Archive
LADIES IN LAVENDER – Nigel Hess
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Nigel Hess is a composer who doesn’t get enough press. An extremely talented composer who has written music for dozens of British TV series over the last 20 or so years, he is one of those people who music is immediately familiar (his themes for “Maigret”, “Wycliffe”, “Campion”, “Dangerfield” and “Hetty Wainthrop Investigates” are classics), but who is almost never recognized by the public at large. I would wager that the vast majority of the people reading this have never heard of him before, and do not own any of his earlier CDs. Bearing that in mind, the fact that he was hand-picked by actor/director Charles Dance to score his debut film, Ladies in Lavender, gives me a great deal of satisfaction. Hess has a talent which begs to be discovered by the wider world. Read more…
THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY – Joby Talbot
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s interesting to watch what happens when a cult becomes a phenomenon. When British author Douglas Adams first developed The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a play for radio in 1978, he could scarcely have imagined the impact on British popular culture his inventive imagination would have. Since that date, Hitchhiker’s has grown to encompass a follow-up novel, four sequels (“The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, “Life the Universe and Everything”, “So Long & Thanks For All The Fish” and “Mostly Harmless”), a well-respected British TV series in 1981, and now a multi-million dollar movie produced by Touchstone Pictures. Several phrases and ideas from the books have entered common language, from the online language translator Babelfish to the popular instant messaging programme Trillian and the chess super-computer Deep Thought. Read more…
THE GAME OF THEIR LIVES – William Ross
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The original choice of composer for director David Anspaugh’s film The Game of Their Lives was Jerry Goldsmith, who sadly died before he was able to contribute any music to the project. While it would have been a thrill to hear one last, potentially great score from Goldsmith, his sad loss ultimately provided an opportunity for William Ross to come in and make the old man proud. Ross, whose career is taking a definite upward shift off the back of films such as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Ladder 49, has responded to the film with a warm, melodic, uplifting score which will surely have great appeal. Read more…
THE INTERPRETER – James Newton Howard
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The international profile of James Newton Howard has arguably never been greater, following his various successes in recent years – The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and the Oscar-nominated The Village amongst them. He is now at a stage in his career where he can pick and choose projects from the most high-profile movie-makers in Hollywood: such is the case with The Interpreter, the latest political thriller from director Sydney Pollack, who in the past has helmed such classic films as Three Days of the Condor and The Firm. Read more…
SAHARA – Clint Mansell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
British composer Clint Mansell has had an interesting career arc. Beginning as a vocalist/guitarist/keyboard player with the 1980s electro-rock band Pop Will Eat Itself, he went on to produce and arrange music for a variety of bands in the 1990s, including Nine Inch Nails, before making his film debut in 1998 with the low-budget sci-fi cult Pi. Further projects, notably Requiem for a Dream, The Hole and Murder By Numbers, brought him further into the limelight, and he briefly received attention when his theme from Requiem for a Dream was re-orchestrated and used in the trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in 2002, but nothing in his back catalogue gave even the merest hint that he was capable of writing something like Sahara, which is possibly one of the most engaging and – for want of a better word – cool action scores in quite some time. Read more…
SIN CITY – Robert Rodriguez, John Debney, Graeme Revell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s been interesting to chart Robert Rodriguez’s career since he first burst onto the international movie scene at the helm of the ultra-low budget crime thriller El Mariachi in 1992. Since then his films have oscillated between violent thrillers and horror movies like Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn and The Faculty, and unexpectedly kid-friendly fire like the Spy Kids trilogy and the upcoming The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl. Sin City is most definitely in the former camp, and can be seen as his attempt to make the ultimate modern film noir. Based on the acclaimed graphic novel by Frank Miller, Sin City is a crime thriller set in the fictional Basin City, the kind of place where Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Hammett’s Sam Spade, or anyone from a Quentin Tarantino movie would feel right at home. The film focuses on three separate stories, all of which take place in the same place, at the same time, and with cross-over between the three (not unlike the story structure of Pulp Fiction, but more linear). In the first, Bruce Willis plays John Hartigan, a tough cop who sets his sights on solving one last case before he retires: to save an 11-year old girl from the clutches of the serial murderer/rapist Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl). Read more…
STEAMBOY – Steve Jablonsky
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Isn’t it funny how sometimes the best music comes from the most unlikely of places? Steamboy is the latest Anime adventure from legendary director Katsuhiro Otomo, the man who brought the groundbreaking Akira to the world back in 1988. The film follows the adventures of Ray, a young inventor living in the England in the middle of the 19th century. Shortly before the first ever World Expo, an incredible invention called the Steam Ball arrives at his door – a present from his eccentric grandfather in the USA. However, the nefarious Ohara Foundation has discovered the vast power the Steamball contains, and send men from Japan to the Expo to recover the invention from Ray – at any cost. Read more…
