Archive
TOBRUK – Bronislau Kaper
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The movie is set in North Africa September 1942. Germany’s top General Erwin Rommel’s and his dreaded Afrika Korps are poised to invade Egypt. The allied command sends in a British Special Forces unit that includes German Jews which invariable causes friction and distrust with their British commandos. They proceed to kidnap a Canadian officer held prisoner by the Vichy French government in Algeria who is an expert topographer. The officer, Donald Craig, is charged with the daunting challenge of guiding this company of British and German-Jewish commandos through 800 miles of the desolate Sahara. The goal is to aid a planned amphibious landing against the seaport of Tobruk and its massive fuel storage base. The team is forced to confront and overcome various challenges, the final one being the discovery of an undetected German armored force poised to launch into Egypt. Read more…
127 HOURS – A. R. Rahman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The true story of Aron Ralston is one of human fortitude, bravery, defiance in the face of death, and incredible bad luck. A young and healthy daredevil with a penchant for extreme sports, Ralston took a brief weekend hiking trip to the canyons around Moab, Utah in the summer of 2003, and had the singular misfortune of suffering an accident which left his right arm pinned against a canyon wall by a large boulder, with no way of extricating it. After five lonely days, and hovering close to death, Ralston eventually took the unimaginable decision to amputate his own arm – with no anesthetic – using nothing more than a blunt Swiss Army knife, and staggered out of the canyon, where he was rescued and ultimately made a full recovery. Read more…
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART I – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The conclusion of the Harry Potter saga is as much of a cinematic event as it was a literary one when J.K. Rowling’s eagerly-awaited seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released in July 2007 and broke a myriad of records for book sales. The success of the Harry Potter franchise is quite astonishing: it is reportedly responsible for almost single-handedly revitalizing the children’s literature market, brought fantasy fiction out of geekdom and into the mainstream, and of course made Rowling herself a gazillionaire, thanks not only to the book sales but also to the spin off merchandise, theme park rides, and of course the movies and soundtracks based on her work. Read more…
IRON MAN 2 – John Debney
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The sequel to the phenomenally successful super hero movie from 2008, Iron Man 2 sees Robert Downey Jr. returning to don the futuristic red and gold suit as Tony Stark, the multi-billionaire industrialist who saves the world in his spare time as his metallic alter ego. This time around his nemesis is megalomaniacal Russian juggernaut Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), seeking revenge for the death of his scientist father, who helped design the original Iron Man technology. Directed by Jon Favreau, the film also stars Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark’s loyal assistant Pepper Potts, Don Cheadle as Stark’s friend Colonel “Rhodey” Rhodes, and Scarlett Johansson as the sexy undercover agent Nastaha Romanoff, also known as Black Widow. Read more…
LET ME IN – Michael Giacchino
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Let Me In is the American remake of the underground hit Swedish vampire movie Låt Den Rätte Komma In (Let the Right One In), which was released to great acclaim in 2008. Directed by Cloverfield helmer Matt Reeves and set in the 1980s, the film stars Kodi Smit-McPhee as Owen, a bullied and lonely young boy who lives in a rundown tenement in New Mexico with his mother (Cara Buono), who is in the midst of a divorce. One day, he makes friends with an equally lonely young girl named Abby (Chloe Moretz), who has moved into the same apartment block with her elderly guardian (Richard Jenkins). Despite being initially hesitant, the two develop a gradual friendship; but Abby harbors a secret – she is a vampire, and has been responsible for the spate of murders being investigated by a dogged detective (Elias Koteas). Despite being a remake of what many consider a superior European film, Let Me In has garnered a great deal of praise, for its performances, for its proper adherence to John Ajvide Lindqvist’s original novel, and for Michael Giacchino’s chilling score. Read more…
TOY STORY 3 – Randy Newman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The second sequel to the groundbreaking Pixar animation comes 15 years after the original, but despite the passage of time has not lost any of its magic or charm. As well as being an excellent (and very funny) diversion for children, it’s also an imaginative, nostalgic, pathos-filled treat for adults, dealing with such mature themes as obsolescence and loss. The majority of the original voice cast – Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn – return to join up with newcomers Ned Beatty and Michael Keaton in a brand new story where the toys are accidentally delivered to a day care facility when their beloved owner Andy goes away to college. At first happy to be played with again, the toys quickly find out that life in the day care is not quite as rosy as it seems, and hatch a plan to escape. Read more…
