Archive
THE BIG KAHUNA – Christopher Young
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
How does one write music for a film, 99% of which takes place in an anonymous hotel room, and which features a cast of characters that barely exceeds the three leads – in this case Kevin Spacey, Danny De Vito and newcomer Peter Facinelli? If your name is Christopher Young, you write a brilliant contemporary jazz score for a selected group of sixteen instrumentalists and invest it with more life, energy and pizzazz than any music for this kind of film has a right to contain. Read more…
U-571 – Richard Marvin
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There’s a joke going round the Internet at the moment about how Richard Marvin’s score for U-571 should really be called “Air Force Two”. It’s true that there are many similarities between this, Marvin’s first major work, and the flag-waving Jerry Goldsmith score of 1997, but to cast these aspersions and mean them would be doing a great disservice to the composer. It’s blatantly obvious that director Jonathan Mostow suffered from an almost terminal case of temp-track love while in post-production for this film, but it surely still took a great deal of effort on Marvin’s part to write music that captures the same power, patriotism and intensity as Goldsmith’s earlier effort. Read more…
EAST WEST – Patrick Doyle
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A truly international collaboration, East West – or, to give it its correct French language title Est Ouest – is the third film in which Patrick Doyle has written music for director Régis Wargnier, following Indochine and Une Femme Français. Set in the heart of Europe during the years immediately following the cessation of World War II, the film stars Sandrine Bonnaire as Marie, a French woman who, at the behest of her husband Sascha (Sergei Bodrov), follows him back to his homeland – Russia – in the hope that they will find a new and better life for themselves there now that the war has ended. Their dreams are quickly shattered, however, when it becomes apparent that all is not well, and that one powerful and corrupt regime has simply been replaced by another one. Realising their mistake, Maria and Sascha try to return to Paris, but find themselves blocked at every turn by the new Soviet power. Things change, however, after Maria meets and falls in love with a handsome swimmer named Alexei (Grigori Manoukov), who may be able to offer then a way out. Read more…
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