy score, which makes for quite an unsettling viewing experience.

Sure, there are flaws in the film, and this isn’t the most adventurous of the composer’s work, but it suits the film perfectly, even if it isn’t the greatest standalone listen due to its relentless nature.

The Village

For his fourth collaboration with Shyamalan, Newton Howard enlisted the help of the Hollywood Studio Symphony and violinist Hilary Hahn to bring his compositions to life. The results are quite fantastic, with Hahn’s work being the highlight.

Like Signs, I think there’s a good idea for a film here. I just feel that it failed to deliver on its early promise. It’s by no means a terrible film, just a mildly disappointing one. So, it’s a shame that Newton Howard’s score is often overlooked, as it’s attached to a maligned film.

The score does exactly what it needs to by creating a sense of an insular community with a mix of curiosity, of fear, and wonder of the outside world, resulting in an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score.

Lady In The Water

Grass dogs and evil tree monkeys are but two of the delights that Shyamalan treats audiences to in what, until recently, was regarded as his worst movie. It’s not without reason, as I struggle to think of a more blatant example of a filmmaker slamming film critics and praising his own genius in a film. It’s a masturbatory mess of a movie that has very few redeeming features other than its score.

Newton Howard makes the most of a large scale orchestra to make this a dramatic and stirring score that is much, much, better than the film deserves. Similarities have been drawn to Morricone’s score for Days Of Heaven, and these comparisons aren’t inaccurate.

There are also some awful Bob Dylan covers in the film that go some way to show how easy it is to ruin great songs.

The Happening

The score here bears similarity to his work on Signs and The Village, in that there’s a reliance on recurring themes and an ominous build of tension. Newton Howard’s work here is fine enough, it’s just a shame that the pay-off on screen doesn’t match the quality of his composition.

However, there’s not enough originality or inventiveness here to recommend the score to even fans of the composer’s. It’s very much a by-the-numbers piece of work.

Blood Diamond

Perhaps the score of Newton Howard’s I listen to most in isolation from its film, this is an incredible score that is one of the finest works of his career. Without exception, all of the pieces here are incredibly well thought out and performed to near perfection. And best of all, it shows off an experimental side that seemed to be lacking from some of his other scores leading up to the film’s release.

The Last Airbender

Okay, the film is obviously rubbish, and will, no doubt, be a prominent feature of the worst film of the year list for many people, but the score is probably one of the best efforts of the year.

Newton Howard has composed a score that far exceeds the quality of the film (not hard, I know), and in my opinion has composed his second best score for a Shyamalan film to date.

Whilst it perhaps lacks the inventiveness of much of his earlier work, he more than makes up for it with a sense of drama by using a huge orchestra to its full potential.

There’s a decent mix of moods, from the ominous and slow build in its opening passages, through to its dramatic finale. There’s little hope in the piece, which is generally quite dark. Comparisons could be made to the scores of John Williams, but it’s much more downbeat than much of that master’s work

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Thanksgiving is over and hope you guys had a good one with your relatives and friends. This weekend I have been searching  the net for some important Shyamalan interviews and I selected 3 good ones which are not that long, but they are useful if you are an aspiring writer or director. The first video is from Devil Premiere which we never posted before. And the last 3  videos are 3 part interviews with Rajeev Masand where Shyamalan talks about his personal life a little bit, The Happening, Lady In The Water, The Last Airbender, The Sixth Sense and all other controversial remarks against him. Check them out. They are not new interviews, but I find them interesting. And make sure to post your comments and let us know your thoughts.

Thanks to ChannelApa for the following video.

The following are 3 part interview with Rajeev Masand. Enjoy!

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M.Night Shyamalan sat with “American Film Institute” to talk about who gave  him the permission to make “The Sixth Sense” and how he  dived into filmmaking. The video is posted below and it’s a short clip, yet a important one for the fans, specially for those who are inspiring directors and writers.

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You will be stuck with the Devil in theatres on September 17th. Thanks to APPLE for the featurette and the folks at  BLOODY-DISGUSTING for the video below. Enjoy!

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M.Night Shyamalan is known for spine-chilling thrillers with ghoulish final-frame twists like in The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and The Village. But director M Night Shyamalan says he loved getting the chance to be a big kid again when making his latest film ‘extravaganza’ The Last Airbender.

Based on a hit children’s TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender, the film in which the world is at war and its fate lies in the hand of one small boy. ‘I think each artist thinks of themselves at a certain period of their life and a little bit of me perceives me as a ten-year-old a lot,’ Shyamalan tells AAP from his home in the US.

‘You see it, even in my darker pieces – there’s always a perspective from that age group. Whether it’s Unbreakable when he sees his father in a certain way, obviously in The Sixth Sense and also in Signs which tells the kid’s point of view of what’s going on.

