Entertainment

Ennio Morricone, the prolific Italian composer and conductor who has written many of the most recognisable film scores in history, says he will never again work with director Quentin Tarantino because he places music in his films without coherence.

Morricone’s work most recently appeared in Tarantino’s Django Unchained, the homage to the Spaghetti Western genre Morricone help popularise in the 1960s with classics including The Good The Bad and the Ugly (1966) and A Fistful of Dollars (1964), both directed by Sergio Leone.

Morricone also wrote most of the award-winning soundtrack for Leone’s epic Once Upon a Time in America.

The Django Unchanged soundtrack included Morricone’s Ancora Qui, sung by Elisa Toffoli, along with three short Morricone instrumental pieces.

Morricone and Tarantino actively worked together on Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s 2009 reinterpretation of the end of World War II, and on both instalments of the Kill Bill franchise — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Fans of cancelled US TV show Veronica Mars have raised $2m (£1.3m) to help bring the series about a young private investigator to the big screen.

More than 30,000 people donated money within 24 hours of a crowd-sourcing campaign being launched.

The more money we raise, the cooler movie we can make, series creator Rob Thomas wrote in his appeal to fans.

The cult show, starring Kristen Bell as a young sleuth, ended its three-season run in 2007.

The movie project is the fastest to reach $1m (£670,000) on the Kickstarter site, reaching the figure in four hours and 24 minutes — via redwolf.newsvine.com

I hate to admit it, but I sometimes find it hard to imagine life without Netflix. Whether it’s watching all six seasons of Lost in a week or enjoying some cool documentary I otherwise never would’ve heard of, Netfix has, for better or worse, definitely become a part of my life. So, you can imagine my delight when I happened to discover Netflix had added the legendary ’50s TV show, You Bet Your Life to its streaming service. The reason for my delight? The host of You Bet Your Life was none other than my grandfather, the one and only Groucho Marx.

It didn’t take long for me to devour all the episodes available on Netflix, and as I watched Groucho delivering his rapid-fire quips at the befuddled contestants, I couldn’t help thinking how amazing it was that I was sitting in the comfort of my den watching a TV show that made its debut in 1950, starring my grandfather.

But I also couldn’t stop thinking about how close every one of those classic episodes of You Bet Your Life came to being destroyed many years ago and how my grandfather and I managed to stop that from happening — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Public Image Ltd with John Lydon perform Reggie Song live in studios of 89.3 The Current

Queen’s classic arranged for solo viola and orchestra and conducted by Nick Hersh, performed by an ad hoc orchestra at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music

When Pulp Fiction thundered into theatres a year later, Stanley Crouch in the Los Angeles Times called it a high point in a low age. Time declared, It hits you like a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart. In Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman said it was nothing less than the reinvention of mainstream American cinema.

Made for $8.5 million, it earned $214 million worldwide, making it the top-grossing independent film at the time. Roger Ebert called it the most influential movie of the 1990s, so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it—the noses of those zombie writers who take ‘screenwriting’ classes that teach them the formulas for ‘hit films’.

Pulp Fiction resuscitated the career of John Travolta, made stars of Samuel L Jackson and Uma Thurman, gave Bruce Willis new muscle at the box office, and turned Harvey and Bob Weinstein, of Miramax, into giants of independent cinema. Harvey calls it the first independent movie that broke all the rules. It set a new dial on the movie clock.

It must be hard to believe that Mr Tarantino, a mostly self-taught, mostly untested talent who spent his formative years working in a video store, has come up with a work of such depth, wit and blazing originality that it places him in the front ranks of American filmmakers, wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times. You don’t merely enter a theatre to see Pulp Fiction: you go down a rabbit hole. Jon Ronson, critic for The Independent, in England, proclaimed, Not since the advent of Citizen Kane … has one man appeared from relative obscurity to redefine the art of movie-making — via redwolf.newsvine.com