MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Star Trek VI was envisioned by Paramount executive Frank Mancuso as a rebound from the disaster that was the Star Trek V film, and a hand off the franchise to the Next Generation crew. As such he again hired Leonard Nimoy to write a script that would bring a memorable final adventure for our legendary crew. Drawing upon Gorbachev’s Glasnost initiative that catalyzed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Nimoy fashioned a classic morality play, which dealt with the issues of racial prejudice, revenge, mistrust and humanity’s eternal search for “The Undiscovered County” – a lasting peace. The film begins dramatically with a cataclysmic explosion on the Klingon moon Praxis. The moon’s destruction fatally cripples energy production and the Klingons face the inevitable depletion of their ozone layer in 50 years, which will bring an irradiating end to their civilization. Chancellor Gorkon resolves to forge peace with the Federation and so bring to an end 70 years of unremitting hostilities, which he understands they can no longer sustain. Captain James Kirk and his crew are called upon by the Federation Council to escort the Chancellor to Earth, however reactionary elements on both sides jointly conspire to covertly sabotage the peace mission by attacking Gorkon’s vessel and assassinating him. Since the Enterprise appears to be responsible, Kirk and McCoy are remanded to Klingon authorities where they are tried, convicted and sent to certain death at the penal colony on Rura Penthe. A daring escape allows Kirk to regain the Enterprise and again save the day. He defeats the traitorous General Chang in battle and foils a second assassination of Klingon emissaries by Federation officers. The movie restored the franchise’s vitality, received critical acclaim and was a huge commercial success. Read more…
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Raven is a fun but forgettable period thriller based around the writings of Edgar Allen Poe. Directed by James McTeigue – still most famous for his work on V for Vendetta – the film is set in Baltimore in the 1840s and stars John Cusack as the famed author Poe, the twisted mind behind such classic tales of the macabre as The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, and of course the timeless poem from which the film takes its title. Already down on his luck, both financially and personally, Poe’s life becomes even more difficult when it becomes apparent that a murderer is on the loose, and using the macabre deaths described in Poe’s books as inspiration for real-life atrocities. Things become even worse when Poe’s young paramour Emily (Alice Eve), the daughter of wealthy businessman Captain Hamilton (Brendan Gleeson) is kidnapped by the murderer, who begins taunting the increasingly frantic poet with mysterious clues and additional killings based on Poe’s stories. To solve the crime, Poe teams up with the dogged and inquisitive detective Fields (Luke Evans), who must work together to solve the mystery before poor Emily takes her last breath and becomes one of the dear departed. Read more…
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The story of La Nouvelle Guerre des Boutons was adapted from Louis Pergaud’s 1912 novel and is a remake of Yves Robert’s 1962 film of the same name. It is a comedy with an anti-war narrative sub-text. Set in France circa 1944, it tells the tale of schoolboys from the neighboring villages of Longeverne and Velrans have formed two opposing factions, which have been waging a mock war for as long as anyone can remember. After each battle the victor’s spoils would be the taking of buttons off the clothes of the vanquished. Hoping to turn the tide of the conflict, one team of the boys employ a strategy of running into battle naked, thus depriving the opposing boys nothing to steal. Fate would have it however that after this amazing victory, one of the boys defects to the other side. This turncoat reveals a weakness in his former camp that allows his new teammates to launch a secret attack that brings victory. The traitor’s betrayal is discovered and he is punished for his treachery. Not done, he informs his superiors and parents that he has been beaten up by bullies. This upsets the entire apple cart as his mom and dad escalate the conflict with the opposing schoolmates resulting in jail time. Read more…
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
À Vous de Jouer Milord was a 1974 spy drama mini-series of six episodes directed by the famous French director Christian-Jaque. The national security storyline concerned the theft of design schematics for the new generation French tank, the AMX 30. Justifiably alarmed by the loss of the schematics, the government resolved to call back into service their retired agent Hubert de Pomarec (AKA Milord) played by Henri Piégay to regain the stolen plans. Christian-Jaque imbued the mini-series with a comic book sensibility and robust action scenes with his lead performing his own stunts. While entertaining, it received no critical acclaim. Read more…
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Casa de Mi Padre is an intentionally silly spoof of those wonderfully cheesy but enormously popular Spanish-language telenovelas, especially ones from the 1970s which have a Grindhouse-esque quality. English-speaking audiences are generally unaware of their success and popularity, but they form a cornerstone of Latin popular entertainment, especially in countries like Mexico, Spain, Portugal, and most of South and Central America. The brainchild of actor/producer Will Ferrell, screenwriter Andrew Steele and director Matt Piedmont, the film stars Ferrell as Armando Alvarez, the good-natured but dim-witted son of a wealthy Mexican landowner (the late Pedro Armendáriz, Jr.), whose life is thrown into turmoil when his younger brother Raul (Diego Luna) returns to the family home with a beautiful new fiancée, Sonia (Genesis Rodriguez) to take over the business. However, Raul has fallen in with the wrong company, and soon Armando finds himself caught up in the middle of a bitter feud between Raul and the evil drug kingpin Onza (Gael Garcia Bernal). Yes, despite the rather serious plot, it is a comedy, and yes, it’s entirely in Spanish, and the jokes come thick and fast, with intentionally bad continuity, poor special effects, and hilarious psychedelic inserts competing with the broad slapstick and clever wordplay Ferrell brings to the table. Read more…
