TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES – Brian Tyler
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were all the rage for a few years when I was a kid in the 1980s, although to be fair I didn’t know they were ninjas until quite some time later, thanks to the busybody interference of the self-appointed guardian of Britain’s national morals, Mary Whitehouse, who decided that showing children scenes of ninjas doing things with nunchaku would contribute to the decline of a generation. To me they will always be the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, and no-one can tell me otherwise, although looking back I now realize I never was entirely sure how Michelangelo defeated his foes with nothing more dangerous than a slice of pizza. This has been an astonishingly long-lived franchise – with the world having already been exposed to three separate animated TV series, a Japanese anime, and a live-action TV series, we are now on our fifth movie based on the characters originally created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in 1984, following the original three movies in 1990, 1991 and 1993, and the 2007 CGI flop “TMNT”. This latest installment is essentially an origin story reboot of the entire story, stars Megan Fox and Will Arnett, and is directed by Jonathan Liebesman. Read more…
CALVARY – Patrick Cassidy
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Calvary is an Irish comedy-drama film written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, starring Brendan Gleeson as Father James, a Catholic priest at a church in rural County Sligo. When Father James’s life is threatened during confession by an anonymous parishioner who claims he suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a now-deceased former priest, he uses what he believes will be the final week of his life to right old wrongs and bury long-standing feuds involving a bitter millionaire (Dylan Moran), a wife-beating local business owner (Chris O’Dowd), a disaffected teenager (Domhnall Gleeson, Brendan’s real life son), an atheist doctor (Game of Thrones star Aidan Gillen), and his estranged daughter from his pre-priesthood days (Kelly Reilly). It’s a deep, thoughtful, moving film, with a rich vein of black, black humor running through it, and with Gleeson’s lead performance being especially critically acclaimed. Read more…
GHOSTBUSTERS – Elmer Bernstein
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the seminal action comedies of the 1980s, Ghostbusters teamed together three of television’s greatest improvisational comedy geniuses – Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis – in a story about three failed parapsychology professors in New York who, after losing funding for their scientifically-debatable experiments, set themselves up as paranormal investigators catching and containing all manner of spectral nasties across the Big Apple. Things get a little more serious, however, when professional cellist Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) contacts the trio after having a strange experience with her refrigerator, and before long they are knee deep in a fight to save the world from an ancient Sumerian god who may be trying to bring about the apocalypse. The film co-starred Rick Moranis, Ernie Hudson and Annie Potts, and was directed by Ivan Reitman, hot from his success with the comedies Meatballs and Stripes a few years before. Read more…
Introducing Throwback Thirty
I have decided to introduce a new feature here at Movie Music UK, which will feature reviews of classic scores from my own childhood and one of my favorite periods for film music – the 1980s. Inspired by the “Throwback Thursday” idea from Facebook, in which people post old photos of themselves every Thursday, I have decided to call this feature Throwback Thirty!
My plan is that, every Thursday, I will debut a brand new review for a score from a film which was in theaters exactly thirty years ago (roughly – there will be a bit of leeway here and there), meaning that for the rest of the year I will be looking at scores released in 1984.
The first review will debut tomorrow; I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you enjoy the series going forward!
