The films put out by Marvel Studios have been excellent in most ways possible. Really nailing the tones of a wide variety of Marvel superheroes. One thing these movies have been lacking, however, is a strong musical presence.

Going back to the original Iron Man, these films have not really had the same level of film score heights that we have come to expect from comic book movies in the last decade plus. The tide began to turn with the last released film, Captain America, which brought in the fantastic Alan Silvestri, but even that didn’t really live up to its potential.

Well Mr. Silvestri is back with the biggest and most epic Marvel film yet, so can he deliver on the promise his name and this property offers? In one word, yes. In seven words and three exclamation points, hell freaking yeah! he totally nailed it!!

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And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth’s mightiest heroes and heroines found themselves united against a common threat. On that day, the Avengers were born—to fight the foes no single super hero could withstand! 

Yesterday in select cities nationwide, thousands of people were treated to a back-to-back marathon screening of all six Marvel Studios films. From Iron Man all the way to the midnight premiere of The Avengers, this epic, butt-busting extravaganza was sold as THE best way to celebrate the arrival of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.

The roster of films was impressive, but the time commitment was daunting. For true Marvel movie fans was this celebration a good thing? Is the act of subjecting yourself to hours upon hours watching these films worthwhile? Does it diminish the quality or enhance the context when you watch them all back-to-back?

These were all questions I had to ask myself before settling in on my seventeen hour quest through the Marvel Movie-verse, and they were all questions that were answered quite emphatically by about the fifth hour.

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One thing will be certain in a few weeks. Once Summer starts there will be more high profile scores than Fridays and some good music might fall through the cracks. Which is precisely why I am so excited to bring you this early review of Danny Elfman’s score from Dark Shadows.

This score ranked as one of my most anticipated of the early summer season, and that anticipation was made all the more severe when we listened to the expanded preview a few weeks back. So suffice to say I am ready to dig into the 14th collaboration between Danny Elfman and Tim Burton.

That is a lot of feature film scores from a director with a very distinct style, and recently there has been a lot of concern about repetitiveness in Elfman’s music. You can only go to that stylized dark well so many times, and eventually it will be dried up completely.

So does this umpteenth collaboration yield beautiful sonic rewards, or is this little more than a Beetlejuice or Sleep Hallow remix album?

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Last week saw the release of the first 2012 mega blockbuster, The Hunger Games. The film was eagerly anticipated and delivered the majority of it’s promise for a sweeping, epic tale of love, death and the games.

Being the first of 2012′s big boys I would be remiss if I didn’t spend some time on it’s score. Especially considering it comes from one of the best composers working today, James Newton Howard.

The score is rather strait forward, if maybe a little uninspired. I am not saying it is bad persay, but while watching the movie I really only had one moment where I felt like the score was connecting with me. Once I had the chance to sit down with the actual album I realized why. Most of the music just ins’t particularly gripping.

Again, there is a difference between bad and not gripping. I truly think Howard made quality music, I just think very little of it stands above the whole proceedings and make’s itself known. Of course there are exceptions to this, a couple of the tracks are actually really fantastic. I just don’t think the score spends enough time with the best stuff, and the majority of the rest feels flat.

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Director Lasse Hallstrom (best known for My Life as a Dog and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) is a man unafraid of heartwarming, and his latest, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, is shameless. The big fish tale of a romantic, mystical Yemeni sheikh (the gorgeous and charismatic Egyptian actor Amr Waked, last seen as Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law in the HBO bio-pic) with seemingly limitless riches and a cockamanie vision of building salmon fishing grounds in his native desert, Salmon Fishing neatly wraps together all the makings of an arthouse wet dream: exotic locales (the Yemen of the title and a Scottish estate that makes Balmoral look like a split level), a star-crossed yet inevitable love story between bumbling, uptight scientist, Dr. Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor, looking good in tweeds) and crisp, proper career gal Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt), plus the necessary danger element in the vague shape of possible Jihadi assassins, or at least jealous locals.

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Every once in a blue moon a film score will resonate in pop culture, it will connect with an audience and grow almost a life of it’s own. Often times it goes hand in hand with a film itself that becomes a cultural milestone for a generation. The music to the phenomenon that was Titanic was one such occasion.

Next month’s 3D re-release of James Cameron’s historical epic brings with it a renewed interest in the music that captured so many imaginations. So Sony Classical is capitalizing on that and releasing an anniversary edition to coincide with the new theatrical run of the film.

There will be two versions of the Anniversary edition released, one will be a standard editions with two discs, and a second with two more discs, designated the collectors edition. This review will be covering the collectors edition, so keep that in mind if you want to pick this set up yourself.

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Friends with Kids is one of those high concept romantic comedies that posits a Big Life Question—in this case: can a couple have a baby together and keep the romance?—and then spends the next 90 minutes trying to answer it. Think of it as the No Strings Attached—can friends sleep together without emotional complications?—of the ticking biological clock set.

Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt, best known for 2002’s Kissing Jessica Stein) and Jason (Adam Scott) are good college friends who live on different floors of the same apartment building on Riverside Drive. They watch in alarm as their coupled friends Leslie and Alex (Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd) and Missy and Ben (Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm, Westerfeldt’s real-life partner) conceive and bear children, and proceed to ruin their lives and relationships. At every point the parents are haggard, distraught and argumentative. Fathers are irresponsible and immature. Mothers depressed and resentful. Their looks are sunk. So are their libidos and marriages.

