Latest news with #AlejandroAmenábar
Metro
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
'Gripping' Spanish thriller with Stanley Tucci quietly added to free platform
A 'distinctive' series about a diplomat hunting down a team of treasure hunters to recover their spoils is now streaming for free in the UK. First hitting screens in 2021, La Fortuna is a Spanish-American adventure drama television miniseries. Directed by Alejandro Amenábar, the series marked the acclaimed filmmakers first foray into small screen productions. Based on the 2018 graphic novel El tesoro del Cisne Negro by Paco Roca and Guillermo Corral, the six-parter was also based on an incredible true story. In 1804 the Spanish ship Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes was sunk by the British Navy off the south coast of Portugal during the Battle of Cap Santa Maria. Over two centuries later, in 2007, the Florida-based company Odysseus Marine Exploration reported having discovered a shipwreck, later revealed to be the Senora. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video The crew recovered almost 500,000 silver and gold coins from the wreck before transporting them to the United States. But soon after the Spanish government kickstarted a legal battle over what it considered to be illegal looting, with the coins estimated to be worth around $500,000 (£368,000). In the TV show, the story focuses on Alex Ventura (Álvaro Mel), a young diplomat who ends up spearheading efforts to recover the underwater shipwreck of La Fortuna, seized off the coast of Gibraltar by Frank Wild (Stanley Tucci), a treasure hunter. It was teased of the show: 'La Fortuna was known to be carrying gold gathered all over South America to fund the Spanish war effort. Wild and his crew claim to have found it by chance. Now the Spanish government wants it back.' The series also stars Ana Polvorosa as Lucía Vallarta, a civil servant and T'Nia Miller as Susan McLean, a lawyer collaborating with Frank. At the time reviews of the series were mixed from critics and viewers, but many did share they were drawn in by the unique premise. 'There is no puzzle to solve in La Fortuna, no hidden messages, and that relative straightforwardness coupled with the actors' clinic put on by Tucci and Peters is enough to make La Fortuna worth retrieving from the depths of streaming,' Vulture wrote in its review. 'La Fortuna's distinctive story, combined with the standout performances from Tucci and Peters, make the show one we want to stick with,' Decider shared. 'It's a very topical, hot-button issue that the series addresses, intelligently and not without acknowledging that its central controversy has two sides — even if director and co-writer Alejandro Amenábar makes clear which side he's on,' the Wall Street Journal added. Deadline explained the show as 'a strange, soupy hybrid of courtroom drama, Indiana Jones fantasies and an Iberian version of The Office'. Meanwhile fans said it was a 'breath of fresh air worth binging', a 'masterpiece' and even 'the best Spanish series ever'. Speaking to Empire in 2022, Stanley spoke about being drawn to his character, who is described in the first episode as a 'pirate'. What drew you to your character in La Fortuna****, who is actually described in the first episode 'I mean, that's what drew me to him, that he's really complicated,' he said. 'He seems to be one thing, but turns out to be another thing. He's a very complex guy, and those are always great roles to play.' More Trending In real life, a U.S. federal court and a panel from the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld the Spanish claim to the contents of La Fortuna. However, they were not returned until 2013, when a court ordered Odyssey Marine to return the coins, which totalled 14.5 tonnes. They are now held in the National Museum of Subaquatic Archaeology in Cartagena (Murcia) for cataloguing, study and permanent display. La Fortuna is streaming on ITVX. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. View More » MORE: The 7 best 'explosive' Australian thrillers free to watch in UK MORE: Star of iconic ITV sitcom addresses claim she's 'living from couch to couch' MORE: 'Engrossing' ITV thriller from the creator of Line of Duty confirms comeback
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How Victorian melodrama turned the sweet music of gothic into something dark and sinister
