Age: 73
male
Daniel Robert Elfman (born May 29, 1953) is an American film composer, singer, songwriter, and musician. He came to prominence as the lead vocalist and primary songwriter for the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the early 1980s. Since scoring his first studio film in 1985, Elfman has garnered international recognition for composing over 100 feature film scores, as well as compositions for television, stage productions, and the concert hall. Elfman has frequently worked with directors Tim Burton, Sam Raimi, and Gus Van Sant, contributing music to nearly 20 Burton projects, including Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, Mars Attacks!, Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish, and Alice in Wonderland, as well as scoring Raimi's Darkman, A Simple Plan, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Oz the Great and Powerful, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Van Sant's Academy Award-winning films Good Will Hunting and Milk. He wrote music for all of the Men in Black and Fifty Shades of Grey franchise films, the songs and score for Henry Selick's animated musical The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the themes for the popular television series Desperate Housewives and The Simpsons. Among his honours are four Oscar nominations, three Emmy Awards, a Grammy, seven Saturn Awards for Best Music, the 2002 Richard Kirk Award, the 2015 Disney Legend Award, the Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award in 2017, and the Society of Composers & Lyricists Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. Description above from the Wikipedia article Danny Elfman, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
This live-action remake of Corpse Bride, directed by Guillermo del Toro, reimagines the stop-motion classic as a breathtakingly macabre, practical-effects-heavy gothic fairy tale (Guillermo del Toro). The film masterfully splits its visual identity into two contrasting worlds. The Land of the Living is a rigid, suffocating Victorian town rendered in an ultra-matte, bloodless color palette of chalky white skin tones, charcoal tailcoats, and suffocating, high-collared gowns that mirror the social desperation of the nouveau-riche Van Dorts and the icy, aristocratic decay of the Everglots. Here, the repressed, melancholic Victor (Connor Storrie) accidentally binds himself to the afterlife during a botched rehearsal when he places a wedding band onto what he believes is a gnarled tree branch.In stark contrast, the Land of the Dead explodes onto the screen in a vibrant, bioluminescent spectacle. Bathed in a stark green cinematic glow, the underworld is a chaotic cabaret of hyper-realistic skeletal prosthetics and eccentric, larger-than-life characters. Olivia Rodrigo delivers a tragic, magnetic performance as Emily, the Corpse Bride, cascading in vibrant turquoise locks and a tattered, water-logged wedding gown. This world thrives on theatrical dark comedy, populated by a jazz-club big band led by the bare-boned Bonejangles (Sterling K. Brown) belting out brassy anthems, alongside a miniature, dueling military duo composed of a bombastic royal blue General Bonesapart (Ralph Fiennes) and a comically slow-witted, red-coated General Wellington (Gary Oldman). Driven by Jane Goldman’s sharp, emotionally sincere screenplay and Danny Elfman’s indispensable, whimsical score, the film evolves from a spooky comedy of errors into a visually stunning, bittersweet romance. It balances the suffocating prisons of high-society greed against the joyful, liberated chaos of the underworld, culminating in a spectacular, heartbreaking sacrifice.