Julie and Jason vow the same will not happen to them, whenever they should each happen to find the mate of their dreams. Problem is: Julie’s not getting younger. There’s no man in sight and she wants a baby. So Jason, a commitment-phobe who’s known for never sleeping with the same woman for longer than a week, hatches a plan, the kind of conceit they come up with in movies and then build the next two acts on, even though it wouldn’t fly for five seconds in real life: he and Julie will have a baby together, totally without ties. Just as parenting partners. Call it Parents Without Benefits.

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Everyone knows that Wednesday is new comic book day. While picking up your new issues consider looking at some of the trade paperbacks and hard covers of past issues and story lines. But which ones should you choose?

That’s why every Tuesday, The Flickcast will recommend a collection of comics that are just as good, if not better, than the issues you are currently buying. Books that deserve to be read, and bought the next time you walk into your local comic book store.

Preacher is The Godfather of comics. Its brazen, over-bearing, and loud tone leave a distinct aftertaste when you finish reading. The characters are mean and hateful. The locations are gritty and gross. Preacher is the sum total of all the dark corners of America combined into a tale of the problems of religion. It is a series that is not for everyone, and will turn some people off of comics forever. However, if someone asked me what my favorite comic book series of all time was, I would be hard pressed to not choose Preacher.

Preacher was a mature and violent comic book series published by Vertigo in 1995. It lasted sixty-six issues as the main characters blasted and hunted their way through America on their quest to find God. Oh, by the way, their quest was not metaphorical; it was literal.

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W.E. is the last of our Golden Globe nominated scores, perfect timing as the show airs this Sunday, and by far the most unexpected. In fact before this nomination I didn’t even know this movie existed. The film is actually directed by Madonna, which is interesting but not all together important for a review of it’s score.

The composer is Abel Korzeniowski and I can see why his excellent work was recognized by the Hollywood Foreign Press. The score is very well put together with an emphasis on large, sweeping strings in a few very choice places. Listening to the music gives me the sense that it probably dominates much of the movie. While I appreciate that sort of heavy handed musical touch, I can also see where it might have played a role in the films less than stellar critical reception.

I am happy to see it nominated though, as there has been a recent trend of nominating more subtle and subdued scores in the last few years. This is far from it, and it plays very nicely to my personal film musical tastes. Strong string work always has a tendency to grip me, and this score delivers that in spades.

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2011 might go down as the year Hollywood finally figured out how to make a great prequel. Between the “X-cellent” X-Men: First Class and Rise of the Planet of the Apes we have seen two high profile franchises recieve a much needed quality boost back into the lime light.

The most impressive part of this movie is the performance of Andy Serkis as Caesar the ape. Millions of words have been written on the subject of his brilliant digital performance, and every single one of them speaks the truth. We are seeing the line between animation and performance blends so much that it is almost impossible to tell the difference.

This Blu-Ray presents the film, and a whole bunch of features that help you understand what exactly went into the astonishing effects work on the film. Of all the films that have come out in the last few years, this is one of the most worthy of a great set of features.

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Superman’s origin story is one of the most well-known stories in pop culture. Almost everyone on the street knows the basic details of his beginning. Dying planet, desperate scientists, loving farm couple, leads one to become Superman. The story has been re-told so many times, that many people prefer just to skip it.

Action Comics #5 is the DC New 52 version of his origin story, and it has all the familiar elements. Jor-El, Martha and Jonathan Kent, and even the Legion of Superheroes all make an appearance.

The exception of this re-telling is that it was written by Grant Morrison and complimented with dynamic art by Andy Kubert. This re-telling is anything, but stale. Action Comics #5 turns everything old new again by making Superman’s origin exciting, epic, and engaging.

When re-telling an old story, one can add a new element to it by simply switching the perspective of who tells the story, which is exactly what Morrison does. We get to see the origin through the eyes of a character that has never been voiced before in any version of the Superman mythos. We get to see the Superman origin through the perspective of his ship, the one that flew him to Earth.

In Morrison’s origin, Superman’s ship has A.I., and it generally cares for the young Kal-El. Its dialogue comes off as alien and machine like, but through the small paragraphs of prose, the ship expresses its duty to carry out its mission. It’s this fresh element that truly makes Krypton for the first time ever truly alien, and not just an Earth-like copy.

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The third score from this year’s Golden Globe nominated set that I have the pleasure to review is from The Artist. The film is an interesting one, a silent film shot in black and white, set during Hollywood’s golden age. The film goes through great lengths to simulate the style of films the movie is about, and one of it’s biggest assets is it’s score.

Musically this could have come right out of the late 20s, it has a timeless quality, that allows it to feel fresh at the same time it transports you back to film music of a long passed era. Silent films used to rely heavily on music to help convey emotion, and as a result the music would often tell you as much of a story as the pictures did. It is exciting to hear that style of music in cinema again.

There is also a tremendous positivity abound in the music. Ludovic Bource has crafted a musical composition that damn near forces you to smile. One of the things that we too often hear these days is dark, monotone notes played for a mildly uncomfortable effect. This score excels at the exact opposite, and is incredibly fun.

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