Posts Tagged ‘mark wahlberg’

The Steel Horse Archives: Steelheart, “I’ll Never Let You Go (Angel Eyes)” (1990)

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Title: I’ll Never Let You Go
Album: Steelheart
Released: May 10, 1990

Why You Remember Them: Previous installments of this award-winning series have included bands with numerous hits, if not multiple albums, to their names, but we bring that streak to a screeching, flaming halt with Steelheart, whose sole contribution to the poufy-hair zeitgeist is “I’ll Never Let You Go,” a song whose fierce, animalistic coda explodes with such visceral fury that it is entirely likely that lead singer Michael Matijevic, a man with a consonant-y name so clunky and Eastern European-sounding that I’m sure we’re related, exploded his carotid artery straining for the last note and is still lying in a pool of blood and Aqua Net in a studio somewhere. It is quite simply impossible to achieve that level of valkyrie screaming without attaching a car battery to your face.

But Suck on This Little Bit of Kevin Bacon Game Madness: Matijevic in 2001 provided the voice for the Mark Wahlberg character in Rock Star, itself modeled on the story of a Judas Priest cover band singer-turned-actual-Judas-Priest frontman. The film featured a version of “We All Die Young,” which originally appeared on Steelheart’s third (!) album, Wait. So, good for Matijevic. (more…)

The Producers: “Rock Star,” Missing Cheese, and the End

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Music production for film is a different animal from the music production I was used to; once you’ve assembled and installed the band in the studio, you’re all sitting in the control room literally on call to turn out a variety of arrangements of the same song as quickly as possible, depending on the requirements on the set. A couple of times we were required to learn, arrange, record and mix a song, all in one day. This was not a low-stress experience.

RockStar_mark[1]For Rock Star, because of the storyline, we needed two separate bands playing the same songs. One band had to sound as though it had been playing as a unit for 20 years. The other was a tribute band, and had to be good, but not quite as good as the older band. In a couple of cases, I actually preferred the tribute band’s finished version to the more seasoned band’s finished version. For the main band, Budd Carr had secured the services of Jason Bonham and Zakk Wylde, so the choices for drums and guitar were already made. After spending a little time with the two of them separately, I knew that I would need someone really diplomatic and cooperative to play bass and keep things running smoothly. I called Jeff Pilson, the bass player from Dokken. Jeff is a great bass player, has a good sense of humor, and is a real team player. He wants things to work, and he’ll do what he has to in order to make sure they do. As it worked out, his presence was quite useful in the studio. We needed a strong, mature lead voice with a huge range, so I called the singer from Steelheart, Michael Matijevic. I had worked with Michael several years earlier on an MCA album, and I had never heard a vocalist with a greater range – especially on the upside. (more…)

DVD Review: “Max Payne”

Cover of "Max Payne [Blu-ray]"
For the benefit of those who haven’t seen Max Payne yet, but are considering renting the DVD, I’m going to spoil as much of it as possible for you. Why? Because this is a film that shouldn’t be seen under any circumstances, even if you’re dragged off an airplane under the Presidential Directive of Rendition, and are placed in a dark room where CIA operatives intend to show it to you in order to forcefully extract information.

Forewarned is forearmed.

In the movie, based on the immensely popular 2001 videogame, Mark Wahlberg (The Departed, The Happening) stars as the titular character, a detective whose wife and infant son were brutally murdered by three home intruders, one of whom managed to escape and was never found. Despondent over the loss of his family and that the final assailant was never brought to justice, Max now works the Cold Case division of the NYPD, and in his spare time hunts down clues as to who the final killer might be.

Three years have passed since the murders, and one night Max tricks three punks into trying to rob him in a subway men’s room, and instead takes two of them down–riding one for clues while the third escapes into the darkness of the subway tracks. As the last punk flees, he is suddenly accosted by what appear to be winged demons (or possibly angels), before he meets his end as a train slams into him on its way to its final destination (ba-dum-bump!)

Max then heads to a club to gain more helpful info from the stoolie who led him to the subway punks. While there, he meets up with Russian hottie Natasha Sax (Olga Kurylenko) and her sister Mona (Mila Kunis). The girls enter into a heated debate before Max brings Natasha home to gain intel on a series of odd wing-shaped tattoos he spotted on one of the subway thugs, and which Natasha has as well. When Natasha unintentionally insults Max’s dead wife, he kicks her out of his place. Shortly afterward, Mona is murdered–seemingly by the selfsame demons from earlier, and Max soon becomes the prime suspect. Caring more about solving his wife’s murder than clearing his name soon plunges Max into a race to find the real killers, and eventually forces him to team up with Mona–head of a Russian mob family–before Max can be brought in by Lt. Jim Bravura (Chris “Ludicris” Bridges), another detective investigating both Natasha’s murder and that of Max’s old partner, in which Max is now also a suspect. (more…)