In 1764, Horace Walpole published the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, set in a labyrinthine castle surrounded by woods. The novel features the supernatural, with a dark secret from the past at its core. Today, 260 years later, gothic is still with us in the form of 'contemporary gothic' plays, fiction, films, music and computer games. Central to the popularity of gothic is the way it affects its audiences. It is supposed to unsettle, to make the flesh creep and provoke feelings of claustrophobia. Soundtracks for gothic films are integral to creating such effects, building suspense and unease while amplifying the visceral impact of sudden jump scares. Alejandro Amenábar's soundtrack for The Others (2001), for example, weirds its listeners out. The hollow but reverberant timbre of brushed piano strings evokes the spaces of the house, conjuring up the old-fashioned alienness of the place. Action, set and music sympathetically resonate. Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here. The soundtrack for The Substance (2024) shrieks with the strings and sudden dissonances of The Nightmare and Dawn (taken from Bernard Herrmann's score for Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece, Vertigo). Then, it deepens the sense of disquiet with the sinister incantations and medieval-sounding harmonies of Swedish composer Anna von Hausswolff's Ugly and Vengeful. Both soundtracks impressively succeed in doing what we expect gothic music to do: provoke unease, create suspense and drive home the horror elements. But has the music of the gothic always been called upon to unsettle and scare? Has it always sounded so, well, gothic? These are questions I explore in my new book The Music of the Gothic 1789–1820. Over the last few years, I've been rummaging through archives in London, Oxford and Dublin searching for settings of songs from novels and music associated with gothic plays such as The Mysteries of the Castle (1795). I uncovered many treasures, some of which probably haven't been performed for a couple of centuries. Thanks to a grant from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, I was able to bring some of this music to audiences once more with the help of a group of wonderful musicians, headed by Seb Gillot, who performed the tracks you can hear in this article. You can see them performing live below. The gothic novels and plays of the 1790s were populated by sweet-singing heroines and heroes. Among the music I encountered was a song by the composer and singer Harriet Abrams (c. 1758-1821), in which a woman imprisoned in a madhouse sweetly pleads with her cold-hearted jailer. I also found music for gothic plays by the Northumbrian William Shield (1748-1829) and the Irish tenor Michael Kelly (1762-1826), who wrote songs about jolly mariners , comic poachers_ and young peasant girls on their way back from market. None of this material sounded remotely what we would now describe as gothic. Even the music accompanying the entrance of a blood-covered ghost in The Castle Spectre (1798) was warm and stately – and singularly unterrifying. I realised that none of the music from the 1790s – a period when gothic was phenomenally popular – was intended to scare. On the contrary, it was called upon to provide relief from the scare. In late 18th-century gothic plays such as The Italian Monk (1797), music was associated with romance, comedy and sublime religious experience, but not horror or terror. At what point then did the kind of gothic music we know today come into being? The evidence can be found in books such as Remick Folio of Moving Picture Music (1914) which contains music for silent film accompanists. With names like Mysterioso, or Forboding and Wind Storm, or Hurry, they were evidently designed for scenes of suspense and mystery. Such music is indebted to the music of Victorian melodrama, but what I wanted to know was when melodrama acquired its distinctive gothic sounds. Very often in research you discover that things happen gradually. There is trial and experiment, a series of influences, a slow accumulation of examples, and then a tipping point. But when it comes to gothic music, that is not the case. There is a definite date when a specific kind of music erupted onto the entertainment scene. The date was 1802, and the occasion a new dramatic production – a 'melo-drame' or musical drama called A Tale of Mystery with music by Thomas Busby. Busby's music was conceptualised very differently to the music of the 1790s. For a start it was intended to add to, not to provide relief from, the gothic elements of the play. Most crucially, it was not part of the imagined world of the drama. The fictional characters did not sing it – they did not even 'hear' it: Busby's music was directed at the audience. Instrumental music calculated to disturb, it was chaotic and unnerving, with lots of fast, disjointed short phrases, disturbing chords and cliffhanger endings. Instantly recognised as new and revolutionary, it caused a sensation. After audiences had a taste of the new gothic in A Tale of Mystery, music on the page and on the stage soon became something darker and more troubling. The older kind of music didn't disappear overnight, of course, but melodrama took hold and the music of gothic was transformed. Not just on stage but also on the page. Gothic music was no longer uplifting but sinister. As seen in The Woman in Black (2012), there's nothing like a music box in a deserted house to terrify audiences. And who doesn't thrill to the sound of the diabolically thundering organ in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera? This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Emma McEvoy received a research grant from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust for the project "The Music of Gothic Literature and Theatre 1790-1820".