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I have to admit, when I learned that Javier Navarrete was scoring Wrath of the Titans, I was pretty excited. The original film to which this is a sequel – 2010’s Clash of the Titans – was solidly panned by the majority of film critics, and had a pretty risible score by Ramin Djawadi that adhered to every Remote Control cliché ever invented. Everything was revamped this time, with a new director in the shape of Jonathan Liebesman, a new supporting cast including Rosamund Pike and Bill Nighy behind leads Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes, and a brand new composer, whose track record promised to provide everything that Djawadi’s score was lacking in terms of thematic identity and orchestral intelligence. Navarrete is, of course, the Spanish composer of such excellent works as Pan’s Labyrinth, Inkheart, Mirrors and Cracks, and this would be far his biggest assignment in the Hollywood mainstream to date. Read more…
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The original Emmanuelle (1974) was adapted from the novel by Emanuelle Arsan. It proved to be a box office sensation, which spawned a franchise. Director Francis Leroi, well known for his work with erotica, took up the Opus 4 story line with an added twist. Sylvia (Sylvia Kristen) is desperately trying to escape from her former lover Marc, and so she goes to Brazil where renowned plastic surgeon Dr. Santamo transforms her into the beautiful Emmanuelle. Her new more youthful identity now played by Mia Nygren potentiates a profound sexual awakening, which is complicated by her memories of Marc. It suffices to say that the plot offers unexpected plot twists, which provide multiple opportunities to fully explore the characters.
Pierre Bachelet, Francis Lai and Serge Gainsbourg had respectively scored the first three films of the franchise. Michel Magne, well known for his neo-romantic style was a natural choice for the film. Like his predecessors, he infused his writing with a modern romanticism and provided a number of beautiful songs. You will notice immediately how Magne provides a rich musical palate, which spans from the chaotic, to the playful, to the sensual erotic. Read more…
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Producers Don Bluth and Gary Goldman had a long history of successful animated films that included “An American Tail” and “The Land Before Time”. With their company now set in Ireland, Bluth decided to utilize traditional Celtic mythology for his next film. In this new story, Stanley is a friendly troll blessed with the gift of a wondrous and magical green thumb that allows him to grow flowers by merely sticking it into the ground. Unfortunately the evil troll Queen Gnorga banishes him from her realm to modern day Manhattan for his life generating gift and kindness to humans. Stanley adapts to his new cave home in Central Park and befriends Gus and Rosie who unknown to their parents have set out on a magnificent adventure. But all is endangered when Queen Gnorga journeys to Manhattan, armed with her purple thumb intent on turning everything she touches to stone. As is fitting, goodness prevails and our heroes defeat and overthrow the evil Queen. The film was not a critical success and failed at the box office, not even coming close to recovering its production costs. Read more…
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Already tainted as one of the biggest box-office disasters in cinema history, John Carter looks set to go down in negative notoriety rather than with the acclaim and applause many expected at Disney when the project was first announced. A large scale action science-fiction epic, the film is a big screen mishmash adaptation of several of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom novels, which were first written in 1912 and stand as some of the first works of interplanetary science fiction ever written. The film, which is directed by Andrew Stanton, stars newcomer Taylor Kitsch as the eponymous Carter, a civil war veteran from Virginia who, while prospecting out west, finds himself inexplicably transported to Mars, where he becomes embroiled in a second civil war between the planet’s inhabitants, who call their world Barsoom. The film co-stars Lynn Collins as the beautiful princess Dejah Thoris, Ciaran Hinds and Dominic West as the two rival jeddak kings in whose lengthy battle Carter gets caught, and Willem Dafoe and Samantha Morton in motion-capture as two of the multi-armed Tharks, who help and hinder Carter in his quest with equal measure. Read more…
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Coming off his directorial success with Star Trek III, Leonard Nimoy again assembled our iconic crew for a thoughtful eco-story that spoke to humanity’s poor stewardship of the Earth. The film opens with a massive space probe of unknown origin en route to Earth. When it arrives it delivers a cryptic message in a language that seems unintelligible. In addition, its power system neutralizes the Earth’s power grid and begins to vaporize its oceans. The exiled Captain Kirk and his fugitive crew correctly determine that the message is directed not to humanity, but instead to an extinct species, the Humpback whale. As such, they resolve to time travel back to late 20th century Earth to recover two humpback whales, hoping to bring them back to the future so they can respond to the probe’s message. Set in 20th century urban San Francisco, this new adventure was comic, light-hearted and proved to be a huge commercial success, earning profits of more than five times it’s production costs. Read more…