THE LAST AIRBENDER – James Newton Howard
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Last Airbender, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, is a fantasy adventure film based on the extremely popular Nickelodeon animated TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender, which ran from 2005 from 2008. The film is set in a world where civilization is divided into four nations based on the elements – water, earth, air and fire – and the concept that, within each nation, people called “benders” have the ability to manipulate their element by practicing different kinds of martial arts. In addition to elemental benders, there is also one person who can manipulate all four elements simultaneously – the mythical Avatar of the title – and his presence brings peace and stability to the world. In Shyamalan’s film, the current Avatar, an air nomad named Aang, has been missing for almost 100 years, and in the intervening period the ruthless Fire nation has begun to dominate the other three elemental kingdoms. After Aang is discovered frozen in ice by two young members of the Water Tribe, the three set off to stop the Fire nation and restore balance to the elements. Read more…
INCEPTION – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
An action thriller dealing with the manipulation of dreams, Inception is the latest film from Batman Begins and Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan. Leonardo di Caprio stars as Cobb, one of an elite group of corporate espionage specialists who have mastered the technology of ‘dream invasion’, which allows him to literally enter the dream world of a subject while he is asleep. A man with a tortured past, Cobb and his cohort Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) are hired by wealthy industrialist Saito (Ken Watanabe) to infiltrate the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), a corporate rival, and perform an ‘inception’, a dangerous procedure where, rather than extracting information, an idea is surreptitiously placed into the subject’s subconscious without them realizing. After assembling his team (Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao), Cobb begins his journey into dreamworld, where he not only has to contend with the dangers presented by the task, but also his own personal demons, in the form of his long-dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard). Read more…
DRAGONSLAYER – Alex North
MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Dragonslayer is a difficult score for someone like me to review, and this is why: it’s because I’m not a musicologist. You can’t review scores as intellectually challenging and musically complex as Dragonslayer in the usual way, because it’s not a standard score: despite being a fantasy film set in an ancient world of dragons, sorcerers, kings, and damsels in distress, the music is about as far removed from the genre conventions as one can imagine. I don’t have the musical vocabulary, or a deep enough knowledge of the compositional techniques Alex North employs in this score, to be able to do it justice, and any attempt by me to describe it in the usual emotional terms would be laughably futile. So let me begin with this: Dragonslayer is one of the most challenging, difficult, complicated, infuriating, disturbing, chaotic scores you are ever likely to hear. It’s also quite brilliant. Read more…
CLASH OF THE TITANS – Ramin Djawadi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I went into Clash of the Titans expecting the worst. When the news broke that Scottish composer Craig Armstrong – who had been attached to the film almost since its inception – was being replaced by Ramin Djawadi, and that the film’s release date was being delayed several months so that the producers could cash in on the Avatar effect and add new 3-D special effects to an already effects-heavy film, my heart sank. However, after my first complete listen to the score, I found myself thinking “hey, it’s not that bad”. And then I stopped and thought again; have my standards dropped so low that ‘not that bad?’ is actually seen as a positive remark? Have Hollywood’s most expensive and elaborate productions become so bloated and self-serving that the music only has to not make the film demonstrably worse for it to be seen as a success? If this is where the major studios are pitching themselves these days, things truly are going from bad to worse. Read more…
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON – John Powell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
