Dear Child Dear Child (Liebes Kind) is a six-part German psychological thriller that landed on Netflix in September 2023. It was a genuine phenomenon: 52.5 million views and 253 million hours in its first months, making it Netflix’s second most-watched title of late 2023. The […]

Bring Forth Fate No spoilers! Mainly because I haven’t seen HOPE yet — but I desperately want to. It has excellent reviews, not to mention the largest budget in Korean film history. I’ll see it in a few days and update this post when I […]

Day One The inception of Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar score is very similar to Gustavo Santaolalla’s Brokeback Mountain soundtrack. With the latter, Ang Lee sent a script to Santaolalla, who wrote and recorded the entire score before a single frame was shot. Lee’s genius was deciding […]

In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night I really love the new Lanterns series on HBO. It’s definitely geared toward a more adult audience — much like the Star Wars spinoff, Andor. It also gives a True Detective vibe, as both of the protagonists are investigating […]

Cornfield Chase I’ve always wanted to double back to the crux of the Interstellar theme, which is really the motif titled “Cornfield Chase.” This was a high-water mark for composer Hans Zimmer. His genius is in not being outsmarted by his own technical skill — […]

If This Be Victory I generally like House of the Dragon. I’ve watched every season, and season three started strong with the Battle of the Gullet, but midway through I found myself not caring about these characters as much as I did in Game of […]

Web Letter Days The new Spider-Man was a great time at the theater. In my day job, most of my guitar students are young people and I’m surprised at the sheer love they have for (Tom Holland’s) Spider-Man. It’s reflected at the Box Office. We […]

L’attente (The Waiting) L’attente (The Waiting) follows a traditional 1-4-5 blues structure, even though it’s a French-styled piece of music. “French-styled” might be presumptuous of me — music carries no geographic borders — but I can’t help envisioning a dimly lit café in Paris when […]

Gonna Fly Now I was in 3rd grade (8 turning 9) during the ’85-’86 school year — and my childhood was an amazingly patriotic time to be alive. The Cold War was hanging over the culture and this was punctuated by several USA vs. the […]

Dreamscapes Dreamscapes is a sparse fingerstyle guitar piece by multi-instrumentalist composer Gustavo Santaolalla. The motif comes from the soundtrack of Dear Child (Liebes Kind), a German thriller limited series on Netflix. The show reopens a 13-year-old missing-persons case after a woman is struck by a […]

Love is in the Air, Pt.1 I love this piece from the film Obsession; a movie made on a shoestring budget ($750,000) and grossing nearly 200 million globally. I don’t expect Hollywood to draw any correct conclusions from this, but it would seem original storytelling […]

Eternia Composer Daniel Pemberton is having quite a year. First he scores the massively successful Project Hail Mary, and now he’s behind Masters of the Universe. You might not recognize the name immediately, but Pemberton is incredibly prolific — and he’s long been one of […]