THE RING/THE RING 2 – Hans Zimmer, Henning Lohner, Martin Tillman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When novelist Koji Suzuki and director Hideo Nakata first came together to make the Japanese film Ringu in 1998, they could scarcely imagine the world wide impact their collaboration would make. The resulting movie was a domestic smash, and an enormous cult success, and has since seen numerous variations-on-a-theme in Asian cinema, as well as the inevitable Hollywood remakes. Essentially a film exploring the horrific potential of modern electrical appliances, the American remake – The Ring – was directed by Gore Verbinski, and starred Naomi Watts as journalist Rachel Keller, who stumbles across a mystery surrounding a video tape which causes the deaths of anyone who watches it. When her own niece falls victim to the video curse, and when her young son Aidan (David Dorfman) begins to behave oddly, Keller digs deeper – and uncovers the horrific history of a young girl named Samara Morgan, an isolated horse farm, terrible telekinetic powers, and an old dark well… Read more…
CUTTHROAT ISLAND – John Debney
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In the decade that has passed since the original release of Cutthroat Island, several things have happened. Firstly, the studio which financed the film – Carolco – was bankrupted and went out of business, predominantly due to the failure of this film. Cutthroat Island cost approximately $92 million to make, and recouped just $10 million at the US box office, making it one of the most spectacular financial flops in cinematic history. Secondly, the film’s stars – Geena Davis and Matthew Modine – have virtually disappeared from our screens: Davis had made just three films since this one (The Long Kiss Goodnight and two Stuart Littles), while Modine has been reduced to starring in movies of the week, although he was nominated for a TV Golden Globe in 1998. Thirdly, and possibly most important in terms of this review, the international profile of John Debney has skyrocketed. Read more…
HOSTAGE – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
March 11th 2005 was unofficially “Alexandre Desplat Day” in US cinemas, when his first two major Hollywood studio films – Hostage and The Upside of Anger – opened in theatres across the country. The 44-year-old Parisian has crept up on the world of film music; having worked solidly in Europe since the early 1990s, people first sat up and took notice following his Golden Globe nomination for Girl With a Pearl Earring in 2003, a success which he capitalized on with the controversial but critically acclaimed Birth in 2004. With the exception of Gabriel Yared, there hasn’t been a French composer in the Hollywood mainstream since Maurice Jarre retired, and before that since the death of Georges Delerue. Desplat more than has the talent to fill their considerable shoes. And, with Hostage, he also shows a great deal of range. Read more…
ROBOTS – John Powell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The first time I sat and listened to John Powell’s score for Robots the two words which immediately sprang to mind were “un-focused” and “schizophrenic”. I had planned for this review to say things like “it’s a score in need of a point”, and talk about how the whole thing lacked coherency and a sense of itself, how it jumped from style to style and genre to genre with such reckless abandon that it rendered the whole thing almost redundant, a chaotic mess of clashing approaches. However, as I have listened to it more and more, my attitude towards it has changed considerably, to the point where I now think it comes close to being one of the best scores Powell has yet written. Read more…
THE DEADLY SPAWN – Michael Perilstein
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When I was about nine or ten years old, my best friend at school had one of those Casio keyboards – the kind of inexpensive ones you bought a nine year old so they would have something to do when the weather was bad outside. I distinctly remember being at my friend’s house one time, playing with the keyboard, and improvising some stupid little melody using one finger. Now bearing in mind that I cannot read music, cannot write music, and never graduated beyond one-fingered keyboard tapping, you will begin to understand what I mean when I say that my amateur plonkings that day were, on the whole, better than Michael Perilstein’s score for The Deadly Spawn. Read more…
DER UNTERGANG/DOWNFALL – Stephan Zacharias
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the most critically acclaimed – and controversial – films to come out of Germany in recent years is Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall). The first German production to feature Adolf Hitler as a central figure, Der Untergang is based on the memoirs of Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge (played by Alexandra Maria Lara), and tells of the final days of the life of the Führer, deep within his bunker beneath Berlin, as the Russian troops close in. Not afraid to exploit the long-standing fascination with one of the most hated men of the 20th century, Hirschbiegel has nevertheless been criticized in some circles for presenting a portrait of Hitler that is “too sympathetic” – a claim which he vehemently denies. The film is blessed with a powerhouse performance by Bruno Ganz as Hitler, and features sterling support from Corinna Harfouch and Ulrich Matthes as the doomed Goebbels family, and Julianne Köhler as Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun. The film played at the Toronto Film Festival in 2004, and is scheduled for release in major cities world-wide in 2005. Read more…
CONSTANTINE – Brian Tyler, Klaus Badelt
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The latest in a long line of comic book adaptations to hit the silver screen, director Francis Lawrence’s film Constantine is based on the classic Hellblazer story by Jamie Delano and Garth Ellis, transposed from Liverpool to contemporary Los Angeles. Keanu Reeves stars as John Constantine, a man cursed with the awareness that a war between angels and demons is taking place on Earth. Having been driven insane by his visions, he committed suicide as a youth, but was sent back by the angel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton) and charged with destroying as many demons as possible, in order to atone for his sins and be able to enter Heaven again when he finally dies for the second time. However, as the story begins, Constantine finds himself facing his biggest challenge yet: with the help of a similarly gifted Los Angeles cop (Rachel Weisz), Constantine must thwart the plans of Satan’s son, who is planning to be re-born on Earth himself. Read more…
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