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY – Tyler Bates
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I have waited for 15 years, ever since I heard his first major score for the 1999 film Rated X, to type the following sentence: finally, after all these years, here is a Tyler Bates score I enjoy quite a lot. I have made no secret of the fact that I have found the vast majority of Bates’s work over the past decade pretty underwhelming. Ignoring the controversy surrounding his work on 300, scores like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Watchmen, and Conan the Barbarian had the conceptual and thematic potential to inspire truly terrific music, but ended up being disappointments of the highest order. Guardians of the Galaxy, thankfully, is a significant step forward. While still lagging behind the upper echelons of the film scoring world, and despite still suffering from a curious lack of individual personality, it is nevertheless the best score of Bates’s career to date by a country mile, making use of a big orchestra, a big choir, electronics, and some rock and 1980s pop elements, all brought together under the banner of a rousing central theme. Read more…
PENNY DREADFUL – Abel Korzeniowski
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Penny Dreadful is a Gothic horror/drama series on the American Showtime network, set in Victorian London at the turn of the 19th century. Taking inspiration from the classic writings of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and others, as well as the “penny dreadful” magazines which told lurid tales of serial killers, highwaymen and cowboys, creator John Logan re-imagined these classic characters in a new setting, interacting with each other, and working together to defeat an ancient evil. The story follows Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), a charming American gunslinger sojourning in the motherland, who is recruited by the mysterious Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) to help Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), a famed African explorer, rescue his daughter Mina, who he believes has been kidnapped by a vampire-like creature. Needing help of a medical nature, Sir Malcolm also obtains the help of Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), a brilliant young surgeon, who has a problem of his own: unknown to the others, Frankenstein has been conducting experiments involving death and resurrection, and one of his creations, the fearsome Caliban (Rory Kinnear), has come looking for his father… Read more…
RURONI KENSHIN: KYOTO INFERNO – Naoki Sato
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Rurôni Kenshin: Kyôto Taika-Hen (Rurôni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno) is the second film in the ongoing Rurôni Kenshin series of period action movies telling the story of the “romantic swordsman” Himura Kenshin, directed by Keishi Ohtomo, and starring Takeru Sato and Emi Takei. Following the events of the first movie, Kenshin has settled into a new life with his wife Kaoru and his other friends, when he is approached with a request from the Meiji government. Makoto Shishio, who like Kenshin is a former assassin, has been betrayed, set on fire and left for dead. Despite suffering grievous injuries, Makoto survived, and is now in Kyoto, plotting with his gathered warriors to overthrow the new government. Against Kaoru’s wishes, Kenshin reluctantly agrees to go to Kyoto and help keep his country from falling back into civil war. Read more…
ALFRED NEWMAN – Fathers of Film Music, Part 3
Article by Craig Lysy
Born: 17 March 1900, New Haven, Connecticut.
Died: 17 February 1970
Alfred Newman is remembered as one of the Titans of film music. Indeed the Newman family has collectively gained recognition as one of the most gifted ever to grace the recording studios of Hollywood. His two younger brothers, Emil and Lionel, were both composers, as are his sons David, Thomas and his nephew Randy. The Newman family legacy is nothing short of remarkable.
Alfred was born humbly of Jewish ancestry, the eldest of ten children. He quickly revealed an appetite for music and we are thankful that his mother, despite their poverty, somehow managed at age six, to secure him piano lessons for 25 cents a session. Everyday Alfred would walk the ten-mile round trip to practice on a neighbor’s piano. It became apparent early on that he was a prodigy and that his gift required tutelage beyond the skills of this local piano teacher. Read more…
LUCY – Éric Serra
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Lucy is a high-concept sci-fi action movie directed by Luc Besson and starring Scarlet Johansson in the eponymous role as a young woman who is tricked into being a mule for a Korean crime syndicate, carrying a highly valuable synthetic super-drug called CPH4 that can increase the user’s brain function capacity, and which has been sewn into a pouch in her abdomen. When the pouch begins to leak and the drug begins to enter Lucy’s bloodstream, she begins to manifest increasingly developed levels of consciousness and physical prowess: absorbing information instantaneously, telekinesis, mental time travel, and imperviousness to pain. So begins a race against time as Lucy tries to understand and control her new abilities, while simultaneously avoiding the drug lord’s private army, who have been charged with capturing Lucy and returning the drug to its intended recipient. The film also stars Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked and Choi-Min Sik, and has an original score by French composer Éric Serra. Read more…
WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE – Takatsugu Muramatsu
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When Marnie Was There (Omoide No Marnie) is a beautiful Japanese animated film, based on the popular children’s novel by Joan Robinson, directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi for Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. It tells the story of a young girl named Anna, who is sent to live in the countryside for health reasons. There she meets an unlikely friend in the form of Marnie, a young girl with flowing blonde hair. As their friendship develops, a series of unusual development begin to suggest that Marnie has closer ties to the Anna than she originally expected. Read more…
DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES – Michael Giacchino