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The immense worldwide success achieved by “Conan the Barbarian” lead, to the surprise of no one, to an inevitably sequel. Producer Dino De Laurentiis hired director Richard Fleischer to revisit the mythic Hyborean world and offer us the classic mythic adventure. In the tale we see that at the bequest of the evil Queen Tamaris of Zamora, Conan is promised that his dead lover Valeria will be resurrected if he would bring to her the sacred Horn of Dagoth. In reality the duplicitous Tamaris plans to betray Conan and sacrifice her niece Jehenna to reanimate the god Dagoth with whom she plans to mate and generate a new progeny of gods. A colorful and eclectic cast lead again by Arnold Schwarzenegger (Conan) was assembled and featured the fierce Amazon warrior Zula (Grace Jones), virginal Princess Jehenna (Olivia d’Abo), the wise wizard Akiro (Mako), the comic thief Malak (Jeff Corey) and the treacherous Bombaata (Will Chamberlain). A parade of directors and a truly feeble script soured Schwarzenegger as he chose to not return for a third film. Never the less, fantasy films were at their zenith in the 80s and the film was a commercial success, doubling its $18 million production costs. Read more…
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Even though, technically, I was born when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, I grew up in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. All of my earliest memories of major socio-political stories – the Falklands War with Argentina in 1982, the Brighton hotel bombing of 1984, the miner’s strike and general industrial unrest of 1984 and 1985, the Poll Tax riots of 1990, and various international issues involving the IRA and the former Soviet Union – all occurred during her tenure. Whether you love her or loathe her (and many people do genuinely loathe her and what she did to the country), there is no escaping the fact that she was a massively influential and important person: the first woman ever to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the seventh-longest serving Prime Minister in history, and the longest serving since Queen Victoria was on the throne. Read more…
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Conan The Barbarian is based on the Conan stories penned by author Robert E. Howard. The movie adaptation tells the story of a young Conan who lives in the mythic Hyborean Age and suffers grievously at the hands of an evil ruler of the Snake Cult, Thulsa Doom, who kills his parents and sells him into slavery. Eventually after much suffering he gains his freedom and trains to become a mighty warrior. He then sets out to solve the riddle of steel and avenge his parent’s death. As such, this is a classic morality tale with an unambiguous hero and villain. The film was a commercial success, which spawned a sequel and served to reinvigorate the fantasy genre. Read more…
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A variation on the classic Black Beauty tale about of the life of a heroic horse, filtered through the cinematic lens of director John Ford, War Horse is director Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the well-regarded novel by Michael Morpurgo about the adventures of a horse named Joey during World War I. The action moves from rural Devon, where young Joey is raised as a plow horse by Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) to work on his father’s farm, to the battlefields of central Europe after he is sold to the British Army upon the outbreak of war and is adopted by a kindly cavalry officer as his personal mount. Moving from adventure to adventure, Joey makes his way through the mire of The Great War, serving on both sides of the conflict – and all the while young Albert, now himself serving in the trenches, never gives up hope of being reunited with his equine friend. The film co-stars Peter Mullan, Emily Watson, David Thewlis, Niels Arestrup, Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch, and of course has a score by the venerable John Williams, his second score of 2011 after several years away from the podium. Read more…
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There’s a lot of discussion going on in film music circles these days about the direction the art is taking, and a lot of it stems from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s Oscar win for their score for The Social Network last year. Amongst many mainstream film critics, Reznor and Ross’s ambient drones are seen as ushering a newer, better way of scoring films, one that moves away from the “schmaltzy emotional manipulation” written by the likes of John Williams and James Horner, and instead embraces a cold, clinical musical style that is more akin to sound effects than traditional film music. In his review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Variety film critic Justin Chang said the score “blends dread with driving momentum, establishing a richly unsettling mood with recurring dissonances, eerie wind chimes and pulsating reverb effects”. In his simultaneously-published review of War Horse, he criticized the film for “a cloying strain of bucolic whimsy driven by John Williams’ pushy score”, so you see what we’re up against. Read more…
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