‘It’s always feathered in there. ‘The Last Airbender tells the story of a primitive world which is being threatened with extinction by the Fire Nation, who aims to annihilate the more peace-loving nations of Air, Water and Earth.

But then a ‘waterbender’, who is still learning to control her powers, discovers the long-lost Aang – not only the world’s last airbender, but an avatar sent to save the earth.

It was Shyamalan’s own children who introduced him to the captivating TV series which inspired the big-budget, CGI-assisted, 3D film. ‘Usually people are getting stabbed in all of my movies,’ Shyamalan laughs.

‘It was fun to make a movie that the whole family was a part of from beginning to end. ‘(My kids) were hanging out (on set) and they’re friends with the cast and when I come home, the cast is at my house – it was like that kind of atmosphere.

‘It was a very emotional, fun time – kind of being a kid and doing something for the family and families and thinking with a different part of my brain. It was a soul-enriching kind of thing.’ Wrapping the movie and saying goodbye to the young cast was a tough day, Shyamalan says.

‘It’s always emotional at the end of a movie, but that one in particular was hard,’ he says. Shyamalan is hoping to get the green light on a sequel to The Last Airbender, but he doesn’t think his darker film-making days are over. ‘As the kids grow older and become teenagers, I’ll start to make movies for them at that age, and soon they’ll be adults and we’ll be making only thrillers again,’ he laughs.

‘But it’s nice to make movies for your kids while you have kids.’  The director always had it in his mind to create an alternate world on film, but he acknowledges that in transforming the hit TV series for the big screens he is under a lot of pressure from hard-core fans to get it right.

‘They know the width of the arrow on the head and all that stuff,’ he says. But it was a story that should always have been told on a grand scale, he argues.

‘The ideas were so cinematic … it felt like it was almost too big for what it was before,’ he says.  Shyamalan says he had always considered CGI effects to be his ‘arch nemesis’, but he embraced them for this film and soon learned to love them.

‘I’m glad I don’t see it as an enemy anymore,’ he says.

‘I’m a technophobe a little bit. I think it’s just my old curmudgeon ways of not wanting to change, more than anything else.

‘But spending all this time working with CGI I’ve really come to love it as an art form … I think I’ve learned a new tool for the belt.’ Shyamalan, who describes himself as a ‘minimalist film maker’ doesn’t envisage a CGI-dominated movie like Transformers on his horizons.

‘I think when I go back to doing other movies I’ll be able to use it as a tool, but it will still have a minimal part of the story-telling process,’ he says.

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“I don’t know what’s going on with me and the critics in the United States. They’ve never got me and it’s getting worse!” said the filmmaker.

Despite high praise for 1999′s The Sixth Sense, which was nominated for six Academy Awards, follow-ups including The Village and Lady In The Water went down like lead balloons.

The writer and director thinks cultural differences may play a part:

“I’ve always had a European sensibility to my movies, so the pacing is always a little bit off for (Americans). It feels a little stilted, they need more electricity. 

“I’m very used to getting on a plane from the US having been savaged by them and going to – in this case – Japan next, and then they’re like ‘genius!’, he added.

Poor reviews or not, Shyamalan has already penned the sequel to The Last Airbender and a strong peformance at the US box office means it is likely to be made.

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 Jackson Rathbone has said that there is more to M. Night Shyamalan’s work than plot turns and gimmicks. Rathbone also told Digital Spy that his Last Airbender director, whose early films The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable featured twist endings, was “amazing” to work with.
“People say he does twists in all his movies but where really was the twist in Signs?” he said. “It’s kind of hard to say that there’s a gimmick to his work, it’s not that, he tells a story so compelling that you’re on the edge of your seat all the way through the film.”

On Shyamalan’s approach to The Last Airbender, which is based on the popular Nickelodeon children’s TV show, Rathbone said: “What he was able to put into the live-action adaptation was a condensed version of the animated series. It was fun, it was amazing to get to work with a director of Night’s calibre, someone we’ve respected and admired for years now. We’re waiting for his next film to get out and see what he was going to do next.”

Do you agree or disagree with Jackson Rathbone?

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Shyamalan shot to fame after writing and directing 1999 hit thriller The Sixth Sense but his more recent projects have been met with disappointing reviews.

The moviemaker has now compared his career to that of basketball legend Michael Jordan, who sometimes struggled to meet fans’ expectations.

He tells Britain’s Total Film magazine, “Look, I loved Michael Jordan, right? He was my favourite basketball player. When I used to watch him at Madison Square Garden there would be 25,000 people booing every time that he touched the ball, screaming abuse at him. And it was because the entire stadium was there to see him be spectacular. They were like, ‘I don’t want you to disappoint me or hurt me.’

“I’m no Michael Jordan but maybe I get a little of that… Reviews of my movies often spend a lot of the time talking about me, not the movie!”

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Read the rest at JoBlo.com

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