News

Hello and thanks for checking in!

Several new films are making the festival rounds.

ABRIL is the new feature film written and directed by Hernán Jiménez. It’s our fourth project together and it’s a fantastic film with a star-making turn from Maricarmen Merino who plays the title character, along with great performances from Jiménez, Lara Mora, and François Arnaud (in a break from “Heated Rivalry”). It follows a single mother who’s rebuilding her life after her daughter moves out to live with her father. Its beautiful cinematography is a kind of love letter to San José, Costa Rica. The score is built from a combination of piano and strings alongside guitar cues that owe allegiance to the Tin Hat sound (helped by Carla Kihlstedt on both normal and E-String violins).

Mark Hoffman’s A SIMPLE MACHINE has been winning awards at festivals across the country. The main character Nick makes a series of radical choices to try to get out of debt, while hiding it all from his fiancée. The film is a meditation on affordability and an examination of what’s left of the American Dream. I had help on the score from two brilliant composers: John Hancock and Jeff Baxter. Our score is a mix of woodwinds, ambient synth textures, and crossover chamber pop elements. This was a rare hometown project for me and several of my favorite Portland musicians contributed to the song-side of the soundtrack including Mike Coykendall, Redray Frazier, and Shelley Short.

OUR MR. MATSURA is a new feature length documentary from director Beth Harrington. It’s the story of photographer Frank Matsura who journeyed from his native Japan to live in rural Washington State in the early 1900s. The son of a samurai, orphaned at a young age, Matsura was raised in Tokyo in the early Meiji Era, emigrated to Seattle as a young man and eventually made his way to Okanogan County, Washington. He settled there in a community of Native people and homesteaders including cowboys, ranchers, miners, fruit growers, shopkeepers, small business owners and other local movers and shakers. I love working with Beth, and this film was an absolute pleasure to score. Matsura’s photography is stunning, crossing over entrenched societal divides that were the reality in the early 20th C., and his life story is both remarkable and moving.

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ALL THREE OF THESE FILMS WILL HAVE THEIR NW PREMIERES AT THE PORTLAND PANORAMA FILM FESTIVAL, APRIL 9th -19th.

I’ll also be leading two panels during the festival. Details are at the PPFF site: https://www.portlandpanorama.org/

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Sony Pictures Classics’ ON SWIFT HORSES stars Daisy Edgar Jones and Jacob Elordi with Will Poulter, Sasha Calle, and Diego Calva. Set in the 1950’s, the story revolves around two brothers – Lee and Julius (Poulter and Elordi) – and the new lives they’re trying to build after returning from the Korean War. Lee’s engaged to Muriel (Jones) who from their first meeting feels an instant connection with her soon to be brother-in-law. The film has the feel of a classic Hollywood romantic drama, and is a study of both the nature of desire and of the secret lives many were forced to live during the post-war era.

“On Swift Horses is about the shapes love can take, the varied lives we live and the many different ways one can make a home. It’s beautiful, heartbreaking and demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible.” ~ The Hollywood Reporter

The original soundtrack is available on Sony’s Madison Gate imprint and is available anywhere and everywhere. Here’s a link to the usual streaming suspects:

https://soundtrk.lnk.to/OnSwiftHorses

The 2024 Oscar winning film THE HOLDOVERS is streaming for free on Peacock and is available for rent or purchase everywhere else. The soundtrack is available on the usual streaming services or as a deluxe double LP (that includes my original score along with the fantastic source-score, including songs by everyone from Cat Stevens and The Allman Bros. to Artie Shaw and The Swingle Singers). Director Alexander Payne helped put together the artwork and contributed some great liner notes to the LP release as well.

“There’s a great theme that runs through filmmaker Alexander Payne’s work that finds curmudgeons bonding on the road, a voyage that takes at first-unlikeable male characters on a trip that would give Odysseus pause, dropping them off at the end of California vineyards, rural America and now Boston preppie-college central, leaving the characters just a bit wiser and more likeable than when we first found them. For Mark Orton, it was the acoustically folksy music of the acclaimed indie-alt. group Tin Hat that caught Payne’s sight as he drove a bickering son and father from Montana to “Nebraska.” Lucky for us, Orton is back in Payne’s company again for both career bests with “The Holdovers,” a film and score that fits their eccentric-enabling talents to a tee. Definitely not in Nebraska anymore, Orton shows his period-centric chops in any number of styles, with soulful blues guitar and brass echoing Cat Stevens, intimate jazz bringing to mind a Charlie Brown Christmas and sardonic sleigh bells for Giamatti’s patented bug outs. While strumming chords and accordion bring to mind Orton’s Tin Hat, a boy’s chorus echoes a college-bound institution haunted by war-fallen graduates, while a lyrical piano melody becomes the regret of a life hidden from in academia. As ironic as it is poignant, Orton’s “Holdovers” evokes sad sack smart people we’ll come to empathize with in an understated, emotionally impactful way. It’s a triumph of understated, literate dramedy in all respects, with a fine sense of time, place and an ultimately quite moving heart, especially in Orton’s musical roads uniquely travelled, once again in particularly excellent company.”
~ ON THE SCORE: THE BEST SCORES OF 2023

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