We’re in a Golden Age of animated motion pictures. When I was a kid growing up in the 1980s you got one, maybe two films from Disney in a calendar year, plus the odd independent movie like Watership Down or The Secret of NIMH, or some arty foreign language thing with bad dubbing, but that was about your lot. Since the Disney renaissance began in 1989 with The Little Mermaid the strength and popularity of the animated feature has grown exponentially, to the point where every major studio has its own animation department, well over a dozen full length feature animations are released each year, and companies like Pixar break box office records with apparent ease. The competition is fierce, but the Dreamworks studio seems to have managed the right blend of hip comedy and family-friendly action, spinning off from their massively successful Shrek series with hits such as Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, and their 20th and most recent feature, How to Train Your Dragon. Read more…
MÄN SOM HATAR KVINNOR/THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO – Jacob Groth
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A Swedish-language murder-mystery thriller, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first film based on the exceptionally popular series of books by the late author Stieg Larsson. Released under its original title, Män Som Hatar Kvinnor, to great box office success in Scandinavia in the spring of 2009, it is receiving a brief theatrical run in art houses the United States in 2010. The film stars Mikael Nyqvist as investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist, who is hired by wealthy industrialist Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) to investigate the disappearance of his niece Harriet some 40 years previously. Meanwhile, punk computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) has been hired by another company to monitor Mikael’s activity, and contacts Mikael when she solves some of the puzzles that Mikael could not; working together, the unlikely pair find out more about the Vanger family than Henrik intended, involving generations of corruption and murder. Read more…
THE PACIFIC – Hans Zimmer, Geoff Zanelli, Blake Neely
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When the TV mini-series Band of Brothers first aired in 2001 it was hailed as a great piece of television art; a thoughtful, emotional, well-produced, well-acted and well-directed look at the lives – and deaths – of the men who served in the US military in Europe during World War 2. Almost a decade later, the same group of talented individuals have come together again to make The Pacific, which tells the simultaneous story of the men and women who fought in the Pacific theater against the Japanese at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and all across the Pacific Ocean. The series stars Joseph Mazzello, Jon Seda, William Sadler and James Badge Dale, and began airing on HBO in the United States on March 14, 2010.
The late, great Michael Kamen wrote one of the finest scores of his career for the original Band of Brothers series. For The Pacific, the producers turned to the composing trifecta of Hans Zimmer, Geoff Zanelli and Blake Neely to write almost nine hours Read more…
ALICE IN WONDERLAND – Danny Elfman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Much has been written over the years about the creative partnership between director Tim Burton and composer Danny Elfman. It now stretches back 25 years and encompasses such successful and well regarded films as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as well as the animated classic The Nightmare Before Christmas. Despite it having been repeated ad nauseum to the point that it’s almost a cliché, theirs is one of the most enduring and fruitful composer/director collaborations in cinema today; the two men complement each other intellectually and stylistically, and clearly Burton’s visual style brings out the best in Elfman’s music. Alice in Wonderland is a prime example of this. Read more…
COP OUT – Harold Faltermeyer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Nostalgia for the 1980s is all the rage these days. As someone who actually grew up in the 1980s I often find myself forgetting that it all happened almost 30 years ago, and that I remember all the new-nostalgia crazes and trends the first time around. In film music circles, the 1980s is remembered with both fondness and incredulity in equal measure, the latter due primarily to the popularity and success of a number of synth-pop composers. Harold Faltermeyer was one of those; over a six-year stretch he wrote music for box office smash after box office smash, with the likes of Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, Fletch and Tango & Cash. His music remains incredibly divisive, and he has as many detractors as fans who laud his creative synth programming and (at the time) cutting edge electronics. In many ways he was the Hans Zimmer of his day, and he can legitimately be considered the source of Zimmer’s über-heroic anthemic style, which originated from Faltermeyer’s collaborations with Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson. However, for a multitude of reasons, his music fell out of fashion, and as a result he hadn’t scored an American feature film since Kuffs in 1992 – until now. Read more…
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