Archive
ENTRAPMENT – Christopher Young
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Entrapment is Chris Young’s second big-budget action score in as many years and is an ideal comparison to the work he undertook for Hard Rain because, if nothing else, it effectively demonstrates Young’s ability to tackle similarly-themed movies in vastly different ways. Whereas Hard Rain was firmly rooted firmly in the musical traditions of the American midwest, Entrapment is a fluid, hi-tec action score which combines efficient, modern orchestral grooves with the some unexpected textures and styles. The film itself is a flawed, but audience-friendly thriller about a beautiful insurance investigator who teams up with an aging breaking-and-entering expert with the express intent of fingering him for the high-profile robbery she thinks he has committed. Things become a little more complicated, though, when he persuades her to join him in undertaking a final, ambitious break-in, and then get even worse when she inexplicably finds herself falling for him in a big way. Disregarding the unlikely love interest between sixty-something Sean Connery and twenty-something Catherine Zeta-Jones, Entrapment works well as an “event picture”, providing the right combination of thrills, spills and technobabble to keep increasingly touchy viewers happy. Most of all, though, it is highly satisfying to finally see Young getting a much-deserved and long overdue shot at the Hollywood big time. Read more…
DURANGO – Mark McKenzie
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Some composers need to get more work, and to be given better projects. Mark McKenzie is one of a small band of excellent writers who, through no fault of their own, are overlooked by Hollywood and spend most of their time toiling away on small-scale features that do not deserve to have their considerable talents wasted on them. After a career that has seen him rise from orchestrating scores for Danny Elfman, Bruce Broughton and others, to writing great music for terrible films such as Warlock: The Armageddon and Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde, McKenzie seems finally to be heading down the right path with Durango, the latest TV movie in the Hallmark Hall of Fame series that, over the last year or so, has included Merlin, Moby Dick, Alice in Wonderland and Cleopatra. Read more…
EXISTENZ – Howard Shore
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
David Cronenberg inspires Howard Shore to compose some of his best and most memorable movie music. Through such notable works as The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly and Crash, Cronenberg had always allowed Shore plenty of room to manoeuvre and stretch his musical muscles. eXistenZ is probably the most approachable and, from a soundtrack fan’s perspective, enjoyable work that has resulted from their collaboration to date. An original science fiction tale, eXistenZ is a film which again merges humanity and technology and blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. It stars Jennifer Jason Leigh as the designer of a virtual reality video game played through a genetically modified organism known as a “Game Pod”, which inserts an umbilical cord into a special socket inserted into the base of the player’s spinal column and taps into the player’s mind. When the game’s first demonstration goes wrong, Leigh and her bodyguard Jude Law are forced to run for their from various violent factions, all of whom want to stop eXistenZ from becoming a reality. Read more…
THE RED VIOLIN – John Corigliano
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It is very rare for a soundtrack to be embraced wholeheartedly and celebrated loudly by aficionados of both classical music and film music, but this is what has happened to John Corigliano’s The Red Violin. Despite being arguably one of the most brilliant and talented American composers of his generation, this is only John Corigliano’s third film score – his others being the wildly impressionistic, abstract, Oscar-nominated Altered States (1980) and the largely unknown Revolution (1985). Instead, Corigliano became an established member of the New York musical circle, writing original pieces, ballets, operas and suchlike, and it has taken fourteen years to tempt Corigliano back to the podium. It has been worth the wait for, as well as his own musical genius, he has brought with him some of the best and brightest talents of the classical world, including the brilliant Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the incredibly talented virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell. Read more…
ALICE IN WONDERLAND – Richard Hartley
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Lewis Carroll’s classic story of Alice in Wonderland has been told and re-told so many times that one would think there were no new ways of putting the cautionary children’s tale of substance abuse-induced hallucinations across. There was the Disney animated film in 1951, which everyone looks back on fondly, and no less than three big-screen versions in 1933, 1950 and 1972, none of which were enthusiastically received by the public. So, in an attempt to breathe new life into the proceedings, the producers of this re-telling, which is part of the Hallmark Entertainment series on American TV, decided to up the star factor and put dozens of Hollywood star names in the famous roles. Read more…
COOKIE’S FORTUNE – David A. Stewart
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Director Robert Altman is equally known for his for his “eclectic” tastes in casting and subject matter as he is for brilliance as a visual dramatist and storyteller. Altman is the man who, in the past, has helmed such notable works as M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville and the ill-fated Popeye. Recently, Altman has brought us a scathing satire of the Hollywood studio system in The Player, an examination of life in suburban American in Short Cuts, a look inside the world of high fashion with Pret-A-Porter, and a relatively straightforward court room thriller with The Gingerbread Man. For his latest effort, Altman is returning to the location he visited in Short Cuts by taking a look behind the white picket fences of small town USA in the critically acclaimed Cookie’s Fortune. Read more…
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