• Composer Series,  Features,  Interviews,  Movies/Entertainment

    The Matrix Revisited: Composer Don Davis Reveals Secrets from His Score to Celebrate the 20th Anniversary of ‘The Matrix’

    Editor’s Note: This post contains the introduction to an article I wrote specifically for The Hollywood Reporter. It was a great honor to work on a post about a film, and film score so dear to my heart. In this retrospective, composer Don Davis plugs back in to recall the lengths he took to satisfy the Wachowskis’ exacting vision. Click here to read the full article. Twenty years ago, The Matrix blew audiences away with its ground-breaking, generation-defining style. That was in tandem with substantive themes that were esoteric yet accessible. For every Hong Kong-styled wire fight, there was an equally engaging reference to Plato.  One integral component to the success of…

  • Movies/Entertainment,  Quick 5/Top 10

    G-S-T Top 10 – Scenes I Could Watch Over and Over and Over…

    Taking huge inspiration (read: ripped off the idea) from Ruth at FlixChatter, I have decided to compile my own of the scenes I love to watch. These, as the headline suggests, are sequences in some of my favorite movies that I think I could watch on never-ending repeat. But before we begin, I would like to apologize up front for the varying quality of these videos (and in some cases the non-existent video of the sequence I’m referencing)…although it is YouTube after all right? So while this is about all the exposition a post like this requires, let’s get on with it, shall we?

  • Movies/Entertainment,  Quick 5/Top 10

    G-S-T Quick 5 – Best Action Melee Scenes

    Let’s face it, when we walk into an action movie, we don’t want realism. We want our hero to be “10 feet tall and bulletproof“. We want him/her to know tons of bone crunching self-defense, walk through a battle unscathed and maybe, just maybe, if we’ve suspended all our disbelief, our hero will be able to walk on water. Now as action films go, pushing the envelope is a requirement, nay, obligation and most times, despite the lunacy of what happening on-screen, we always think bigger and better is the way to go…except in Transformers 2. Yet for as long as films have had that genre defining high action content,…