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is the eighth film extrapolated from the ideas originally posited in Pierre Boulle’s 1963 French novel La Planète des Singes; after the five original films in the 1960 and 70s that began with the Charlton Heston classic, the 2001 Tim Burton movie everyone ignores, and the well-received first installment of the reboot series, Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011, we continue the story ten years after the conclusion of that film. Most of the world’s human population has been killed by the ALZ-113 virus, which was created in the first film as a possible cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but proved fatal to all humans except for a few random individuals with natural genetic immunity. Caesar, the chimpanzee who became super-intelligent during the first film, subsequently escaped into the woods near San Francisco with other apes he freed from captivity, and established a basic civilization there; like all non-humans, he is completely immune to the effects of ALZ-113. The plot concerns the conflict between Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), the leaders of a group of survivors in what remains of San Francisco who must venture into ape territory to re-establish power at a hydroelectric dam, and Caesar (Andy Serkis) and Koba (Toby Kebbell), the leaders of the ape colony who face dangers both from the humans and from within their own community. Read more…
EARTH TO ECHO – Joseph Trapanese
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Essentially a remake of E.T. for the current youngest generation, Earth to Echo is a children’s sci-fi adventure directed by David Green and starring Teo Halm, Brian Bradley and Reese Hartwig as three young friends in suburban America. Two days before they are scheduled to separate – their neighborhood is being destroyed by a highway construction project – the boys begin receiving a strange series of signals on their cell phones. Convinced that something bigger is going on, they team up with another school friend, Emma, and set out to look for the source of their phone signals, filming their adventures on a hand-held video camera as they go. Much to their astonishment, the friends come face to face with a small alien who has become stranded on Earth, and quickly find themselves in a race against time to send their new friend home. Read more…
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 – John Powell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
John Powell received his first – and, to date, only – Academy Award nomination for the surprise smash hit animated film from Dreamworks, How to Train Your Dragon, in 2010. The film was almost universally well-received, and grossed over $400 million worldwide, so a sequel was inevitable: so here we are, four years later, with How To Train Your Dragon 2. The film picks up five years after the events of the last film, and finds the heroic Viking dragon rider Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), his girlfriend Astrid (America Ferrara), and his dragon Toothless, happily exploring and mapping out new lands on behalf of his father Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler), the chieftain of Berk. However, on one of their expeditions, Hiccup and Astrid discover a terrible potential threat: an insane warrior named Drago Bludvist (Djimon Hounsou) who has been capturing and enslaving dragons of his own for years, in order to help him conquer neighboring villages. Worst of all, Drago has a ‘bewilderbeast’, an alpha dragon which can control all other dragons it encounters – including Toothless… The film has an impressive voice cast, including Cate Blanchett, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill and Kit Harington from Game of Thrones, and – thankfully – sees John Powell returning to the scoring stage after his brief personal sabbatical last year. Read more…
LAIR – John Debney
GAME ZONE REVIEW
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Lair is a role-playing video game where the player assumes the role of a dragon-riding knight named Rohn Partridge. The player is given a variety of tasks to perform including; defending a certain realm, destroying certain objects, eliminating enemies or creatures, and other mission-based objectives. After each stage of the game, the player has an opportunity to earn gold, silver, or bronze medals, depending on their performance during the level. A rare platinum medal is also available, although unlike the other three medals its requirements are secret. Earning medals assists the player in unlocking combos and behind-the-scenes videos. lair takes place in a world threatened by numerous emerging volcanoes that are destroying the planet’s ecosystem. Two cultures contest; the Mokai, whose lands are arid and depleted of resources, and the Asylians, who live in one of the last remaining verdant areas. Desperate to survive, the Mokai attack and try to seize the granaries of the Asylians. The spiritual leader of the Asylians, called the Diviner, condemns the Mokai as pagans and savages. Thus war begins and the game revolves around the pursuits of Rohn Partridge, an Asylian Sky Guard. His allegiance wavers after the Diviner orders the assassination of the Mokai peace envoy Atta-kai, and he becomes a renegade when his attack on a Mokai ‘armory’ reveals instead a temple housing women and children. He thus assumes the mantle of a warrior for justice as he navigates the conflict and attempts to bring about a lasting peace. Read more…
MALEFICENT – James Newton Howard
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Walt Disney’s 1959 animated version of Charles Perrault’s classic 15th century fairy tale Sleeping Beauty is rightly considered a classic of children’s literature and cinema. In it, a beautiful princess is cursed by a wicked witch to prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fall into a deep, death-like sleep, from which she can only be awakened by true love’s kiss. It’s a timeless tale, the basis of many fables, but in Disney’s new film Maleficent things turn on their head: it tells essentially the same story, but from the point of view from the “evil witch”. In this version, Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) is not truly evil, but instead a fairy from an enchanted world known as The Moors, who was betrayed and mutilated by her human lover. Vowing revenge on those who harmed her and her kind, Maleficent does indeed curse Aurora (Elle Fanning), the daughter of King Stefan (Sharlto Copley), but immediately regrets her actions; with the help of her minion Diaval (Sam Riley), Maleficent tries to protect Aurora throughout her childhood, while Stefan’s forces attempt to invade and destroy The Moors. The visually sumptuous film was directed by Robert Stromberg (the Oscar winning production designer of Avatar), and features a dazzling score by composer James Newton Howard. Read more…
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